UC-NRLF 
 
 B 3 132 Mlb 
 
 nlrargli 
 
 Eleven 
 
 Gavin Ogilvy 
 
''British Weekly Extras, No. III. 
 
 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN 
 
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Auld Licht Idylls. Tenth Edilion. Civicn Svo. Buckram. 
 
 6s. 
 Auld Licht Idylls. Edition de Luxe. With Eighteen Etchings 
 
 by William Hole, R.S.A. Large post ^to. 31s. 6d. 
 
 When a Man's Single. A Stoi7 of Literary Life. Tenth 
 Edition. Croivn >^vo. Buckram. 6s. 
 
 A Window in Thrums. Fourteenth Edition. Crown Svo. 
 
 Buckram. 6s. 
 My Lady Nicotine. Si.xtli Edition. Croivn Sw. Buckram. 
 
 6s. 
 
 THE THISTLE EDITION. 
 
 J. M. BARRIES WORKS. 
 Vol. I. AULD LICHT IDYLLS and BETTER DEAD. 
 II. WHEN A MAN'S SINGLE. 
 in. WINDOW IN THRUMS AND AN EDIN- 
 BURGH ELEVEN. 
 IV. MY LADY NICOTINE, 
 v.-vi. THE LITTLE MINISTER. 2 Vols, 
 vii.-vill. SENTIMENTAL TOM?»IY .and MARGARET 
 OGILVY. 
 
 A superb uniform and complete Edition, illustrated with 
 sixteen photogravures. Printed in bold type, from new- 
 plates, on a fine deckle-edged paper, £s L'^s. per set, the 
 volumes not sold separately. Fifty copies on Imperial Hand- 
 made Japanese paper, ;^io los. per set. 
 
 LONDON : HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 
 27, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN 
 
 |lciin( IJortraits from (L^oKcgc ICife 
 
 J. M. BARRIE 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 ITonboit 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 27, TATERNOSTER ROW 
 
 MUCCCXC\T 
 
w 
 
 ^\ 
 
 
 
 3B 
 
 '/- 
 
 •^ 'c^^^ 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Lord Rosebery 
 II. Professor Masson . 
 
 III. Professor Blackie . 
 
 IV. Professor Calderwood 
 V. Professor Tait 
 
 VI. Professor Fraser . 
 VI I. Professor Chrystal 
 VIII. Professor Sellar 
 IX. Mr. Joseph Thomson 
 X. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson 
 XL Rev. Walter C. Smith, D.D. 
 
 PAOE 
 
 7 
 17 
 27 
 35 
 45 
 57 
 (^5 
 77 
 89 
 
 97 
 109 
 
 29'^ ^y^ 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2008 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/elevenedinburghpOObarrrich 
 
LORD ROSEBERY. 
 
 THE first time I ever saw Lord Rosebery 
 was in Edinburgh when I was a student, 
 and I flung a clod of earth at him. He was 
 a peer ; those were my politics. 
 
 I missed him, and I have heard a good 
 many journalists say since then that he is a 
 difficult man to hit. One who began by 
 liking him and is now scornful, which is just 
 the reverse process from mine, told me the 
 reason why. He had some brochures to 
 write on the Liberal leaders, and got on 
 nicely till he reached Lord Rosebery, where 
 he stuck. In vain he walked round his lord- 
 ship, looking for an opening. The man was 
 naturally indignant ; he is the father of a 
 family. 
 
 Lord Rosebery is forty-one years of age, 
 and has missed many opportunities of becom- 
 ing the bosom friend of Lord Randolph 
 
S' ■' '' ' ■' AN' EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 Churchill. They were at Eton together and 
 at Oxford, and have met since. As a boy 
 the Liberal played at horses, and the Tory 
 at running off with other boys' caps. Lord 
 Randolph was the more distinguished at the 
 University. One day a proctor ran him 
 down in the streets smoking in his cap and 
 gown. The undergraduate remarked on the 
 changeability of the weather, but the proctor, 
 gasping at such bravado, demanded his name 
 and college. Lord Randolph failed to turn 
 up next day at St. Edmund Hall to be lec- 
 tured, but strolled to the proctor's house about 
 dinner-time. " Does a fellow, name of Moore, 
 live here ? " he asked. The footman contrived 
 not to faint. " He do," he replied, severely ; 
 "but he are at dinner." " Ah ! take him in my 
 card," said the unabashed caller. The Merton 
 books tell that for this the noble lord was 
 fined ten pounds. 
 
 There was a time when Lord Rosebery 
 would have reformed the House of Lords to 
 a site nearer Newmarket. As politics took a 
 firmer grip of him, it was Newmarket that 
 seemed a long way off. One day at Edin- 
 
LORD ROSEBERY. 9 
 
 burgh he realized the disadvantage of owning 
 swift horses. His brougham had met him 
 at Waverley Station to take him to Dalmeny. 
 Lord Rosebery opened the door of the car- 
 riage to put in some papers, and then turned 
 away. The coachman, too well bred to look 
 round, heard the door shut, and thinking that 
 his master was inside, set off at once. Pur- 
 suit was attempted, but what was there in 
 Edinburgh streets to make up on those 
 horses ? The coachman drove seven miles, 
 until he reached a point in the Dalmeny 
 parks where it was his lordship's custom to 
 alight and open a gate. Here the brougham 
 stood for some minutes, awaiting Lord Rose- 
 bery's convenience. At last the coachman 
 became uneasy and dismounted. His brain 
 reeled when he saw an empty brougham. He 
 could have sworn to seeing his lordship enter. 
 There were his papers. What had happened ? 
 With a quaking hand the horses were turned, 
 and, driving back, the coachman looked fear- 
 fully along the sides of the road. He met 
 Lord Rosebery travelling in great good 
 humour by the luggage omnibus. 
 
lO AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 Whatever is to be Lord Rosebery's future, 
 he has reached that stage in a statesman's 
 career when his opponents cease to question 
 his capacity. His speeches showed him long 
 ago a man of brilliant parts. His tenure of 
 the Foreign Office proved him heavy metal. 
 Were the Gladstonians to return to power, the 
 other Cabinet posts might go anywhere, but 
 the Foreign Secretary is arranged for. Where 
 his predecessors had clouded their meaning in 
 words till it was as wrapped up as a Mussul- 
 man's head. Lord Rosebery's were the straight- 
 forward dispatches of a man with his mind 
 made up. German influence was spoken of ; 
 Count Herbert Bismarck had been seen shoot- 
 ing Lord Rosebery's partridges. This was the 
 evidence : there has never been any other, 
 except that German methods commended 
 themselves to the Minister rather than those 
 of France. His relations with the French 
 Government were cordial. " The talk of 
 Bismarck's shadow behind Rosebery," a great 
 French politician said lately, " I put aside 
 with a smile ; but how about the Jews ? " 
 Probably few persons realize what a power the 
 
LORD ROSEBERY. 1 I 
 
 Jews are in Europe, and in Lord Rosebery's 
 position he is a strong man if he holds his 
 own with them. Any fears on that ground 
 have, I should say, been laid by his record 
 at the Foreign Office. 
 
 Lord Rosebery had once a conversation 
 with Prince Bismarck, to which, owing to some 
 oversight, the Paris correspondent of the 
 Times was not invited. M. Blowitz only 
 smiled good-naturedly, and of course his 
 report of the proceedings appeared all the 
 same. Some time afterwards Lord Rose- 
 bery was introduced to this remarkable man, 
 who, as is well known, carries Cabinet 
 appointments in his pocket, and compli- 
 mented him on his report. "Ah, it was all 
 right, was it ? " asked Blowitz, beaming. Lord 
 Rosebery explained that any fault it had was 
 that it was all wrong. " Then if Bismarck did 
 not say that to you," said Blowitz, regally, 
 "I know he intended to say it." 
 
 The " Uncrowned King of Scotland " is a 
 title that has been made for Lord Rosebery, 
 whose country has had faith in him from the 
 beginning. Mr. Gladstone is the only other 
 
12 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 man who can make so many Scotsmen take 
 politics as if it were the Highland Fling. 
 Once when Lord Rosebery was firing an 
 Edinburgh audience to the delirium point, 
 an old man in the hall shouted out, " I dinna 
 hear a word he says, but it's grand, it's 
 grand ! " During the first Midlothian cam- 
 paign Mr. Gladstone and Lord Rosebery were 
 the father and son of the Scottish people. 
 Lord Rosebery rode into fame on the top of 
 that wave, and he has kept his place in the 
 hearts of the people, and in oleographs 'on 
 their walls, ever since. In all Scottish matters 
 he has the enthusiasm of a Burns dinner, and 
 his humour enables him to pay compliments. 
 When he says agreeable things to Scotsmen 
 about their country, there is a twinkle in his 
 eye and in theirs to which English scribes can- 
 not give a meaning. He has unveiled so many 
 Burns' statues that an American lecturess 
 explains, " Curious thing, but I feel somehow 
 I am connected with Lord Rosebery. I go 
 to a place and deliver a lecture on Burns ; 
 they collect subscriptions for a statue, and he 
 unveils it." Such is the delic^ht of the Scottish 
 
LORD ROSEBERY. I 3 
 
 students in Lord Rosebciy, that he may be 
 said to have made the triumphal tour of the 
 northern universities as their Lord Rector ; 
 he lost the post in Glasgow lately through a 
 quibble, but had the honour with the votes. 
 His address to the Edinburgh undergraduates 
 on " Patriotism " was the best thing he ever 
 did outside politics, and made the students his 
 for life. Some of them had smuggled into the 
 hall a chair with " Gaelic chair " placarded on 
 it, and the Lord Rector unwittingly played 
 into their hands. In a noble peroration he 
 exhorted his hearers to high aims in life. 
 " Raise your country," he exclaimed (cheers) ; 
 " raise yourselves (renewed cheering) ; raise 
 your university" (thunders of applause). 
 From the back of the hall came a solemn 
 voice, " Raise the chair ! " Up went the Gaelic 
 chair. 
 
 Even Lord Rosebery's views on Imperial 
 Federation can become a compliment to 
 Scotland. Having been all over the world 
 himself, and felt how he grew on his travels, 
 Lord Rosebery maintains that every British 
 statesman should visit India and the Colonies. 
 
14 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 He said that first at a semi-public dinner in 
 the country — and here I may mention that 
 on such occasions he has begun his speeches 
 less frequently than any other prominent 
 politician with a statement that others could 
 be got to discharge the duty better ; in other 
 words, he has several times omitted this 
 introduction. On his return to London he 
 was told that his colleagues in the Adminis- 
 tration had been seeing how his scheme would 
 work out. " We found that if your rule were 
 enforced, the Cabinet would consist of your- 
 self and Childers." " This would be an ideal 
 Cabinet," Lord Rosebery subsequently re- 
 marked in Edinburgh, " for it would be 
 entirely Scottish" ; Mr. Childers being member 
 for a Scottish constituency. 
 
 The present unhappy division of the 
 Liberal party has made enemies of friends 
 for no leading man so little as for Lord Rose- 
 bery. There are forces working against him, 
 no doubt, in comparatively high places, but 
 the Unionists have kept their respect for him. 
 His views may be wrong, but he is about the 
 only Liberal leader, with the noble exception 
 
LORD ROSEBERY. 1 5 
 
 of Lord Hartlngton, of whom troublous times 
 have not rasped the temper. Though a great 
 reader, he is not a Hterary man Hke Mr. 
 Morley, who would, however, be making 
 phrases where Lord Rosebery would make 
 laws. Sir William Harcourt has been spoken 
 of as a possible Prime Minister, but surely it 
 will never come to that. If Mr. Gladstone's 
 successor is chosen from those who have fol- 
 lowed him on the Home Rule question, he 
 probably was not rash in himself naming 
 Lord Rosebery. 
 
 Lord Rosebery could not now step up 
 without stepping into the Premiership. His 
 humour, which is his most obvious faculty, 
 has been a prop to him many a time ere now, 
 but, if I was his adviser, I should tell him that 
 it has served its purpose. There are a great 
 many excellent people who shake their heads 
 over it in a man who has become a power in 
 the land. " Let us be grave," said Dr. John- 
 son once to a merry companion, " for here 
 comes a fool." In an unknown novel there is 
 a character who says of himself that " he is 
 not stupid enough ever to be a great man." 
 
l6 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 I happen to know "that this reflection was 
 evolved by the author out of thinking over 
 Lord Rosebery. It is not easy for a bright man 
 to be heavy, and Lord Rosebery's humour is 
 so spontaneous that if a joke is made in theii 
 company he has always finished laughing be- 
 fore Lord Hartington begins. Perhaps when 
 Lord Rosebery is on the point of letting his, 
 humour run off with him in a public speech 
 he could recover his solemnity by thinking of. 
 the Exa7niner. 
 
II. 
 
 PROFESSOR MASSON. 
 
 n^HOUGH a man might, to my mind, be 
 -'■ better employed than in going to college, 
 it is his own fault if he does not strike on 
 someone there who sends his life off at anew 
 angle. If, as I take it, the glory of a pro- 
 fessor is to give elastic minds their proper 
 bent, Masson is a name his country will retain 
 a grip of There are men who are good to 
 think of, and as a rule we only know them 
 from their books. Something of our pride in 
 life would go with their fall. To have one 
 such professor at a time is the most a univer- 
 sity can hope of human nature, so Edinburgh 
 need not expect another just yet. These, of 
 course, are only to be taken as the reminis- 
 cences of a student. I seem to remember 
 everything Masson said, and the way he 
 said it. 
 
 Having immediately before taken lodgings 
 
 2 
 
1 8 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 in a crow's nest, my first sight of Masson was 
 specially impressive. It was the opening of 
 the session, when fees were paid, and a whisper 
 ran round the quadrangle that Masson had set 
 off home with three hundred one-pound notes 
 stuffed into his trouser pockets. There was 
 a solemn swell of awestruck students to the 
 gates, and some of us could not help following 
 him. He took his pockets coolly. When he 
 stopped it was at a second-hand bookstall, 
 where he rummaged for a long time. Even- 
 tually he pounced upon a dusty, draggled little 
 volume, and went off proudly with it beneath 
 his arm. He seemed to look suspiciously at 
 strangers now, but it was not the money but 
 the book he was keeping guard over. His 
 pockets, however, were unmistakably bulging 
 out. I resolved to go in for literature. 
 
 Masson, however, always comes to my 
 memory first knocking nails into his desk or 
 trying to tear the gas-bracket from its socket. 
 He said that the Danes scattered over Eng- 
 land, taking such a hold as a nail takes when it 
 is driven into wood. For the moment he saw 
 his desk turned into England ; he whirled an 
 
PROFESSOR MASSON. I9 
 
 invisible hammer in the air, and down it 
 came on the desk with a crash. No one w4io 
 has sat under Masson can forget how the 
 Danes nailed themselves upon England. His 
 desk is thick with their tombstones. It was 
 when his mind groped for an image that he 
 clutched the bracket. He seemed to tear his 
 good things out of it. Silence overcame the 
 class. Some were fascinated by the man ; 
 others trembled for the bracket. It shook, 
 groaned, and yielded. Masson said another 
 of the things that made his lectures literature ; 
 the crisis was passed ; and everybody breathed 
 again. 
 
 He masters a subject by letting it master 
 him ; for though his critical reputation is built 
 on honesty, it is his enthusiasm that makes 
 his work warm with life. Sometimes he 
 entered the classroom so full of what he had 
 to say that he began before he reached his 
 desk. If he was in the middle of a perora- 
 tion when the bell rang, even the back-benches 
 forgot to empty. There were the inevitable 
 students to whom literature is a trial, and 
 sometimes they call attention to their suffer- 
 
20 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 ings by a scraping of the feet. Then the pro- 
 fessor tried to fix his eyeglass on them, and 
 when it worked properly they were transfixed. 
 As a rule, however, it required so many ad- 
 justments that by the time his eye took hold of 
 it he had remembered that students were made 
 so, and his indignation went. Then, with the 
 light ill his eye that some photographer ought 
 to catch, he would hope that his lecture was 
 not disturbing their conversation. It was 
 characteristic of his passion for being just 
 that when he had criticised some writer 
 severely he would remember that the back- 
 benches could not understand that criticism 
 and admiration might go together, unless they 
 were told so again. 
 
 The test of a sensitive man is that he is 
 careful of wounding the feelings of others. 
 Once, I remember, a student was reading a 
 passage aloud, assuming at the same time 
 such an attitude that the Professor could not 
 help remarking that he looked like a teapot. 
 It was exactly what he did look like, and the 
 class applauded. But next moment Masson 
 had apologized for being personal. Such 
 
PROFESSOR MASSON. 21 
 
 reminiscences are what make the old litera- 
 ture classroom to thousands of graduates a 
 delight to think of. 
 
 When the news of Carlylc's death reached 
 the room, Masson could not go on with his 
 lecture. Every one knows what Carlyle has 
 said of him ; and no one who has heard it 
 will ever forget what he has said of Carlyle. 
 Here were two men who understood each 
 other. One of the Carlylean pictures one 
 loves to dwell on shows them smoking to- 
 gether, with nothing breaking the pauses but 
 Mrs. Carlyle's needles. Carlyle told Masson 
 how he gave up smoking and then took to it 
 again. He had walked from Dumfriesshire 
 to Edinburgh to consult a doctor about his 
 health, and was advised to lose his pipe. He 
 smoked no more, but his health did not im- 
 prove, and then one day he walked in a wood. 
 At the foot of a tree lay a pipe, a tobacco 
 pouch, a match-box. He saw clearly that 
 this was a case of Providential interference, 
 and from that moment he smoked again. 
 There the Professor's story stops. I have no 
 doubt, though, that he nodded his head when 
 
22 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 Carlyle explained what the pipe and tobacco 
 were doing there. Masson's " Milton " is, of 
 course, his great work, but for sympathetic 
 analysis I know nothing to surpass his 
 " Chatterton." Lecturing on Chatterton one 
 day, he remarked, with a slight hesitation, 
 that had the poet mixed a little more in com- 
 pany and — and smoked, his morbidness would 
 not have poisoned him. That turned my 
 thoughts to smoking, because I meant to be 
 a Chatterton, but greater. Since then the 
 professor has warned me against smoking too 
 much. He was smoking at the time. 
 
 This is no place to follow Masson's career, 
 nor to discuss his work. To reach his position 
 one ought to know his definition of a man-of- 
 letters. It is curious., and, like most of his 
 departures from the generally accepted, sticks 
 to the memory. By a man-of-letters he does 
 not mean the poet, for instance, who is all 
 soul, so much as the strong-brained writer 
 whose guardian angel is a fine sanity. He 
 used to mention John Skclton, the Wolsey 
 satirist, and Sir David Lindsay, as typical 
 men-of-letters fiom this point of view, and 
 
PROFESSOR MASSON. 23 
 
 it is as a man-of-letters of that class that 
 Masson is best considered. In an age of many 
 whipper-snappers in criticism he is something 
 of a Gulliver. 
 
 The students in that class liked to see then 
 professor as well as hear him. I let my hair 
 grow long because it only annoyed other 
 people, and one day there was dropped into 
 my hand a note containing sixpence and the 
 words : " The students sitting behind you 
 present their compliments, and beg that you 
 will get your hair cut with the enclosed, as it 
 interferes with their view of the professor." 
 
 Masson, when he edited " Macmillan's," 
 had all the best men round him. His talk 
 of Thackeray is specially interesting, but he 
 always holds that in conversation Douglas 
 Jerrold was unapproachable. Jerrold told 
 him a good story of his sea-faring days. His 
 ship was lying off Gibraltar, and for some 
 hours Jerrold, though only a midshipman, was 
 left in charge. Some of the sailors begged 
 to get ashore, and he let them, on the promise 
 that they would bring him back some oranges. 
 One of them disappeared, and the midship- 
 
24 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 man suffered for it. More than twenty years 
 afterwards Jerrold was looking in at a window 
 in the Strand when he seemed to know the 
 face of a weather-beaten man who was doing 
 the same thing. Suddenly he remembered, 
 and put his hand on the other's shoulder- 
 "My man," he said, " you have been a long 
 time with those oranges ! " The sailor recog- 
 nized him, turned white, and took to his heels. 
 There is, too, the story of how Dickens and 
 Jerrold made up their quarrel at the Garrick 
 Club. It was the occasion on which Masson 
 first met the author of " Pickwick." Dickens 
 and Jerrold had not spoken for a year, and 
 they both happened to have friends at dinner 
 in the strangers' room, Masson being Jerrold's 
 guest. The two hosts sat back to back, but 
 did not address each other, though the con- 
 versation was general. At last Jerrold could 
 stand it no longer. Turning, he exclaimed, 
 " Charley, my boy, how are you ? " Dickens 
 wheeled round and grasped his hand. 
 
 Many persons must have noticed that, in 
 appearance, Masson is becoming more and 
 more like Carlyle every jear. Plow would 
 
PROFESSOR MASSON. 2$ 
 
 you account for it ? It is a thing- his old 
 students often discuss when they meet, espe- 
 cially those of them who, when at college, 
 made up their minds to dedicate their first 
 book to him. The reason they seldom do it 
 is because the book does not seem good 
 enough. 
 
III. 
 
 PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE. 
 
 LATELY I was told that Blackie— one 
 does not say Mr. Cromwell — is no longer 
 Professor of Greek in Edinburgh University. 
 What nonsense some people talk. As if 
 Blackie were not part of the building. In 
 his class one day he spoke touchingly of the 
 time when he would have to join Socrates in 
 the Elysian fields. A student cheered — no 
 one knows why. " It w^on't be for some time 
 yet," added John Stuart. 
 
 Blackie takes his ease at home in a 
 dressing-gown and straw hat. This shows 
 that his plaid really does come off. " My 
 occupation nowadays," he said to me recently, 
 "is business, blethers, bothers, beggars, and 
 backgammon." He has also started a pro- 
 fession of going to public meetings, and 
 hurrying home to w^rite letters to the news- 
 papers about them. When the editor shakes 
 
28 AN EDINP.UKGH ELEVEN. 
 
 the manuscript a sonnet falls out. I think I 
 remember the Professor's saying that he had 
 never made five shillings by his verses. To 
 my mind they are worth more than that. 
 
 Though he has explained them frequently, 
 there is still confusion about Blackie's politics. 
 At Manchester they thought he was a Tory, 
 and invited him to address them on that 
 understanding. " I fancy I astonished them," 
 the Professor said to me. This is quite pos- 
 sible. Then he was mistaken for a Liberal. 
 
 The fact is that Blackie is a philosopher 
 who follows the golden mean. He sees this 
 himself. A philosopher who follows the 
 golden mean is thus a man who runs zig-zag 
 between two extremes. You will observe 
 that he who does this is some time before he 
 arrives anywhere. 
 
 The Professor has said that he has the 
 strongest lungs in Scotland. Of the many 
 compliments that might well be paid him, 
 not the least worthy would be this, that he is as 
 healthy mentally as physically. Mrs. Norton 
 begins a novel with the remark that one of 
 the finest sights conceivable is a wcll-pre- 
 
PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE. 29 
 
 served gentleman of middle-age. It will be 
 some time yet before Blackie reaches middle- 
 age, but there must be something wrong with 
 you if you can look at him without feeling 
 refreshed. Did you ever watch him marching 
 along Princes Street on a warm day, when 
 every other person was broiling in the sun ? 
 His head is well thrown back, the staff. 
 grasped in the middle, jerks back and for- 
 ward like a weaver's shuttle, and the plaid 
 flies in the breeze. Other people's clothes 
 are hanging limp. Blackie carries his breeze 
 with him. 
 
 A year or two ago Mr. Gladstone, when 
 at Dalmeny, pointed out that he had the 
 advantage over Blackie in being of both 
 Hie^hland and Lowland extraction. The 
 Professor, however, is as Scotch as the 
 thistle or his native hills, and Mr. Gladstone, 
 quite justifiably, considers him the most out- 
 standing of living Scotsmen. Blackie is not 
 quite sure himself. Not long ago I heard 
 him read a preface to a life of Mr. Gladstone 
 that was being printed at Smyrna in modern 
 Greek. He told his readers to remember 
 
30 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 that Mr. Gladstone was a great scholar and 
 an upright statesman. They would find it 
 easy to do this if they first remembered that 
 he was Scottish. 
 
 The World included Blackie in its list of 
 " Celebrities at Home." It said that the door 
 was opened by a red-headed lassie. That 
 was probably meant for local colour, and it 
 amused every one who knew Mrs. Blackie. 
 The Professor is one of the most genial of 
 men, and will show you to your room 
 himself, talking six languages. This tends 
 to make the conversation one-sided, but he 
 does not mind that. He still writes a good 
 deal, spending several hours in his library 
 daily, and his talk is as brilliant as ever. 
 His writing nowadays is less sustained than 
 it was, and he prefers flitting from one sub- 
 ject to another to evolving a great work. 
 When he dips his pen into an ink-pot it at 
 once writes a sonnet — so strong is the force 
 of habit. Recently he wrote a page about 
 Carlyle in a little book issued by the Edin- 
 burgh students' bazaar committee. In this 
 he reproved Carlyle for having " bias." 
 
PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE. 3 1 
 
 Blackie wonders why people should have 
 bias. 
 
 Some readers of this may in their student 
 days have been invited to the Greek profes- 
 sor's house to breakfast without knowing 
 why they were selected from among so many. 
 It was not, as they are probably aware, be- 
 cause of their classical attainments, for they 
 were too thoughtful to be in the prize-list ; 
 nor was it because of the charm of their 
 manners or the fascination of their conver- 
 sation. When the Professor noticed any 
 physical peculiarity about a student, such as 
 a lisp, or a glass eye, or one leg longer than 
 the other, or a broken nose, he was at once 
 struck by it, and asked him to breakfast. 
 They were very lively breakfasts, the eggs 
 being served in tureens ; but sometimes it 
 was a collection of the maimed and crooked, 
 and one person at the table — not the host 
 himself— used to tremble lest, making mirrors 
 of each other, the guests should see why they 
 were invited. 
 
 Sometimes, instead of asking a student 
 to breakfast, Blackie would instruct another 
 
32 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 student to request his company to tea. Then 
 the two students were told to talk about 
 paulo-post futures in the cool of the evening, 
 and to read their Greek Testament and to go 
 to the pantomime. The Professor never tired 
 of giving his students advice about the pre- 
 servation of their bodily health. He strongly 
 recommended a cold bath at six o'clock every 
 morning. In winter, he remarked genially, 
 you can break the ice with a hammer. Ac- 
 cording to himself, only one enthusiast seem? 
 to have followed his advice, and he died. 
 
 In Blackie's classroom there used to be ?> 
 demonstration every time he mentioned the 
 name of a distinguished politician. Whether 
 the demonstration took the Professor by sur- 
 prise, or whether he waited for it, will never, 
 perhaps, be known. But Blackie at least put 
 out the gleam in his eye, and looked as if he 
 were angry. " I will say Beaconsfield," he 
 would exclaim (cheers and hisses). " Beacons- 
 field " (uproar). Then he would stride for- 
 ward, and, seizing the railing, announce his 
 intention of saying Beaconsfield until every 
 goose in the room was tired of cackling. 
 
PROFESSOR JOHN STUART BLACKIE. 33 
 
 (" Question.") " Beaconsfield." (" No no.") 
 " Beaconsfield." (" Hear, hear," and shouts 
 of "Gladstone.") "Beaconsfield." ("Three 
 cheers for Dizzy.") Eventually the class 
 would be dismissed as — (i) idiots, (2) a bear 
 garden, (3) a flock of sheep, (4) a pack of 
 numskulls, (5) hissing serpents. The pro- 
 fessor would retire, apparently fuming, to his 
 anteroom, and five minutes afterwards he 
 would be playing himself down the North 
 Bridge on imaginary bagpipes. This sort of 
 thing added a sauce to all academic sessions. 
 There was a notebook also, which appeared 
 year after year. It contained the Professor's 
 jokes of a former session, carefully classified 
 by an admiring student. It was handed 
 down from one year's men to the next, and 
 thus if Blackie began to make a joke about 
 haggis, the possessor of the book had only 
 swiftly to turn to the H's, find what the joke 
 was, and send it along the class quicker than 
 the professor could speak it. 
 
 In the old days the Greek professor recited 
 a poem in honour of the end of the session. 
 He composed it liimsclf,and, as known to me, it 
 3 
 
34 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 took the form of a graduate's farewell to his 
 Alma Mater. Sometimes he would knock a 
 map down as if overcome with emotion, and 
 at critical moments a student in the back- 
 benches would accompany him on a penny- 
 trumpet. Now, I believe, the Hellenic Club 
 takes the place of the classroom. All the 
 eminent persons in Edinburgh attends its 
 meetings, and Blackie, the Athenian, is in 
 the chair. The policeman in Douglas 
 Crescent looks skeered when you ask him 
 what takes place on these occasions. It is 
 generally understood that toward the end 
 of the meeting they agree to read Greek next 
 time. 
 
IV. 
 
 PROFESSOR CALUERWOOD. 
 
 TTERE is a true story that the general 
 •■■ ^ reader may jump, as it is intended for 
 Professor Calderwood himself. Some years 
 ago an English daily paper reviewed a book 
 entitled " A Handbook of Moral Philosophy." 
 The Professor knows the work. The 
 "notice" was done by the junior reporter, 
 to whom philosophical treatises are generally 
 entrusted. He dealt leniently, on the whole, 
 with Professor Calderwood, even giving him 
 a word of encouragement here and there. 
 Still the criticism was severe. The reviewer 
 subsequently went to Edinburgh University, 
 and came out 144th in the class of Moral 
 Philosophy. 
 
 That student is now, I believe, on friendly 
 terms with Professor Calderwood, but has 
 never told him this story. I fancy the Pro- 
 lessor would like to know his name. It may 
 
30 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 perhaps, be reached in this way. He was the 
 young gentleman who went to his classes the 
 first day in a black coat and silk hat, and 
 was cheered round the quadrangle by a body 
 of admiring fellow-students, who took him 
 for a professor. 
 
 Calderwood contrives to get himself more 
 in touch with the mass of his students than 
 some of his fellow-professors, partly because 
 he puts a high ideal before himself, and to 
 some extent because his subject is one that 
 Scottish students revel in. Long before 
 they join his class they know that they are 
 moral philosophers ; indeed, they are some- 
 times surer of it before they enrol than 
 afterwards. Their essays begin in some such 
 fashion as this — " In joining issue with Reid, 
 I wish to take no unfair advantage of my 
 antagonist" ; or *' Kant is sadly at fault when 
 he says that " ; or " It is strange that a man 
 of Locke's attainments should have been 
 blind to the fact." When the Professor reads 
 out these tit-bits to the class his eyes twinkle. 
 Some students, of course, arc not such keen 
 philosophers as others. Does Professor 
 
PROFESSOR CALDKRWOOD. 
 
 J/ 
 
 Calderwood remember the one who was 
 never struck by anything in moral philo- 
 sophy until he learned by accident that 
 Descartes lay in bed till about twelve o'clock 
 every morning? Then it dawned on him 
 that he, too, must have been a philosopher 
 all his life without knowing it. One year a 
 father and son were in the class. The 
 father got so excited over volition and the 
 line that divides right from wrong, that he 
 wrenched the desk before him from its 
 sockets and hit it triumphantly, meaning that 
 he and the Professor were at one. He was 
 generally admired by his fellow-students, 
 because he was the only one in the class 
 who could cry out " Hear, hear," and even 
 "question," without blushing. The son, on 
 the other hand, was blase, and would have 
 been an agnostic, only he could never re- 
 member the name. Once a week Calderwood 
 turns his class into a debating society, and 
 argues things out with his students. This 
 field-day is a joy to them. Some of them 
 spend the six days previous in preparing 
 posers. The worst of the Professor is that 
 
$S AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 he never sees that they are posers. What 
 is the use of getting up a question of the 
 most subtle kind, when he answers it right 
 away ? It makes you sit down quite sud- 
 denly. There is an occasional student who 
 tries to convert liberty of speech on the 
 discussion day into license, and of him the 
 Professor makes short work. The student 
 means to turn the laugh on Calderwood, and 
 then Calderwood takes advantage of him, and 
 the other students laugh at the wrong person. 
 It is the older students, as a rule, who are 
 most violently agitated over these philo- 
 sophical debates. One with a beard cracks 
 his fingers, after the manner of a child in 
 a village school that knows who won the 
 battle of Bannockburn, and feels that he 
 must burst if he does not let it out at once. 
 A bald-headed man rises every minute to 
 put a question, and then sits down, looking 
 stupid. He has been trying so hard to re- 
 member what it is, that he has forgotten. 
 There is a legend of two who quarrelled over 
 the Will and fought it out on Arthur's Seat. 
 One year, however, a boy of sixteen or so, 
 
PROFESSOR CALDERWOOD. 39 
 
 with a squeaky voice and a stammer, was 
 Calderwood's severest critic. He sat on the 
 back bench, and what he wanted to know 
 was something about the infinite. Every 
 discussion day he took advantage of a kill 
 in the debate to squeak out, " With regard to 
 the infinite," and then could never get any 
 further. No one ever discovered what he 
 wanted enlightenment on about the infinite. 
 He grew despondent as the session wore on, 
 but courageously stuck to his point. Pro- 
 bably he is a soured man now. For purposes 
 of exposition Calderwood has a black board 
 in his lecture-room, on which he chalks circles 
 that represent the feelings and the will, with 
 arrows shooting between them. In my class 
 there was a boy, a very little boy, who had 
 been a dux at school and was a dunce at 
 college. He could not make moral philo- 
 sophy out at all, but did his best. Here were 
 his complete notes for one day : — " Edinburgh 
 University, class of Moral Philosophy, Pro- 
 fessor Calderwood, Lecture 64, Jan. 11, 18 — . 
 You rub out the arrow, and there is only the 
 circle left." 
 
40 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 Professor Calderwood is passionately fond 
 of music, as those who visit at his house 
 know. He is of opinion that there is a great 
 deal of moral philosophy in " The Dead 
 March in Saul." Once he said something to 
 that effect in his class, adding enthusiastically 
 that he could excuse the absence of a student 
 who had been away hearing " The Dead 
 March in Saul." After that he received a 
 good many letters from students, worded in 
 this way : " Mr. McNaughton (bench 7) 
 presents his compliments to Professor Calder- 
 wood, and begs to state that his absence from 
 the class yesterday was owing to his being 
 elsewhere, hearing * The Dead March in 
 Saul.'" "Dear Professor Calderwood — I 
 regret my absence from the lecture to-day, 
 but hope you will overlook it, as I was un- 
 avoidably detained at home, practising ' The 
 Dead March in Saul.'— Yours truly, Peter 
 Webster." " Professor Calderwood, — Dear 
 Sir, — As I was coming to the lecture to-day, 
 I heard ' The Dead March in Saul ' being 
 played in the street. You will, I am sure, 
 make allowance for my non-attendance at 
 
PROFESSOR CALDKRWOOD. 4T 
 
 the class, as I was too much affected to 
 come. It is indeed a grand march. — Yours 
 faithfully, JOIIN ROBBIE." "The students 
 whose names are subjoined thank the Pro- 
 fessor of Moral Philosophy most cordially 
 for his remarks on the elevating power of 
 music. They have been encouraged thereby 
 to start a class for the proper study of the 
 impressive and solemn march to which he 
 called special attention, and hope he will 
 excuse them, should their practisings occa- 
 sionally prevent their attendance at the 
 Friday lectures." Professor Calderwood does 
 not lecture on " The Dead March in Saul " 
 now. 
 
 The class of Moral Philosophy is not for 
 the few, but the many. Some professors do 
 not mind what becomes of the nine students, 
 so long as they can force on every tenth. 
 Calderwood, however, considers it his duty to 
 carry the whole class along with him, and it 
 is, as a consequence, almost impossible to fall 
 behind. The lectures are not delivered, in 
 the ordinary sense, but dictated. Having 
 explained the subject of the day with the 
 
42 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 lucidity that is this professor's pecuh'ar gift, 
 he condenses his remarks into a proposition. 
 It is as if a minister ended his sermon with 
 the text. Thus : — " Proposition 34. Man is 
 born into the world — (You have got that ? 
 See that you have all got it.) Man is born 
 into the world with a capacity — with a 
 capacity — " (Anxious student : " If you 
 please, Professor, where did you say man was 
 born into ? ") " Into the world, with a 
 capacity to distinguish " — (" With a what, 
 sir ? ") — " with a capacity to distinguish " — 
 (Student : " Who is born into the world ? ") 
 " Perhaps I have been reading too quickly. 
 Man is born into the world, with a capacity 
 to distinguish between — distinguish between 
 (student shuts his book, thinking that com- 
 pletes the proposition) — distinguish between 
 right and wrong — right — and wrong. You 
 have all got Proposition 34, gentlemen ? " 
 
 Once Calderwood was questioning a student 
 about a proposition to see that he thoroughly 
 understood it. " Give an illustration," sug- 
 gested the Professor. The student took the 
 case of a murderer. " Very good," said the 
 
PROFESSOR CALDERWOOD. 43 
 
 Professor. " Now give me another illustra- 
 tion." The student pondered for a little. 
 " Well," he said at length, " take the case of 
 another murderer." 
 
 Professor Calderwood has such an excep- 
 tional interest in his students that he asks 
 every one of them to his house. This is 
 but one of many things that makes him 
 generally popular ; he also invites his ladies' 
 class to meet them. The lady whom you 
 take down to supper suggests Proposition 41 
 as a nice thing to talk about, and asks what 
 you think of the metaphysics of ethics. 
 Professor Calderwood sees the ladies into the 
 cabs himself. It is the only thing I ever 
 heard as^ainst him. 
 
PROFESSOR TAIT. 
 
 JUST as I opened my desk to write enthu- 
 siastically of Tait, I remembered having 
 recently deciphered a pencil note about him, 
 in my own handwriting, on the cover of 
 Masson's " Chronological List," which I still 
 keep by me. I turned to the note to see if 
 there was life in it yet. *' Walls," it says, 
 '* got 2s. for T. and T. at Brown's, i6, Walker- 
 street." I don't recall Walls, but T. and T. 
 was short for " Thomson and Tait's Elements 
 of Natural Philosophy" (Elements!), better 
 known in my year as the " Student's First 
 Glimpse of Hades." Evidently Walls sold 
 his copy, but why did I take such note of the 
 address? I fear T. and T. is one of the 
 Books Which Have Helped Me. This some- 
 what damps my ardour. 
 
 When Tait was at Cambridge it was flung 
 
46 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 in the face of the mathematicians that they 
 never stood high in Scriptural knowledge. 
 Tait and another were the two of whom 
 one must be first wrangler, and they agreed 
 privately to wipe this stigma from mathe- 
 matics. They did it by taking year about 
 the prize which was said to hang out of their 
 reach. It is always interesting to know of 
 professors who have done well in Biblical 
 knowledge. All Scottish students at the 
 English Universities are not so successful. I 
 knew a Snell man who was sent back from 
 the Oxford entrance exam., and he always 
 held himself that the Biblical questions had 
 done it. 
 
 Turner is said by medicals to be the finest 
 lecturer in the University. He will never 
 be that so long as Tait is in the Natural 
 Philosophy chair. Never, I think, can there 
 have been a more superb demonstrator. I 
 have his burly figure before me. The small 
 twinkling eyes had a fascinating gleam in 
 them ; he could concentrate them until they 
 held the object looked at ; when they flashed 
 round the room he seemed to have drawn a 
 
PROFESSOR TAIT. 47 
 
 rapier. I have seen a man fall back in alarm 
 under Tait's eyes, though there were a dozen 
 benches between them. These eyes could be 
 merry as a boy's, though, as when he turned a 
 tube of water on students who would insist on 
 crowding too near an experiment, for Tait's 
 was the humour of high spirits. I could 
 conceive him at marbles still, and feeling 
 annoyed at defeat. He could not fancy 
 anything much funnier than a man missing 
 his chair. Outside his own subject he is not, 
 one feels, a six-footer. When Mr. R. L. 
 Stevenson's memoir of the late Mr. Fleeming 
 Jenkin was published, Tait said at great 
 length that he did not like it ; he would 
 have had the sketch by a scientific man. 
 But though scientists may be the only men 
 nowadays who have anything to say, they are 
 also the only men who can't say it. Scientific 
 men out of their sphere know for a fact that 
 novels are not true. So they draw back 
 from novelists who write biography, Pro- 
 fessor Tait and Mr. Stevenson are both men 
 of note, who walk different ways, and when 
 they meet neither likes to take the curbstone. 
 
48 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 If they were tied together for life in a three- 
 legged race, which would suffer the more ? 
 
 But if Tait's science weighs him to the 
 earth, he has a genius for sticking to his 
 subject, and I am lost in admiration every 
 time I bring back his lectures. It comes as 
 natural to his old students to say when they 
 meet, " What a lecturer Tait was ! " as to 
 Englishmen to joke about the bagpipes. It 
 is not possible to draw a perfect circle, 
 Chrystal used to say, after drawing a very fine 
 one. To the same extent it was not possible 
 for Tait never to fail in his experiments. 
 The atmosphere would be too much for him 
 once in a session, or there were other hostile 
 influences at work. Tait warned us of these 
 before proceeding to experiment, but we 
 merely smiled. We believed in him as 
 though he were a Bradshaw announcing that 
 he would not be held responsible for possible 
 errors. 
 
 I had forgotten Lindsay ; " the mother may 
 forget her child." As I write he has slipped 
 back into his chair on the Professor's right, 
 and I could photograph him now in his 
 
PROFESSOR TAir. 49 
 
 brown suit. Lindsay was the imperturbable 
 man who assisted Tait in his experiments, 
 and his father held the post before him. 
 When there were many of us together, we 
 could applaud Lindsay with burlesque exag- 
 geration, and he treated us good-humouredly, 
 as making something considerable between 
 us. But I once had to face Lindsay alone, 
 in quest of my certificate ; and suddenly he 
 towered above me, as a waiter may grow tall 
 when you find that you have not money enough 
 to pay the bill. He treated me most kindly ; 
 did not reply, of course, but got the certifi- 
 cate, and handed it to me as a cashier con- 
 temptuously shovels you your pile of gold. 
 Long ago I pasted up a crack in my window 
 with the certificate, but it said, I remember, 
 that I had behaved respectably — so far as I 
 had come under the eyes of the Professor. 
 Tait was always an enthusiast. 
 
 We have been keeping Lindsay waiting. 
 When he had nothing special to do he sat 
 indifferently in his chair, with the face of a 
 precentor after the sermon has begun. But 
 though it was not very likely that Lindsay 
 4 
 
30 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 would pay much attention to talk about such 
 playthings as the laws of Nature, his fingers 
 went out in the direction of the Professor 
 when the experiments began. Then he was 
 not the precentor ; he was a minister in one 
 of the pews. Lindsay was an inscrutable 
 man, and I shall not dare to say that he even 
 half-wished to see Tait fail. He only looked 
 on, ready for any em.ergency ; but if the 
 experiment would not come off, he was as 
 quick to go to the Professor's assistance as 
 a member of Parliament is to begin when 
 he has caught the Speaker's eye. Perhaps 
 Tait would have none of his aid, or pushed 
 the mechanism for the experiment from him 
 — an intimation to Lindsay to carry it 
 quickly to the ante-room. Do you think 
 Lindsay read the instructions so ? Let me 
 tell you that }our mind fails to seize hold 
 of Lindsay. He marched the machine out 
 of Tait's vicinity as a mother may push her 
 erring boy away from his father's arms, to 
 take him to her heart as soon as the door 
 is closed. Lindsay took the machine to his 
 seat, and laid it before him on the desk with 
 
PROFESSOR TAIT. 5 1 
 
 well-concealed apathy. Tait would flash his 
 eye to the right to see what Lindsay was 
 after, and there was Lindsay sitting with his 
 arms folded. The Professor's lecture resumed 
 its way, and then out went Lindsay's hands 
 to the machine. Here he tried a wheel ; 
 again he turned a screw ; in time he had 
 the machine ready for another trial. No 
 one was looking his way, when suddenly 
 there was a whizz — bang, bang. All eyes 
 were turned upon Lindsay, the Professor's 
 among them. A cheer broke out as we 
 realized that Lindsay had done the experi- 
 ment. Was he flushed with triumph ? Not 
 a bit of it ; he was again sitting with his 
 arms folded. A Glasgow merchant of modest 
 manners, when cross-examined in a law court, 
 stated that he had a considerable monetary 
 interest in a certain concern. " How much 
 do you mean by a 'considerable monetary 
 interest ' ? " demanded the contemptuous bar- 
 rister who was cross-exam.ining him. " Oh,' 
 said the witness, humbly, " a maiter o' a 
 million an' a half — or, say, twa million.' 
 That Glasgow man in the witness-box is the 
 
52 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 only person I can think of when looking 
 about me for a parallel to Lindsay. While 
 the Professor eyed him and the students 
 deliriously beat the floor, Lindsay quietly 
 gathered the mechanism together and carried 
 it to the ante-room. His head was not flung 
 back nor his chest forward, like one who 
 walked to music. In his hour of triumph he 
 was still imperturbable. I lie back in my 
 chair to-day, after the lapse of years, and ask 
 myself again, How did Lindsay behave after 
 he entered the ante-room, shutting the door 
 behind him .? Did he give way ? There is 
 no one to say. When he returned to the 
 classroom he wore his familiar face ; a man 
 to ponder over. 
 
 There is a legend about the Natural Philo- 
 sophy classroom — the period long antecedent 
 to Tait. The Professor, annoyed by a habit 
 students had got into of leaving their hats on 
 his desk, announced that the next hat placed 
 there would be cut in pieces by him in pre- 
 sence of the class. The warning had its 
 effect, until one day when the Professor was 
 called for a few minutes from the room. An 
 
PROFESSOR TAIT. 53 
 
 undergraduate, to whom the natural sciences, 
 unrelieved, were a monotonous study, slipped 
 into the ante-room, from which he emerged 
 with the Professor's hat. This he placed on 
 the desk, and then stole in a panic to his seat. 
 An awe fell upon the class. The Professor 
 returned, but when he saw the hat he 
 stopped. He showed no anger. " Gentle- 
 men," he said, " I told you what would 
 happen if you again disobeyed my orders." 
 Quite blandly he took a pen-knife from his 
 pocket, slit the hat into several pieces, and 
 flung them into the sink. While the hat was 
 under the knife the students forgot to demon- 
 strate, but as it splashed into the sink they 
 gave forth a true British cheer. The end. 
 
 Close to the door of the Natural Philo- 
 sophy room is a window that in my memory 
 will ever be sacred to a janitor. The janitors 
 of the University were of varied interest, 
 from the merry one who treated us as if 
 we were his equals, and the soldier who 
 sometimes looked as if he would like to 
 mow us down, to the Head Man of All, 
 whose name I dare not write, though I can 
 
54 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 whisper it. The janitor at the window, how- 
 ever, sat there through the long evenings 
 while the Debating Society (of which I was 
 a member) looked after affairs of State in 
 an adjoining room. We were the smallest 
 society in the University and the longest- 
 winded, and I was once nearly expelled for 
 not paying my subscription. Our grand 
 debate was, '' Is the policy of the Govern- 
 ment worthy the confidence of this Society? " 
 and we also read about six essays yearly 
 on " The Genius of Robert Burns " ; but it 
 was on private business that we came out 
 strongest. The question that agitated us 
 most was whether the meetings should be 
 opened with prayer, and the men who 
 thought they should would not so much as 
 look at the men who thought they should not. 
 When the janitor was told that we had begun 
 our private business he returned to his win- 
 dow and slept. His great day was when we 
 could not form a quorum, which happened 
 now and then. 
 
 Gregory was a member of that society: 
 what has become of Gregory ? He was one of 
 
PROFESSOR TAIT. 55 
 
 those men who professors say have a briHiant 
 future before them, and who have not since 
 been heard of. Morton, another member, 
 was of a different stamp. He led in the 
 debate on " Beauty of the Mind v. Beauty of 
 the Body." His writhing contempt for the 
 beauty that is only skin deep is not to be 
 forgotten. How noble were his rhapsodies 
 on the beauty of the mind ! And when he 
 went to Calder wood's to supper, how quick 
 he was to pick out the prettiest girl, who took 
 ten per cent, in Moral Philosophy, and to sit 
 beside her all the evening. Morton had a 
 way of calling on his friends the night before 
 a degree examination to ask them to put him 
 up to as much as would pull him through. 
 
 Tait used to get greatly excited over the 
 rectorial elections, and if he could have dis- 
 guised himself, would have liked, I think, tc 
 join in the fight round the Brewster statue. 
 He would have bled for the Conservative 
 cause, as his utterances on University reform 
 have shown. The reformers have some cause 
 for thinking that Tait is a greater man in 
 his classroom than when he addresses the 
 
56 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 graduates. He has said that the less his 
 students know of his subject when they join 
 his class, the less, probably, they will have to 
 unlearn. Such views are behind the times 
 that feed their children on geographical 
 biscuits in educational nurseries with astro- 
 nomical ceilings and historical wall-papers. 
 
VI. 
 
 PROFESSOR CAMPBELL ERASER. 
 
 ATOT long ago I was back in the Old 
 -"-^ University — how well I remember 
 pointing it out as the gaol to a stranger who 
 had asked me to show him round. I was in 
 one of the library ante-rooms, when some one 
 knocked, and I looked up, to see Campbell 
 Fraser framed in the doorway. I had not 
 looked on that venerable figure for half a 
 dozen years. I had forgotten all my meta- 
 physics. Yet it all came back with a rush. 
 I was on my feet, wondering if I existed 
 strictly so-called. 
 
 Calderwood and Fraser had both their fol- 
 lowings. The moral philosophers wore an 
 air of certainty, for they knew that if they 
 stuck to Calderwood he would pull them 
 through. You cannot lose yourself in the 
 back-garden. But the metaphysicians had 
 their doubts. Fraser led them into strange 
 
58 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 places, and said he would meet them there 
 again next day. They wandered to their 
 lodgings, and got into difficulties with their 
 landlady for saying that she was only an 
 aggregate of sense phenomena. Fraser was 
 rather a hazardous cure for weak intellects. 
 Young men whose anchor had been certainty 
 of themselves went into that class floating 
 buoyantly on the sea of facts, and came out 
 all adrift — on the sea of theory — in an open 
 boat — rudderless — one oar — the boat scuttled. 
 How could they think there was any chance 
 for them, when the Professor was not even 
 sure of himself? I see him rising in a daze 
 from his chair and putting his hands through 
 his hair. " Do I exist," he said, thoughtfully, 
 " strictly so-called ? " The students (if it was 
 the beginning of the session) looked a little 
 startled. This was a matter that had not 
 previously disturbed them. Still, if the Pro- 
 fessor was in doubt, there must be something 
 in it. He began to argue it out, and an 
 uncomfortable silence held the room in awe. 
 If he did not exist, the chances were that they 
 did not exist either. It was thus a personal 
 
PROFESSOR CAMPBELL ERASER. 59 
 
 question. The Professor glanced round slowly 
 for an illustration. "Am I a table.?" A 
 pained look travelled over the class. Was it 
 just possible that they were all tables ? It is 
 no wonder that the students who do not go to 
 the bottom during their first month of meta- 
 physics begin to give themselves airs strictly 
 so-called. In the privacy of their room at 
 the top of the house they pinch themselves to 
 see if they are still there. 
 
 He would, I think, be a sorry creature who 
 did not find something to admire in Campbell 
 Fraser. Metaphysics may not trouble you, as 
 it troubles him, but you do npt sit under the 
 man without seeing his transparent honesty 
 and feeling that he is genuine. In appear- 
 ance and in habit of thought he is an ideal 
 philosopher, and his communings with himself 
 have lifted him to a level of serenity that is 
 worth struggling for. Of all the arts profes- 
 sors in Edinburgh he is probably the most 
 difficult to understand, and students in a hurry 
 have called his lectures childish. If so, it may 
 be all the better for them. For the first half 
 of the hour, they say, he tells you what he is 
 
60 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 going to do, and for the second half he revises. 
 Certainly he is vastly explanatory, but then 
 he is not so young as they are, and so he has 
 his doubts. They are so cock-sure that they 
 wonder to see him hesitate. Often there is a 
 mist on the mountain when it is all clear in 
 the valley. 
 
 Eraser's great work in his edition of 
 Berkeley, a labour of love that should live 
 after him. He has two Berkeleys, the large 
 one and the little one, and, to do him justice, 
 it was the little one he advised us to consult. 
 I never read the large one myself, which is in 
 a number of monster tomes, but I often had a 
 look at it in the library, and I was proud to 
 think that an Edinburgh professor was the 
 editor. When Glasgow men came through to 
 talk of their professors we showed them the 
 big Berkeley, and after that they were reason- 
 able. There was one man in my year who 
 really began the large Berkeley, but after a 
 time he was missing, and it is believed that 
 some day he will be found flattened between 
 the pages of the first volume. 
 
 The "Selections" was the text -book we 
 
PROFESSOR CAMPBELL ERASER. 6 1 
 
 used in the class. It is sufficient to prove that 
 Berkeley wrote beautiful English. I am not 
 sure that any one has written such English 
 since. We have our own " stylists," but how 
 self-conscious they are after Berkeley. It is 
 seven years since I opened my " Selections," 
 but I see that I was once more of a metaphy- 
 sician than I have been giving myself credit 
 for. The book is scribbled over with posers in 
 my handwriting about dualism and primary 
 realities. Some of the comments are in short- 
 hand, which I must at one time have been 
 able to read, but all are equally unintelligible 
 now. Here is one of my puzzlers : — " Does 
 B here mean impercipient and unperceived 
 subject or conscious and percipient subject ? " 
 Observe the friendly B. I daresay farther on 
 I shall find myself referring to the Professor 
 as F. I wonder if I ever discovered what B 
 meant. I could not now tell what I meant 
 myself. 
 
 As many persons are aware, the " Selections" 
 consist of Berkeley's text with the Pro- 
 fessor's notes thereon. The notes are expla- 
 natory of the text, and the student must find 
 
62 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 them an immense help. Here, for instance, 
 is a note : — ■" Phenomenal or sense dependent 
 existence can be substantiated and caused 
 only by a self-conscious spirit, for otherwise 
 there could be no propositions about it expres- 
 sive of what is conceivable ; on the other! 
 hand, to affirm that phenomenal or sense j 
 dependent existence, which alone we know,j 
 and which alone is conceivable, is, or even! 
 represents, an inconceivable non-phenomenal 
 or abstract existence, would be to affirm a 
 contradiction in terms." There we have it. 
 
 As a metaphysician I was something of a 
 disappointment. I began well, standing, if I 
 recollect aright, in the three examinations, 
 first, seventeenth, and seventy-seventh. A 
 man who sat beside me — man was the word 
 we used — gazed at me reverently when I 
 came out first, and I could see by his eye 
 that he was not sure whether I existed' 
 properly so-called. By the second exam, his 
 doubts had gone, and by the third he was 
 surer of me than of himself. He came out 
 fifty-seventh, this being the grand triumph of 
 his college course. He was the same whose 
 
PROFESSOR CAMPJ3ELL FRASER. 62> 
 
 key translated eras donaberis haedo "To- 
 morrow you will be presented with a kid," 
 but who, thinkingr that a little vulgar, refined 
 It down to " To-morrow you will be presented 
 with a small child." 
 
 In the metaphysics class I was like the 
 fountains in the quadrangle, which ran dry 
 toward the middle of the session. While 
 things were still looking hopeful for me, I had 
 an invitation to breakfast with the Professor. 
 If the fates had been so propitious as to for- 
 ward me that invitation, it is possible that I 
 might be a metaphysician to this day, but I 
 [lad changed my lodgings, and when I heard 
 3f the affair, all was over. The Professor 
 isked me to stay behind one day after the lee 
 iure,and told me that he had got his note back 
 v^ith " Left : no address," on it. " However," 
 ie said, "you may keep this," presenting m'e 
 /ith the invitation for the Saturdaypreviously. 
 mention this to show that even professors 
 ave hearts. That letter is preserved with 
 le autographs of three editors, none of 
 hich anybody can read. 
 There was once a medical student who 
 
64 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 came up to my rooms early in the session, 
 and I proved to him in half an hour that he 
 did not exist. He got quite frightened, and I 
 can still see his white face as he sat staring at 
 me in the gloaming. This shows what meta- 
 physics can do. He has recovered, however, 
 and is sheep-farmingnow, his examiners never 
 having asked him the right questions. 
 
 The last time Fraser ever addressed me 
 was when I was capped. He said, " I con- 
 gratulate you, Mr. Smith " : and one of the 
 other professors said, " I congratulate you^ 
 Mr. Fisher." My name is neither Smith no| 
 Fisher, but no doubt the thing was kindl; 
 meant. It was then, however, that the pro- 
 fessor of metaphysics had his revenge on me. 
 I had once spelt Fraser with a " z " 
 
vir. 
 
 PROFESSOR CHRYSTAL. 
 
 117 HEN Chiystal came to Edinburgh he 
 * * rooted up the humours of the classroom 
 as a dentist draws teeth. Souls were sold for 
 keys that could be carried in the waistcoat 
 pocket. Ambition fell from heights, and lay 
 with its eye on a certificate. By night was a 
 rush of ghosts, shrieking for passes. Horse 
 play fled before the Differential Calculus in 
 spectacles. 
 
 I had Chrystal's first year, and recall the 
 gloomy student sitting before me who hacked 
 " All hope abandon ye who enter here " into 
 a desk that may have confined Carlyle. It 
 took him a session, and he was digging his 
 own grave, for he never got through ; but it 
 was something to hold by, something he felt 
 sure of. All else was spiders' webs in chalk. 
 
 Chrystal was a fine hare for the hounds who 
 could keep up with him. He started off the 
 
66 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 first day with such a spurt that most of us 
 were left behind mopping our faces, and say- 
 ing, " Here's a fellow," which is what Mr. 
 Stevenson says Shakespeare would have re- 
 marked about Mr. George Meredith. We 
 never saw him again. The men who were 
 on speaking acquaintance with his symbols 
 revelled in him as students love an enthusiast 
 who is eager to lead them into a world toward 
 which they would journey. He was a rare 
 guide for them. The bulk, however, lost him 
 in labyrinths. They could not but admire 
 their brilliant professor ; but while their friend 
 the medalist and he kept the conversation 
 to themselves, they felt like eavesdroppers 
 hearkening to a pair of lovers. " It is beauti- 
 ful," they cried, " but this is no place for us ; 
 let us away." 
 
 A good many went, but their truancy stuck 
 in their throats like Otway's last roll. The 
 M.A. was before them. They had fancied it 
 in their hands, but it became shy as a maiden 
 from the day they learned Chrystal's heresy 
 that Euclid is not mathematics but only some 
 riders in it. This snapped the cord that had 
 
PROFESSOR CHRYSTAL. 67 
 
 tied the blind man to his dog, and the M.A. 
 shot down the horizon. When Rutherford 
 deHvered his first lecture in the chair of Insti- 
 tutes of Medicine, boisterous students drowned 
 his voice, and he flung out of the room. At 
 the door he paused to say, " Gentlemen, we 
 shall meet again at Philippi." A dire bomb 
 was this in the midst of them, warranted to 
 go off, none able to cast it overboard. We, 
 too, had our Philippi before us. Chrystal could 
 not be left to his own devices. 
 
 I had never a passion for knowing that 
 when circles or triangles attempt impossi- 
 bilities it is absurd ; and x was an unknown 
 quantity I was ever content to walk round 
 about. To admit to Chrystal that we under- 
 stood ,r was only a way he had of leading you 
 on to y and z. I gave him his chance, how- 
 ever, by contributing a paper of answers to 
 his first weekly set of exercises. When the 
 hour for returning the slips came round, I was 
 there to accept fame — if so it was to be — with 
 modesty ; and if it was to be humiliation, still 
 jto smile. The Professor said there was one 
 jpaper, with an owner's name on it, which he 
 
68 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 could not read, and it was handed along the 
 class to be deciphered. My presentiment 
 that it was mine became a certainty when 
 it reached my hand ; but I passed it on 
 pleasantly, and it returned to Chrystal, a 
 Japhet that never found its father. Feeling 
 that the powers were against me, I then re- 
 tired from the conflict, sanguine that the 
 teaching of my mathematical schoolmaster, 
 the best that could be, would pull me through. 
 The Disowned may be going the round of the 
 classroom still. 
 
 The men who did not know when they were 
 beaten returned to their seats, and doggedly 
 took notes, their faces lengthening daily. 
 Their note-books reproduced exactly the 
 hieroglyphics of the blackboard, and, ex- 
 amined at night, were as suggestive as the 
 photographs of persons one has never seen. 
 To overtake Chrystal after giving him a start 
 was the presumption that is an offshoot from 
 despair. There was once an elderly gentle- 
 man who for years read the Times every day 
 from the first page to the last. For a fort- 
 night he was ill of a fever ; but, on recovering, 
 
PROFESSOR CIIRYSTAL. 69 
 
 he began at the copy of the Times where he 
 had left off. He struggled magnificently to 
 make up on the Times, but it was in vain. 
 This is an allegory for the way these students 
 panted after Chrystal. 
 
 Some succumbed and joined the majority — 
 literally ; for to mathematics they were dead. 
 I never hear of the old University now, nor 
 pass under the shadow of the walls one loves 
 when he is done with them, without seeing 
 myself as I was the day I matriculated, an 
 awestruck boy, passing and repassing the 
 gates, frightened to venture inside, breathing 
 heavily at sight of janitors, Scott and Carlyle 
 in the air. After that I see nothing fuller of 
 colour than the meetings that were held out- 
 side Chrystal's door. Adjoining it is a class- 
 room so little sought for, that legend tells of 
 its door once showing the notice : '' There 
 will be no class to-day as the student is un- 
 well." The crowd round Chrystal's could 
 have filled that room. It was composed of 
 students hearkening at the door to see 
 whether he was to call their part of the roll 
 to-day. If he did, they slunk in ; if not, the 
 
70 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 crowd melted into the streets, this refrain in 
 their ears — 
 
 " I'm plucked, I do admit, 
 
 I'm spun, my mother dear, 
 Yet do not grieve for that 
 
 Which happens every year. 
 I've waited very patiently, 
 
 I may have long to wait, 
 But you've another son, mother, • 
 
 And he will graduate." 
 
 A professor of mathematics once brought 
 a rowdy student from the back benches to a 
 seat beside him, because — "First, you'll be near 
 the board ; second, you'll be near me ; and, 
 third, you'll be near the door." Chrystal soon 
 discovered that students could be too near the 
 door, and he took to calling the roll in the 
 middle of the hour, which insured an increased 
 attendance. It was a silent class, nothing" 
 heard but the patter of pencils, rats scraping 
 for grain, of which there was abundance, but 
 not one digestion in a bench. To smuggle 
 in a novel up one's waistcoat was perilous, 
 Chrystal's spectacles doing their work. At 
 a corner of the platform sat the assistant, 
 with a constable's authority, but not formed 
 
PROFESSOR CHRYSTAL. 7I 
 
 for swooping, uneasy because he had legs, 
 and where to put them he knew not. He got 
 through the hour by shifting his position every 
 five minutes ; and, sitting there waiting, he 
 reminded one of the boy who, on being told 
 to remain so quietly where he was that he 
 could hear a pin drop, held his breath a 
 moment, then shouted, " Let it drop ! " An 
 excellent fellow was this assistant, who told 
 us that one of his predecessors had got three 
 months. 
 
 A jest went as far in that class as a plum in 
 the midshipmen's pudding, and, you remem- 
 ber, when the middies came on a plum they 
 gave three cheers. In the middle of some 
 brilliant reasoning Chrystal would stop to add 
 4, 7, and 1 1. Addition of this kind was the 
 only thing he could not do, and he looked to 
 the class for help — " 20," they shouted, " 24," 
 " 17," while he thought it over. These appeals 
 to their intelligence made them beam. They 
 woke up as a sleepy congregation shakes itself 
 into life when the minister says, " I remember 
 when I was a little boy. . . ." 
 
 The daring spirits — say, those who were 
 
^2 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 going into their father's office, and so did not 
 look upon Chrystal as a door locked to their 
 advancement — sought to bring sunshine into 
 the room. Chrystal soon had the blind down 
 on that. I hear they have been at it recently 
 with the usual result. To relieve the mono- 
 tony,a student at the end of bench ten dropped 
 a marble, which toppled slowly downward 
 toward the Professor. At every step it took 
 there was a smothered guffaw ; but Chrystal, 
 who was working at the board, did not turn 
 his head. When the marble reached the 
 floor, he said, still with his back to the class, 
 " Will the student at the end of bench ten, 
 who dropped that marble, stand up ? " All 
 eyes dilated. He had counted the falls of the 
 marble from step to step. Mathematics do 
 not obscure the intellect. 
 
 Twenty per cent, was a good percentage in 
 Chrystal's examinations ; thirty sent you away 
 whistling. As the M. A. drew nigh, students 
 on their prospects might have been farmers 
 discussing the weather. Some put their faith 
 in the Professor's goodness of heart, of which 
 symptoms had been showing. He would 
 
PROFESSOR CIIRYSTAL. -J I 
 
 not, all at once, " raise the standard "—hated 
 phrase until you arc through, when you write 
 to the papers advocating it. Courage ! was it 
 not told of the Glasgow Snell competition 
 that one of the competitors, as soon as he saw 
 the first paper, looked for his hat and the door, 
 that he was forbidden to withdraw until an 
 hour had elapsed, and that he then tackled 
 the paper and ultimately carried off the Snell ? 
 Of more immediate interest, perhaps, was the 
 story of the quaking student, whose neighbour 
 handed him in pencil, beneath the desk, the 
 answer to several questions. It was in an 
 M.A. exam., and the affrighted student found 
 that he could not read his neighbour's notes. 
 Trustingtofortune, he enclosed them with his 
 own answers, writing at the top, " No time to 
 write these out in ink, so enclose them in 
 pencil." He got through : no moral. 
 
 A condemned criminal wondering if he is 
 to get a reprieve will not feel the position 
 novel, if he has loitered in a University quad- 
 rangle waiting for the janitor to nail up the 
 results of a degree exam. A queer gathering 
 we were, awaiting the verdict of Chrystal. 
 
74 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 Some compressed their lips, others were lively 
 as fireworks dipped in water ; there were those 
 who rushed round and round the quadrangle ; 
 only one went the length of saying that he 
 did not want to pass. H. I shall call him. I 
 met him the other day in Fleet Street, and he 
 annoyed me by asking at once if I remem- 
 bered the landlady I quarrelled with because 
 she wore my socks to church of a Sunday : 
 we found her out one wet forenoon. H. 
 waited the issue with a cigar in his mouth. 
 He had purposely, he explained, given in a 
 bad paper. He could not understand why 
 men were so anxious to get through. He had 
 ten reasons for wishing to be plucked. We 
 let him talk. The janitor appeared with the 
 fateful paper, and we lashed about him like 
 waves round a lighthouse, all but H., who 
 strolled languidly to the board to which the 
 paper was being fastened. A moment after- 
 wards I heard a shriek, " I'm through ! I'm 
 through ! " It was H. His cigar was dashed 
 aside, and he sped like an arrow from the bow 
 to the nearest telegraph office, shouting " I'm 
 through ! " as he ran. 
 
PROFESSOR CIIRYSTAL. 75 
 
 Those of us who had H.'s fortune now con- 
 sider Chrystal made to order for his chair, but 
 he has never, perhaps, had a proper apprecia- 
 tion of the charming fellows who get ten per 
 cent. 
 
VIII. 
 
 PROFESSOR SELLAR. 
 
 11 THEN one of the distinguished hunting 
 '' • ladies who chase celebrities captured 
 Mr. Mark Pattison, he gave anxious con- 
 sideration to the quotation which he was 
 asked to write above his name. " Fancy," 
 he said with a shudder, " going down to 
 posterity arm in arm with carpe diem ! " 
 Remembering this, I forbear tying Sellar to 
 odi profamnn vtilgus. Yet the name opens 
 the door to the quotation. 
 
 Sellar is a Roman senator. He stood 
 very high at Oxford, and took a prize for 
 boxing. If you watch him in the class, you 
 will sometimes see his mind murmuring that 
 Edinburgh students do not take their play 
 like Oxford men. The difference is in man- 
 ner. A courteous fellow-student of Sellar 
 once showed his relatives over Balliol. " You 
 have now, I think," he said at last, "seen 
 
78 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 everything of interest except the Master." 
 He flung a stone at a window, at which the 
 Master's head appeared immediately, menac- 
 ing, wrathful. " And now," concluded the 
 polite youth, " you have seen him also." 
 
 Mr. James Payn, who never forgave the 
 Scottish people for pulling down their blinds 
 on Sundays, was annoyed by the halo they 
 have woven around the name " Professor." 
 He knew an Edinburgh lady who was scan- 
 dalized because that mere poet, Alexander 
 Smith, coolly addressed professors by their 
 surnames. Mr. Payn might have known 
 what it is to walk in the shadow of a Senatus 
 Academicus, could he have met such speci- 
 mens as Sellar, Fraser, Tait, and Sir Alexan- 
 der Grant marching down the Bridges abreast. 
 I have seen them : an inspiriting sight. The 
 pavement only held three. You could have 
 shaken hands with them from an upper win- 
 dow. 
 
 Sellar's treatment of his students was 
 always that of a fine gentleman. Few got 
 near him ; all respected him. At times he 
 was addressed in an unknown tongue, but he 
 
PROFESSOR SELLAR. 79 
 
 kept his countenance. He was particular 
 about students keeping to their proper 
 benches, and once thought he had caught 
 a swarthy north countryman straying. " You 
 are in your wrong seat, Mr. Orr." " Na, am 
 richt eneuch." " You should be in the seat 
 in front. That is bench 12, and you are 
 entered on bench 10." "Eh? This is no 
 bench twal, (counting) twa, fower, sax, aucht, 
 ten." " There is something wrong." " Oh-h-h 
 (with sudden enlightenment) ye've been coon- 
 tin' the first dask ; we dinna coont the first 
 dask." The Professor knew the men he had 
 to deal with too well to scorn this one, who 
 turned out to be a fine fellow. He was the 
 only man I ever knew who ran his medical 
 and arts classes together, and so many lectures 
 had he to attend daily that he mixed them up. 
 He graduated, however, in both faculties in 
 five years, and the last I heard of him was 
 that, when applying for a medical assistant- 
 ship, he sent his father's photograph because 
 he did not have one of himself He was a 
 man of brains as well as sinew, and dined 
 briskly on a shilling a week. 
 
8o AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 There was a little fellow in the class who 
 was a puzzle to Sellar, because he was higher 
 sitting than standing : when the Professor 
 asked him to stand up, he stood down. " Is 
 Mr. Blank not present ? " Sellar would ask. 
 " Here, sir," cried Blank. " Then, will you 
 stand up, Mr. Blank ? " (Agony of Blank, 
 and a demonstration of many feet.) "Are 
 you not prepared, Mr. Blank ? " " Yes, sir ; 
 Pastor qiium traJiaret — " " I insist on your 
 standing up, Mr. Blank." (Several students 
 rise to their feet to explain, but subside.) 
 " Yes, sir ; Pastor quum traharet per — " " I 
 shall mark you ' not prepared,' Mr. Blank." 
 (Further demonstration, and then an indig- 
 nant squeak from Blank.) " If you please, 
 sir, I am standing." " But, in that case, how 
 is it — } Ah, oh, ah, yes ; proceed, Mr. 
 Blank." As one man was only called upon 
 for exhibition five or six times in a year, the 
 Professor had always forgotten the circum- 
 stances when he asked Blank to stand up 
 again. Blank was looked upon by his fellow- 
 students as a practical jest, and his name was 
 always received with the prolonged applause 
 
PROFESSOR SELLAR. 8 1 
 
 which greets the end of an after-dinner 
 speech, 
 
 Sellar never showed resentment to the 
 students who addressed him as Professor 
 Sellars. 
 
 One day the Professor was giving out some 
 English to be translated into Latin prose. 
 He read on — " and fiercely Hfting the axe with 
 both hands — " when a cheer from the top 
 bench made him pause. The cheer spread 
 over the room like an uncorked gas. 
 Sellar frowned, but proceeded — " lifting the 
 axe — ," when again the class became de- 
 mented. "What does this mean?" he 
 demanded, looking as if he, too, could lift 
 the axe. "Axe!" shouted a student in ex- 
 planation. Still Sellar could not solve the 
 riddle. Another student rose to his assist- 
 ance. " Axe — Gladstone ! " he cried. Sellar 
 sat back in his chair. " Really, gentle- 
 men," he said, " I take the most elaborate 
 precautions against touching upon politics 
 in this class, but sometimes you are beyond 
 me. Let us continue — * and fiercely lifting 
 his weapon with both hands — .' " 
 6 
 
82 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 The duxes from the schools suffered a Httle 
 during their first year, from a feeh'ng that 
 they and Sellar understood each other. He 
 Hked to undeceive them. We had one, all 
 head, who went about wondering at himself. 
 He lost his bursary on the way home with it, 
 and still he strutted. Sellar asked if we saw 
 anything peculiar in a certain line from 
 Horace. We did not. We were accustomed 
 to trust to Horace's reputation, all but the 
 dandy. " Eh — ah ! Professor," he lisped ; 
 " it ought to have been so and so." Sellar 
 looked at this promising plant from .the 
 schools, and watered him without a rose on 
 the pan. " Depend upon it, Mr. — ; ah, I did 
 not catch your name, if it ought to have been 
 so and so, Horace would have made it so and 
 so." 
 
 Sellar's face was proof against sudden wit. 
 It did not relax till he gave it liberty. You 
 could never tell from it what was going on in- 
 side. He read without a twitch a notice on 
 his door : " Found in this class a gold-headed 
 pencil case ; if not claimed within three days 
 will be sold to defr^ expenses." He even 
 
PROFESSOR SELLAR. 83 
 
 withstood the battering ram on the day of the 
 publication of his " Augustan Poets." The 
 students could not let this opportunity pass. 
 They assailed him with frantic applause, 
 every bench was a drum to thump upon. His 
 countenance said nothing. The drums had 
 it in the end, though, and he dismissed the 
 class with what is believed to have verged 
 on a smile. Like the lover who has got his 
 lady's glance, they at once tried for more, but 
 no. 
 
 Most of us had Humanity our first year, 
 which is the year for experimenting. Then 
 is the time to join the University library. 
 The pound, which makes you a member, has 
 never had its poet. You can withdraw your 
 pound when you please. There are far-see- 
 ing men who work the whole thing out by 
 mathematics. Put simply, this is the notion. 
 In the beginning of the session you join the 
 library, and soon you forget about your 
 pound ; you reckon without it. As the winter 
 closes in, and the coal-bunk empties ; or you 
 find that five shillings a week for lodgings is a 
 dream that cannot be kept up; or your coat 
 
84 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 assumes more and more the colour identified 
 with spring ; or you would feast your friends 
 for once right gloriously ; or next Wednesday 
 is your little sister's birthday ; you cower, 
 despairing, over a sulky fire. Suddenly you 
 are on your feet, all aglow once more. What 
 is this thought that sends the blood to 
 your head ? That library pound ! You had 
 forgotten that you had a bank. Next morn- 
 ing you are at the university in time to help 
 the library door to open. You ask for your 
 pound ; you get it. Your hand mounts guard 
 over the pocket in which it rustles. So they 
 say. I took their advice and paid in my 
 money ; then waited exultingly to forget 
 about it. In vain. I always allowed for that 
 pound in my thoughts. I saw it as plainly, I 
 knew its every feature as a schoolboy re- 
 members his first trout. Not to be hasty, I 
 gave my pound two months, and then brought 
 it home again. I had a fellow-student who 
 lived across the way from me. We railed at 
 the library pound theory at open windows 
 over the life of the street ; a beautiful dream, 
 but mad, mad. 
 
PROFESSOR SELLAR. 85 
 
 He was an enthusiast, and therefore happy, 
 whom I have seen in the Humanity class- 
 room on an examination day, his pen racing 
 with time, himself seated in the contents of 
 an ink-bottle. Some stories of exams, have 
 even a blacker ending. I write in tears of 
 him who, estimating his memory as a leaky 
 vessel, did with care and forethought draw 
 up a crib that was more condensed than a 
 pocket cyclopaedia, a very Liebig's essence of 
 the classics, tinned meat for students in the 
 eleventh hour. Bridegrooms have been 
 known to forget the ring ; this student for- 
 got his crib. In the middle of the examina- 
 tion came a nervous knocking at the door. 
 A lady wanted to see the Professor at once. 
 The student looked up, to see his mother 
 handing the Professor his crib. Her son had 
 forgotten it ; she was sure that it was im- 
 portant, so she had brought it herself. 
 
 Jump the body of this poor victim. There 
 was no M.A. for him that year ; but in our 
 gowns and sashes we could not mourn for a 
 might-have-been. Soldiers talk of the Vic- 
 toria Cross, statesmen of the Cabinet, ladies 
 
S6 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 of a pearl set in diamonds. These are pretty 
 baubles, but who has thrilled as the student 
 that with bumping heart strolls into Middle- 
 mass's to order his graduate's gown. He 
 hires it — five shillings — but the photograph 
 to follow makes it as good as his for life. 
 Look at him, young ladies, as he struts to 
 the Synod Hall to have M.A. tacked to his 
 name. Dogs do not dare bark at him. His 
 gait is springy ; in Princes Street he is as one 
 who walks upstairs. Gone to me are those 
 student days for ever, but I can still put a 
 photograph before me of a ghost in gown and 
 cape, the hair straggling under the cap as 
 tobacco may straggle over the side of a tin 
 when there is difficulty in squeezing down the 
 lid. How well the little black jacket looks, 
 how vividly the wearer remembers putting it 
 on. He should have worn a dress-coat, but 
 he had none. The little jacket resembled 
 one with the tails off, and, as he artfully 
 donned his gown, he backed against the wall 
 so that no one might know. 
 
 To turn up the light on old college days is 
 not always the signal for the dance. You are 
 
PROFESSOR SELLAR. 87 
 
 back in the dusty little lodgiiif^, with its 
 battered sofa, its slippery tablecloth, the 
 prim array of books, the picture of the death 
 of Nelson, the peeling walls, the broken clock ; 
 you are again in the quadrangle with him who 
 has been dead this many a year. There are 
 tragedies in a college course. Dr. Walter 
 Smith has told in a poem mentioned elsewhere 
 of the brilliant scholar who forgot his dominie ; 
 some, alas ! forget their mother. There are 
 men — I know it — who go mad from loneliness ; 
 and medalists ere now have crept home to 
 die. The capping-day was the end of our 
 spring-tide, and for some of us the summer 
 was to be brief. Sir Alexander, gone into 
 the night since then, flung " I mekemae " at 
 us as we trooped past him, all in bud, some 
 small flower to blossom in time, let us hope, 
 here and there. 
 
IX. 
 
 MR. JOSEPH THOMSON. 
 
 n^WO years hence Joseph Thomson's repu- 
 -'■ tation will be a decade old, though he 
 is at present only thirty years of age. When 
 you meet him for the first time you con- 
 clude that he must be the explorer's son. 
 His identity, however, can always be proved 
 by simply mentioning Africa in his presence. 
 Then he draws himself up, and his eyes 
 glisten, and he is thinking how glorious it 
 would be to be in the Masai country again, 
 living on meat so diseased that it crumbled 
 in the hand like short-bread. 
 
 Gatelaw-bridge Quarry, in Dumfriesshire, is 
 famous for Old Mortality and Thomson, the 
 latter (when he is at the head of a caravan) 
 being as hardheaded as if he had been cut 
 out of it. He went to school at Thornhil), 
 where he spent great part of his time in 
 reading novels, and then he matriculated at 
 
90 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 Edinburgh University, where he began to 
 accumulate medals. Geology and kindred 
 studies were his favourites there. One day 
 he heard that Keith Johnston, then on the 
 point of starting for Africa, wanted a lieu- 
 tenant. Thomson was at that time equally 
 in need of a Keith Johnston, and everybody 
 who knew him saw that the opening and he 
 were made for each other. Keith Johnston 
 and Thomson went out together, and Johnston 
 died in the jungle. This made a man in an 
 hour of a stripling. Most youths in Thom- 
 son's position at that turning point of his 
 career would have thought it judicious to turn 
 back, and in geographical circles it would 
 have been considered highly creditable had 
 be brought his caravan to the coast intact. 
 Thomson, however, pushed on, and did every- 
 thing that his dead leader had hoped to do. 
 From that time his career has been followed 
 by every one interested in African explora- 
 tion, and by his countrymen with some pride 
 in addition. When an expedition was or- 
 ganized for the relief of Emin Pasha, there 
 was for a time some probability of Thomson's 
 
MR. JOSEPH THOMSON. 91 
 
 having the command. He and Stanley 
 differed as to the routes that should be taken, 
 and subsequent events have proved that 
 Thomson's was the proper one. 
 
 Thomson came over from Paris at that 
 time to consult with the authorities, and 
 took up his residence in the most over-grown 
 hotel in London. His friends here organized 
 an expedition for his relief. They wandered 
 up and down the endless stairs looking for 
 him, till, had they not wanted to make 
 themselves a name, they would have beaten 
 a retreat. He also wandered about looking 
 for them, and at last they met. The leader 
 of the party, restraining his emotion, lifted 
 his hat, and said, " Mr. Thomson, I pre- 
 sume ? " This is how I found Thomson. 
 
 The explorer had been for some months in 
 Paris at that time, and France did him the 
 honour of translating his " Through Masai- 
 land " into French. In this book there is a 
 picture of a buffalo tossing Thomson in the 
 air. This was after he had put several 
 bullets into it, and in the sketch he is repre- 
 sented some ten feet from the ground, with 
 
92 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 his gun flying one way and his cap another. 
 " It was just as if I were distributing largess 
 to the natives," the traveller says now, though 
 this idea does not seem to have struck him 
 at the time. He showed the sketch to a 
 Parisian lady, who looked at it long and 
 earnestly. " Ah, M. Thomson," she said at 
 length, " but how could you pose like that ? " 
 
 Like a good many other travellers, inclu- 
 ding Mr. Du Chaillu, who says he is a dear 
 boy, Thomson does not smoke. Stanley, 
 however, smokes very strong cigars, as those 
 who have been in his sumptuous chambers in 
 Bond Street can testify. All the three hap- 
 pen to be bachelors, though ; because, one 
 of them says, after returning from years of 
 lonely travel, a man has such a delight in 
 female society that to pick and choose would 
 be invidious. Yet they have had their 
 chance. An African race once tried to bribe 
 Mr. Du Chaillu with a kingdom and over 
 eight hundred wives, — " the biggest offer," he 
 admits, " I ever had in one day." 
 
 Among the lesser annoyances to which 
 Thomson was subjected in Africa was the 
 
MR. JOSEPH THOMSON. 93 
 
 presence of rats in the night-time, which he 
 had to brush away Hke flies. Until he was 
 asked whether there was not danger in this, 
 it never seems to have struck him that it 
 was more than annoying. Yet though he 
 and the two other travellers mentioned 
 (doubtless they are not alone in this) have 
 put up cheerfully with almost every hardship 
 known to man, this does not make them 
 indifferent to the comforts of civiHzation 
 when they return home. Du Chaillu was 
 looking very comfortable in a house-boat the 
 other day, where his hosts thought they were 
 " roughing it " — with a male attendant ; and 
 in Stanley's easy chairs you sink to- dream. 
 The last time I saw Thomson in his rooms in 
 London he was on his knees, gazing in silent 
 rapture at a china saucer with a valuable 
 crack in it. 
 
 If you ask Thomson what was the most 
 dangerous expedition he ever embarked on, 
 he will probably reply, " Crossing Piccadilly." 
 The finest thing that can be said of him is 
 that during these four expeditions he never 
 once fired a shot at a native. Other ex- 
 
94 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 plorers have had to do so to save their 
 lives. There were often occasions when 
 Thomson could have done it, to save his life 
 to all appearance, too. The result of his 
 method of progressing is that where he has 
 gone— and he has been in parts of Africa 
 never before trod by the white man — he 
 really has " opened up the country " for those 
 who care to follow him. Civilization b}' 
 bullet has only closed it elsewhere. Yet 
 though there is an abundance of Scotch 
 caution about him, he is naturally an impul- 
 sive man, more inclined personally to march 
 straight on than to reach his destination by a 
 safer if more circuitous route. Where only 
 his own life is concerned he gives you the 
 impression of one who might be rash, but his 
 prudence at the head of a caravan is at the 
 bottom of the faith that is placed in him. 
 According to a story that got into the papers 
 years ago, M. de Brazza once quarrelled with 
 Thomson in Africa, and all but struck him. 
 Thomson was praised for keeping his temper. 
 The story was a fabrication, but I fear that 
 if M. de Brazza had behaved like this, 
 
MR. JOSEPH THOMSON. 95 
 
 Thomson would not have remembered to be 
 diplomatic till some time afterwards. A 
 truer tale might be told of an umbrella, 
 gorgeous and wonderful to behold, that De 
 Braza took to Africa to impress the natives 
 with, and which Thomson subsequently pre- 
 sented to a dusky monarch. 
 
 The explorer has never shot a lion, though 
 he has tracked a good many of them. Once 
 he thought he had one. It was reclining in 
 a little grove, and Thomson felt that it was 
 his at last. With a trusty native he crept 
 forward till he could obtain a good shot, 
 and then fired. In breathless suspense he 
 waited for its spring, and then when it did 
 not spring he saw that hehad shot it through 
 the heart. However, it turned out only to be 
 a large stone. 
 
 The young Scotchman sometimes thinks 
 of the tremendous effect it would have had 
 on the natives had he been the possessor of 
 a complete set of artificial teeth. This is 
 because he has one artificial tooth. Hap- 
 pening to take it out one day, an awe filled 
 all who saw him, and from that hour he 
 
96 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 was esteemed a medicine man. Another 
 excellent way of impressing Africa with the 
 grandeur of Britain was to take a photograph. 
 When the natives saw the camera aimed at 
 them they fell to the ground vanquished. 
 
 When Thomson was recently in this 
 country, he occasionally took a walk of 
 twenty or thirty miles to give him an appe- 
 tite for dinner. This he calls a stroll. One 
 day he strolled from Thornhill to Edinburgh, 
 had dinner, and then went to the Exhibition. 
 In appearance he is tall and strongly knit, 
 rather than heavily built, and if you see him 
 more than once in the same week, you dis- 
 cover that he has still an interest in neck- 
 ties. Perhaps his most remarkable feat 
 consisted in taking a bottle of brandy into 
 the heart of Africa, and bringing it back 
 intact. 
 
X. 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 
 
 OOME men of letters, not necessarily the 
 ^ greatest, have an indescribable charm to 
 which we give our hearts. Thackeray is the 
 young man's first love. Of living authors 
 none perhaps bewitches the reader more 
 than Mr. Stevenson, who plays upon words 
 as if they were a musical instrument. To 
 follow the music is less difficult than to 
 place the musician. A friend of mine, who, 
 like Mr. Grant Allen, reviews 365 books a 
 year, and 366 in leap years, recently arranged 
 the novelists of to-day in order of merit. 
 Meredith, of course, he wrote first, and then 
 there was a fall to Hardy. " Haggard," he 
 explained, "I dropped from the Eiffel Tower; 
 but what can I do with Stevenson ? I can't 
 put him before * Lorna Doone.' " So Mr. 
 Stevenson puzzles the critics, fascinating 
 them until they are willing to judge him by 
 7 
 
98 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 the great work he is to write by and by 
 when the little books are finished. Over 
 " Treasure Island " I let my fire die in 
 winter without knowing that I was freezing. 
 But the creator of Alan Breck has now 
 published nearly twenty volumes. It is so 
 much easier to finish the little works than to 
 begin the great one, for which we are all 
 taking notes. 
 
 Mr. Stevenson is not to be labelled nove- 
 list. He wanders the byways of literature 
 without any fixed address. Too much of a 
 truant to be classified with the other boys, 
 he is only a writer of fiction in the sense that 
 he was once an Edinburgh University stu- 
 dent because now and again he looked in at 
 his classes when he happened to be that way. 
 A literary man without a fixed occupation 
 amazes Mr. Henry James, a master in the 
 school of fiction which tells, in three volumes, 
 how Hiram K. Wilding trod on the skirt of 
 Alice M. Sparkins without anything's coming 
 of it. Mr. James analyzes Mr. Stevenson 
 with immense cleverness, but without sum- 
 ming up. That "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 99 
 
 should be by the author of "Treasure Is- 
 land," " Virglnibus Puerisque " by the author 
 of " The New Arabian Nights," "A Child's 
 Garden of Verses " by the author of " Prince 
 Otto," are to him the three degrees of com- 
 parison of wonder, though for my own part 
 I marvel more that the author of *' Daisy 
 Miller" should be Mr. Stevenson's eulogist. 
 One conceives Mr. James a boy in velveteens 
 looking fearfully at Stevenson playing at 
 pirates. 
 
 There is nothing In Mr. Stevenson's some- 
 times writing essays, sometimes romances, 
 and anon poems to mark him versatile be- 
 yond other authors. One dreads his continuing 
 to do so, with so many books at his back, lest 
 it means weakness rather than strength. He 
 experiments too long ; he is still a boy 
 wondering what he is going to be. With 
 Cowley's candour he tells us that he wants to 
 write something by which he may be for ever 
 known. His attempts in this direction have 
 been in the nature of trying different ways, 
 and he always starts off whistling. Having 
 gone so far without losing himself, he turns 
 
lOO AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 back to try another road. Does his heart 
 fail him, despite his jaunty bearing, or is it 
 because there is no hurry ? Though all his 
 books are obviously by the same hand, no living 
 writer has come so near fame from so many 
 different sides. Where is the man among 
 us who could write another " Virgin ibus 
 Puerisque," the most delightful volume for 
 the hammock ever sung in prose? The 
 poems are as exquisite as they are artificial. 
 " Jekyll and Hyde " is the greatest triumph 
 extant in Christmas literature of the morbid 
 kind. The donkey on the Cevennes (how 
 Mr. Stevenson belaboured him !) only stands 
 second to the " Inland Voyage." " Kid- 
 napped " is the outstanding boy's book of its 
 generation. "The Black Arrow" alone, to 
 my thinking, is second-class. We shall all 
 be doleful if a marksman who can pepper his 
 target with inners does not reach the bull's- 
 eye. But it is quite time the great work was 
 begun. The sun sinks while the climber 
 walks round his mountain, looking for the 
 best way up. 
 
 Hard necessity has kept some great 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 101 
 
 writers from doing their best work, but Mr. 
 Stevenson is at last so firmly established that 
 if he continues to be versatile it will only 
 be from choice. He has attained a popu- 
 larity such as is, as a rule, only accorded to 
 classic authors or to charlatans. For this he 
 has America to thank rather that Britain, 
 for the Americans buy his books, the only 
 honour a writer's admirers are slow to pay 
 him. Mr. Stevenson's reputation in the 
 United States is creditable to that country, 
 which has given him a position here in which 
 only a few saw him when he left. Unfor- 
 tunately, with popularity has come publicity. 
 All day the reporters sit on his garden wall. 
 
 No man has written in a finer spirit of the 
 profession of letters than Mr. Stevenson, but 
 this gossip vulgarizes it. The adulation oi" 
 the American public and of a little band of 
 clever literary dandies in London, great in 
 criticism, of whom he has become the darling, 
 has made Mr. Stevenson complacent, and he 
 always tended perhaps to be a thought too 
 fond of his velvet coat. There is danger in 
 the delight with which his every scrap is now 
 
102 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 received. A few years ago, when he was 
 his own severest and sanest critic, he stopped 
 the publication of a book after it was in proof 
 — a brave act. He has lost this courage, or 
 or he would have re-written " The Black 
 Arrow." There is deterioration in the essays 
 he has been contributing to an American 
 magazine, graceful and suggestive though 
 they are. The most charming of living 
 stylists, Mr. Stevenson is self-conscious in all 
 his books now and again, but hitherto it has 
 been the self-consciousness of an artist with 
 severe critics at his shoulder. It has become 
 self-satisfaction. The critics have put a 
 giant's robe on him, and he has not flung 
 it off. He dismisses " Tom Jones " with a 
 simper. Personally Thackeray *' scarce ap- 
 peals to us as the ideal gentleman ; if there 
 were nothing else [what else is there?], per- 
 petual nosing after snobbery at least suggests 
 the snob." From Mr. Stevenson one would 
 not have expected the revival of this silly 
 charge, which makes a cabbage of every man 
 who writes about cabbages. I shall say no 
 more of these ill-considered papers, though 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. I03 
 
 the sneers at Fielding call for indignant 
 remonstrance, beyond expressing a hope 
 that they lie buried between magazine covers. 
 Mr. Stevenson has reached the critical point 
 in his career, and one would like to see him 
 back at Bournemouth, writing within high 
 walls. We want that big book ; we think 
 he is capable of it, and so we cannot afford 
 to let him drift into the seaweed. About the 
 writer with whom his name is so often 
 absurdly linked we feel differently. It is 
 as foolish to rail at Mr. Rider Haggard's 
 complacency as it would be to blame Chris- 
 topher Sly for so quickly believing that he 
 was born a lord. 
 
 The key - note of all Mr. Stevenson's 
 writings is his indifference, so far as his 
 books are concerned, to the affairs of life 
 and death on which other minds are chiefly 
 set. Whether man has an immortal soul 
 interests him as an artist not a whit : what 
 is to come of man troubles him as little 
 as where man came from. He is a warm, 
 genial writer, yet this is so strange as to 
 seem inhuman. His philosophy is that we 
 
I04 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 are but as the light-hearted birds. This is 
 our moment of being ; let lis play the in- 
 toxicating game ot life beautifully, artisti- 
 cally, before we fall dead from the tree. 
 We all know it is only in his books that Mr. 
 Stevenson can live this life. The cry is to 
 arms ; spears glisten in the sun ; see the 
 brave bark riding joyously on the waves, the 
 black flag, the dash of red colour twisting 
 round a mountainside. Alas ! the drummer 
 lies on a couch beating his drum. It is a 
 pathetic picture, less true to fact now, one 
 rejoices to know, that it was recently. A 
 common theory is that Mr. Stevenson dreams 
 an ideal life to escape from his own suffer- 
 ings. This sentimental plea suits very well. 
 The noticeable thing, however, is that the 
 grotesque, the uncanny, holds his soul ; his 
 brain will only follow a coloured clue. The 
 result is that he is chiefly picturesque, and, to 
 those who want more than art for art's sake, 
 never satisfying. Fascinating as his verses 
 are, artless in the perfection of art, they take 
 no reader a step forward. The children of 
 whom he sings so sweetly are cherubs without 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. IO5 
 
 souls. It is not in poetry that Mr. Steven- 
 son will give the great book to the world, 
 nor will it, I think, be in the form of essays. 
 Of late he has done nothing quite so fine as 
 " Virginibus Puerisque," though most of his 
 essays are gardens in which grow (e\v weeds. 
 Quaint in matter as in treatment, they are 
 the best strictly literary essays of the day, 
 and their mixture of tenderness with humour 
 suggests Charles Lamb. Some think Mr. 
 Stevenson's essays equal to Lamb's, or 
 greater. To that I say No. The name of 
 Lamb will for many a year bring proud tears 
 to English eyes. Here was a man, weak like 
 the rest of us, who kept his sorrows to him- 
 self. Life to him was not among the trees. 
 He had loved and lost. Grief laid a heavy 
 hand on his brave brow. Dark were his 
 nights ; horrid shadows in the house ; sudden 
 terrors ; the heart stops beating waiting for 
 a footstep. At that door comes Tragedy, 
 knocking at all hours. Was Lamb dis- 
 mayed ? The tragedy of his life was not 
 drear to him. It was wound round those 
 who were dearest to him ; it let him know 
 
I06 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 that life has a glory even at its saddest, 
 that humour and pathos clasp hands, that 
 loved ones are drawn nearer, and the soul 
 strengthened in the presence of anguish, pain, 
 and death. When Lamb sat down to write 
 he did not pull down his blind on all that is 
 greatest, if most awful, in human life. He 
 was gentle, kindly ; but he did not play at 
 pretending that there is no cemetery round 
 the corner. In Mr. Stevenson's exquisite 
 essays one looks in vain for the great heart 
 that palpitates through the pages of Charles 
 Lamb. 
 
 The great work, if we are not to be disap- 
 pointed, will be fiction. Mr. Stevenson is 
 said to feel this himself, and, as I understand, 
 " Harry Shovel " will be his biggest bid for 
 fame. It is to be, broadly speaking, a nine- 
 teenth-century " Peregrine Pickle," dashed 
 with Meredith, and this in the teeth of 
 many admirers who maintain that the best 
 of the author is Scottish. Mr. Stevenson, 
 however, knows what he is about. Critics 
 have said enthusiastically — for it is difficult 
 to write of Mr. Stevenson without enthusiasm 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. IO7 
 
 — that Alan Breck is as good as anything in 
 Scott. Alan Breck is certainly a masterpiece, 
 quite worthy of the greatest of all storytellers, 
 who, nevertheless, it should be remembered, 
 created these rich side characters by the 
 score, another before dinner-time. English 
 critics have taken Alan to their hearts, and 
 appreciate him thoroughly ; the reason, no 
 doubt, being that he is the character whom 
 England acknowledges as the Scottish type. 
 The Highlands, which are Scotland to the 
 same extent as Northumberland is England, 
 present such a character to this day, but no 
 deep knowledge of Mr. Stevenson's native 
 country was required to reproduce him. An 
 artistic Englishman or American could have 
 done it. Scottish religion, I think, Mr. 
 Stevenson has never understood, except as 
 the outsider misunderstands it. He thinks 
 it hard because there are no coloured win- 
 dows. " The colour of Scotland has entered 
 into him altogether,'' says Mr. James, who, 
 we gather, conceives in Edinburgh Castle a 
 a place where tartans glisten in the sun, while 
 rocks re-echo bagpipes. Mr. James is right 
 
I08 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 in a way. It is the tartan, the claymore, the 
 cry that the heather is on fire, that are Scot- 
 land to Mr. Stevenson. But the Scotland 
 of our day is not a country rich in colour ; a 
 sombre grey prevails. Thus, though Mr. 
 Stevenson's best romance is Scottish, that is 
 only, I think, because of his extraordinary 
 aptitude for the picturesque. Give him any 
 period in any country that is romantic, and 
 he will soon steep himself in the kind of 
 knowledge he can best turn to account. 
 Adventures suit him best, the ladies being 
 left behind ; and so long as he is in fettle 
 it matters little whether the scene be Scot- 
 land or Spain. The great thing is that 
 he should now give to one ambitious book 
 the time in which he has hitherto written 
 half a dozen small ones. He will have to 
 take existence a little more seriously — to 
 weave broadcloth instead of lace. 
 
XI. 
 
 REV. WALTER C. SMITH, D.D. 
 
 DURING the four winters another and I 
 were in Edinburgh we never entered any 
 but Free churches. This seems to have been 
 less on account of a scorn for other denomi- 
 nations than because we never thought of 
 them. We felt sorry for the " men " who 
 knew no better than to claim to be on the 
 side of Dr. Macgregor. Even our Free 
 kirks were limited to two, St. George's and 
 the Free High. After all, we must have 
 been liberally minded beyond most of our 
 fellows, for, as a rule, those who frequented 
 one of these churches shook their heads at 
 the other. It is said that Dr. Whyte and 
 Dr. Smith have a great appreciation of each 
 other. They, too, are liberally minded. 
 
 To contrast the two leading Free Church 
 ministers in Edinburgh as they struck a 
 student would be to become a boy again. 
 
no AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN 
 
 The one is always ready to go on fire, and 
 the other is sometimes at hand with a jug 
 of cold water. Dr. Smith counts a hundred 
 before he starts, whilst the minister of Free 
 St. George's is off at once at a gallop, and 
 would always arrive first at his destination if 
 he had not sometimes to turn back. He is 
 not only a Gladstonian, but Gladstonian ; his 
 enthusiasm carries him on as steam drives 
 the engine. Dr. Smith being a critic, with a 
 faculty of satire, what would rouse the one 
 man makes the other smile. Dr. Whyte 
 judges you as you are at the moment ; Dr. 
 Smith sees what you will be like to-morrow. 
 Some years ago the defeated side in a great 
 Assembly fight met at a breakfast to reason 
 itself into a belief that it had gained a 
 remarkable moral victory. Dr. Whyte and 
 Dr. Smith were both present, and the former 
 was so inspiriting that the breakfast became 
 a scene of enthusiasm. Then Dr. Smith 
 arose and made a remark about a company 
 of Mark Tapleys — after which the meeting 
 broke up. 
 
 I have a curious reminiscence of the 
 
REV. WALTER C. SMITH, D.D. Ill 
 
 student who most frequently accompanied 
 me to church in Edinburgh. One Sunday 
 when we were on our way up slushy Bath 
 Street to Free St. George's he discovered that 
 he had not a penny for the plate. I sug- 
 gested to him to give twopence next time; 
 but no, he turned back to our lodgings for 
 the penny. Sometime afterwards he found 
 himself in the same position when we were 
 nearing the Free High. " I'll give twopence 
 next time," he said, cheerfully. I have 
 thought this over since then, and wondered if 
 there was anything in it. 
 
 The most glorious privilege of the old is 
 to assist the young. The two ministers who 
 are among the chief pillars of the Free 
 Church in Edinburgh are not old yet, but 
 they have had a long experience, and the 
 strength and encouragement they have been 
 to the young is the grand outstanding fact of 
 their ministries. Their influence is, of course, 
 chiefly noticeable in the divinity men, who 
 make their Bible classes so remarkable. 
 There is a sort of Freemasonry among the 
 men who have come under the influence of 
 
112 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 Dr. Smith. It seems to have steadie them 
 — to have given them wise rules of Hfe that 
 have taken the noise out of them, and left 
 them undemonstrative, quiet, determined. 
 You will have little difficulty, as a rule, in 
 picking out Dr. Smith's men, whether in the 
 pulpit or in private. They have his mark, 
 as the Rugby boys were marked by Dr. 
 Arnold. Even in speaking of him, they 
 seldom talk in superlatives : only a light 
 comes into their eye, and you realize what a 
 well-founded reverence is. I met lately in 
 London an Irishman who, when the conver- 
 sation turned to Scotland, asked what Edin- 
 burgh was doing without Dr. Smith (who 
 was in America at the time). He talked 
 with such obvious knowledge of Dr. Smith's 
 teaching, and with such affection for the man, 
 that by and by we were surprised to hear 
 that he had never heard him preach nor read 
 a line of his works. He explained that he 
 knew intimately two men who looked upon 
 their Sundays in the Free High, and still 
 more upon their private talks with the min- 
 ister, as the turning point in their lives. 
 
REV. WALTER C. SMriTI, D.D. II3 
 
 They were such fine fellows, and they were 
 so sure that they owed their development to 
 Dr. Smith, that to know the followers was to 
 know something of the master. This it is to 
 be a touchstone to young men. 
 
 There are those who think Dr. Smith the 
 poet of higher account than Dr. Smith the 
 preacher. I do not agree with them, though 
 there can be no question that the author of 
 " Olrig Grange" and Mr. Alexander Ander- 
 son are the two men now in Edinburgh who 
 have (at times) the divine afflatus. "Surface- 
 man " is a true son of Burns. Of him it may 
 be said, as it never can be said of Dr. Smith, 
 that he sings because he must. His thoughts 
 run in harmonious numbers. The author of 
 "Olrig Grange" is the stronger mind, how- 
 ever, and his lines are always pregnant of 
 meaning. He is of the school of Mr. Lewis 
 Morris, but an immeasurably higher intellect 
 if not so fine an artist : indeed, though there 
 are hundreds of his pages that are not poetry, 
 there are almost none that could not be re- 
 written into weighty prose. Sound is never 
 his sole object. Good novels in verse are a 
 
114 AN EDINBURGH ELEVEN. 
 
 mistake, for it is quite certain they would be 
 better in prose. The novelist has a great 
 deal to say that cannot be said naturally in 
 rhythm, and much of Dr. Smith's blank verse 
 is good prose in frills. It is driven into an 
 undeserved confinement. 
 
 The privilege of critics is to get twelve or 
 twenty minor poets in a row, and then blow 
 them all over at once. I remember one who 
 dispatched Dr. Smith with a verse from the 
 book under treatment. Dr. Smith writes of 
 a poet's verses : " There is no sacred fire in 
 them. Nor much of homely sense and 
 shrewd," and when the critic came to these 
 lines, he stopped reading : he declared that 
 Dr. Smith had passed judgment on himself. 
 This is a familiar form of criticism, but in 
 the present case it had at least the demerit of 
 being false. There is so much sacred fire 
 about Dr. Smith's best poetry, that it is what 
 makes him a poet ; and as for " homely sense 
 and shrewd," he has simply more of it than 
 any contemporary writer of verse. It is 
 what gives heart to his satire, and keeps him 
 from wounding merely for the pleasure of 
 
REV. WALTER C. SMI'm, D.I). II5 
 
 drawing blood. In conjunction with the 
 sacred fire, the noble indignation that mean 
 things should be, the insight into the tragic, 
 it is what makes '' Hilda" his greatest poem. 
 Without it there could not be pathos, which 
 is concerned with little things ; nor humour, 
 nor, indeed, the flash into men and things 
 that makes such a poem as " Dr. Linkletter's 
 Scholar " as true as life, as sad as death. If 
 only for the sake of that noble piece of 
 writing, every Scottish student should have 
 "North-Country Folk" in his possession. 
 The poem is probably the most noteworthy 
 thing that has been said of Northern Uni- 
 versity life. 
 
 UXWIX UROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKIXG AND LONDON". 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 I. 
 
 A WINDOW IN THRUMS. 
 
 Fonrt:cnth Edition. Crown ?7'o, hnckrnni. i^ilt iop, 6s. 
 
 " In (lull clays of sensational horrors, and wild, would-be 
 
 humorous hums, 
 What delight to fly darkness, and watch the ' Auld Licht,' 
 
 Irom a ' Window in Thrums ! ' 
 Let pessimists potter and pule, and let savages slaughter 
 
 and harry ; 
 Give me Hendry and Tanimas ■^Xi(S. Jess, and a smile and a 
 
 tear born ol Barrie." — Ftinch. 
 
 Times. — " Some of these chapters are gems of their kind, 
 and we doubt whether to award the palm to the humorous or 
 the pathetic. . . . However genuine, unstrained pathos is a 
 rarer product of the^e days than humour, and we hardly 
 desire to read anything better in that line than the chapter 
 called ' The Lnsl Night.' " 
 
 Academy. — "In 'A Window in Thrums' the true pathos 
 and sublime of human life, unsung, scarcely wept, but silently 
 honoured, stands first. . . . Mr. liarrie can hardly improve 
 on this book." 
 
 Athcnctum. — "Few chapters are more evenly humorous 
 than the third, ' Preparing to receive Company' ; but apart 
 from the real pathos of Joey's death and Janve's return, there 
 are few things in the book more life-like and more suggestive 
 than the good old woman's final words." 
 
 ATr. A. T. Qiiiller- Conch in " The Speakcj'" says: — 
 *' What is the tale about ? A little cottage, not specially 
 picturesque; an invalid mother; the commonplace death of 
 her first-born son, and the commonplace ruin of her second- 
 born. No rhiracter is extraordinary, of plot there is nothing 
 at all ; the latastrophe might befall any young man, what- 
 ever his nationaluy or station of life. . . . But search about 
 in English literature, and where will you find a story of like 
 quality of pathos written by an Anglo-Saxon?" 
 
 London : HODDER AND S TOUGHTON. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 11. 
 
 MY LADY NICOTINE. 
 
 Sixth Edition. Buckram, gilt top, crown 8vo, 6s. 
 
 Speaker. — *'A very delightful book. 'Jimmy's Dream' 
 was the chapter which made us laugh out loud the most. As 
 a general rule Mr. Barrie's humour leads us to a rather low, 
 almost inaudible chuckle. The letters of Primus to his 
 uncle seem as if they must really have been written by a 
 schoolboy. But it is almost impossible to select chapters. 
 The book should be read straight through, and then picked 
 up at intervals and opened anywh^-e. Wherever it is 
 opened it will please." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — "What an odd strain of humour is 
 Mr. J. M, Barrie's ! ' Dry ' is not the word for it ; it is as 
 torrid and almost as unsubstantial as his own cigar-ash. Mr. 
 Barrie's mirth is of the kind his countrymen call ' pawky.' 
 There is never a smile on his face, never the smallest sign of 
 enjoyment of his own fantasy. He talks on and on, copiously, 
 whimsically, crisjily, with a sedate, almost melancholy air, 
 air, in which lies half his art." 
 
 Academy. — " Take ' My Lady Nicotine ' as it stands, and 
 it is not too much to say of it that it is the funniest book 
 of its kind that has been published for a quarter of a 
 century." 
 
 Times. — " In ' A Window in Thrums ' Mr. Barrie gave an 
 admirably pathetic description of the cares and sorrcnvs of 
 the hard-working poor in a Scottish manufacturing town. 
 In ' My Lady Nicotine ' he is in the opposite vein, and 
 shows that he has no inconsiderable power as a hurnorisi. 
 ^Written generally in serio-comic vein, brightened with 
 flashes of droll irony and quaint suggestion." 
 
 London: IIODDER AND STOUCHITON. 
 
aV THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 III. 
 
 WHEN A MAN'S SINGLE. 
 
 A Tale of Literary Life. 
 
 Tenth Edition. Bound in buckram, gilt top^ cro7vn Zvo, ds. 
 
 Saturday Review. — " Mr. Barrie is a man with a style. 
 From one end to the other the story is bright, cheerful, 
 amusing — barring the idyllic prologue, which is pathetic as 
 well as humorous. Original men and men with styles are so 
 xmcommon as to make Mr. Barrie's appearance as a novelist 
 a matter for general congratulation." 
 
 Spectator. — " Full of drolleries and surprises, alike in 
 dialogue and in action." 
 
 Daily Chronicle. — " It is not too much to say that the 
 pictures of homely Scotch life are unsurpassed in the whole 
 range of fiction." 
 
 Scottish Leader. — " We can revel in the many felicitous 
 touches of satire, description, and characterisation — a very 
 clever book which few people could have written." 
 
 Daily News. — " The best one-volume novel of the year." 
 
 St. Jameses Gazette. — "The circumstances under which the 
 hero falls in love are too entertaining, alike in conception 
 and relation, to be told by anybody but Mr. Barrie, who is 
 both a humorist and a wit." 
 
 Times. — " The young ladies are charming, but the person 
 who really gives distinction to the book is Noble Simms. 
 This wayward, indolent Bohemian, as good as any creation 
 of Henri Murger, is so amusing a type of the ' casual ' genius 
 that he deserves not to perish." 
 
 London: HODDER AND STOUGIITON. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 IV. 
 
 AULD LIGHT IDYLLS. 
 
 Tenth Edition. Boztnd in buckram, gilt top, croivn 2>vo, 6s. 
 
 Spectator. — " At once the most succes-ful, the most truly 
 h'lerary, ami the most realistic attempt that has been made 
 for years — if not for generations — to reproduce humble Scotch 
 life. . . . We have thought it positively our duty to call 
 attention at some length to this book, because in its fidelity 
 to truth, its liumour, and its \ivid interest, it is a complete 
 and a welcome contrast to the paltry ' duds ' which are 
 nowadays printed by the dozen as pictures of humble and 
 religious life in Scotland." 
 
 Academy. — "Not only the best book dealing exclusively 
 vviih Scotch humble life, but the only book of the kind, 
 deserving to be classed as literature, that has been published 
 for at least a quarter of a century." 
 
 AtJicnceum. — " Very graphic is tlie description of the 
 storm-beaten, snow-laden clachan of grey stones, and bright 
 is the observant insight displayed by the solitary and philo- 
 sophic village dominie who tells the tale." 
 
 Saturday Revieiv. — "Not merely readable, but amusing 
 and suggestive in no mean degree." 
 
 Truth. — "It is some time since I read anything so racy, 
 humorous, and altogether delightful. I defy any one to 
 read 'The Courting of T'nowhiad's Bell,' for instance, or 
 'The Auld Licht Kirk,' without a smile or a laugh at every 
 (jther sentence." 
 
 Times. — " A really remarkable book." 
 
 Graphic. — " A book of real humour, touching the surface 
 of things and persons with a light and lively hand, with 
 occasional subtle suggestions of tlie tlepths of human miture 
 below them . . . admirable in their humorous simplicity.'' 
 
 World. — " Drawn in a number of light but singularly 
 careful and vivid touches. Of its cleverness there can be no 
 question." 
 
 London : IIODDER AND STOUGIITOK. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRAR 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped belc 
 
 m 
 
 Fim 
 
 NOV 11 ^9^ 
 
 REC'O ^^^ 
 
 DEC 4 - 1359 
 
 LD 21-100m-12,'46(A2012sl6)4120 
 
^ '^^ y<j 
 
 2a3it72 
 
 //- 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY