g--_first_, Why I brought this grim,
old Rhadamanthus, Belzaleel, U. P. Naso of a doorkeeper up before you;
and _secondly_, How I am to get him down decorously in that ancient
blue greatcoat, and get at my own proper text.

And first of the _first_. I thought it would do you young men--the
hope of the world--no harm to let your affections go out toward this
dear, old-world specimen of homespun worth. And as to the _second_, I
am going to make it my excuse for what is to come. One day soon after
I knew him, when I thought he was in a soft, confidential mood, I
said: "_Jeems_, what kind of weaver are you?" "_I'm in the fancical
line_, maister John," said he somewhat stiffly; "I like its
_leecence_." So _exit Jeems_--_impiger, iracundus, acer--torvus
visu--placide quiescat_!

Now, my dear friends, I am in the _fancical_ line as well as _Jeems_,
and in virtue of my _leecence_, I begin my exegetical remarks on the
pursuit of truth. By the bye, I should have told Sir Henry that it was
truth, not knowledge, I was to be after. Now all knowledge should be
true, but it isn't; much of what is called knowledge is very little
worth even when true, and much of the best truth is not in a strict
sense knowable,--rather it is felt and believed.

Exegetical, you know, is the grand and fashionable word now-a-days for
explanatory; it means bringing out of a passage all that is in it, and
nothing more. For my part, being in _Jeems's_ line, I am not so
particular as to the nothing more. We _fancical_ men are much given to
make somethings of nothings; indeed, the noble Italians, call
imagination and poetic fancy _the little more_; its very function is
to embellish and intensify the actual and the common. Now you must not
laugh at me, or it, when I announce the passage from which I mean to
preach upon the pursuit of truth, and the possession of wisdom:--

"On Tintock tap there is a Mist,
And in the Mist there is a Kist,
And in the Kist there is a Cap;
Tak' up the Cap and sup the drap,
And set the Cap on Tintock tap."

And as to what Sir Henry[43] would call the context, we are saved all
trouble, there being none, the passage being self-contained, and as
destitute of relations as Melchisedec.

[Footnote 43: This was read to Sir Henry W. Moncreiff's Young Men's
Association, November 1862.]

_Tintock_, you all know, or should know, is a big porphyritic hill in
Lanarkshire, standing alone, and dominating like a king o