him habitually. "I sat at his feet,"
writes one of these, "when I asked his advice, and when the broad brow
was set in thought and the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that
no man could add to the worth of the conclusion." He had excellent
taste, though whimsical and partial; collected old furniture and
delighted specially in sunflowers long before the days of Mr. Oscar
Wilde; took a lasting pleasure in prints and pictures; was a devout
admirer of Thomson of Duddingston at a time when few shared the taste;
and though he read little, was constant to his favourite books. He had
never any Greek; Latin he happily re-taught himself after he had left
school, where he was a mere consistent idler: happily, I say, for
Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief authors. The first
he must have read for twenty years uninterruptedly, keeping it near him
in his study, and carrying it in his bag on journeys. Another old
theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in his hands. When he was
indisposed, he had two books, "Guy Mannering" and "The Parent's
Assistant," of which he never wearied. He was a strong Conservative, or,
as he preferred to call himself, a Tory; except in so far as his views
were modified by a hot-headed chivalrous sentiment for women. He was
actually in favour of a marriage law under which any woman might have a
divorce for the asking, and no man on any ground whatever; and the same
sentiment found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh,
founded and largely supported by himself. This was but one of the many
channels of his public generosity; his private was equally unstrained.
The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a
sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited
often by his time and money; and though, from a morbid sense of his own
unworthiness, he would never consent to be an office-bearer, his advice
was often sought, and he served the Church on many committees. What he
perhaps valued highest in his work were his contributions to the defence
of Christianity; one of which, in particular, was praised by Hutchison
Stirling and reprinted at the request of Professor Crawford.

His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid; morbid, too,
were his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for death.
He had never accepted the conditions of man's life or his own character;
and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the Celti