he crest of the hill you follow Dr. Brown into the valley of
Yarrow, and the deep black pools, now called the "dowie dens," and so,
"through the pomp of cultivated nature," as Wordsworth says, to the
railway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet won back Tamlane from
the queen of the fairies. All this country was familiar to Dr. Brown,
and on one of the last occasions when I met him, he was living at
Hollylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel, Scott's home while he was
happy and prosperous, before he had the unhappy thought of building
Abbotsford. At the time I speak of, Dr. Brown had long ceased to write,
and his health suffered from attacks of melancholy, in which the world
seemed very dark to him. I have been allowed to read some letters which
he wrote in one of these intervals of depression. With his habitual
unselfishness, he kept his melancholy to himself, and, though he did not
care for society at such times, he said nothing of his own condition that
could distress his correspondent. In the last year of his life,
everything around him seemed to brighten: he was unusually well, he even
returned to his literary work, and saw his last volume of collected
essays through the press. They were most favourably received, and the
last letters which I had from him spoke of the pleasure which this
success gave him. Three editions of his book ("John Leech, and Other
Essays") were published in some six weeks. All seemed to go well, and
one might even have hoped that, with renewed strength, he would take up
his pen again. But his strength was less than we had hoped. A cold
settled on his lungs, and, in spite of the most affectionate nursing, he
grew rapidly weaker. He had little suffering at the end, and his mind
remained unclouded. No man of letters could be more widely regretted,
for he was the friend of all who read his books, as, even to people who
only met him once or twice in life, he seemed to become dear and
familiar.

In one of his very latest writings, "On Thackeray's Death," Dr. Brown
told people (what some of them needed, and still need to be told) how
good, kind, and thoughtful for others was our great writer--our greatest
master of fiction, I venture to think, since Scott. Some of the lines
Dr. Brown wrote of Thackerary might be applied to himself: "He looked
always fresh, with that abounding silvery hair, and his young, almost
infantile face"--a face very pale, and yet radiant, in his last years