these minute-guns his allocutions to the bench. His humour
was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism,
stone, and gravel might have combined their forces against that frail
tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside
Jeremy Taylor's "Life of Christ" and greet me with the same open brow,
the same kind formality of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the
man almost to a decade. He had begun life, under his mother's influence,
as an admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had transferred his
admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be
punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a Scotsman,
that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the
colloquial, I should certainly be shamed: the remark was apposite, I
suppose, in the days of David Hume. Scott was too new for him; he had
known the author--known him, too, for a Tory; and to the genuine classic
a contemporary is always something of a trouble. He had the old, serious
love of the play; had even, as he was proud to tell, played a certain
part in the history of Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully
pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing
Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great scenic display. A Moderate in
religion, he was much struck in the last years of his life by a
conversation with two young lads, revivalists. "H'm," he would say--"new
to me. I have had--h'm--no such experience." It struck him, not with
pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as
he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing, should hear these young
fellows talking of his own subject, his own weapons that he had fought
the battle of life with,--"and--h'm--not understand." In this wise and
graceful attitude he did justice to himself and others, reposed unshaken
in his old beliefs, and recognised their limits without anger or alarm.
His last recorded remark, on the last night of his life, was after he
had been arguing against Calvinism with his minister and was interrupted
by an intolerable pang. "After all," he said, "of all the 'isms, I know
none so bad as rheumatism." My own last sight of him was some time
before, when we dined together at an inn; he had been on circuit, for he
stuck to his duties like a chief part of his existence; and I remember
it as the only occasion on which he ever soiled his lips with slang--a
thing h