ing
and his sons--Highland life--The cruise of the steam-launch--Summer
in Styria--Rustic manners--II. The drama--Private theatricals--III.
Sanitary associations--The phonograph--IV. Fleeming's acquaintance
with a student--His late maturity of mind--Religion and morality--His
love of heroism--Taste in literature--V. His talk--His late
popularity--Letter from M. Trelat.

The remaining external incidents of Fleeming's life, pleasures, honours,
fresh interests, new friends, are not such as will bear to be told at
any length or in the temporal order. And it is now time to lay narration
by, and to look at the man he was, and the life he lived, more largely.

Edinburgh, which was thenceforth to be his home, is a metropolitan small
town; where college professors and the lawyers of the Parliament House
give the tone, and persons of leisure, attracted by educational
advantages, make up much of the bulk of society. Not, therefore, an
unlettered place, yet not pedantic, Edinburgh will compare favourably
with much larger cities. A hard and disputatious element has been
commented on by strangers: it would not touch Fleeming, who was himself
regarded, even in this metropolis of disputation, as a thorny
table-mate. To golf unhappily he did not take, and golf is a cardinal
virtue in the city of the winds. Nor did he become an archer of the
Queen's Body Guard, which is the Chiltern Hundreds of the distasted
golfer. He did not even frequent the Evening Club, where his colleague
Tait (in my day) was so punctual and so genial. So that in some ways he
stood outside of the lighter and kindlier life of his new home. I should
not like to say that he was generally popular; but there, as elsewhere,
those who knew him well enough to love him, loved him well. And he, upon
his side, liked a place where a dinner-party was not of necessity
unintellectual, and where men stood up to him in argument.

The presence of his old classmate, Tait,[26] was one of his early
attractions to the Chair; and now that Fleeming is gone again, Tait
still remains, ruling and really teaching his great classes. Sir Robert
Christison was an old friend of his mother's; Sir Alexander Grant,
Kelland, and Sellar were new acquaintances, and highly valued; and these
too, all but the last,[27] have been taken from their friends and
labours. Death has been busy in the Senatus. I will speak elsewhere of
Fleeming's demeanour to his students; and it will be enou