Part 1 (2/2)
”... Humor, wild wit, Quips, cranks, puns, sneers,-with clear sweet thought profound;- _And stinging jests, with honey for the wound_,”- The subtlest lines of ALL fine powers, split To their last films, then marvellously spun In magic web, whose million hues are ONE!”
I knew one man who was almost altogether and absolutely comic, and yet a man of sense, fidelity, courage, and worth, but over his entire nature the comic ruled supreme-the late Sir Adam Ferguson, whose very face was a breach of solemnity; I dare say, even in sleep he looked a wag. This was the way in which everything appeared to him first, and often last too, with a serious enough middle saw him not long before his death, when he was of great age and knew he was dying; there was no levity in his manner, or thoughtlessness about his state; he was kind, and shrewd as ever; but how he flashed out with utter merriment when he got hold of a joke, or rather when it got hold of him, and shook him, not an inch of his body was free of its power-it possessed him, not he it. The first attack was on showing me a calotype of himself by the late Adamson (of Hill and Adamson; the Vand.y.k.e and Raeburn of photography), in the corner of which he had written, with a hand trembling with age and fun, ”Adam's-sun _fecit_”-it came back upon him and tore him without mercy.
Then, his blood being up, he told me a story of his uncle, the great Dr. Black the chemist; no one will grudge the reading of it in my imperfect record, though it is to the reality what reading music is to hearing it.
Dr. Black, when Professor of Chemistry in Edinburgh University, had a gruff old man as his porter, a James Alston. James was one of the old school of chemistry, and held by phlogiston, but for no better reason than the endless trouble the new-fangled discoveries brought upon him in the way of apparatus.
The Professor was lecturing on Hydrogen Gas, and had made arrangements for showing its lightness, what our preceptor, Dr. Charles Hope, called, in his lofty way, its ”principle of absolute levity.” He was greatly excited, the good old man of genius. James was standing behind his chair, ready and sulky. His master told his young friends that the bladder he had filled with the gas must, on principle, ascend; but that they would see practically if it did, and he cut the string. Up it rushed, amid the shouts and upturned faces of the boys, and the quiet joy of their master; James regarding it with a glum curiosity.
Young Adam Ferguson was there, and left at the end of the hour with the rest, but finding he had forgotten his stick, went back; in the empty room, he found James perched upon a lofty and shaky ladder, trying, amid much perspiration, and blasphemy, and want of breath, to hit down his enemy, who rose at each stroke-the old battling with the new. Sir Adam's reproduction of this scene, his voice and screams of rapture, I shall never forget.
Let me give another pleasant story of Dr. Black and Sir Adam, which our Princ.i.p.al (Dr. Lee) delights to tell; it is merely its bones. The doctor sent him to the bank for 5-four in notes, and one in silver; then told him that he must be paid for his trouble with a s.h.i.+lling, and next proceeded to give him good advice about the management of money, particularly recommending a careful record of every penny spent, holding the s.h.i.+lling up before him all the time. During this address, Sir Adam was turning over in his mind all the trash he would be able to purchase with the s.h.i.+lling, and his feeling may be imagined when the doctor finally returned it to his own pocket.
It only remains now for me to thank my cousin and life-long friend, John Taylor Brown, the author of the tract on ”St. Paul's Thorn in the Flesh.” I am sure my readers will thank me not less heartily than I now do him. The theory that the thorn of the great apostle was an affection of the eyes is not new; it will be found in ”Hannah More's Life,” and in ”Conybeare and Howson;” but his argument and his whole treatment, I have reason to believe, from my father and other competent judges, is thoroughly original; it is an exquisite monograph, and to me most instructive and striking. Every one will ask why such a man has not written more-a question my fastidious friend will find is easier asked than answered.
This Preface was written, and I had a proof ready for his pencil, when I was summoned to the death of him to whom I owe my life. He had been dying for months, but he and I hoped to have got and to have given into his hands a copy of these _Horae_, the correction of which had often whiled away his long hours of languor and pain. G.o.d thought otherwise. I shall miss his great knowledge, his loving and keen eye-his _ne quid nimis_-his sympathy-himself. Let me be thankful that it was given to me _a.s.sidere valetudini, fovere deficientem, satiari vultu, complexu_.
_Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non c.u.m corpore extinguuntur magnae animae; placide quiescas!_
Or, in more sacred and hopeful words, which, put there at my father's request, may be found at the close of the paper on young Hallam: ”O man greatly beloved, go thou thy way till the end; for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.”
It is not for a son to speak what he thinks of his father so soon after his death. I leave him now with a portrait of his spiritual lineaments, by Dr. Cairns,-which is to them what a painting by Velasquez and Da Vinci combined would have been to his bodily presence.
”As he was of the Pauline type of mind, his Christianity ran into the same mould. A strong, intense, and vehement nature, with masculine intellect and unyielding will, he accepted the Bible in its literal simplicity as an absolute revelation, and then showed the strength of his character in subjugating his whole being to this decisive influence, and in projecting the same convictions into other minds. He was a believer in the sense of the old Puritans, and, amid the doubt and skepticism of the nineteenth century, held as firmly as any of them by the doctrines of atonement and grace. He had most of the idiosyncrasy of Baxter, though not without the contemplation of Howe. The doctrines of Calvinism, mitigated but not renounced, and received simply as dictates of Heaven, without any effort or hope to bridge over their inscrutable depths by philosophical theories, he translated into a fervent, humble, and resolutely active life.
”There was a fountain of tenderness in his nature as well as a sweep of impetuous indignation; and the one drawn out, and the other controlled by his Christian faith, made him at once a philanthropist and a reformer, and both in the highest departments of human interest. The union of these ardent elements, and of a highly devotional temperament, not untouched with melancholy, with the patience of the scholar, and the sobriety of the critic, formed the singularity and almost the anomaly of his personal character. These contrasts were tempered by the discipline of experience; and his life, both as a man and a Christian, seemed to become more rich, genial, and harmonious as it approached its close.”-_Scotsman_, October 20th.
J. B.
23, RUTLAND STREET, _October 30, 1858_.
POST PREFACE.
I have to thank the public and my own special craft cordially and much for their reception of these Idle Hours-Brown Studies, as a friendly wag calls them-and above all, for their taking to their hearts that great old dog and his dead friends,-for all which the one friend who survives thanks them. There is no harm and some good in letting our sympathy and affection go forth without stint on such objects, dead and homely though they be.
When I think of that n.o.ble head, with its look and eye of boundless affection and pluck, simplicity and single-heartedness, I feel what it would be for us, who call ourselves the higher animals, to be in our ways as simple, affectionate, and true, as that old mastiff; and in the highest of all senses, I often think of what Robert Burns says somewhere, ”Man is the G.o.d of the dog.” It would be well for man if his wors.h.i.+p were as immediate and instinctive-as absolute as the dog's. Did we serve our G.o.d with half the zeal Rab served his, we might trust to sleep as peacefully in our graves as he does in his. When James turned his angry eye and raised his quick voice and foot, his wors.h.i.+pper slunk away, humbled and afraid, angry with himself for making _him_ angry; anxious by any means to crouch back into his favor, and a kind look or word. Is that the way we take His displeasure, even when we can't think, as Rab couldn't, we were immediately to blame? It is, as the old worthy says, something to trust our G.o.d in the dark, as the dog does his.
A dear and wise and exquisite child, drew a plan for a headstone on the grave of a favorite terrier, and she had in it the words ”WHO died” on such a day; the older and more worldly-minded painter put in ”WHICH;”
and my friend and ”Bossy's” said to me, with some displeasure, as we were examining the monuments, ”Wasn't he a Who as much as they?” and wasn't she righter than they? and
”Quis desiderio sit aut pudor aut modus Tam cari capitis”-
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