Ex Libris
C. K. OGDEN
PROFESSOR BLACKIE.
FIRST EDITIOK, November, 1895.
SECOND EDITION, February, 1896.
PROFESSOR BLACKIE
His SAYINGS AND DOINGS.
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
By His Nephew
HOWARD ANGUS KENNEDY.
With Illustrations.
London: JAMES CLARKE & CO.
1896.
THIS ACCOUNT OP
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
IS DEDICATED, IN
SYMPATHY AND RESPECT,
TO HIS WIFE,
WHOSE LOSS A NATION SHAKES
THE BOOK, AND ITS SUBJECT.
THIS is a small book about a great man.
A biography not indeed complete, for no
two octavos could give a full account of
such a life, but approaching completeness
will have been published before this
appears in print. Miss Anna Stoddart has
produced, from plentiful stores of authori-
tative information, a work to which I hope
many readers of these pages may be
induced to turn. Indeed, it is not for
those who can obtain the larger work
that the smaller has been written, but for
the many who cannot. It will be evident
at the same time that the present volume
has an entirely independent origin and
existence.
A strong man breasts the tide ; a great
man turns it. Not once alone, nor only
twice, did Blackie justify his title by such a
test. Neither of him nor of any man can
it be said that he was always great and
2OO0016
VI
altogether original; and I am not con-
cerned, even if it were possible for me, to
determine his precise degree of greatness
or originality. Much of our debt to
Blackie is owing to Bunsen ; some, far less
than is commonly imagined, to Carlyle.
He himself said that the writers who had
most influenced him were Aristotle, Plato,
Goethe, Shakespere, Scott, Burns, Words-
worth, and the Apostle Paul. From a
multitude of other sources he drew such
nourishment as they had for him, assim-
ilating the good and rejecting the uselesa
with a peculiarly active mental digestion.
ft Perhaps even more important," he said,
' ' towards the achievement of a noble life
than a memory well stored with sacred
texts is an imagination well decorated
with heroic pictures." In both these
ways his mind was richly furnished, and
from such a storehouse he brought forth
continually " things old and new." Deny
the existence of originality if you will
trace all good things right up to heaven,
by a Jacob's ladder direct or through long
lines of ancestors and teachers and the
fact remains that John Stuart Blackie
Vll
clothed with a new form the ideas he had
received, and charged them afresh with a
penetrating force that made men listen
and accept. He was a seer, who saw
deeply if not always to the bottom, and
opened the eyes of other men to see.
He was a prophet who made prophets ; a
teacher who not only taught but inspired
others to teach. He showed the young
how to quit themselves like men, the old
how to keep the spirit of youth. He
presented to the student, as Professor
Laurie has said, " the true type of the
scholar in the large and unconventional
sense of that word : always in search of
the truth, always proclaiming the inalien-
able right of reason to be heard in the
affairs of men ; always proclaiming the
eternal attractions of the good and the
beautiful within or without the academic
walls."
A man of the world who set a shining
example of unworldliness, he was too
genuinely religious to be " other-worldly."
Most orthodox of heretics, his Protestant-
ism was as deep as his Catholicity was
wide. A fervid patriot, he proved his love
Till
by chastising Ms country even more than
by chastising her foes ; and his country-
men, to their credit be it said, came to
love him with a personal devotion such as
no flatterer could have won. His sayings
and doings often made them angry ; but
the roots of his popularity ran deep into
the Scottish heart. Edinburgh well, he
was a part of the city. Not Sir Walter's
monument nor the Castle Rock itself was
a more familiar object than the old but
ever young Professor, marching along so
lithe and erect, the brown plaid wound
over his chest and shoulders, the stout
silver-k nobbed staff in his hand, the clean-
cut face full of distinction, the long white
hair flowing from a wideawake pressed
well down over the keen, grey eyes. The
citizens felt a pride of ownership in
him. He poured shame upon their idols
fashion in West-end circles and democ-
racy in the multitude but they still
cherished, in the one case a genteel and
in the other an overflowing, affection for
their censor. From Edinburgh you may
travel round the world in any direction,
sure that wherever you find a Scottish
IX
heart you will see a face that brightens
with affection at the sound of Blackie's
name.
Great as he was in the public esteem,
he had a private fame still more illus-
trious. He brought into the home a
soul unspotted by the impurities of
the outside world. The more intimately
he was known, the more dearly he was
loved and the more fervently admired.
He was " a hero to his valet."
To call him the last of the Scots would
be a piece of pessimism, and pessimism is
a vice that he abhorred. There are men
in Scotland yet, and in every Scottish
community in the world, who are carrying
forward the flag he lifted so high. But
Scotland seems a different place since he
has gone, and Scotsmen are a nation
bereaved.
Thou brave old Scot! And art thou gone ?
How much of light \vith thee's departed !
Philosopher, yet full of fun,
Great humorist, yet human-hearted ;
A Caledonian, yet not dour,
A scholar, yet not dry-as-dusty,
A pietist, yet never sour !
O stout and tender, true and trusty,
Octogenarian optimist,
The world for thee seemed aye more sunny;
We loved thee better for each twist
Which streaked a soul as sweet as honey.
We shall not see thy like again !
We've fallen on times most queer and quacky,
And oft shall miss the healthy brain
And manly heart of brave old Blackie ! *
The aim of the following pages is not
to give a severely chronological list of
Professor Blackie's doings and sayings.
Although he did one thing at a time
and did that well, it was never long before
he was doing something else. Sub-
serviency to dates in the case of such a
man would keep the reader dancing from
subject to subject and back again in a
peculiarly bewildering fashion. The writer
has attempted to give not only a plain
narrative of the Professor's outward
doings, but a moderately coherent account
of his sayings on the great questions with
which he dealt. No attempt has been
made to hide such incidents, however
laughable, and such extreme and auda-
cious assertions, hasty as they sometimes
* From " Punch/' March 9th, 1895, by permission
of the Proprietors.
were, as show the perennially boyish side
of the Professor's nature. Of incidents
that might bring anything worse than
laughter upon his memory there are none
to hide.
In writing the Life of Robert Burns,
Blackie said: "I have allowed the poet,
both in his verse and in his prose, to be as
much as possible his own portrait painter."
I have followed this example, while grate-
fully taking advantage of the reminis-
cences of old students and other friends,
and not neglecting the duty of inde-
pendent research. The book has been
finished neither without difficulty nor to
the writer's satisfaction ; but if, as I hope,
it helps to spread and perpetuate the
knowledge of the good and wise Professor,
its aim will be achieved and its existence
justified.
H. A. KENNEDY.
NOTE TO SECOND EDITION.
THE warmth of the welcome given with
practical unanimity to the first edition of
this book has agreeably surprised the
writer. Happily for him, the subject is
of sufficient interest to cover the short-
comings in its treatment. If the opinion
expressed by public and private critics of
every degree is correct that the book
gives a true picture of the Professor and
an epitome of his teaching such as young
men, whom he loved, will find useful-
its publication has been more than
justified.
H. A. KENNEDY.
January 8, 1896.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. His Forebears 1
II. The Boy 14
III. Going to be a Minister 22
IV. Germany and Italy ... ... ... 34
V. "Stickit" 46
VI. The Fight for the Chair 59
VII. Professor of Humanity ... ... 67
VIII. Excursions 85
IX. The Greek Chair 102
X. Educational Eeform 110
XL Eational Greek 122
XII. Professor and Students 136
XIII. Noctes Hellenicse 156
XIV. His Politics 163
XV. The Highlanders' Champion 175
XVI. The Celtic Chair 185
XVII. The Scottish Nationalist 205
XVIII. Poet and Versemaker 218
XIX. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful 234
XX. Self-Culture, and Some Other Books 271
XXI. English Excursions 285
XXII. Farther Afield 298
XXIII. The Man, and Some of His Friends... 312
XXIV. The End 329
Published Works of John Stuart
Blackie 338
Index , 341
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PORTRAITS OF JOHN STUART BLACKII.
As a Boy of Five. From " The Strand Maga-
zine." Engraved from an oil painting
in the possession of Mrs. Blackie ... 17
At the Age of 45. From a lithograph ... 112
At the Age of 68. From a photo by Macara 312
At the Age of 80. Etched from a photo-
graph by Elliot and Fry. (Frontispiece.)
From a Political Cartoon, 1880 ...... 165
" A Professor of the Highlands " ...... 196
ALEXANDER BLACKIE. From an oil painting
by Sir Watson Gordon, President of the
Eoyal Scottish Academy, in the possession
of Mrs. Kennedy ............ 8
GEORGE S. BLACKIE. From a steel engraving 93
THE HOMES or JOHN STUART BLACKIE.
His Father's House, Marischal Street, Aber-
deen ; and the Humanity Professor's
House in Old Aberdeen ......... 88
His Edinburgh Homes : 24 Hill Street, from
1860 to 1882 ; 9 Douglas Crescent, 1882
to 1895 ............... 152
His Highland Home: Altnacraig, Oban ... 192
xvi Illustrations.
PAGE
His UNIVERSITIES.
Marischal College, Aberdeen 69
Arms of Marischal College, Aberdeen ... 67
Edinburgh University 138
Arms of Edinburgh University 102
FACSIMILES.
Letter from Edinburgh, 1824 24
Latin Exercise for " the Gooders," 1827 ... 32
Last Letter from Aberdeen, 1852 106
"Rain!" 188
His Favourite Mottoes 241
Letter from His Father: "Victory," 1852 104
ST. GILES'S CATHBDBAL, EDINBURGH 336
PROFESSOR BLACKIE,
HIS SAYINGS AND DOINGS.
I.
HIS FOEEBEAES.
THE story of John Stuart Blackie, if a
man's life began at his birth, should open
in Glasgow ; but when we begin to ascend
the ancestral streams which met there
eighty-six years ago, we find ourselves in
far more attractive surroundings. The
Blackies, a small but energetic tribe,
belong to Kelso, in the border country.
For the most part mechanics and t( mer-
chants," or tradesmen, achieving the high
nobility of honest work, until this century
they were unknown to fame. Alexander
Blackie, the son of a Kelso " merchant "
and of Alison Stuart his wife, was early
left an orphan. He was not friendless, or
left entirely to his own devices. In Glasgow,
where he worked for his bread from the
l
2 Professor BlacJiie.
age of fourteen, lie was faithfully put
through his catechism on Sunday evenings
by his mother's kinswoman, Mrs. Lock-
hart. Mrs. Lockhart's own boy, John,
became the son-in-law and biographer of
Sir Walter Scott. As for John Lockhart's
cousin " Scotch cousin," in what degree
I cannot tell at first he seems to have
thought of becoming a manufacturer. At
any rate, he worked at the loom ; and in
more prosperous days, especially when his
guests were "ower genteel," he used to
apologise for his inability to sit still on a
chair by saying, " When I was a weaver
in Glasgow ! " Later on but he was
still a very young man he carried on the
trade of a drysalter, or oilman.
At the head of a long list of entries in
the old two-volume family Bible stands
this : " Alexander Blackie and Helen
Stodart, married at Airbless by the Rev.
William Thomson, of Dalziel, 7th July,
1807." The Stodarts were a Hamilton
family of some repute ; perhaps a couple
of pegs higher than the Blackies in the
social scale, if that were of any conse-
quence. A cousin, great in heraldry, Mr.
His Forebears.
POST NUBES LUX.
Robert Riddeli Stodart, has traced them
back to John Stodart in Liberton three
miles south of
Edinburgh who
was a very old
man when Charles
I. and his Parlia-
ment came to
blows. John's
great - grandson,
James, had nine
children, of whom
three may here
be mentioned
namely the third, James, a farmer, who
gave Robert Burns his breakfast on
the poet's famous pony-ride to Edin-
burgh; the fourth, John, with whom
Rob took his lunch, and who became
the grandfather of William and Robert
Chambers ; and the fifth, William, an
architect of some note, a man of lite-
rary taste, a friend of the poet Graeme,
and the grandfather of John Stuart
Blackie. William Stodart was born in
1740, five years before Prince Charlie's
rebellion, and married Christina Naismith,
4 Professor Blackie.
daughter of Hamilton's chief magistrate.
The architect died, a few days after his
wife, in 1790, leaving Bothwell Brig and
four small daughters to witness that he
had not lived in vain. The eldest of
these little orphans she was only seven
was the Helen of our old Bible. She was
brought up, together with her sisters
Marion and Margaret, by her mother's
kinsfolk. A few minutes spent in looking
at the mother of such a son cannot be
wasted, and no apology is needed for
presenting such dim outlines of a word-
portrait as exist.
But for one bosom friend, who valued
her letters enough to copy and bind them,
we should know next to nothing of Helen
Stodart. From these letters, which begin
in 1804 and continue nearly till her death
in 1821, it is clear that she was a young
woman of remarkable character. " Blest
with the best education," as she says, and
" bookishly inclined," she had that strong
dash of common-sense which afterwards
kept her scholar-son from becoming a
pedant. This quality would have saved
her from degenerating into a blue-stock-
His Forebears. 5
ing, even if a family of ten had not
removed the possibility of such a fate.
Genuinely religious, her soul rose against
the high-and-dry discourses of her day,
as well as against the morbid extreme of
religiosity. " Let us not mourn over those
virtues we do not possess," she exhorts
her friend, "but be active and vigilant;
seek and we shall find ; let us be cheerful
in doing our duty." She early came to
the practical conclusion, not even now so
generally admitted as it ought to be, that
" Faith in Christ, if it does not influence
our whole conduct in this life, can avail
little in another." Despising those
" sequestered virtues " which are " too
delicately brought up to endure fatigue,"
she avows, "I am always aiming to be
what I have never attained." Naturally,
she discarded that mental asceticism
which confines the aspiring heart to " re-
ligious " literature. " Too much religious
and sentimental reading clogs the mind,"
she says in one place ; and in another, " I
always thought much reading of books of
Divinity rather weakened and overwhelmed
the mind than strengthened and ennobled
6 Professor Elackie.
it." Nature she loved, but not solitude.
"We have had variety of employment
for our hands ; our ears are charmed with
rural music, our eyes feasted with rural
scenes ; but what are these ? Quite in-
sipid without society ! " This was in 1806.
She had quite enough of society before
long, though not always of the ideal
kind with which she would have peopled
the rural paradise of Airbliss and Sil-
verton. Marriage came in 1807. At first
the young couple made their home on the
Abbey Hill, near Holyrood Palace; but
after a few months they moved from
Edinburgh to Glasgow. There, at Mel-
ville Place, on May 29th, 1808, the first
child was born. On July 28th, 1809, in
Charlotte Street, came the second, who
was baptized as "John Stuart" by the
Rev. Henry Mushet, of Shuttlestone.
With these two little ones, and a still
more recent arrival, Mr. Blackie in 1812
took his wife to Aberdeen, having been
appointed by the Commercial Bank as its
first agent in that city. The family
settled down Aberdoniaus, at any rate,
will like to know these trifles in a
Sis Forebears. 7
strangely-situated house, with its front on
Marischal Street and its side several
storeys lower on Virginia Street, one road
being carried over the other by a bridge.
Marischal Street has come down in the
world since then, though its bridge is as
high as ever. The bank is now a humble
eating-house ; but the lodgers who share
the upper floors no longer have to send to
the top of the street for their water, as
the banker had. A peep of the River Dee
and the heather slopes beyond was to be
had from the windows, but otherwise the
view consisted of granite not the clean
granite of the newer town, but black with
the dust of countless coal carts passing up
from the wharf. The surroundings were
not calculated to feed the love for beauty
in a woman or develop it in a child. As
to surroundings of the human sort, the
young wife says : " We live very retired.
The people in this town visit in a very
ceremonious style, which neither Mr.
Blackie nor I like; and so we are not
obliged to cultivate many friends." " I
have not that enlightened society which my
imagination pictures, but I have inde-
8 Professor BlacJcie.
pendence, which of all things I enjoy.
I am not obliged to receive idle and insipid
Tisitors that I do not care for." " There is
no music amongst us, little entertain-
ment of any kind but eating and drinking;
I mean dinner parties. From tea till
supper the never-failing entertainment is
cards. Then the toddy commences, which
lasts till twelve or one."
Although husband and wife agreed as
to the shortcomings of Aberdeen society,
they could not compensate each other for
the deficiency. Alexander Blackie was a
lively fellow, a singer of rattling songs,
with " a great flow of spirits," " a ready
tongue," "full of joke and fun," "very
famous at talking nonsense," quick of
temper, and a keen man of business. His
son-in-law gives an illustration of this
last quality. A certain firm, of the
highest repute, owed the Commercial
Bank 40,000. Mr. Blackie came to a
shrewd conclusion that the firm were
going beyond their depth, and, resisting
all influence and pressure, even from his
own directors, he left no stone unturned
till the debt was all paid off. Soon after
ALEXANDER BLACKIE.
His Forebears. 9
that the firm failed, bringing another Aber-
deen Bank down in the crash; and the
Commercial Bank directors thanked Mr.
Blackie for saving them from themselves.
This bj the way. According to the childish
recollections of one who spent much time
in her house, Mrs. Blackie " was a good
height, dark hair, dark eyes beaming with
kindness, nimble in her movements,
cheerful in manner, did not care about
dress, though always tidy, and a great
reader." An attractive picture, but in-
complete. The banker's wife was a far
more serious thinker than himself, and
too profound for him either to sympathise
with or to understand, especially as she
was " bitter bad at speaking." Their
eldest daughter, who was nearly thirteen
when her mother died, preserved the
impression that " she was a very quiet,
timid person, silent and reserved, and cer-
tainly not demonstrative to her children."
The meagreness of these recollections,
to which Professor Blackie could add
nothing, is poorly supplemented by a
solitary incident, not bearing on the
family life but recalling an event of
10 Professor Blackie.
interest in the history of public opinion.
To use the daughter's words : " On the
occasion of the illumination for Queen
Caroline's acquittal, my mother and
father were dining at Mr. Ewing's,
opposite us. As she was standing at the
lighted window dressed for the occasion,
with a white satin hat and feathers, which
happened to be the favourite costume
of the queen, the crowd below gave a
shout of applause, supposing that she was
intended as a representation of their idol."
Only a mother knows what the burden
of motherhood means ; and Helen Blackie
had the burden in overflowing measure,
with neither opportunity nor capacity for
much of the compensating joy. " I have
been sadly kept down," she wrote in
1815, when she had three children living
and had buried two " sadly kept down
with a small family, fully as large as I
am able to manage, having not much
ability that way." When three more
children had come, and two gone, she
continued: "As to my own method
with children, I have nothing to
boast of. The task is difficult. Some
His Forebears. 11
people have a natural turn for it, which
I am afraid is not the case with me."
The general cares of the household, too,
were heavy. She had not been idle in
her maiden days; the spinning-wheel
was her steady companion at Airbliss ;
but 'she was "a bad hand at gown-making
or anything of that kind." "Very dif-
ferent is the case now," she writes after
eleven years of married life. " It is not
as in days of old, when you once told me
that my own thoughts were my greatest
amusement." "We have enough to make
ourselves and friends comfortable," she
was able to say, "and a little to give
away to the Bible Society " ; but such
savings were made at heavy cost to the
housewife. Acknowledging a shawl sent
from India by her friend, she remarks,
' ( It is the piece of dress I stood most in
want of, but I have got so many to pro-
vide for that I myself am always the last
person to be considered." At another
time, " I have so much to sew, and such a
bustle in the house, that I have little
quiet for reading, although I attempt it
sometimes " and gallantly she kept up the
12 Professor BlacJcie.
attempt to the end. " My grand aim in
all my domestic economy is to preserve
my temper unruffled if possible ! I would
wish to be as little impressed with dis-
agreeable trifles as possible " an opti-
mism of the deliberately-aimed-at sort,
like that which her son so happily
achieved. Fortunately, there was a sister
to carry part of the housewife's load.
Marion Stodart was a second, and
perhaps more motherly, mother to
Helen's children. It was she who sang
to them the old Scottish songs, most
ravishing of entertainments to a Scottish
child. One of these ballads, which seems
to have dropped out of sight and hearing,
was a tragic legend of the West country :
There were seven gypsies all in a row,
And they were brisk and bonny, O ;
They sang till they came to the Earl o*
Cassilis' gate,
And there they sang sae sweetly, O.
They sang sae sweet, and sae complete,
That doun came the fair leddy, O ;
And when they saw her weel-faured face
They cast the glamour ower her, O.
So she's taen off her high-heeled shoes
That are made o' the Spanish leather, O,
His Forebears. 13
And she's put on her Highland brogues
To skip amang the heather, O.
On the discovery of which the Earl
ff saddled to him his milk-white steed,"
and rested not till he had hanged the
seven gypsies on a tree.
It was Marion Stodart who took charge
of the six motherless bairns in 1821, when
Helen Blackie brought her tenth child
into the world and died. Four years later
Alexander Blackie married a beautiful
widow, Mrs. Margaret Paterson, a grand-
daughter of James Watt, and five more
children were the result ; but Marion
Stodart was still the angel of the house,
and lived not only to comfort her brother-
in-law when for a second time he was left
a widower, but to see her youngest niece
a grandmother, and her eldest nephew an
old man.
n.
THE BOY.
WHEN this same nephew was only six
years old, his mother was able to say,
"He seems a steady boy, and fond
of his books." Two years later she
spoke of her family as "all fine lively
children, none of them beautiful, but all
have something pleasing a certain some-
thing which I cannot describe." In the
same year, however, she ventured on a piece
of description which deserves our gratitude.
" As for John, he is all consideration.
He is also possessed of a good deal of the
milk of human kindness. He is rapid in
all his motions, and methodical to a fault.
Nothing that can be done to-day is put off
till to-morrow with John. He is ever
happy with the present; anything new
rather vexes than delights him." Then
follows a prophecy of which the beginning
is as safe and the ending as wrong as
The Boy. 15
prophecy can well be. "His character
depends much on the society he forms in
after life. If they are good I expect to
see him a fine young man, very pushing
and fond of money-making, but not much
religion about him."
We have just one more glimpse of the
mother and children together before the
great separation. " Christina has been
studying French. She is fond of it, and the
language seems to flow as easily from her
tongue as English. She is not like her
mother in this respect, having the gift of
speech in a very eminent degree. John,"
now ten years old, " is at the grammar
school. He is considered a good scholar,
an d has got several prizes . Christina and he
are bothrather clever than otherwise. They
are lively children, impatient of restraint,
perversely averse to everything that will
cross their vain imaginations. I need not
add that to keep them within the bounds
of prudence and decorum is no easy task."
Poor mother !
" You know I am a very incorrect per-
son," Helen Blackie wrote once, by way
of apology for having forgotten a date.
16 Professor Blackie.
This was a weak point also in her son's
memory a faculty nevertheless which
has preserved for us some youthful recol-
lections not on any account to be omitted
from this book. The Professor has left
two admirable pieces of autobiography,
one printed in " The Pupil-Teachers'
Monthly" in 1888, and the other, four
years later, in " The Young Man." Both,
and especially the latter, help to kindle a
welcome familiarity between us and the
interesting youth whom, the present gene-
ration has only known as a snowy sage.
" From the family," he says, " I learned
obedience and affection. I was neither
pampered nor unduly repressed, and never
thrust into premature manhood by being
removed in my boyish days from the kindly
influence of the paternal roof and the home
fireside. I always got a penny from my
father on certain notable days to buy rock,
when I was a good boy, and a sound flog-
ging when I was a bad boy." Both of
these experiences he decided not at the
time were extremely beneficial, and
especially the flogging. He was only
thrashed twice, it is fair to say once for
The Boy.
17
saying he had been at school when he had
been sulking in concealment, his aunt
having made him take some undesired
JOHN STUART BLACKIE, AGED FIVE.
broth, and the other time for ''calling:
' O
names " at a servant-girl against whom he
had a grudge. "I was, I fancy," he says,
"as a rule, a very sober, sensible, and
well-behaved human creature." " Of my
2
18 Professor BlacJcie.
early boyhood I have nothing either very
sorrowful or very gladsome to tell nothing
that would make a chapter in a novel, or
even give matter for a sentimental sonnet.
I just lived as the sparrows live, when
they hop about picking up what may lie
on the roadside, or as the cattle and the
sheep live when they are driven comfort-
ably from field to field." As for book-
learning, the child would have none of it.
He would treat the " gooders," as he used
to call his little brothers and sisters, to a
dramatic rendering of a psalm or soliloquy ;
but the ear and not the eye had taught
him his lesson. He could neither read nor
write till he was about eight years old,
when he first went to school: but then
he soon made up for lost time.
Though his mother writes of "John"
as taking prizes at the grammar school,
his name does not appear on the registers
of that institution. "I was sent," his
own account is, " to a private school, well
conducted by Peter Merson. I learned a
good deal about classical matters," and
little else, it seems. " It was the eternal
Latin grammar, grammar, grammar," he
The Boy. 19
told an Aberdeen audience only last year,
with, jovial exaggeration ; " nobody talked
about anything but Latin grammar. All
the beauty of God's creation was never
looked at for a moment." A " systematic
training of the body for grace and
strength " was equally undreamt of in the
granite city. However, he says, " we had
* robbers and rangers' for our legs, and
marbles and hoops for our arms and
fingers and our eyes; and every Wednes-
day and Saturday afternoon we had free
time to perambulate the green * links ' on
both sides of the ' Broad hill,' giving
scope to our kites (which we called
dragons), and speeding our balls from hole
to hole with that combination of strength
and calculation which the noble game of
golf requires. For cruel sports, such as
hanging cats, and bloody noses, and a
boyish pugilism, I had never any taste."
No taste, but some capacity, it seems.
One of his schoolfellows quarrelled with
him and flung the usual challenge : " Will
you fight me?" "No," said little
Blackie, "but I'll knock you down"; and
he did.
20 Professor Blackie.
After four years of Latin grammar
and less-considered trifles, the boy was
sent to Marischal College, " where, for a
few, in those stern granite countries,"
as Carlyle says in a reference to the
founder, "the diviner pursuits are still
possible (thank God and this Keith) on
frugal oatmeal."
Blackie has put on record that Scottish
students " died rather of eating too little
than of eating too much "; but he was
never in danger from either. That his
mental digestion did not suffer more than
his physical is surprising, for he entered
the University at the ridiculous age of
twelve " an age not uncommon in those
days, when, by the fault of the ignoble
nobles who, at the Reformation, seized on
the funds that should have been appro-
priated to middle schools and colleges, the
universities were doomed, as they still are
in no small measure, to devote themselves
to the drill of crude boys rather than to
the stimulation of ambitious youth."
The mental stage he had reached in 1821
Blackie describes thus : " From the school
I learned the habit of persistent intel-
The Boy. 21
lectual work over books, of accuracy in
whatever I handled, and of a laudable
ambition to do my best in competition
with my comrades ; but, beyond this in-
tellectual drill, principally through the
medium of the Latin language, I learned
little at school." His college career may
be put in one sentence, also of his own :
"I went through the usual routine of
Greek, mathematics, natural history, and
natural philosophy, during a three years*
course, with credit in three of the classes
and distinction in one." Strange to say,
it was in mathematics that he achieved
this fleeting distinction. " Some people
say," he remarked twenty years after-
wards, " that mathematics is a science for
angels ; but I could never manage it."
"But!"
Now came the great question, always
hard enough to answer, What is the boy
to do when he becomes a man ? Alexander
Blackie wanted to make a lawyer of him,
and John actually spent six months in a
solicitor's office. Fancy the feelings of
a human Jack-in-the-box with the lid
screwed down!
in.
GOING TO BE A MINISTER.
WHEN John was a little lad of six, and
his parents had been discussing the matter
of education, his mother wrote to her
friend in India, " I would like that the
minister would take John under his charge,
as I wish to have him educated for the
Church.*' The boy's own ambition was
that of his mother dead three years, at
this crisis. " Born in Glasgow and edu-
cated in Aberdeen," he told the Aber-
donians last year, ff a man should be a
match for the devil." He was no
match for the devil in 1824, in his own
opinion, but he was eager to prepare
for the conflict, and the front rank, so
far as he then saw, was composed of
ministers. His tendency to the pulpit
was strengthened by an incident which he
never forgot. fl At that period an intimate
friend of my father, who used to come in
Going to be a Minister. 23
early in the evening and take a hand at
cards and a glass of wine, died suddenly. I
was a thoughtful youth, and naturally such
a striking exhibition of the great mystery
of death so close to the family fireside made
me think. I became very serious, and
fell, in the fashion of young men, a willing
victim to the action of strong feelings
and untempered imaginings, which only
experience could teach me to regulate."
With his father's permission he escaped
from the lawyer's office and went up to
Edinburgh "there," as he tells us, "to
finish my quinquennial career of Arts by
attending the logic class and second Greek
in the first year and the moral philosophy
in the second, to which I added chemistry :
a breadth and variety of purely human
culture which our Scottish Church has
wisely ordained to precede the special
studies that belong to the clerical profes-
sion, and which, I believe, always admit-
ting our inferiority in the higher scholar-
ship, renders our Scottish theologians more
intelligent and more accomplished men
than the young aspirants for episcopal
honours in the sister kingdom."
24 Professor Blackie.
A curious old letter lies before me, writ-
ten (partly printed) by the boy of fifteen
soon after his arrival in Edinburgh to the
little sister Marion, then five years old, in
Aberdeen. It is a sweet and simple letter,
rather more serious in tone than might be
expected. It begins : " I was very glad to
hear that you and James were turned such
good scholars. O what good children you
must be. All good children read the Good
book, the Bible. But remember, MARION,
that you must be a good girl, too, for if you
read the Bible and be not a good girl it will
be very BAD. Can Dodle read any now ? "
Dodle is baby Helen, now three and
a-half . Here are a few more sentences :
F
n>
S\><X>U.ofc.NvVtU < aliwSe
Going to be a Minister. 25
" There has been a great fire here which has
burnt a great number of houses. What do
you think will become of all the poor
people who lived in them ? If you were
here would you not give them some money
to buy a house, or to help them to
buy a house ? Yes, James and Marion
and Dodle would all do it. . . . Good
Marion ! I am glad that you are a good
girl. Never be bad, for I cannot love bad
girls."
In another letter, written while he was
staying with his " Uncle and Aunt
Gibson " at a farm in Ladhope, before the
Edinburgh classes began, the young man
tells of his " delicate stomach," and how
severely it has made its delicacy known.
" They say," however, " I am looking far
more stout and healthy than when I first
came out, though they were all much
surprised at my ( thin bit ' arms." His
uncle writes in a postscript: " Dearest
John is much stouter than when he
came here, and he is the delight of
everybody who sees him." John himself
had given a delightful picture of the
family circle: " There is a continual
26 Professor BlacJcie.
smile on the face of the individuals here.
Every morning and every evening they
shake hands together, and for the most
part salute with a kiss. Indeed, Aunt
Gibson kisses me more than twice a
day, and has for me almost a mother's
kindness."
Writing in March, 1826, to his Aunt
Marion, the student says : " Professor
Wilson is at present lecturing on the
Grecian philosophy. This is a very
profitable subject of contemplation.
In each of these systems of morals
framed by the wise men of Greece we
see much to admire and much to
pity." More to pity than to admire,
however; for the two lessons he draws
from this exercise are that we
should be thankful for the clearer
light we have received in the Scrip-
tures and ashamed of the little good
we have achieved by it. In the same
letter he writes : " I have no expec-
tation of a prize this winter ; my studies
have not been diligently pursued. I
have made little progress in them.
Nor could it be otherwise when the
Going to Je a Minister. 27
blessing of God was not with me
and I was not simply and sincerely
devoting all my powers to His glory."
In fact, the young student's mind was
so distracted by religious emotions and
speculations that he was quite unfit for
common studies. Describing this painful
experience in "The Young Man," he
says : " I became overwhelmingly serious
after the extreme Calvinistic type native
to Scotland, and began immediately an
other-worldly sort of piety which in-
terfered seriously with my enjoyment
of life and with the further progress of
my academical studies. To such a degree,
indeed, was I puzzled and preoccupied
with profound theological problems about
election, reprobation, and other points
of the severe Calvinistic theology, that
I abstained from reading many books
of approved literary excellence, because
I thought they were too worldly in
their tone, and not sufficiently in har-
mony with the spirit of reverential
seriousness without which all knowledge
and all cleverness merely make a man a
more efficient agent of the devil. So far
28 Professor 'Blackie.
did this extreme religiosity lead me that
I remember well, when I went up at the
end of my fifth academical year to
receive my certificate of attendance from
John Wilson, the Professor expressed his
regret that he could not give me
a testimonial of the highest kind,
because, though I had written one
very excellent essay during the session,
I had written only one. To this I
could say nothing, the true cause of
my deficiency, a morbid religiosity, being
so personal and peculiar; all I could
do was to cover my face and burst into
tears, and leave the room." One
outcome of the two years at Edin-
burgh University two barren years for
the most part was the warm friend-
ship that sprang up between young
Blackie and the aforesaid John Wilson,
the famous " Christopher North," who
was then, what Blackie afterwards
became, the most noted inhabitant of the
capital.
With unshaken resolve Blackie now
mounted another step on the pulpit stair.
Returning to Marischal College, he en-
Going to be a Minister. 29
tered in the theological faculty. He went
in for his new studies with enthusiasm,
and did his exercises well for the required
space of three years. Long before that
term was out the warmth of his heart
had softened the rigidity of his creed,
which afterwards took so elastic, not to
say fluid, a form. The students had to
write sample sermons for their professors
and fellow-students to criticise. In one
of his discourses Blackie let his incipient
Arminianism show itself, and Dr. Mearns
snubbed him severely. In criticising
other men's sermons he won some college
fame, not, for sure, because of his zeal in
exposing doctrinal errors, but through his
gift of tongues. "Principal Brown had
been taught in Holland, and knew Latin
very well indeed. He laid it down as
a rule," Blackie tells us, " that if
there was to be any criticism of the
discourse it must be in Latin. I remem-
ber that I was the only one having
the hardihood to criticise in Latin, and
I made some little reputation as a Latin
scholar."
Not long after he had plunged into the
30 Professor Blaclde.
professional study of theology, his father
who was no theologian, but a shrewd man
in other matters than finance noticed that
the young man's intellectual vision was
still somewhat clouded by over-seriousness,
and sent him to take the advice of an
equally shrewd divine, Dr. Patrick Forbes,
then professor of Latin and chemistry at
King's College. Here is Blackie's account
of the interview, which had great
results :
" I immediately made a declaration that
in dealing with a subject of so extensive
a range as Christian theology I had
deemed it advisable to commence with a
general systematic scheme of the whole
subject, and had accordingly submitted
myself to the orthodox guidance of
Boston's 'Body of Divinity.' ( Boston!
Boston ! Body ! Body ! ' said the stout old
doctor; 'neither Boston, nor Calvin, nor
any other D.D. must be allowed to stand
between you and your Protestant Bible.
Let them stalk about on the stilts of a
scholastic dogmatism as high as they
please, but you place yourself at
the feet of Jesus Christ and learn
Going to le a Minister. 31
from Him directly. Take your Greek
Testament, interleave it, and make notes
carefully of what you read ; make
a vow to read no Body of Divinity
for two years, and after that you will
likely find that they are not worth
reading.'
"I followed his instructions conscien-
tiously," the young man adds, now old,
" and have, during the whole course of a
life protracted considerably beyond the
usual term, known how to combine profit-
ably and carefully the study of the original
Scriptures with a total abstinence from
theological systems and sectarian commen-
taries." A complete digest of the New
Testament, in Greek, was one of the
immediate results of the Professor's advice
to this student, whose voracity for work,
checked in its monstrous meal of Boston,
was instantly let loose upon the more
wholesome victual set before it. Nor was
he so engrossed in professional studies
that he could not find time to give
the " gooders " their first lessons in
botany, sitting on the banks of the
Don at Caskie Ben, or to painfully print
32 Professor BlacJcie.
for their instruction a long series of
original Latin exercises, of which this is
a specimen * :
The three years passed without a catas-
trophe. The potential parson managed to
escape, with all his infant heresies, the
utter condemnation of his professors, and
was ready to emerge from his probationary
chrysalis in full-blown gown and bands.
" And why was I not licensed to preach ?
The why," he tells us, " lay in a good idea
of my good father." Whether Mr. BlacMe
had any strong conviction that his son
ought not to be a minister, or whether he
* On a reduced scale, as with the other facsimiles.
Going to be a Minister. 33
simply wished to equip " his young theo-
logical Johnnie " more fully for his minis-
try, it would be hard to guess. Certain it
is that Professor Forbes once more
appeared in the way with a suggestion
that young Blackie should go off with a
pair of young Forbes's to the Continent,
and add two years in a German university
to the eight he had spent in Aberdeen and
Edinburgh.
IV.
GERMANY AND ITALY.
THE fathers having agreed to this plan,
the three sons were packed off by coach to
Edinburgh, and took ship at Leith for the
North Sea passage. Landing at Hamburg,
they made their way to Gottingen. There
they spent six months {f eagerly drinking
in living waters from Heeren in history,
Otfried Miiller in philology," and other
sources. The consuming energy with
which young Blackie not only set about his
appointed work but created new tasks for
himself considerably astonished his com-
rades, the elder of whom (the Rev. John
Forbes, D.D., LL.D., Emeritus Professor
of Oriental Languages, Aberdeen) still
preserves, at the hale old age of ninety-
three, a vivid recollection of the ex-
perience. To begin with, as Blackie tells
us himself, he gripped, overcame, and
made a friend of his first enemy, the
Germany and Italy. 35
German language, as Jacob wrestled
with, the angel. " I learnt how to learn
languages, not by a painful machinery
of dry rules and dead books, but just
as we learn to swim by plunging into
the water and plashing about. It is
fear that would make you sink, not the
weight of your body. I did not know
a single word of German when I stepped
out of the Leith packet (there were
no steamboats in those days) at Hani-
burg, but before I had been three
months in Gottingen I followed Professor
Heeren's lectures on history as pleasantly
as if they had been in English ; not,"
he assures us, "because I had any
special gift of learning languages, but
because I plashed about daily in the
element and breathed the atmosphere of
German."
This was only one of the "notable
revelations " that were speedily made to
him, and perhaps the least of a revelation,
for he had learnt to speak Latin by the
same fearless and natural method at
home. "The next thing I learned," he
continues, " was that the German univer-
36 Professor BlacJcie.
sities are the model institutions of the kind,
the real jraveTria-Ttj^iov, as the Greeks
phrase it, or bazaar of universal know-
ledge, while the Scottish Universities,
except in the medical department in
Edinburgh, are mere shops for retail
trade in certain useful articles ; and the
English universities are shops of a higher
order and more gentlemanly appearance,
dealing only in a few select articles
sought after by persons of much money
and great leisure, more from a certain
aristocratic tradition and respectable show
than from any practical fruits which they
are destined to bear." He does not tell
us how soon he communicated this un-
pleasant discovery to his fellow country-
men, and thus flung himself into that
struggle for university reform which is
one of his many claims upon the national
gratitude. His fellow-traveller supplies
the omission. " Blackie," he says, " was
very quick at picking up German ; he
had got a few words even as we were
passing through Hamburg; he was very
ready in talking to the German stu-
dents, and studied the German grammar
Germany and Italy. 37
very keenly. We soon noticed that he
was busy writing he would not say
what and at last we found that by
the time we had been six weeks in Got-
tingen he had written an article to
send home on the inferiority of the
Scottish universities ! " This article, the
first shot in a brilliant campaign, was
published in "The Edinburgh Literary
Journal."
Busy as he was enlarging his own
mind, and transmitting his new light to
the nation he had left sitting in darkness,
Blackie was no more of a recluse then
than in his sunny after life. He threw
himself into the life around him, joining
his fellow- students in all their amuse-
ments except one. He visited the duel-
ling-halls, though the more cautious
Forbes's left him to go alone; but he
would not fight, and it is not recorded
that he had to knock any German
down as an alternative. "As a stu-
dent among students," he says, " I lived
in the most intimate fellowship with
the Burschen, and joined in all their
studies and recreations, except that I
38 Professor BlacJcie.
did not fight a duel, or come -home
with a scar of honourable folly on my
face."
As for those unclean courses to which
every young man is tempted, and into
which the weaker-minded stray under
various contemptible excuses, Blackie's
mind was absolutely made up from the
beginning. "Along with the stern
theology of Calvin," he told the young
men of later generations, <f I got the pure
morality of the Gospel, and after drop-
ping the one, as the wisdom of life
gradually taught me, I had the sense
to stick closely by the other " ; and
so he "was preserved untouched by
those sensual excesses and youthful lusts
which when they once get free rein
are sure to poison the fountain-head
and trouble the flow of all noble emo-
tion in the soul." No wonder that on
a calm retrospect he described "the
early adoption of the Bible standard of
morality as by far the most valuable
educative influence" in his life, or
that the advantages far out-weighed
the disadvantages of the "hyper-Cal-
Germany and Italy. 39
vinistic soul-cancer" from which he had
suffered.
The narrow theological shell, which
we saw beginning to crack before the
horrified eyes of Dr. Mearns, burst and
fell off altogether under the expanding in-
fluence of German suns like Fichte, Schiller,
Kichter, and Goethe. For a time he
seemed to be parting from much of religion
itself, along with the uncongenial forms
in which he had generally met it. That he
saw his mistake before his mind had time
to become hardened in the extreme fashion
of scepticism is probably due to his meet-
ing with Baron von Bunsen after leaving
Germany.
Meanwhile, we had better get back to
Gottingen. The session passed in peace,
and the three young Scotsmen agreed to
begin their holidays with a walking tour
in the Harz Mountains. The eldest, who
was also the purse-bearer, proposed that
in case of a difference of opinion (which
he quite anticipated) as to future plans,
a vote should be taken, and the majority
should have their way. But on the first
application of the new rule, when the two
40 Professor BlacJcie.
brothers voted for going off to Leipzig
Fair, young Blackie, resolved on seeing
more of the mountains, claimed the right
of secession. The Forbes's returned to
Gottingen for another session, while
Blackie, the Hanoverian town having dis-
agreed with his health, made his way to
Berlin. For six months he listened to
"Ranke expatiating on the virtues and
villainies of the Popes, Boeckh expounding
the pregnant sentences of Athenian wisdom
in the choral odes of Sophocles, and
Neander teaching German speculation to
shake hands with Hebrew Platonism in
the Gospel of John." Under this rush of
inspiration the young Aberdonian felt as
if he was conversing with Luther, and
Melanchthon, and Erasmus, " in the days
when learning meant thinking and Greek
meant wisdom. I likewise," he goes on to
say, "had the advantage of hearing
Schleiermacher, with his graceful little
figure and his chaste earnestness, preach-
ing regularly every Sunday in the Trini-
tats-Kirche. With such advantages I
could not fail to take the first step in
true scholarship, by being made fully alive
Germany and Italy. 41
to the srnallness of my own, and indeed of
all Scottish, attainments in the higher
learning."
The young student had found his
" model thinker " in Goethe : he was now
to find his " model man " in another
German but not in Germany. Blaclde
was happy in his relations with his teachers
at both the German universities. At Gottin-
gen old Professor Blumenbach had been
very kind to him and his companions ; and
on leaving Berlin he received from Neander
a greater boon than any course of lectures.
" The greatest benefit," he says, " which
I got from my twelve months' experience
of German academical life was from a
letter of introduction which Neander gave
me, when leaving Berlin for Rome, to a
great German man at that time acting as
Prussian ambassador at the papal Court."
With this letter in his pocket Blackie
travelled through Bohemia and Austria to
Rome, where he presented it to the man
who was to mould so much of his nature.
" Baron von Bunsen," he says, " was as
learned in Greek and Latin, in Hebrew, and
English, and Italian, as any professor; but
42 Professor Blackie.
he was far more than a professor. He was
a man of life and of society, and moved
with dignity and grace and effect on the
diplomatic stage that belonged to his
position. He was, moreover, a man of piety,
and, like Gladstone, of special theological
study, but of a piety healthy and cheerful,
and as far as possible removed from the
rigid orthodoxy and the sacred gloom of
the Calvinistic doctors, whose contagion
had so severely affected me in my first
outlook into the seriousness of responsible
life." The great man was very fond of
patronising and helping young men, and
Blackie's fine open nature helped to ripen
the acquaintance into a friendship of the
warmest kind, which endured for a long
series of years, in Heidelberg and London
as well as Rome. tf Familiar intercourse
with a noble, well-rounded, and highly-
cultured man is the greatest piece of good
fortune that can happen to a young man
in his entrance on life. This good fortune
was mine," writes Blackie, recalling those
old Eoman days; " and I advise all young
men to pray for no higher blessing than
the reverential and loving fellowship with
Germany and Italy. 43
such a man, to whom they may look
up daily, and grow by his gracious in-
fluence, as the flower looks up to the
sun and grows with the brightness of
the summer."
The fifteen months that Blackie spent
in Italy are memorable also for the new
fields of learning which he speedily added
to his German conquests. One of these
was archaeology, the study of the monu-
ments of Greek and Roman art which
continually met his eyes in the Capitol,
and the Vatican, and almost at every
street corner. " With this delightful
study as the sister of philology," he
writes, " I occupied myself so seriously
that Professor Gerhard, then the leading
man in the Archaeological Institute at
Rome, requested me to write an account
of a newly-discovered sarcophagus repre-
senting a battle between Romans and
barbarians. This I did to his satisfaction,
using Italian, with which I was quite
familiar, as the medium of expression " :
and the curious may still inspect in the
British Museum an old brown treatise,
formidably elaborate in its contents, and
44 Professor Blackie.
bearing on the title-page these words:
INTORNO UN SARCOFAGO RINVENUTO NELLA
VIGNA AMMENDOLA SULLA VIA APPIA.
TLLUSTRAZIONE DI GIOVANNI BLACKIE.
ROMA. 1831.
Here was a guttural Scotsman, fresh
from guttural Germany, able to speak and
write in perfect Italian after a few months'
experience! The spectacle is surprising
enough, even when we remember his
achievement at Gottingen. His method
was the same in both cases the method
of nature. He learnt to speak by speak-
ing, chatting with the Italians as he
had with the Prussians, utterly careless
whether he amused them or not.
It was in Italy, too, that he laid the
foundation in ground prepared by nature,
to be sure of that love of beauty which
he was never tired of preaching to his
fellow-countrymen. For one thing, as he
spent his time chiefly in Rome and the
neighbourhood, he "naturally fell into
the society of artists, both German and
English, and received the greatest benefit,"
he tells us, "not only from the pure
humanity that characterises that class,
Germany and Italy. 45
but specially from this : they taught me
to use my eyes, an exercise too often
neglected in the bookish style of teaching
to which too many of our modern educa-
tors have enslaved themselves.'
V.
"STICKET."
AT last the young traveller turned his
face northwards, his boxes packed with
presents for his step-mother and the
rest of the Aberdeen household, and his
" head full of pictures, statues, churches,
and other beautiful objects." One can
imagine the astonishment, not to say
horror, that sermons preached under the
combined inspiration of Rome and Berlin
would have excited in a Scottish Presby-
terian congregation sixty years ago.
Happily for the peace of his Church, the
young minister stuck fast on the very
threshold of the pulpit. He could not
conscientiously declare the creed of his
Church to be the expression of his
heart's belief. He was " much given to
thinking, and thinking is twin sister
to doubt." The absolute orthodoxy
with which he had set out on his
"Stickit." 47
theological career half-a-dozen years
before had been " rudely shaken," not
only by the great writers who have
been named, but " by continued familiar
intercourse with such large and liberal
Christian men as Professor Neander and
Baron Bunsen."
The elder Blackie was not greatly dis-
appointed, though he must have grudged
the three years his son had spent learning
to be a stickit minister. Stickit he was,
and there was an end of it. What re-
mained but to re-enter the despised pro-
fession of the law, (( with a side glance at
literature if the Pandects and the statute
books should fail " ? Up to Edinburgh he
went again, therefore, to supplement his
ten years of college work with three of
special training for the Bar. "My father,"
he says, "with his old liberality, pro-
mised to give me an allowance of 100 for
three years, and after that I was to shift
for myself. I knew he was a man of his
word, so I set my face to the writer's desk
and the Institutes," studying hard, and
taking part in the debates of the Specu-
lative and Juridical Societies, "and
48 Professor Blackie.
bravely passed as advocate on the usual
presentation of a Latin thesis and exami-
nation in the general outlines of Scottish
law."
Thus it came to pass that in 1834 John
Stuart Blackie was called to the Bar, and
went on circuit with the rest of the
budding chancellors. There is a legend
that he had one case, and lost it. A dili-
gent Aberdeen journalist' 55 ' has unearthed
enough of the ancient records of his
town to show that Blackie had ff a fairly
busy time of it " when the Court sat
there in the autumn of '34. A local
paper reported his first case in this little
paragraph :
" Alexander Watt, a boy apparently
ten or eleven years of age, was placed at
the bar charged with theft, and two
previous convictions. Panel pleaded
guilty ; and the Advocate-Depute having
restricted the libel, Mr. J. S. Blackie
urged in mitigation that the boy had
been driven from home by the conduct of
a drunken father. Lord Medwyn, after
a serious advice to the panel as to
* See " The Evening Gazette," March 16, 1895.
"SticJcit." 49
his future behaviour, sentenced him to
twelve months' imprisonment in Bride-
well."
A friend who went to court especially to
hear the most important of the cases
entrusted to the young advocate tells me
that it was " something to do with a cat."
This must have been the case in which,
as appears from the scanty reports of
the period, a certain "William Walls was
charged with having, " at or near the door
of the dwelling-house upon the farm of
Dencadlie, or Dencallie, parish of Strichen,
then occupied by him," shot Mr. " John
Forsyth, farmer, residing at Greens, in
said parish, with a gun, whereby the said
Forsyth was severely wounded, to the
injury of his person and the effusion of
blood, with intent to murder, maim, dis-
figure or disable him. Mr. J. S. Blackie,"
we are informed, " made a forcible appeal
to the jury on behalf of the prisoner,
contending that he had fired at the cat,
and not at Forsyth." The judge, how-
ever, " felt that his sense of justice would
not allow him to pass any other sentence
than that next to the highest punishment
50 Professor Blackie.
of the law, namely, that of transportation
for life."
One other case, perhaps the most
notable of all that came into his hands,
may be mentioned because of its con-
nection with the politics of sixty years
ago. Alexander Blackie was an advanced
Whig he had been one of the chief
speakers at a great Reform demonstration
on the Broad Hill in 1832 ; and later on,
when Whiggery as a whole was rather shy
of Free Trade, Alexander Blackie was one
of the few prominent A.berdonians who
showed themselves on the platform with
Richard Cobden. John Stuart, as his
father's son, and as (at this time) a
Radical himself, was asked to defend two
indiscreet members of the party from the
charge of mobbing and rioting on the
occasion of a public dinner at Banff. When
he was cross-examining some of the Crown
witnesses, " Mr. Blackie was asked what
he intended to prove. He stated that he
wished to show who were the parties who
commenced the riot. The mob, he said,
was not, as had been said, a many-sided
monster, but a monster all heart and no
" Stickit." 51
head. He wished to know what it was
which brought these countrymen, this
junta, these self-constituted police " (the
anti-mob, in short) " into the town. Lord
Medwyn said the counsel was endeavouring
to turn the case into a political affair. Mr.
Blackie denied that he had endeavoured
to do so. He had never mentioned the
words Whig or Tory. The counsel for
the other panels had spoken of cheers
given for Colonel Hay. He (Mr. Blackie)
might, if he had been willing, have spoken
of groans given for Mr. Brodie. (Laughter.)
Lord Medwyn said, if Mr. Blackie's client
had confined himself to cheers for one
party or groans for another, there could
have been no objection at all to his
conduct. There was nothing wrong in
such ebullitions of feeling. But, alas, he
had not confined himself to cheers and
groans, but had proceeded to blows." Mr.
Blackie "addressed the jury at con-
siderable length " a few extracts from
that speech would have been welcome .
" maintaining that no case had been made
out by the prosecution." One of the
prisoners was discharged; the other, a
52 Professor BlacJcie.
young lad, though, convicted only of
assault, and recommended to mercy by
the jury, was sentenced to six weeks'
imprisonment. The Whigs did not let
the matter drop there ; and Lord Medwyn
was charged by the local party paper with
having sent Blackie's client to gaol "to
propitiate the deity of appearances."
This was in the autumn of 1835. It is
the only record which has preserved for
us a single incident characteristic of the
young lawyer who afterwards for many
years enjoyed the honour of verbatim
reports. In the absence of knowledge to
the contrary, a belief has grown up that
Blackie invariably succeeded in obtaining
verdicts of " guilty" and extra heavy
sentences for his clients. So, at any rate,
said Blackie's friend Dr. Kilgour, at a
farewell banquet given to the Professor
in 1852. The facetious physician could
scarcely foresee that his remark would
travel over the world for half-a-century,
or he would have attached the label,
" This is a joke." It is quite undeniable,
however, that Blackie did not win that
speedy success which might have con-
" Stickit." 53
quered his old dislike for the law. " The
lawyers had a notion," he once said, " that
I had too much German, and that I had
not a business head, which perhaps was
true." His fees were " almost null." To
be sure, this troubled him little. He used
to entertain the convivial gatherings of his
friends by laughing at himself in song.
We can imagine the shout that went
round the table when Blackie rose to
sing :
GIVE A FEE.
A NEW SONG FOE YOUNG BABEISTEES.
(Air: " Buy a Broom.")
O listen, of Scotch and of civil law doctors all,
Solicitors, agents, accountants, to me !
O listen, of strifes and of lawsuits concoctors all,
And give to a poor starving lawyer a fee !
Give a fee ! give a fee ! give a fee ! give a
fee!
O give to a poor starving lawyer a fee !
Happily, he had a second string to his bow.
Indeed, Literature was his first string, and
Law only the second. While studying con-
scientiously, but without ambition or affec-
tion, for the Bar, his pen was brisk and
54 Professor SlacJcie.
busy at the work lie loved. Before tlie tliree
years were ended, lie was making 100 a
year, independently of the paternal aid,
by writing articles in " Tait " and " Black-
wood" and the "Foreign Quarterly
Review " ; and he went diligently on
with his literary career while practising
at the Bar. His subjects were largely
German; and, while he profited by the
wave of interest in German literature
which Carlyle raised, Blackie's own efforts
did much to keep the billow rolling.
He was the first, as Dr. Kirchner has re-
cently reminded us,* to introduce " Ecker-
mann's Conversations with Goethe" to
the British public, by an article in the
" Foreign Quarterly " ; and Blackie's first
book, published in the year that saw
its author's futile call to the Bar, was
a translation of Goethe's Faust. This
was a bold attempt for a young poet;
but Blackie had drunk so deeply of his
author's spirit that Goethe's biographer,
George Henry Lewes, preferred his
translation to any other, and usually
followed it. " In general tone and effect,"
* In the " Illustrirte Zeitung."
" SticJrit." 55
Blackie writes in his preface, "I have
carefully followed the movement of the
original. To have done otherwise, indeed,
would have been difficult for me, to whom
the movement of the original, in all its
changes, has long been as familiar as the
responses of the Church service to a
devout Episcopalian." Nevertheless, the
translator was not over confident in his
own power for such a great work, and he
gladly accepted the help of " Christopher
North " who corrected rhymes which
would have been correct in Aberdeen of
Sir William Hamilton and Mr. George
Moir (the " Delta " of " Blackwood ") in
revising the proofs and collecting material
for the very curious notes on the witch-
craft and astrology of the Middle Ages.
The translation was reprinted, after being
largely rewritten, in 1880.
With his reputation as a German
scholar lifted higher than ever by this
book, Blackie gained in favour with the
editors. He reviewed German books, ex-
pounded in the " Westminster Re view"
the Prussian constitution, and wrote what
is considered "one of the clearest mili-
56 Professor Blackie.
tary monographs, describing Napoleon's
Leipzig Campaign." This last, and several
kindred articles, were intended to form
part of a work on the Liberation War in
Germany, for which Blackie collected
large materials at a time when Providence
had not yet marked out for him " a less
genial but more useful sphere of action."
Another great plan of his was that of " a
large work on sestlietical philosophy."
The complete scheme of this work was
drawn up when he was fresh from the
beauties of Italy; but, u being convinced
afterwards that the British mind is
remarkably intolerant of big books on
theoretical subjects," he allowed the pro-
ject to drop. Many years afterwards, as
we shall see, he revived the subject in a
form which the British mind was delighted
to tolerate.
Two momentary glimpses will show
Blackie as the affectionate brother in the
midst of his legal and literary struggles.
In 1834 we see him taking his little sister
Helen through the streets and over the
hills of Edinburgh, on her first visit to the
Capital, and a professor already by nature
" SticJcit." 57
so instilling the principles of botany
and architecture that they have not been
forgotten in sixty years. In 1835 he is
off on a walking tour in the Border
country, and sending his sister a descrip-
tion, in 300 lines of verse crowded on a
single sheet, of what he had seen and
done. Let us make room for just this
scrap of doggerel :
how I swilled the cups of tea !
Much better, I vow, than wine they be !
Much better when tongues are parched with
heat,
With empty stomachs and weary feet ;
1 swilled the cups, full three times three,
Of darkest Inverleithen tea ;
Dark as the sea when tempest-tost,
Dark as the whiskers of my host.
For six years Blackie went on with his
reviewing, and more casually with his
pleading ; but neither the editors nor the
prisoners could supply him with the niche
he was made to fill. " I was now thirty
years old," he says, "and, having no
special genius for law, must have drifted
into the wide field of general literature,
with a fair chance of making shipwreck,
58 Professor Blaclde.
as I am by nature and habit too much of
a severe, systematic student to make a
living by the graceful playfulness of a
writer in magazines, or the pugilistic
dexterity of the politician."
VI.
THE FIGHT FOE THE CHAIE.
BY the irony of events, it was the " dex-
terity of the politician " that opened a
new career to the stickit lawyer. "A
happy combination of personal merit in
the travelled scholar and paternal influence
in the world of patronage led to my
appointment as Professor of Latin in the
newly - created chair in the Marischal
College, Aberdeen."
Before this there had been no chair of
Latin (or Humanity, as the Scotch phrase
goes) in Marischal College, though lectures
on Latin were given to the students by
Dr. Melvin, rector of the Grammar School.
On the 1st of May, 1839, the Home Secre-
tary signed a decree at once establishing
such a chair, and appointing John Stuart
Blackie to fill it. This was brought about
by the influence of the Whig Member of
Parliament for the city, Mr. Alexander
60 Professor Blackie.
Bannerman. The chair was wanted no
doubt about that and in obtaining it
from the Government Mr. Bannerman
acted as a friend of his constituents ; but
in getting the new place for Blackie
before any one else knew there was a
place to apply for, the M.P. acted as a
friend of one particular constituent,
Alexander Blackie one of Bannerman's
chief supporters and most intimate
friends. However, it is as well to re-
member that the politician's recommen-
dation was strongly endorsed by high
educational authorities.
The wrath of the Tories at the perpe-
tration of a " political job" by another
party was deep and furious. We shake
our heads over the lapse of journalism
into personalities ; but we may pluck up
heart when we read the personalities of
our predecessors. Imagine the bitterness
of party feeling that could inspire an
editor with language like this: "the
absurdly-ridiculous appointment of Master
John Blackie, alias Faust; a boy in
common -sense, a very child in talents, a
very infant of the classics, a very fool
The Fight for the Chair. 61
when labouring on the circuit in his pro-
fession." " He has a professorship made
up for him, gets a gown put over hig back
instead of a child's frock and pinafore,
with 300 a-year " the salary was
really 200 " and his fees instead of a
bawbee to buy gibbery* ! " Angry Tories
apart, there was a widespread though
ill-informed opinion that the new
chair should have been given to Melvin,
a man who had explored every micro-
scopical nook and cranny in the whole
Latin language, who had in his library as
many editions of Horace as there were
days in the year, and who had become, as
Blackie himself said, "one of the most
accurate and elegant Latinists in the
country. 3 ' Thirteen years later, when
Blackie left Aberdeen and the Tories
were in power, Melvin's appointment to
the vacant chair was taken for granted by
everyone except the Government, who
appointed somebody else. " Wounded in
the house of his friends," the Grammar
School rector died in the following year.
Melvin or no Melvin, Tories or no
* Gingerbread.
62 Professor Blackie.
Tories, the decree lay there in black and
white with " John B/ussell " at the foot,
and in the natural course of events the
" lucky son of a Whig father " should at
once have assumed the title by which
the last two generations have known him.
But the natural course of events was not
the road Blackie's affairs were in the
habit of travelling. Like a fairy-tale
prince caught in an enchanted forest,
twice he had struggled towards apparent
outlets only to find himself back in the
middle of the wood ; and now, as the
open world lay just before him, the way
out was a third time barred.
The event that has now to be set down
made a great noise at the time and is
famous still. It marks a distinct and per-
manent gain in the struggle for religious
liberty. At that time, before a professor
could begin his work he had to produce to
the University Senate a certificate from the
Aberdeen Presbytery ministers and elders
of the Established Church that he had
signed the Westminster Confession. Now
Blackie's opinion of creeds and tests was
The Fight for the Chair. 63
pretty well known, for lie had expressed
it vigorously enough in Aberdeen three
years before, when speaking on liberty of
thought at a great Whig banquet. The
Aberdonian Tories thought they had him
now. They were loudly anxious to know
what he was going to do about the creed
and test that stood between him and a
professorship.
Blackie was equal to the emergency.
On July 2nd the reverend assembly met ;
the Confession was produced, full-length
and the young heretic signed it, saying
as he did so, " I have signed not as my
private confession of faith, nor as a
churchman learned in theology, but in
my public profession and capacity, and in
reference to university offices and duties
merely. I am a warm friend of the
Church of Scotland, and I have been
accustomed to worship according to the
Presbyterian form, and will continue to do
so; but I am not sufficiently learned in
theology to be able to decide on many
articles of the confession of faith."
In answer to the remark of a presbyter
that they had nothing to do with any
64 Professor Blackie.
mental reservations, the young professor
warmly declared that he had no mental
reservations whatever. He had said what
he had in justice to the Presbytery as
well as to himself. Let them now, if they
were dissatisfied, proceed to evict him
from the chair. To ensure an accurate
report of what had occurred, Blackie sent
to a local newspaper a letter in which he
gave the exact words of his declaration,
and added: "I hold that in law a non-
theological professor is not subject to the
spiritual jurisdiction of the Church. He
signs the articles as articles of peace only."
In this case they proved articles of war.
The Presbytery, doubtless after some
inward wrestlings, decided to send the
necessary certificate of signature to the
University Senate. On this an editorial
marplot raised a storm of outraged
orthodoxy in his newspaper, and a dozen
elders, representing as many parishes,
petitioned the Presbytery to reverse its
decision in view of the " great injury
to the Protestant religion" that Mr.
Blackie's admission, under the circum-
stances, would cause. The Presbytery
The Fight for the Chair. 65
took fright, met again on the 3rd of
September, and decided to undo, if
possible, what they had done. A written
statement was handed in from Mr.
Blackie, supplementing his previous decla-
ration, and respectfully disputing the
power of the Presbytery to recall or
suspend his certificate ; but " this expla-
nation" was thrown aside as "not
satisfactory," only two members daring to
dissent. The Senate would have dis-
regarded the Presbytery's second thoughts
and inducted the new professor to his
chair, having no stomach for a fight in the
law-courts ; but by this time the courage
of the Presbyters had been screwed up to
the requisite degree of obstinacy, and they
took all the risk on their own shoulders.
The question was fought out in the courts,
the Presbytery was declared to have no
power to do more than witness and certify
to the signature, as Blackie had claimed
from the outset, and the Presbyters had
to pay their costs out of their individual
pockets, to the great disgust of the dis-
sentient pair. The judgment was a long
time in coming, and two years had gone
5
66 Professor BlaeJcie.
since his nominal appointment before the
dangerous young advocate could abandon
his Edinburgh lodgings and introduce
himself as "Professor Blackie" to the
lads of Marischal College. Out of the
wood at last !
It was the Aberdeen Presbytery, by-
the-bye, that tried a fall with the cele-
brated Dr. Kidd nearly twenty years
before, and came to sudden grief, sup-
plying Mr. Stark with one of the best
stories in his Life of the pugnacious
parson. Dr. Kidd was one of the few
Established clergy who disobeyed the order
to cease praying for Queen Caroline. The
Presbytery met to reprimand him.
" Why," he asked, " should the Queen
not be prayed for?" One of them an-
swered, " She is a bad woman, Dr. Kidd."
" Then," replied the Doctor, with flashing
eyes, " she has the more need to be prayed
for. I have prayed for the Queen, I will
pray for the Queen, and" looking his
ecclesiastical superiors one by one in the
face, " I'll pray for you, and you, and you,
and for any other sinner out of hell ! "
and off he marched.
vn.
PEOFESSOB OF HUMANITY.
IT was clear enough now
that the right man had got
the Latin chair. " Happy,
indeed," says one of his
Aberdeen pupils,* " was
the student who, thorough-
ly taught by Melvin, im-
pregnated with the prin-
ciples of the Latin grammar, and more or
less master of its idiom, now found himself
in the hands of a professor who opened up
to him the literature of the language and
led him along its flowery paths. To sup-
plement the minute verbal accuracy of
Melvin, we now got the fuller freedom of
Blackie, and were encouraged to use the
language in speech, even in thought. The
stiffness of our translations from Latin
ARMS OF MARISCHAL
COLLEGE.
* Dr. John F. White, in "Alma Mater," June 5,
1895 ; slightly condensed.
68 Professor BlacTcie.
gave place to better English, though no
evasion of the meaning of the text was
allowed and a ( crib ' was speedily detected.
To read copiously, to master the spirit of
an author, to connect it with the thought
of other literatures, Greek, Italian, Ger-
man, or English, was his aim in guiding
our work. From him we got some idea
of philology, of history, and of geography,
in their widest sense. Doubtless many
students left his class without large addi-
tions to their knowledge of Latin, but
many of those who took advantage of his
inspiring teaching have admitted that he
was the most stimulating of professors.
"The influence of Blackie," writes Dr.
Peter Bayne, after a lapse of nearly fifty
years, t{ was for me a sunrise of the soul
in admiration, wonder, sympathy, esteem,
and love, and its colours were never fresher
or brighter than at this hour." Dr.
White continues :
" After his two years' struggle with the
Presbytery, in which his victory led the
way to the abolition of tests in the lay
chairs, attempts were made to introduce
disorder in the class. But, by his good
Professor of Humanity.
69
nature and his cutting wit, he soon
mastered the turbulent element, and by
my year, *43-'44, an easy, natural good
behaviour was the rule. He was loved,
and this love got him respect. He was,
of course, fond of jokes and of extreme
MARI8GHAL COLLEQE IN 1841.
statements which caused a laugh ; bub the
class went on sweetly and merrily, busily
at work, perfectly under control, a class
entirely different from any other in the
ease of its manner. Bright and sympa-
thetic, playful yet earnest, he gained our
hearts by the absence of all pedantry and
70 Professor Blackie.
by his large humanity. Devoted to books,
but not a bookworm, a student of life as
well as of literature, he was our com-
panion and guide rather than our master.
History, philosophy, and poetry charmed
him, but the love of nature seemed his
passion. He glowed with eloquence as he
spoke of the mountains and rivers of Scot-
land, of the heather and the bracken, so
dear to his heart. And on the prize-
giving day, when, in violation of the estab-
lished order of things, he filled his plat-
form with ladies, he declaimed his verses,
pithily describing the students by name"
like this, happily preserved from the same
year by another hand :
Davidson, mantling with the poet's crimson,
Though forced last year to bow the head to
Simpson.
The steady Smith, the brisk mercurial White,
The calm Machray, the good and gentle Knight,
Stanley, and Stevenson, and Stoddart he
May shine elsewhere ; he never shone with me !
Wee Wattie, William Thomson, and James Hill,
Chalmers, and Sackville, who with ready skill
And classic grace plies his pictorial manum
To furnish the Museum Blackianum.
He had been caught caricaturing his
Professor of Humanity. 71
professor, perhaps. The teachers were
immortalised along with the taught,
The ponderous Clark, the light and nimble Bain,
Blackie, whose will the devil could not bend,
And Brown, the students' father and their friend
Ending "always with a summons to
throw away dusty books and betake
ourselves to the hills and streams of our
own land. Who could fail to love such a
man?"
It was not only his natural sympathy
with the young that made Blackie their
"companion rather than master." The
coldness and formality of Aberdeen
society, frozen several degrees harder by the
political and theological and Melvinian
prejudices aroused at the time of his
appointment, made him feel that while he
knew "everybody in Aberdeen" exter-
nally, " internally " he knew next to no one.
"I therefore," he says, "very naturally
kept myself within the hedge of my own
academic garden, and made friends and
companions of the boys, since the men
everywhere seemed to eye me either with
suspicion or indifference." His contact
72 Professor Blackie.
with the students was "not confined to
the class-room, but carried" in Dr.
White's time "into the Saturday read-
ings at his house, when, after work done,
he delighted us by singing German songs,
and by his genial gaiety." Like some
of the other professors, he used to invite
batches of the students to breakfast on
Saturday mornings. "That a profound
philosopher," Blackie wrote many
years afterwards, thinking not of himself
but of Heraclitus, " who despised the
shallow thinkers about him, should prefer
playing at astragals with a boy, is quite
natural and stands in tradition."
Looking back from the shores of Lake
Michigan, in 1895, to the banks of the
Dee in 1851, another of " Blackie's boys "
says : " The Professor allowed great free-
dom in the way of applause in his class,
and once in a while, when it became too
demonstrative, he would say, { Now, you
must not make so much noise, or Dr.
Cruickshank ' whose class was across the
corridor ( will be saying, " That fellow
Blackie does not know how to keep his
class in order." ' He seemed to thoroughly
Professor of Humanity. 7$
believe that ' boys will be boys/ and never
criticised the snowball fights that used to
take place in the quadrangle, but rather
seemed to enter into the spirit of all the
youthful capers of the students. Every
week or two," perhaps not quite so often,
' ' on Saturday, he had what he called a dies
poetica, when those students who were
poetically inclined could bring their con-
tributions and read them before the Pro-
fessor and the class and such visitors as
the Professor might invite. On these
occasions Mrs. Blackie very often attended,
and entered into the spirit of the occa-
sion." The same writer tells how a friend,
when the Professor had given up hi
house and was lodging in the new town,
called one day on the landlady. The
visitor was dismayed to hear a tempest of
oratory in a foreign tongue raging appa-
rently in an upper room. "la that a
madman in the house ? " " O no," said
the landlady, "it's only Mr. Blackie-
reciting some of his pieces."
After forty years' experience of it Blackie
could describe the work of a Scottisn
academical teacher as "the happiest of
74 Professor BlacJcie.
human avocations " ; but the happiness
was tempered for many years by some of
the absurd conditions under which the
work had to be carried on. He touched
on the worst of these when telling how
he himself went to college at the age
of twelve. Nominally a University pro-
fessor, and eager to do the work of a
University the work of education in its
highest and broadest aspect he was
confronted with rows of boys who should
have spent several more years at school,
and he had to grovel in the weak and
beggarly elements for their sake. In one
of his earliest lectures, by the way,
Blackie happened to make some assertion
on the authority of Grimm, the great
German philologist : " but I suppose you
never heard of Grimm," he added, in the
bitterness of his soul. To his great
astonishment the whole class claimed to
know Grimm intimately, and laughed as if
someone had made a joke. It turned out
that " Grim " " Grim Pluto "was the
boys' nickname for the Grammar School
rector. Even those who had got their
grammar from Melvin had often been
Professor of Humanity. 75
" stupefied with too nmcli of it." Takingthe
lads as a whole, their range of Latin read-
ing had been so scanty and formal that the
Professor had to devote his whole strength
to reading a few select authors with them,
not more than fifty lines a day, " with as
much seasoning of human sympathy and
intellectual outlook as possible : but any-
thing like a systematic treatment of
Roman history, Roman policy, Roman
literature, Roman archaeology, not to
mention the higher philology in all its
branches, such as would have been the
staple of a Latin class in a German
University, was not to be dreamt of."
We may guess the sharpness of the pang
he suffered when letters came from his
masters of higher learning in Berlin
reproaching him with having " aban-
doned those refined studies of classical
archaeology" of which he "had given
some creditable promise on the banks of
the Tiber." Most men would just have
groaned and gone on, doing perhaps their
best under the conditions that had dis-
abled their academical ancestors. Blackie
set about getting the conditions altered.
76 Professor BlacJcie.
<l Xa\7rct ra Ka\d " was one of the mottoes
he lived by; "difficult things, in fact,.
are the only things worth doing, and they
are done by a determined will and a
strong hand."
He succeeded in getting his own
would-be pupils classified and sifted by an
entrance examination ; and he besieged
the ear of his country with demands for a
general and generous reform of her educa-
tional machinery. He began these public
appeals in 1846 if we except the pre-
cocious Gottingen article with a <( Letter
to the Citizens of Aberdeen," and " An
Appeal to the People of Scotland " later
in the year. In 1848 he published his
(f University Eef orm," reprinting from the
"Scotsman" a series of articles to which
Professor Pillans had taken exception, with
an open letter to that gentleman by way
of postscript. His denunciation of the
degradation of the Universities to the
level of schools, his war against tests, his
advocacy of an efficient High School
system with properly paid teachers, found
support at first only in the wise minority.
" He was in advance of his time, and was
Professor of Humanity. 77
met by the cry of ' Flibberti-gibbet ' and
* Will o' the Wisp,' " as Dr. White says ;
but " Blackie did not trouble himself with
the outpourings of ill-natured talk, to
which he was supremely indifferent. He
did not even despise them, but said, with
a smile, ' These people know nothing
about it.' "
He spoke as well as wrote on this burn-
ing question of which most men only
see the smoke, and think an educational
topic must be dull because they were edu-
cated in a dull way and among his lectures
at this period must be mentioned the
course he gave before crowded audiences
at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institu-
tion in 1847. A curious letter written in
the previous year shows him hammering
away at a smaller problem in the manage-
ment of his own university, and becoming
as nearly cynical as it was possible for
him to be : " I am at present busy with
the Bursary test in the Senatus Academi-
cus ; but with such a pedant as A, such a
formalist as B, such a coward as C, and
such ninnies as D and E and F, to deal
j 1 shall have a hard fight. However,
78 Professor Blackie.
it is not improbable I may beat them, if
G and H have not altogether deceived me.
At the same time I look for bareness, and
nothing but bareness, as the common state
of all corporations. I am in danger,
indeed, of becoming altogether a misan-
thrope." He did beat them, but by slow
degrees and not as thoroughly as he
would have liked. Hitherto the bursaries
had been granted on ridiculous terms : the
competitors simply had to turn one piece of
English into Latin. In 1846 the Senatus
consented to add a Latin passage for trans-
lation into English, in 1849 Greek was
introduced, and in 1851 arithmetic !
It was characteristic of the man that
while struggling for the distant ideal he
never neglected the duty of the hour. In
a letter to his sister in London, in 1846,
we see him constantly trying to improve
his own method of teaching, and also " to
excite a taste for reading among the lads."
In the same Aberdeen letter we get our
first introduction to a " lad " who is now
Principal of the sister university at St.
Andrews : " Your husband's young friend
Donaldson, by the way, stands among my
Professor of Humanity. 79
best, and I gave him a small book the
other day (the Life of Luther) in token of
my approbation." One thing that Blackie
did to encourage reading was to start a
class library, in this following the example
of a colleague, Professor Martin. The
curious fact has been noticed, by the
way, that while Blackie was a professor
in one class he was a student in
three ; and Martin's was one of these.
" I have nothing to report to you," Blackie
writes to an ex-Aberdonian in J 46, ( f of the
doings of this Laodicea which would give
pleasure to your soul, except, perhaps,
that Professor Martin is going on trium-
phantly with his moral philosophy class,
and exciting a rare spirit of speculation
and study among the boys. I attend his
lectures, and think a class could not
possibly be better conducted." The other
two professors who used to find their
colleague occasionally on the benches
before them were Macgillivray, the geolo-
gist, and Gray, whose problems in natural
philosophy Blackie used to work out after-
wards with less circumlocution by drawing
diagrams on the gravel with his stick.
80 Professor Blackie.
Within a year or two of his settlement
at the college Blackie announced a course
of Latin lectures on the Reformation, and
invited the ministers of the town, and any
one else who could understand, to his
class-room. The invitation was well re-
sponded to, and the lectures excited much
interest. One of the ministers who went
to them says he was surprised to find
how easily he could follow the speaker.
"In his lips Latin seemed a real and
living language, not the dead thing we had
been given at school. Blackie's pronuncia-
tion, accentuation and whole delivery
made every lecture a great treat." His
Latin was all alive, whether tripping off
his tongue or flowing from his pen.
Witness the Latin section of his book of
" Lyrical Poems " ; the rollicking students'
song of 1848, with its puns on his own
name and that of the paternal Brown
Fusco salus ! Salus
and the Latin version of John Gilpin :
Londini clarus clara vivebat in urbe
Civis, et urbanse dux quoque militias
Gilpinus ;
Professor of Humanity. 81
following the .Romanised old rider all the
way to Ware and home again :
Ergo cantemus felicia tempera regi !
Et Gilpine fluant tempora laeta tibi !
Et quandoque voles tantos iterare rolatus
Ilia contingat me quoque adesse die !
Much as he loved Latin, he loved Greek
more. His lectures before the Aberdeen
Philosophical Society (and he gave one
nearly every year) dealt with " The Theo-
logy of the Greeks," and "The Genius
and Character of the Modern Greek
Language," as well as such subjects as
"The Theory of the Beautiful," "The
Rhythmical Declamation of the Ancients,'*
and " The Agrarian Laws of the Romans."
He even began to communicate his ideas
on Greek as a living language to his Latin
class, and to read them scraps from an
Athenian newspaper to which he had
already become a subscriber.
In 1848 Blackie and a few other mem-
bers of his university, dissatisfied with the
" extremely low level " at which the
knowledge of Greek literature was stand-
ing in Scotland, began meeting together
once a week and reading continuously
6
82 Professor Blackie.
through, some classical author. Homer's
Odyssey occupied one session, his Iliad
the next ; and then the enthusiastic little
group resolved to give lf a more permanent
form to their meetings, under the name of
the Hellenic Society," with BlacMe as
constitution-maker and president. The
society was organised on the 16th of
March, 1850, with two kinds of members
the ordinary, or eraipoi, who should
" honestly go through the whole readings
of the session," and the " sworn brethren,"
or a&e\<j)ol crvvwiLorai, who were bound
not only to investigate Greek litera-
ture and antiquities during every vaca-
tion for the benefit of the society
in the following session, but " to consider
the advancement of Greek literature in
Scotland as their special duty." The
original list of sworn brethren was short
and notable enough : " John S. Blackie ;
William D. Geddes, A.M.," now Principal
of Aberdeen University; (e Robert Angus,
A.M. ; James Donaldson, A.M." Dr.
White, who was one of the five eraipoi,
says : " Without doubt it was the Hellenic
Society of Aberdeen that contributed
Professor of Humanity. 83
largely to the wave of Greek scholarship
which was to spread over the North for
the next forty years, and of which the
force is not yet spent, in spite of the
depressing influences of recent University
legislation." We shall hear more of
Hellenic Society meetings when we get to
Edinburgh. Meanwhile, the president had
been busy for years on a work that showed
him practising the higher scholarship
he preached. This was a poetical version
of the Lyrical Dramas of ^Eschylus : as
bold an attempt as the translation of
Faust, and even more successful. He did
not hide the difficulties from himself. To
give an English facsimile was impossible.
" Like a practised posture-maker, or expert
ballet-dancer, the old Hellenic dialect can
caper gracefully through movements that,
if attempted, would twist our English
tongue into distortion or dislocation." On
the other hand, a translator had no right
"by every sort of fine flourishing and
delicate furbishment to obscure or to blot
out what was most characteristic " in the
original. "The proper problem of an
English translator is not how to say a
84 Professor BlacJcie.
thing as the author would have said it had
he been an Englishman ; but how, through
the medium of the English language, to
make the English reader feel both what
he said and how he said it, being a
Greek." This Blackie aimed at doing;
and the translation, with an essay " On
the Genius and Character of the Greek
Tragedy," and notes profoundly learned
but always interesting and suggestive,
came out in 1850, with a dedication " To
his Excellency the Chevalier Bunsen, and
to Edward Gerhard, Eoyal Archaeologist,
Berlin, the friends of his youth and the
directors of his early studies."
vni.
EXCUBSIONS.
THIS crowning achievement of his Aber-
deen career did as much as anything else
to bring that career to an end. But we
must accompany the professor on several
excursions before going with him to
Edinburgh. First, and most important
of all, to Gilston in Fife, where lived his
mother's cousin, the wife of Mr. James
Wyld a Leith wine merchant and a
director of the Commercial Bank. John
Stuart Blackie had resolved to have Eliza
Wyld for his wife, and Eliza Wyld, being
a woman of insight, had no difficulty in
resolving to have John Stuart Blackie for
her husband, in spite of her family's
objections to his unconventional ways
and opinions and perhaps also the slender-
ness of his financial prospects. The
stories of a ' ' runaway marriage " are un-
founded, unless this circumstance be
86 Professor Blackie.
reckoned a foundation : that the spirited
maiden went to stay with her relations
in Edinburgh when she could stop the
domestic dissuasions in no other way.
The victory was won, and on the 19th of
April, 1842, the family gathered harmo-
niously at the wedding. Mr. (now Sir)
Theodore Martin, who had long been and
ever continued- one of the bridegroom's
warmest friends, was among the wedding
guests. It was on his wedding tour, by
the banks of the Tweed, that Blackie
composed that noble song of praise to
the Creator, " Angels holy, high and
lowly," which appeared fifteen years later
in the "Lays and Legends," and has
since found its way into the hymn-
books :
Ocean hoary,
Tell His glory;
Cliffs where tumbling seas have roared,
Pulse of waters blithely beating,
Wave advancing, wave retreating,
Praise ye, praise ye, God the Lord !
In reverent joy like this John Stuart
Blackie began a companionship which
lasted, with a happiness equally lasting,
Excursions. 87
for more than half-a-century. " Domestic
life/' as he wrote a few years ago to a
young friend about to marry, " is not a
rose without a thorn; thorns are every-
where, but they can always be made harm-
less by delicate handling and nice tact.
In fact, I should be inclined to say
marriage is the only good school of a
loving and discriminating toleration
toleration of the merely negative kind,
which plays a part in political history,
being rather the absence of a vice than
the presence of a virtue ; " with this for
the other young person concerned : " It
is always more easy to gain a man's heart
than to keep it. It is gained by the charm
of the moment : it is kept by the wisdom
of the life."
To his cottage on Dee Street, where his
sister Helen had hitherto kept house for
him, Blackie led his bride from the banks
of the Tweed. Not long afterwards, how-
ever, he took a house in Old Aberdeen,
close to the rival University of King's
College now 113, High Street, just over
the way from the Town House, if any
visitor would like to see the actual walls
88 Professor Blaclcie.
which appear on the opposite page. In
this house the .ZEschylus was written and
the Hellenic Society projected. In this
house, most likely, occurred a little inci-
dent that the Professor related many years
afterwards to Dr. Donald Macleod, with
whom he often stayed when lecturing in
Glasgow.
{f Whatever other faults I have," said
Blackie to his host, during one of these
visits, " I am free from vanity." " An
incredulous smile on my face roused
him," says Dr. Macleod. " f You don't
believe that; give me an instance.'
Being thus challenged, I said, 'Why
do you walk about nourishing a plaid
continually ? ' ' I'll give you the history
of that, sir. When I was a poor man,
and when my wife and I had our
difficulties, she one day drew my attention
to the threadbare character of my surtout,
and asked me to order a new one. I told
her I could not afford it just then; when
she went, like a noble woman, and put her
own plaid shawl on my shoulders, and I
have worn a plaid ever since in memory
of her loving deed.' "
Excursions. 89
To get anything like a complete idea of
how Blackie spent his Aberdeen years, we
must realise that he passed at least a part
of every summer exploring his native land.
Soon after his return from Germany,
indeed, he made a vow that he would visit
some new district of Scotland every year.
This vow he conscientiously kept, travel-
ling as much as possible on his own legs,
neither fearing the rain nor shunning the
mist, that he might get to thoroughly
know what the tourist only sees. Thus we
hear of him climbing Lochnagar with
" Mrs. Oke " wicela, " the swift "as he
playfully called his bride, " singing songs
and dancing Celtic dances " on the top ;
or " hospitably entertained by a shepherd
in a bothie, at the south-west end of Loch
Etive"; spending "many happy days on
the banks of beautiful Loch Lomond, in
solitary musing, or in company with
sagacious old Celts or keen-eyed professors
of science." We see him sailing in and
out of the Western Archipelago, and
landing on the sacred isle of lona ; <f ram-
bling over every quaint crag and down
into every clear pebbly creek," while ' f in
90 Professor Blackie.
the evening, looking out from the inn
window on the lofty peaks of Jura, and
the red granite slabs of the coast of Mull
glowing in the rays of the setting sun,"
he " pondered over the old Latin book
containing the life of the great local
saint." And coming back to the mainland,
we share his indignant gusto as he defies
the gamekeepers to keep him off the
mountains. " That magnificent Ben, the
Buachaill Etive (the shepherd of Etive),"
he tells us,* " is by no means difficult to
climb if you assail it, as I did, from the
western side, and are not to be deterred
from your purpose by a threatened action
of damages from any gentleman who may
assert that the wild mountains in this part
of the world belong to him exclusively
and to his gamekeeper. I have been
threatened by these gentlemen more than
once in my wanderings, but I have given
them an answer simply, as I advise you to
do, by walking straightforward, even
though it should lead to jumping a dyke,
as a distinguished professor of botany is
celebrated to have done in Glen Tilt."
* Lays of the Highlands and Islands.
Excursions. 91
Here is Blackie's story of one of these
encounters : " On coming back to the inn
at Kingshouse, at the east end of Glencoe,
after the ascent of the Buachaill Etive, a
man on a horse asked me where I had
been. I answered, 'On the top of the
Buachaill.' ' What business had you
there?' said he. ' Seeing the glorious
works of God,' said I. ' You have been
disturbing the sheep,' said he ; ( you will
have to answer to my master for that.'
' I saw no sheep there,' was my reply ;
'and as for your master, who claims a
right to keep the Scottish braes as his
private property, nothing could give me
greater pleasure than to answer him
publicly either at Fort "William or at
Edinburgh in the Court of Session.' Of
course, I heard nothing more of the
matter.
" The heather braes are free to any man,
I hold, to tread, who bravely will and can."
The last place in which we should
expect to find him, after such a glimpse
of his holiday habits, is a hydropathic
institute, with its strict supervisions and
92 Professor Blackie.
prohibitions. " Chains and slavery "
surely, after the Buachaill Etive ! Yet
we find him undergoing this regimen in
1849, and telling the world to go and do
likewise. Among the millions of for-
gotten pamphlets in the bowels of the
British Museum there is one composed of
five letters on " The Water Cure in Scot-
land/' written from Dunoon by John
Stuart Blackie to the Aberdeen " Herald."
" We rise every morning at six o'clock,"
the Latin Professor says, " and jump into
a trough of cold water immediately after
we jump out of bed, and drink four
tumblers of the same ' best beverage '
apia-rov ftev vBwp (Pindar) cold from
the hillside before breakfast." "Cold
tub " was always a part of the Blackie
system of life ; but getting up at six was
a mere episode, and was forgotten by the
time he came to write the " Self -Culture."
" As to early rising," he says there,
"which makes such a famous figure in
some biographies, I can say little about
it, as it is a virtue which I was never able
to practise."
After ten years of teaching in Aberdeen,
J^Wtf (flf7c
v
94 Professor BlacJcie.
the Professor, now a middle-aged man of
42, but as eager for new light as ever,
determined to renew his youth as a student
in a German university. The summer of
1851 he spent at the University of Bonn,
in order "to become more thoroughly
acquainted with the present state of philo-
logical literature." Under his wing on
this occasion was his half-brother George,
whom we hear of casually as " very dili-
gent in his botanical studies." George
Blackie afterwards studied medicine in
Edinburgh, emigrated to America, became
Professor of Botany in the University of
Tennessee, and the fervid leader of the
Scottish colony in that State. A man of
great all-round ability, which he lavished
on enterprises for the public benefit, his
special knowledge of medical botany raised
him to a high place in the Confederate
forces when quinine was contraband of
war and substitutes had to be found for
many such necessities of Southern exis-
tence. Dr. George Blackie died in 1881,
at the age of 47.
Of the elder brother's doings and say-
ings that summer some have been preserved
Excursions. 95
that are still worth handing down : " I
attend the lectures of the University every
other day," he writes to his father, " and
am much delighted, as much by the
thorough knowledge of their subject dis-
played by the several professors as by the
easy, natural, and often animated way in
which they speak. From grace or dignity,
indeed, so far as I have yet seen, they are
far ; but I did not look for this, as, of all
things, what is most foreign to the Ger-
man mind is the art of exhibition. The
people are delightfully simple-minded,
fcrue-hearted, and open, but they have too
little of what the French and the Greeks
have too much of, viz., vanity, and from
this defect of character, wherever show is
required, either in words or deeds, they
either fail altogether or, like other pre-
tenders, overdo the thing."
" I am looking curiously into all matters
connected with the academical system
here, hoping to turn my observations to
some account in driving another goad
beneath the fifth ribs of plausible " So-and-
so " and crude " What's-his-name two
educational Goliaths whom this David had
96 Professor Blackie.
to polemically slay before the University
Reform fight could be won.
The German professors showed great
attention to the man who had done so
much to spread their literature and emulate
their learning in a foreign land. On a
visit to one of them Blackie met, among
other notable men, old Maurice Arndt,
" whose song of Marshal Blucher, and
other blasts of patriotism along with
Russian gunpowder helped the honest
Germans to drive out Napoleon from the
Fatherland in 1813."
Before coming back to Scotland the
pedestrian professor went roughing it
among the German peasants for a while ;
getting, for instance, to " a mere village of
boors, where no ( gentleman' would think of
lodging ; but as I am only a man I rather
like the variety of a dirty-looking country
inn, as one often finds the most honest,
unsophisticated people there, and as good
fare as elsewhere (for an unfastidious
palate)." His bill next morning, for
supper, bed, breakfast, and two tumblers
of Mosel wine, amounted to one and
f ourpence 1
Excursions. 97
But the brightness of existence which
dirty inns could not dull was sadly tar-
nished by a crippling attack of rheumatism.
So far as the present generation knows,
Blackie enjoyed perennial health; but
before the present generation was born he
had his share of ailments. We can be
sorry for the sufferer, and yet forgive the
" flitting devil " that drove him to write
this letter. It is from Marienberg, in the
middle of September, to his sister Marion,
Mrs. Eoss :
" I am lame, and have been so now for
more than two months, with no symptom
of amendment. I thought at first 'twas
merely a passing twitch of that flitting
rheumatic devil which played various
monkey-tricks about my side, back and
limbs. Now he has taken firm hold of
my left heel, like a vicious dog that will
not quit his bite, and here I am,
deprived of my main organ of motion
and my grand implement of bodily
health, feeling exactly like a bird sud-
denly clipt of its wings, or a king
ungraciously kicked from his throne by a
few chimney-sweep boys and sent out
7
98 Professor Blackie.
like Louis Philippe by the back-door of
his palace, or like a dog with a clog, or "
in fact, in a very suggestive state of
misery.
"I sit the victim of a stupid philo-
sophic resignation, with lucid intervals of
faint alertness. Ichabod ! Ichabod ! I
sometimes think that I am a used man,
and have now little more to do than creep
into a corner. At other times I think on
Walter Scott and Sheridan Knowles, on
Lord Byron and Sir William Gill, and
even Napoleon in the island of St. Helena
looking at the sunset with his back to the
spectators. O Heavens ! Most curious
and comprehensive Fish, pray put an
angling line with a good bait into the
deep pond of your memory, and fish up
for me a catalogue of lame men and a
philosophy of limping that shall serve my
need this winter, or longer if Providence
will."
''The Pro," as he was affectionately
called, had endowed his women-folk with
an extraordinary series of nicknames,
chosen perhaps for their very outlandish-
ness and incongruity. No epithet could
Excursions. 99
possibly have been more incongruous than
" Fish " for his sister Marion a woman
as nearly perfect as the race can produce,
with warm affections and acute intelli-
gence expressing themselves through a
visible personality of unusual charm.
The next sister, Helen, was "Podler"
in her brother's vocabulary; while
"Toodum" or " Toodi," or the " Too-
derite," was his Aunt Marion. With a
letter to "dear, dear Podler," breath-
ing a deep personal affection which he
did not often commit to paper, we may
bring the Aberdonian chapter to an
end.
In 1845 a friendship formed in the
house of the Latin Professor led to his
sister Helen's betrothal to the Eev. John
Kennedy, who had then been for ten years
in Aberdeen as minister of Blackfriars
Independent Church. Soon afterwards
Mr. Alexander Blackie retired with his
family to Melrose, close to his native
place ; and there the wedding took place
in the spring of 1846, the Professor and
his wife travelling south for the occasion.
Helen Blackie, therefore, came back as
tOO Professor Blackie.
Helen Kennedy to Aberdeen, and when
she migrated with her husband to London,
a few months later, the brother fell
a-grieving thus :
"I am not at all reconciled to the
absence of your small but not unengaging
personality. True, you have for some time
past belonged not so much to me as you
were wont to do but whether absent in
the body or present both in body and
spirit, a Podler must still remain a
necessary part of the imaginative and
emotional furniture of my inner man. I
am not at all pleased that I have lived so
many weeks since your departure without
having obtained any idea, clear or hazy,
of the present locality, scenery and
machinery, wherewith your dear little
body is accompanied. I wish to know in
what sort of a room you habitually sit,
what sort of a prospect you have from the
window, whether of smoking chimneys,
rigged masts, a brewery, a pottery, a
tannery or a church whether of modest
matrons with white caps sitting at a
window knitting garments for the poor,
or of dirty boys fighting, and bawling,
Excursions. 101
and wading in a dirty puddle. Podler,
give me some idea of these things ! I
verily in my present blank state know as
little of you as I do of Camillus or Cin-
cinnatus, or any other iron old .Roman
whom Livy has put upon stilts and made
to spout sounding rhetoric for the amuse-
ment of Latin professors in this nineteenth
century and the vexation of schoolboys."
IX.
THE GEEEK CHAIR.
ON the 2nd of March, 1852,
the Town Council of Edin-
burgh had a singular duty
to perform; a duty from
which the bravest of bailies,
expert in paving stones
and municipal finance,
ARMS OF EDINBURGH *
UNIVERSITY. might shrink without a
blush. Dunbar having died, Edinburgh
University wanted a Greek professor, and
Edinburgh Town Council had to supply
the article. As likely as not some of the
bailies and councillors knew a few words
of Greek, but that was a small matter
beside the question, What Church they
belonged to? There were nineteen can-
didates; but thirteen names were with-
drawn as soon as the Council met, the
contest being evidently hopeless for them.
The Lord Provost, Mr. Duncan Maclaren,
The Greek Cliair. 103
then nominated Dr. W. Smith Dictionary
Smith, afterwards Sir William but ad-
mitted that he had a second choice in Mr.
John Stuart Blackie. Blackie was then
nominated by Bailie Morrison and
Treasurer Wemyss, both waxing warm in
his praise ; and the third name announced
was that of Mr. Charles Macdouall, Pro-
fessor of Greek in Queen's College,
Belfast. Mr. Bonamy Price, the Bev.
J. Hannah, rector of the Edinburgh
Academy, and Dr. Leonard Schmitz,
rector of the High School, were also
proposed, but as none of the three got as
many as five votes a minimum previously
agreed on they were all dropped after the
first ballot. Blackie had a narrow escape,
securing the five necessary votes and not
one to spare. The field was now clear
for the battle of the Kirks. Smith,
the Nonconformist candidate, had taken
first place with nine votes; Macdouall,
the Free Church favourite, had one less.
Blackie was supposed to represent the
Establishment. In the second ballot
Smith kept hi a nine votes, but his name
was then dropped, for Macdouall and
104
Professor Blackie.
Blackie had eleven each. Again the
Council divided^ and again the result was
a tie: Macdouall sixteen, Blackie sixteen.
The Lord Provost, his own man out of the
way, gave the casting vote to Blackie;
and so the chair was filled. " The toughest
battle ever fought in Edinburgh," old Mr.
Blackie called it in this hurried despatch
to his son-in-law in London :
spji^^ZteDn/ts
\?anjul4lfa
r ^ ' <r
The Greek Chair. 105
How the news was received in Aber-
deen ! "Well, the story has often been
told in a lying fashion, and will bear
telling in a true one. The victorious
Professor is variously described as waving
a red flag or a blanket out of his window
and making a ferocious speech to the
gathering crowd, eloquently shaking off
the dust of their city from his feet.
Blackie was lodging in the new town
then, in the Adelphi. His Aberdeen
friends, who were entirely devoted and not
so few as they had been, were eager to
hear the news from Edinburgh. To save
them from unnecessary calls especially
one friend who lived within sight but at
some little distance and to spare an ailing
landlady the trouble of constantly opening
the door, the Professor promised to hang
a white napkin from the window-sill if
good news came. That is all.
On the other hand, Blackie made no
pretence of sorrow at the end of his Aber-
deen existence. He could not forget his
friends, but they were the exceptions that
proved the rule : the rule being, if not now
unfriendliness, at least lack of sympathy
106
Professor BlacJcie.
and comprehension. This is the beginning
of a letter to his sister Marion the queer
beastie is meant for " Fish " written on
the day before he left a " waste wilderness,
which does not even howl^ but only sur-
rounds one with an infinite dreariness " :
The Greek Chair. 107
Writing three days after the election
to thank his brother-in-law for bringing
influence to bear on certain Nonconformist
members of the Council and helping to
produce a " quite unexpected " result, the
Professor said :
"Now I enter among friends every-
where. ( All the world,' Hunter writes,
f now discover that ' my f claims were the
highest ' ! Much obliged. I am thankful
to Providence that a larger sphere of
activity is now opened up to me. But I
rejoice, above all things, that bigotry and
sectarianism have been defeated. The
election was substantially, with most of
the electors, a mere affair of Churches.
Quousque tandem ? Is this the kind of
practical Christianity that the world is
called on to respect in the nineteenth
century? Thank Heaven, there is a dif-
ferent picture in the Gospels and in HIM
who pled the cause of the heterodox
Samaritan."
" When I go to Edinburgh," he said in
another letter, " I feel as if I were going
home after a long banishment." His
father, by the way, had brought his
108 Professor Blaclcie.
household to Edinburgh, where he occu-
pied himself as an amateur gardener and
a director of the Philosophical Institution.
" I have sometimes the notion that if my
life in Aberdeen has been my church
militant, my career in Edinburgh will be
my church triumphant. But about the
future I think little; who knows but
Providence may wish to make a victim
of me in the test business 9 "
This groundless fear apart, it was " not
without trembling " that Blackie went to
Edinburgh. " No doubt," he said, " my
flaming certificates will have excited un-
reasonable expectations in the minds of
some persons, which I am more likely to
undershoot than to surpass. But a man
who understands his subject is a fool to
fret himself about his audience. Dash in,
move your arms and legs, and trust to
Providence, and you are not likely to be
drowned in the deepest water."
The " flaming certificates " are all on
view in the national storehouse of printed
things, and only one demands a place here.
It is from Thomas Carlyle, who describes
his friend as " a man of lively intellectual
The G-reek Chair. 109
faculties, of ardent friendly character, and
of wide speculation and acquirement. In
all things he means sincerely; is of
hopeful, rapid nature, very fearless, very
kindly, without ill-humour and without
guile."
So Blackie left Aberdeen, after a public
banquet at which those who loved him
and those who only admired him, and
those who were glad to have him go for the
sake of their nerves, united to bid him
farewell ; left his friends the students to
gnash their teeth over the English pro-
nunciation of Latin introduced by his
successor; and became a citizen of
Edinburgh for the rest of his days.
X.
EDUCATIONAL KEFORM.
GLAD as lie was to get his new post,
Blackie was as far as possible from think-
ing it a place to rest and be thankful in.
It was a vantage-ground, rather, from
which he could wage war more freely
against educational and other abuses. In
the very letter which thanked " My Lord
Provost and Gentlemen " for the honour
they had conferred on him, he told them
his " strenuous care for the future " would
be " to advance the interests and raise the
standard of classical education in Scot-
land." He found the same " radical vice "
in Edinburgh as in Aberdeen : a defective
school system, turning out boys without
the preliminary knowledge which would
fit them for university learning. In Edin-
burgh matters were in some respects
worse, for the classes were much larger,
and there was " no Hellenic Dr. Melvin
Educational Reform. Ill
existing in the schools from which the
Edinburgh Greek classes drew their
supply." Blackie immediately got the
Town Council to introduce an entrance
examination for the Greek classes ; and he
secured his former student, Mr. Donaldson,
as his assistant, to " coach " the more
ignorant of those who knew just enough
to pass. In his inaugural lecture he set
up a high ideal of classical culture before
the university, and tried to rouse the sleep-
ing ambitions of his countrymen. Greek,
Sidney Smith had said, never marched
in great force beyond the Tweed: but,
said Blackie, " a half -starved hound will
win the race before an overfed spaniel. So
may we, Greek starvelings here on the
Firth of Forth, yet get the start of those
sleek Hellenists on the banks of the Cam
and Isis, if we only rouse our mettle
properly and do our best." A little later
he was addressing the Lord Provost and
Town Council on "the advancement of
learning in Scotland," and reproachfully
telling them that in Berlin University
there were twelve lecturers expounding
various branches of Greek literature and
112 Professor Blackie.
art. " And you," he said, " you have one
to do all or rather to do none at all, only
to teach the elementary command of the
THE PROFESSOR AT THE AQE OF 48.
Greek language as it is acquired at a
German school." " Greek," he wrote in
the following year, " is an exotic in Scot-
Educational Reform. 113
land, and can never flourish without glass ;
but they leave the poor plant in the open
air as if it were cabbages or potatoes. O
wisdom ! "
This was in 1856. Four years later,
thanks largely to Blaclde's agitation and
partly to a scheme of University reform
which he prepared and which a Scottish
national society brought to the notice of
every Member of Parliament, a considerable
measure of reform was obtained. As often
happens, he who had been the soul of the
movement in its early and struggling days,
a voice crying in the wilderness with
hardly so much as an echo, was almost
ignored when the cause became popular and
the laggards were swarming to the front.
For example, two and a-half columns
of " The Times " for January 2nd, 1858,
are filled with the report of a great public
meeting in Edinburgh, under the auspices
of the Association for the Extension and
Improvement of the Scottish Universities.
Dr. Candlish, Principal Tulloeh, Lord
Neaves, Dr. Guthrie, and nine or ten
others made speeches ; but the only sign
of Blackie's existence is a reproachful
&
114 Professor SlacTcie.
remark by the Chairman, Lord Chief
Justice Campbell, that his friend the
Professor should not lead Englishmen
to exaggerate the defects of Scottish
scholarship. This the Professor had
answered in advance. In " The Times "
of November llth, 1857 (side by side with
announcements of the capture of Delhi
and the relief of Lucknow), there is a two-
column report of Blackie's introductory
lecture for the winter session. After com-
paring Edinburgh and Oxford, though not
flattering either, he said: "So long as I
see the most glaring defects and the most
unmitigated absurdities tolerated in our
existing University system, I shall con-
sider it my duty, on every suitable
occasion, to stand forward and denounce
them, that both my own usefulness may
no longer be marred and the intellectual
character of the nation no longer degraded
by the continuance of puerile practices in
our highest seats of learning." Among
other points on which he dwelt was the
need of greater encouragements and
rewards for scholarship in the Northern
Universities. "Even Scotsmen, whose
Educational Reform. 115
brains are as hard as reapers' loins, cannot
afford to study and to starve at the same
time." The wound he declared to be
incurable unless a swift remedy were
applied; and he asked whether Scotland
would " voluntarily surrender to a foreign
people and to a strange system the highest
education of her noblest sons."
The Professor's battle was only half
won. His country's educational system,
the measureless importance of which even
Scotsmen but half realise, was improved,
but it was painfully far from perfect.
Tli ere were two great idols set up in the
land Cram and Shop ; until they could be
deposed Blackie reckoned his work unfin-
ished. They are still standing; but the
worshippers of Cram are in open revolt,
and Shop will presently be dragged from
the high altar to its appropriate niche.
Blackie, as a practical man, had no objec-
tion to special study for special work. He
was a specialist himself, and studied most
systematically ; though the outside public
were bewildered into a different impression
by his amazing versatility. A desultory
and miscellaneous habit of reading, he
116 Professor Blackie.
once remarked, was " like the racing of
some little dog about the moor, snuffing
everything and catching nothing." What
he abhorred was to see a man so fill him-
self with the speciality of his profession
as to have no room for broadly human
interests a habit that has blighted the
lives of great men enough. " Avoid pro-
fessionalism ! " he cried. " Medicine has
as much to do with a knowledge of human
nature and of the human soul as with the
virtues of cunningly -mingled drugs and
the revelations of a technical diagnosis ;
and theology is generally the least human
and least evangelical when it is most stiffly
orthodox and most nicely professional."
"Not a few persons are a sort of human
lobster : they live in a Lard shell formed
out of some professional, ecclesiastical,
political, or classical crust, and cautiously
creep their way within certain beaten
bounds,- beyond which they have no
desires."
These words are from " Self Culture,"
and were not printed for twenty years
after Blackie came to Edinburgh ; but his
ideas about education were fresh, healthy,
Educational Reform. 117
human, and consistent, all though his public
life. Only seven years ago, for example,
lie published "A Letter to the People
of Scotland on the Beforrn of their
Academical Institutions," pleading, as he
had pled forty years before, for " tho-
rough and far-reaching reforms " in the
machinery of our educational institutions,
urging that boys should be educated up to a
much higher standard at school a ' ' gym-
nasium," college, or middle school being
established in every county so that a
professor might devote all his energies to
teaching of the highest kind.
Education as we all know, but grudge
to confess, so woefully is our practice
at odds with such a principle is the
drawing out of talents, the development
of powers. "The best educated man
is the man who has been well trained
to do as many things as possible
for himself."* What an ignoramus a
scholar may be under this definition !
Books, much as he loved them, were of
quite secondary importance in education,
according to Blackie, and bookishness a
* Tract on Education, 1868.
118 Professor Blackie.
disease. "What a student should specially
see to, both in respect of health and of
good taste " (here we dip into Self Culture
again) "is not to carry the breath of
books with him wherever he goes, as some
people carry the odour of tobacco." The
young should " commence their studies as
much as possible by direct observation of
facts." "All the natural sciences are
particularly valuable, not only as supplying
the mind with the most rich, various,
and beautiful furniture, but as teaching
people that most useful of all arts
how to use their eyes. Among the most
useful primary studies are Botany, Zoology,
Mineralogy, Geology, Chemistry, Archi-
tecture, Drawing, and the Fine Arts."
Along with accurate observation should go-
well - disciplined but active imagination.
"In history, and in the whole region of
concrete facts, imagination is as necessary
as in poetry ; the historian, indeed, cannot
invent his facts, but he must mould them
and dispose them with a graceful con-
gruity ; and to do this is the work of the
imagination. Fairy tales and fictitious
narratives of all kinds, of course, have
Educational Reform. 119
their value, and may be wisely used in the
culture of the imagination. But by far
the most useful exercise of this faculty
is when it buckles itself to realities.
Count yourself not to know a fact when
you know that it took place, but then only
when you see it as it did take place."
As for the great god Cram, Blackie
says : " All debauch is incipient suicide ;
it is the unseen current beneath the house
which sooner or later washes away the
foundations. So it is with study. Long-
continued intense mental exercise, espe-
cially in that ungrateful and ungenial
form of the acquisition of knowledge
called Cram, weakens the brain, disorders
the stomach, and makes the general action
of the whole organism languid and un-
emphatic. Be warned, therefore, in time.
Violent methods will certainly produce
violent results. Wisdom is a good thing ;
but it is not good even to be wise
always."
But Cram was the offspring of our
examination system. What was to be
done with this parent-idol? Examina-
tions of some kind were necessary. The
120 Professor BlacTcie.
question was, How to conduct them " so
as to hit upon the best man," or to really
discover the knowledge of a set of men,
without encouraging Cram. Taking his
own particular subject, Greek, he answers :
" (1) I would place before the candidate a
selection of some dozen passages of the
best prose writers in the Greek language,
but passages not involving any special
linguistic difficulty, in the rich and various
groups of its literary existence, from
Herodotus to Polybius and Clemens of
Alexandria, and from the Church fathers,
through the whole series of Byzantine
writers, down to Phranzes, in the
fifteenth century, and from him forward
to Tricoupi, Rangabes, Bikelas, in the
most recent phase of that wonderful
continuity of cultivated human speech,
and should require of him to ac-
company his translation of these pas-
sages into clear, vigorous and tasteful
English, with such remarks on the his-
torical sequence and social significance of
the facts recorded or the opinions
expressed as would naturally suggest
themselves to a thoughtful and sympa-
Educational Reform. 121
thetic young reader " under the stimulus
of a thoughtful and sympathetic teacher.
*' (2) I would then place before him the
names of some dozen or a score of famous
Greek authors, from Homer to Rangabes,
and ask him to write what he knew of
them, from the general history of Greek
literature or from special study. (3) I
would hang up before him on the wall of
the examination room a series of some
dozen or a score of engravings of well-
known places, and portraits of famous
persons in Greek, Roman, and recent
times, and request him to stand up before
me and describe viva voce in the Greek
language both the picture before him and
the memories which it recalled, with the
feelings which it stirred in his bosom;
and I should then request him to retire
and set down in cool writing what he had
written in fervid speech."
XI.
EATIONAL GREEK:.
So much for Blackie as the reformer gf
education in general. As the reader,
though he may be reckoned a profound
Greek scholar, has probably never heard
of Eangabes or Bikelas, let the professor
now be introduced as reformer of Greek
education in particular. He repudiated,
it should be said, any claim of the Greek
language to the fictitious primacy given
to it in the English Universities. " George
Buchanan, John Milton and John Locke
studied Latin and Greek because these
languages were the key to the only great
storehouses of useful knowledge and high
culture then open to the world. It is not
so now. The most rich and various store-
houses of all sorts of knowledge, both
speculative and practical, are open to a
modern British man without any key but
his mother tongue." " What was once an
Rational Greek. 123
anomalous necessity has now become an
absurd anachronism and a scholastic tra-
dition, defended mainly on the ground
that it is valuable, like mathematics, as a
mental discipline is, in fact, the one in-
dispensable course of drill without which,
in these latter days, a well-educated man
cannot be produced. But this is a gross
exaggeration." " The Greeks learned no-
language but their mother tongue, and
were nothing the less the wisest people in
the ancient world, and the teachers of
wisdom to all generations ; but even on
the supposition that linguistic training is
the very best possible, it is quite certain
that German is as good for this purpose
as either Latin or Greek, with this
immense advantage that the language of
Goethe and Bismarck, if once learned, is
likely to be used. . . Neither Latin
nor Greek has any claim to be prescribed
as a sine qua non to the full participation
in the privileges of academical education
in this country."*
When Greek is taught and he was
eloquent on its advantages to ministers
* In " The Times," January 21, 1891.
124 Professor Black,ie.
and other professional men let it be as a
living language, and not as a curious
grammatical skeleton. This was another
of Blackie's messages to the dull ears of
his country. It came as a revelation to
most men, the knowledge that Greek is
not a dead language " but a very vital
speech, as any man may see in a Greek
newspaper in fact, the only living bridge
betwixt the remote past and the actual
present of our European civilisation, and,"
more wonderful still, " living in a state as
free from any borrowed blot or blemish as
it was in the days of Plato, of Alexander
the Great or the Apostle Paul." In a
preface he contributed not long ago to a
manual of modern Greek he insisted
that " a language which has come down
to us in an uninterrupted stream of vitality
from the time of Homer to the present
hour nearly 3,000 years and is still
spoken extensively, not only in Greece
proper but in various parts of the Medi-
terranean, by confessedly the most acute,
the best educated and the most progressive
people in those parts, has a legitimate
claim to be treated and studied as a living
Rational Greek. 125
language, and not to be stretched out, as
dead bodies are on an anatomical table,
for the purposes of the grammatical
dissector."
One curious but inevitable result of the
English style of teaching Greek is that
our great Greek scholars, when they visit
Greece, cannot even make themselves
understood. It is said that Mr. Gladstone
himself had to fall back on Italian ; while
his friend Blackie could chat away with
the Athenians in their own language as
comfortably as with the Aberdonians in
theirs. He took a keen interest in the
domestic affairs of the nation which, after
emancipating itself from Mahomedan
bondage, undertook to purify the ancient
language of Plato and Herodotus from the
Turkish and Italian corruptions of later
centuries, and is now struggling against
difficulties and corruptions of another
kind. He became an honorary member
of the Society for the Spread of Greek
Letters, at Athens, and of the Greek
Philological Society at Constantinople.
The breadth of his sympathies and of his
studies shows itself in the volume of
126 Professor Blaclcie.
41 Horse Hellenic*/ 5 which he published in
1874 with a dedication to Mr. Gladstone,
" Statesman, Orator, and Scholar." The
subjects of these essays vary from " The
Philological Genius and Character of the
Neo-Hellenic Dialect" and "The Place
and Power of Accent in Language" to
"The Spartan Constitution and the
Agrarian Laws of Lycurgus," "The
Scientific Interpretation of Myths," and
* f The Popular Poetry of Modern Greece."
National poetry, as we Scotsmen ought to
know, was a subject very dear to the Pro-
fessor's heart. On the Greek side of the
subject here is just one quotation for the
benefit of the curious. Blackie found that
* l Charon, or Death, is a great figure in
the popular poetry of the modern Greeks,
and is one of the very few, perhaps the
only mythical personage which Byzantine
orthodoxy and Slavonian barbarism have
left to haunt the hills of -Greece from the
fair company that once peopled Olympus."
And the Professor gives us this example,
translated into English verse :
Why are the hills so dusky dark, so dark and
sable shrouded ?
Rational Greek. 127
Is it the wind that flouts the crag, or is it the rain
that's beating ?
"Pis not the wind that flouts the crag, 'tis not the
rain that's falling ;
'Tis only Charon with his dead that o'er the hills
is treading.
The Professor of Greek was not afraid
of that noble language falling into oblivion
among scholars when such artificial and
unjustifiable props as the laws of Oxford
and Cambridge should be knocked away.
4S A language," he says, " which has sur-
vived so many changes, and resisted such
a succession of destructive forces, will
maintain its vitality unimpaired so long
as the moral motive-power of the world
is mainly Christian, and the science of the
world is proud to root itself in Greek
traditions." There is, he says in the
same Hora Hellenica, no reason why
Greek should not be studied much more
than at any previous period ( ' when our
classical scholars shall have become
ashamed of their false methods and
narrow prejudices, and when a succession
of intelligent travellers shall have been
practically convinced that it is as easy to
128 Professor BlacTcie.
learn Greek in Athens as to learn German
in Berlin or French in Paris." But so long
as the present farce is being played by our
university authorities, "let Greek gram-
mars and Greek lexicons be multiplied to
infinity ; let certain plays of Euripides
and certain treatises of Aristotle be com-
mented on, so long as England shall be
England, by all the aspirants to a master-
ship, a deanery, or a bishopric in the
kingdom ; let headmasters of large schools
and tutors of colleges dilate in every form
of mingled reason and sophistry on the
never-sufficiently-to-be-belauded advant-
ages of a classical education ; with all this
the inner soul of Greece "will not be known
by, or kiiowable to, the normal English-
man ; and Greek scholarship in England
will be liable to become a thing, as we
have too frequently seen it, altogether
without a soul a thing that deals merely
with the external shell of learning, and
amuses a snugly-cabined leisure with all
sorts of grammatical fribbles and philo-
logical card-castles ; " * or, as he once
very happily put it, " mere scraps and dry
* Edinburgh Essays, 1857s
Eational Greek. 129
bones, a respectable tradition * having a
name to live while it is dead/ a stunted,
artificial growth, all thorns and no berries."
To Blackie all this was revealed more
than half-a-century ago. In 1850 he wrote
for the (f Aberdeen Universities Magazine "
two articles to show that modern Greek
is not more different from the Hellenic
than is the English of Macaulay from the
English of Chaucer or Wicklif . " Wilt
thou not," he concluded, " act on thy
belief " that Greek is a living tongue, and
to be pronounced accordingly, not in the
false and conventional way ? " Pedantic
or conservative scholars will certainly
laugh at thy strange pronunciation, and
call thee an affected fool: but truth,
maintained in the love of it, cannot be
affected. Laugh at the world if it laughs
at thee, and thou wilt be a better,
mightier, and earnester man for thy trials.
For assuredly, as Paul and Pope Urban
have said, it is only through much tribu-
lation that thou (or anyone else) canst
enter into the kingdom of heaven ! " He
opened his second session in Edinburgh
with a lecture on " The Living Language
9
130 Professor Blackie.
of the Greeks, and Its Utility to the
Classical Scholar," in which he proposed
that living Hellenes should be imported
to act as tutors for the lower Greek classes
in the Universities, or, better still, that
travelling bursaries should be established,
enabling the best students to spend six
months in Athens. And he saw to it
that if no one else took his advice the
proposal should still be carried out, by
setting aside 2,500 of his own money for
the purpose.
When the Professor was too weak to
write by his own hand, he dictated a
request for information as to a class
for teaching modern Greek by the con-
versational method, which Mr. Christos
Bougatsos, a graduate of the University
of Athens, had opened in London. Pro-
fessor Blackie took great interest in
this experiment, which will be followed by
others, one may hope, even in the ancient
universities of " England, that grand
European stronghold of all reasonable and
unreasonable conservatism." Of Blackie's
other writings on the Greek language and
literature, a complete list would include
Rational Greek. 131
his Edinburgh Essaj on "The Philo-
sophy of Plato/' 1856 ; his paper on " The
Character, Condition, and Prospects of
the Greek People/' in the " Westminster
Review" for October, 1854; his article
on " Plato and Christianity," in the
" North British Review " for November,
1861 ; and many other contributions to
various reviews ; his book on ' ' The Pro-
nunciation of Greek," 1852 ; his preface
to Clyde's Greek Syntax in 1856 ; parts of
the "Four Phases of Morals," and of
"Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece,"
which fall more naturally into another
chapter ; his " Greek and English Dia-
logues for Use in Schools and Colleges/'
and his " Greek Primer, Colloquial and
Constructive." The dry titles are all of
these books that can here be given. " The
"Wise Men of Greece," published in 1877,
is a series of dramatic dialogues, designed
" to give the general reading public, so far
as they may care for wisdom, a living
concrete notion of what the thought of
Thales was in his day to the society of
Miletus, what Pythagoras with his school
of moral discipline was to Crotona, Xeno-
132 Professor Blackie.
phanes to Colophon, and so with the
rest " the rest including Heraclitus,
Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and
Plato.
Blackie's greatest work, so far as length
of labour and resulting dimensions are
concerned, was that on Homer a subject
on which he had already written for the
Encyclopedia Britannica. Of the four
large volumes grouped under the title
" Homer and the Iliad," the first and the
last, composed of " Notes Philological and
Archaeological," contain the results of a
vast amount of research such as no
scholar can despise, in a form which no
intelligent man can describe as dull. The
two middle volumes contain the Iliad
itself, translated into English verse. As
to this, it is enough to say that Blackie
had no idea of making " a poetical trans-
lation so elegantly defaced as that of
Pope"; that he succeeded to a large
extent in rendering vivid to English
minds the spirit, the ideas, and the action
of the old Greek epic; and that such
ruggedness as occurs in the translation
hardly exceeds the demands of fidelity to
Rational Greek. 133
the original. These few lines,, picked out
at random^ will give an idea of the metri-
cal form :
Five times ten ships Achilles owned that swiftly
ploughed the brine,
And fifty men in each good ship obeyed the chief
divine.
Five captains over all he placed, who each with
due control
Led on their several bands ; himself was lord to
sway the whole.
* *
AB when a cunning builder well-hewn stones hath
nicely joined,
Tier above tier, in a palace wall, to bar the
whistling wind,
So helm to helm was closely pressed, and bossy
shield to shield,
And man to man was tightly packed o'er all the
bristling field.
* *
As when the strength of fire divine hath seized a
dry old wood,
Deep in a heathy glen, and now the wind in lusty
mood
Bolls raving through the crackling trees the folds
of the naming flood ;
So raged Achilles with hig spear, and like a god
the slain
Upon the slain he heaped ; with blood swims all
the reeking plain.
134 Professor BlacJde.
On the great Homeric question, the
question " whether Homer wrote his own
poems," as some one puts it, Blackie
found the evidence insufficient to justify
dogmatism, especially on the negative
side ; but he keenly appreciated the
" positive " work of the " negative "
champion. Wolf, he sayB, " attempted
to establish strange paradoxes, repugnant
alike to the instincts of a sound sesthetical
and of a healthy historical criticism";
but "the principal value of Wolf's
theory in the eye of many genuine
lovers of poetry is that while it robbed
us of the poet Homer and his swarms
of fair fancies, it restored to us the
Greek people, and their rich garden of
heroic tradition, watered by fountains
of purely national feeling, and freshened
by the breath of a healthy popular
opinion."
" Homer and the Iliad " from which
this last quotation is not made, by the
bye represented the work of twelve
years. When the author consulted Mr.
John Murray about getting it into print,
the publisher warned him, "Never publish
Rational Greek. 185
Greek in Scotland." " He was right
there," said Blackie, after neglecting
Murray's advice and finding himself about
250 oat of pocket.
XII.
PEOFESSOE AND STUDENTS.
" IT is but a fallen university," mourned
Eobert Louis Stevenson, in a briskly
melancholy message to his successors in
the Edinburgh class-rooms.* " To-day they
have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has
a prodigious deal of Greek ; and they have
Professor Chrystal, who is a man filled
with the mathematics. And doubtless
these are set-offs. But they cannot change
the fact that Professor Blackie has retired
and Professor Kelland is dead." Un-
happily, this brightest of Blackie's many
brilliant students, the man whose jewelled
words make even Dullness sparkle, went
before his old Professor to the happy here-
after. It is sad for us who remain to think
that both have gone ; sad even to think that
the one never wrote his impressions of the
other. To be sure, Stevenson was not
* Book of the University Union Fancy Fair.
Professor and Students. 137
in the Greek class above a dozen times.
" Professor Blackie was even kind enough
to remark (more than once), while in the
very act of writing my certificate of attend-
ance," Stevenson says, "that he did not
know my face. Indeed, I denied myself
many opportunities ; acting upon an exten-
sive and highly rational system ef truantry,
which cost me a great deal of trouble to
put in exercise perhaps as much as would
have taught me Greek and sent me forth
into the world and the profession of letters
with the merest shadow of an education.
None ever had more certificates for less
education." But tho*e dozen hours, des-
cribed by the Great Imaginer, would have
been a priceless contribution to Blackie'a
biography.
Others have written, however, who have
earned a 'right to be read since they lis-
tened to the Greek Professor ; and every-
one, it is safe to say, of the hundreds of
his students, now scattered over the
whole world, has some tale to tell of
Blackie in old Edinburgh days.
To begin with, as we have seen, aspirants
for Grecian culture had to pass an exam-
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY.
from a. fJiotoaraph by Mr. A. A. Inglit, Edinburyk.
Professor and Students.
illation before they could enter Blackie's
class at all. Those who tried and failed
were put in a preliminary class under the
tutorship of the Professor's assistant.
During the session the lads would have
another chance, and those who scraped
through this second examination would
find themselves in the fold of the head
shepherd. Blackie had three classes. In
the lowest, however diligent the tutor had
been, Blackie found himself face to face
with lads entirely unfit for the higher
learning a professor is supposed to give.
In the second class, which young fellows
from the highest forms of the High School
and Academy used to enter, the reading of
Plutarch, Euripides, and even Homer, was
possible ; while the score or so of students
who filtered through into the third-year
class were able to concern themselves
chiefly with Plato.
The class assembles. The Professor
enters, nimble and erect, a whiff of East
wind from the North Bridge coming in
with him and playing among his long^
snowy locks. No matter how bad the ven-
tilation, with sixty or even a hundred
140 Professor BlacJcie. ,
pairs of lungs using up the air, there is a
breeze in that room as long as the Pro-
fessor is there. "Blackie carries his
breeze with him," says Mr. Barrie.
As likely as not the Professor is greeted
with a cheer, which he gracefully acknow-
ledges. After repeating the Lord's Prayer
in Greek, he opens the class-work with the
remark, "As I was enjoying the sunset on
Princes Street yesterday, I met a beautiful
damsel in an ugly brown dress. Say that
in Greek, Macnab." Which Macnab does
as well as he can, and Macgregor, perhaps,
a little better. The Professor makes a
forcible remark on the incongruity, not
to say criminality, of dressing a bonnie
lass in a dowdy gown, and then asks
Eobbie Thomson to get up and turn a bit of
the Iliad into vigorous English. Eobbie is
in the middle of his eleventh line when the
Professor breaks in, seizes on some little
word that was in danger of slipping by
unnoticed, tells how it came to mean
what it does, and describes the state of
Greece at some period of the word's
development. Davie Johnstone is called
on next, and gets through five lines ; but
Professor and Students. 141
his accentuation outrages the sensitive ear
of the Professor, who sings a Greek ballad
to show how the language ought to be
pronounced. The sixth line strikes the
Professor as a good peg on which to hang
the second paragraph of his lecture, and
he proceeds to expound the ethical or
political conditions revealed in the text,
fearlessly applying its lessons to the most
ticklish and controversial problems of
present-day politics. The association of
ideas will lead him on to dilate at one
time on the poems of Ossian or of
Browning, at another on the affinities of
Gaelic and Greek, and to complain that
no composer has yet arisen to utilise the
magnificent capacity of the Gaelic tongue
for an opera. In a poetic allusion to the
domestic affairs of the gods Blackie finds
an opportunity of confidentially advising
his students never to keep any secret from
their future wives. " You can't do it
if you try," he observes. "The other
day, while I was on a visit to a friend in
the country, I climbed a tree," he was a
youngster of fifty at the time " but I
saw the farmer coming and slid down in
142 Professor Blackie.
such a hurry that I tore my good black
coat. I put on a great coat, reached
home unnoticed, and quietly got my sister
to sew up the rent ; but when I next put the
coat on to go out, my careful wife came to
brush me down. ' Why/ she said, ' when
did this happen?' and the whole story
was out." Another spell of Greek
provokes another outburst of cosmo-
politan wisdom from this modern Socrates ;
and so the time passes until there is only
a quarter of an hour left, when one of the
seniors is asked to take the poem in hand,
and translates a page or two at full speed.
The students are then instructed to
produce a Greek version of "Jack the
Giant-Killer," or translate a dialogue on
the respective merits and demerits of the
Free and Established Kirks composed
for the occasion by the Professor or to
undertake some equally unconventional
exercise, and the class is dismissed.
According to Mr. Barrie, " there was a
notebook which appeared year after year "
in the class. "It contained the Pro-
fessor's jokes of a former session, care-
fully classified by an admiring student.
Professor and Students. 143
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 out what the joke was, and
send it along the class quicker than the
Professor could speak it."
Occasionally the proceedings, never
humdrum but generally in good enough
order, became uproarious to the point of
rank rebellion. " Those who do not know
their grammar sufficiently," says one of
the old students from whose chronicles,
verbal or published, it is safe to quote,*
" are exasperated at not having an oppor-
tunity of learning more ; while those
whom superior advantages have long ago
enabled to master the beggarly elements
are delighted at not being obliged to
retraverse the weary waste of verbs and
particles." When, therefore, the Pro-
fessor embarks on a course of things-in-
general, the former faction protests by
* The verbal need not be specified : the published
accounts are Mr. Charles Lowe's, in the World;
Mr. J. M. Barrie's, in the British "Weekly ; and
"Fergus Mackenzie's " in Alma Mater.
144 Professor Blackie.
" O-0-ing and shuffling with their feet,
whereupon the progressists feel bound
in honour to raise a counter-demonstra-
tion, and the Professor's voice is finally
drowned in a Babel uproar of hissing,
whistling, cock-crowing, and cat-calls."
But it was often partisan or sectarian
zeal rather than academic ambition that
raised the storm. Blackie's modern
heroes, worthy to be held up along with
the heroes of Homer for the admiration of
his class, included Dr. Guthrie and
Norman Macleod; but one day he
expressed a preference for Macleod. Some
one hissed. " In a moment the Professor
was as furious as a Highland tarn in a
tempest, and shouted at the top of his
voice, f Put out that Free Kirk deevil ! J
Fortunately, the imp could not be dis-
covered." Blackie used to say, "There are
three animals that hiss : a serpent, a goose,
and a creature that should be a man."
Once in Mr. Barrie's experience he
does not tell us what part he took in it
the class had to be broken up. "In
Blackie's class-room there used to be a
demonstration every time he mentioned
Professor and Students. 145
the name of a distinguished politician."
On this occasion the Professor looked, at
least, as if he were angry. "I will say
Beaconsfield," he exclaimed. (Cheers and
hisses.) " Beaconsfield." (Uproar.) Then
he would stride forward, and, seizing the
railing, announce his intention of saying
Beaconsfield until every goose in the room
was tired of cackling. (" Question ! ")
"Beaconsfield." ("No, no!") "Beacons-
field." (" Hear, hear," shouts of " Glad-
stone," and " Three cheers for Dizzy ! ")
Eventually the class was dismissed as
" a bear-garden," or worse ; and five
minutes afterwards the Professor would be
" playing himself down the North Bridge
on imaginary bagpipes."
Such episodes, however, did not prevent
Blackie's students those, at any rate,
who had been fairly ready for University
life when they entered his class did not
prevent them from becoming good Greek
scholars before Blackie had done with
them. And the lad must have been dull
as oblivion who failed to receive or
retain the essence of the best Greek
philosophy, ennobled by a Christian spirit
10
146 Professor BlacJcie.
and given off with the penetrating force
of genius. The,function of a professor is,
in Blackie's words, "to stimulate philo-
sophic thought and open up the paths of
scholarly research " ; and one who may be
taken as the spokesman of hundreds of
grateful men the world over declares that
Blackie fulfilled his mission by <f opening
the eyes of blind youth, flashing wisdom
before it, and persuading it to think."
Blackie could teach Greek from the
rudiments upwards, if that had been his
business; and he could show others the
way, which was better still. The Northern
minister who as " Fergus Mackenzie " has
chronicled " The Humours of Glenbruar "
was present one Saturday at a gathering
of Edinburgh teachers when a Normal
School Principal gave a lecture. Professor
Blackie attended as critic, and, having
fulfilled this disagreeable duty in his own
agreeable way, he gave the young men an
object-lesson in the teaching of Greek by
the natural method the only effectual
way of teaching Greek or any other spoken
language. Stepping to the front of the
rostrum, the Professor commanded a youth
Professor and Students. 147
on the front seat to "say fj\iov" No
answer. " Say r)\iov," he repeated. Still
no reply. " Say tf\iov, you " the Pro-
fessor shouted, with a threatening
whirl of his staff. ""HXtoz/," the youth
cried out in terror. "Very good; now
say, rov f)\i,ov" He did, with alacrity.
" Now say opS> rov i]\iov." " 'Op& TOV
r)\t,ov" came the answer. " Do you know
what you are saying? " asked the Professor.
" No," said the youth : he was a reporter.
The reporters insinuated themselves
occasionally into the Greek class-room
itself, along with truants from less attrac-
tive quarters of the University. On the
last day of the session, indeed, the pro-
ceedings were regarded by the Press, if
not by the Professor, as a fair source of
"copy." The programme apart from
such interpolations by student lungs as
any student memory can imagine con-
sisted of three parts. First, the distribution
of prizes generally books, but sometimes
pictures on which the students had been
set to write Greek meditations. Second,
the speech considerately delivered in Eng-
lish for the benefit of the weaker Grecians
148 Professor Blackie.
brimful of affectionate and practical
advice to those about to become citizens.
Third, and last, the Greek poem, declaimed
by the Professor as he alone could declaim
it, chanting, in mock heroics but with many
a beautiful phrase, the renown of the
prize-winners, (f than whom more brilliant
victors were never bred on English soil,
nor in this Celtic land so famed for
learned men. Some envious power," the
poet continues, with merry eye but only
half in jest, " assigned to Scotsmen a
rugged plot of earth on the chilly edge of
the world. A backbone of barren rock
extends from sea to sea, and the land
bears everywhere a crop of stones. To
the English the soil yields roses unasked ;
to us, thistles, and that with labour. But
strong hearts, subtlety of thought, un-
bending wills, untiring hands, and a spark
of the fire divine which Prometheus
brought from heaven to kindle wise
invention these are the glorious gifts
that the blessed ones, the givers of all
good things, have bestowed on Caledonia ;
our roses these ! " And then he celebrates
in turn the classical conquests of " Mac-
Professor and Students. 149
Master, who lays hold of knowledge like
a crab clawing his prey"; " Kennedy,
gentle, mild of speech, pure in spirit, like
a violet on the bank of a sacred river "
some exceptionally angelic member of the
clan ; " McClymont, in whose kindly face
shines the kindliness of his heart " : and
so forth.*
Blackie's love for his students was not
a thing of words. He visited them when
they were ill, he helped them when
they were poor. In the Senatus Aca-
demicus he was the champion of the whole
body of undergraduates. He never grew
old in heart, so he could look at all things,
as few but young men can, from a young
man's standpoint. They loved him in
return. They loved him as one of them-
selves ; as a buoyant, hopeful idealist.
They admired him for his genius, but they
loved him for his candour, his courage,
his open-mindedness, his transparent and
unconventional sincerity.
Many men out of Edinburgh still re-
member the famous snow riots between.
" town " and " gown " some thirty years
* 1863.
150 Professor Blaclde.
ago ; in fact, I cannot say how recent the
last of the riots may have been. Early
one morning the Town Council, with com-
mendable but insufficient foresight, sent
up a fire-engine to the college quadrangle
to melt the snow that had fallen in the
night. The medical students, being earlier
still, captured the engine and played the
hose up and down the street till nightfall,
snow and water being more than a match
for policemen's batons. During one of
these riots, an old student says, a score
of undergraduates were made prisoners,
but (perhaps for that reason) the shops
had to keep their shutters up for a
week. "I remember Blackie marching
into the quadrangle one day. Mounting
the steps to the right that led to
his classroom, with the springing step
of a boy, he was suddenly arrested by a
snowball. Swinging round and facing
the silent students, throwing aside his
plaid and lifting his hat from his silvery
locks, he cried out, with a dramatic
gesture, ( Throw away, my brave fellows ! ' "
The snowballs were instantly dropped. " I
never," says the narrator, " remember
Professor and Students. 151
Blackie looking more picturesque than he
did on that day."
There is one student story about the
Professor that has appeared, at one time
or another, in almost every newspaper
printed in English, and still insists on a
place in Blackie literature. Blackie him-
self totally forgot this, as he did many
other unimportant incidents; but it is
true enough. Mr. George M. Lawson, of
Newtyle, was an eye-witness. He says :
" One morning in the spring of 1879, as
the students attending the Greek class,
then held in the north-east corner of the
old University, were hurrying up at nine
o'clock, they were confronted by a notice,
posted on one of the pillars outside, some-
what to this effect : ( Owing to the out-
break of fire this morning, Professor
Blackie regrets that he will not be able to
meet his classes to-day.' One of us I do
not claim the distinction stroked out the
' c ' of ' classes,' whereat the laughter of
the undergraduates became extreme. In
the course of the morning, as I was
lounging about the quadrangle awaiting
the next class hour, I saw Professor
152 Professor Blackie.
Blackie emerge from what I think was the
Senate Hall, at the south-east corner of
the buildings. A small crowd still sur-
rounded the notice, and at sight of the
Professor the laughter and the shouting
were renewed. He walked across to see
what tho excitement was about, and the
students readily gave way to let him see
the joke at his expense. Without saying
a word the Professor took out a pencil,
stroked out the ' 1,' and walked off. He
seemed to think little about the incident,
and evidently before he next heard of the
joke he had forgotten all about it, as it
has frequently been reported that he
doubted its authenticity."
Every Saturday the Professor used to
have a batch of his students to breakfast.
Mr. Barrie inferred, from observation,
that the guests were chosen on account
of their physical peculiarities, " such as a
lisp, or a glass eye, or one leg longer than
the other, or a broken nose." The supply
of defective students would soon have run
short, even with two or three hundred men
on the rolls ; but there is no doubt that
Blackie was full of tenderness for the
Professor and Students. 153
maimed and the halt. Once, in class, he
noticed that the young man whose turn it
was to translate was holding the book in
his left hand. " Hold the book in your
right hand," he commanded. The lad
paused for a moment, but only went on
with his reading. ' ' Hold it in your EIGHT
HAND," called out the Professor, angered
by disobedience. Some of the students
hissed, and the young man with downcast
eyes stretched forth a right arm without
a hand. " My dear boy," said the Pro-
fessor, coming down from his desk and
embracing the youth in fatherly pity and
shame, " can you forgive me ? " Then, as
the room rang with applause, " I am glad
that I teach a class of gentlemen " not
serpents, this time !
Let us get back to our breakfast, with
Mr. Lowe for chronicler. " Eight is
generally the breakfast hour, and the
hungry company arrive with exemplary
punctuality."
Whatever other system of selection he
had, Blackie naturally gave the poor
Highland students the preference over
Edinburgh lads, some of whom were never
154 Professor Blackie.
invited at all. " It was a bit of an ordeal,"
says one of the guests, tf to have to trans-
late the Greek mottoes on the Professor's
library walls before going down to the
coffee and Findon haddocks " and a soup-
tureen full of eggs, " but Blackie always
responded to the appeal of shyness, and
seldom oppressed a young student who
looked uncomfortable by professorial
attentions of this nature."
Mr. Lowe again speaks: "The Pro-
fessor welcomes all with a few kind words,
and, after grace in Greek, recommends his
guests, as a rule of their lives, to read, as
lie does, a chapter of the Septuagint every
morning on rising. At these repasts the
rule is that every one shall express his
ideas and wants, as far as possible, in the
speech of Xenophon. All the guests are
somewhat sheepish and shy; but the
Professor, aided by the tact of Mrs.
Blackie, will occasionally elicit a shrewd
remark. Raw, red-haired Donald Macleod,
from the Isle of Skye, who lives all the
week on herring, oatmeal, and potatoes,
feeing importuned, will treat the company
to a Gaelic song ; and then the Professor
Professor and Students. 155
will launch out on the importance of this
tongue for philological and other purposes.
Then some remark will make him. revert
to his past career, and he will inflame the-
peripatetic ambition of his audience by
referring to his wanderings all over
Europe in search of truth and beauty ; or
he will recount how he met that doughty
champion of Chartism, Ernest Jones, on
the platform of the Music Hall to hold
public appeal to reason on the merits of
Democracy. Then, to vary the enter-
tainment, the Professor will sing one of
his own songs. Then all rising will join
in pealing forth f Gaudeamus Igitur,' J>
and file out, filled in body and in mind, to
woo digestion on the shores of the Forth
or the slopes of Arthur's Seat.
xin.
NOCTES HELLENICS.
THERE were suppers as well as breakfasts
at Blackie's: the legitimate successors to
Noctes Ambrosianse, more sober, but
just as gay. The Hellenic Society which
he had planted in Aberdeen took root and
flourished mightily in Edinburgh as the
Hellenic Club. The club met once a fort-
night, and the married members enter-
tained it in turn. Whoever the host
might be, Blackie was the leading spirit
of the company, and if we are to attend a
meeting of the club let it be at his own
house in Hill Street, a thoroughfare
already hallowed by the residence of Sir
Walter Scott. Arriving a little early, as
soon as the door is opened you hear some
one striding about and dropping masculine
scraps of song as he goes. The owner of
the voice immediately dashes out upon
you and kales you through a doorway
Nodes Hellenicce. 157
over which ^aXevra ra /caXa is printed in
letters of gold. You find yourself at once
in the master's workshop. The walls, and
not the walls only, are covered with books,
arranged well, at first you think they
are not arranged at all. You never saw
a library like this. Books of every age and
condition and of every size are packed on
the same shelf. What you imagine to be
disorder is really order of a rational kind,
Blackie's books are not for show but for
use, and they are classified not by size
or binding but according to their subjects.
One large section is devoted to the
literature of modern Greece the finest
collection of its kind in the country,
since transferred to Edinburgh University
and some of these books are pro-
bably lying out on the Professor's desk
or on the great working table that
occupies so much of the room. The
Professor keeps up a rattling monologue
as he moves about the room. If you really
prefer a dialogue he will listen attentively
and answer relevantly, no matter how
young or insignificant you are; not all
great men are so considerate ! If, as is.
158 Professor BlacJcie.
likely, you have come to listen and to look,
you have time enough to do so. You see
before you, if you keep your eyes moving,
a lithe and erect though only middle-sized
man ; with hair of the whitest and silkiest,
and plenty of it; with a splendid brow,
grey eyes twinkling with merriment or
flashing with scorn, a perfect Grecian nose,
firm lips and chin ; altogether a face ex-
pressing immense power, clean-shaven,
and undoubtedly handsome. He wears a
long blue dressing-gown, or perhaps
a brown velvet jacket, and in any case
a long red sash round his waist; with
a large turned-down collar, described, I
believe, as Shakespearean. In a corner
you may discover the big-brimmed soft
straw hat that he always wears when at
work, to shade his eyes which repaid his
care by never needing glasses as long as
he lived.
By this time, let us hope, the other
Hellenists have assembled. Lord Neaves
is sure to be there : the lt Beta" of "Black-
wood's Magazine," a writer offers de societe
and Latin songs, a man of widely- varied
culture. Dr. Donaldson, too, is a most;
Nodes Hellenicce. 159
regular attendant. He has been at the
High School since 1856, and its rector
since 1866; author of "The Critical
History of Christian Literature and Doc-
trine " ; one of the first scholars in the
country; u a granite-headed Scot," as
Blackie calls him
Hard and keen,
A granite Hock from granite Aberdeen.
Then there are Sir Noel Paton, though
not a Hellenist ; Erskine of Linlathen ;
Professor Sellar, author of the ' f Augustan
Poets " ; Dr. John Muir " Sanscrit
Muir " ; David Masson, Professor of
English Literature; Dr. Clyde, of the
Academy; Dr. Andrew Wood, the trans-
lator of Horace ; Dr. Lindsay Alexander,
the Congregational minister, strong in
theology and moral philosophy ; Dr.
Walter C. Smith, the Free Church poet
always some of these, and four or five of
Blackie's best Greek students.
For two hours some old Greek author
has the honour of being read and trans-
lated and discussed by such men as these.
The seniors do the talking, the juniors
160 Professor BlacTde.
content to read their allotted page and
catch the sparks of inspiration that fly to
and fro : for great is the whetting of the
wits. Blackie, of course, is chief speaker.
He has affinities with every one in the
room with the poet, the philologist, the
divine, the philosopher, the teacher, the
artist. There is scarcely a subject on
which he can throw no light ; but he is
far, indeed, from thinking himself infalli-
ble, speaks with notable modesty of his
own researches, and turns up a word in
the dictionary rather than press his inter-
pretation on a doubter. And how he reads f
<( It was wonderful," says a learned friend,
after thirty years in which to forget if
he could ; " I never heard any one read
like him. It was a chorus of Aristophanes,
and the way in which he united accent
and * quantity* was marvellous. It was
all so musical."
The two hours fly, Aristophanes retires
to his shelf, and " the Professor leads the
way upstairs to where a sumptuous supper
has been spread under the eye of Mrs.
Blackie, who places herself, like a speaker
of the House of Commons, at the head
Noctes Hellenicce. 161
of the table, a silent, much-respected
perhaps much- needed restraining influ-
ence. Song alternates with debate; and
the Professor, goaded by a remark from
an ex-Professor of Divinity as to the pre-
eminence of Mill as a moralist, will
strike out ferociously against the Utilitar-
ians, and wither up their principle by
sarcastically referring to it as the greatest
happiness of 'the greatest number:
greatest number Number One ! ' Or,
again, he will be lashed into fury by the
suggestion of some one that the person-
ality of Homer is a myth, and inveigh
savagely against Wolf and the whole
tribe of Separatists ; which, in turn, will
lead him to expatiate on the higher sys-
tematising proclivities of the Germans.
Or he will troll forth in lusty tones f The
Quaker's Wife,' " his father's favourite,
with the son's additions " ' The Maid of
Dalnacorra,' ' A Song of Good Conserva-
tives,' or the ' Herr Philister.' "
Once, when roused to an extra pitch of
eloquence on some burning question, the
Professor wound up his speech by falling
on his knees beside the wife of a reverend
11
162 Professor BlacJcie.
Hellenist and kissing her hand, while her
daughter's cheek received a similar salute.
This was the unique prerogative of a
unique man, and none of his friends
grudged it. What would have been in-
dignantly resented from anyone else was
felt to be perfectly natural and delightful
from the chivalrous, pure-hearted, and
loving Professor.
At another of these festivals a young
politician was present who had just re-
canted his Conservatism and formally
joined the Liberal party. Blackie sur-
prised the company by making a speech
in praise of the young " 'vert " (the reader
can supply the prefix). The Professor
even declared that he himself, though
flourishing his stick in Mr. Gladstone's
face on election cartoons, had found it
time to turn Liberal ! And this brings us
to another chapter.
XIV.
HIS POLITICS.
FORTY years ago, " when the nation had
entered on the Crimean war, and all
Europe was excited and expectant, Blackie
got up and said something which seemed
a little unacademic at a large University
function. When a few voices were heard
in discord with what he had said, he
replied, swinging his arms about, ' What !
do you think I am one of those gerund-
grinders who can keep his academic soul
unruffled by the war breeze which is
sweeping over Europe ? ' This was like
Blackie," adds Professor Laurie, who tells
the story. It was like Blackie to take a
citizen's interest in the affairs of the
State ; yet he had the impartiality of
a mere spectator impartiality, not neu-
trality. He could throw himself into a
political fight, but never into a political
party. At one time he was to be seen
164 Professor BlacJde.
battling shoulder to shoulder with the
Tories, and at another with the Liberals
it all depended on what they were fighting
for at the moment. His most famous
appearances in the political arena were as
champion of the constitution against de-
mocracy, and as champion of Scottish
Home Rule and the Scottish peasantry
against landlordism and centralisation.
These appearances did not represent
different stages of Blackie's political
development. The two positions were
held at the same time.
The famous debate to which the Pro-
fessor alluded at his breakfast-table was
held on two successive nights in January,
1867, at the Edinburgh Music Hall. In
a lecture to working-men a few weeks
before he had challenged any democratic
champion to meet him in single combat,
and Ernest Jones picked up the glove. In
the discussion that followed, as on all other
occasions, Blackie was perfectly frank.
He did not, like some Tory politicians,
attempt to clothe the naked Toryism
of his doctrine with professions of re-
spect for the democratic principle. It
FROM A POUTICAL CARTOON. 1880.
166 Professor BlacJcie.
was the democratic principle lie explicitly
denounced, and especially its embodiment
in the Reform Bill of that period. He
had no objection to give a large increase
of Toting power to the working men,
many of whom he described as more
intelligent and trustworthy in a political
capacity than some classes of those im-
mediately above them in the social scale.
But to determine all public questions by
the votes of the majority was to him " the
rule of unreason." He would balance the
democratic force by giving special repre-
sentation to " the natural, moral, and in-
tellectual aristocracy of the community."
About seventeen years ago a pre-
sumptuous young man wrote to Professor
Blackie expostulating with him for publicly
supporting the Tory candidate at a bye-
election in the West of Scotland. The
Professor did not throw the letter into the
fire. He sat down and covered eight
pages of letter paper with "political
maxims " for his young friend's benefit.
Here are a few of them :
"A horse requires a rein as well as a
spur; and a coachman is not wise who
His Politics. 167
flings away the drag because he is not
now going down hill.
" If the Tories are the stupid party in
the State, the Liberals are the feverish
party. To over-stimulated brains a little
stupidity may sometimes be conducive to
health.
"J in domestic progress the chief
honours belong to the Liberals, the Tories
show their talent in the greater force and
vigour of their foreign policy.
" The Liberals and the Tories are equally
factious, struggling for power. Those
who are stirred by the passions which
inspire these parties vote systematically
with their party ; those who are free from
those passions that is, true patriots
vote for their country.
" Liberty is a snare ; Equality a lie, and
Fraternity a dream.
" Liberty is like wine : a little is good ;
much of it is dangerous."
To these let us add a motto which
he never left long unspoken "All
extremes are bad" ; and this sentence
from his " Self-Culture " : "A good man
will as much as possible strive to be
168 Professor BlacJcie.
shaken out of himself, and learn to study
the excellences of persons and parties to
whom he is naturally opposed."
He believed in Liberty as necessary to
free men ' ' from those artificial bonds and
hindrances to normal development, with
which insolent power, official formalism,
or ossified institutions may have enthralled
them." Moreover, as he said in the last
article he wrote, " in all forms of govern-
ment, whether political or ecclesiastical,
absolute power is a weapon too strong to be
used wisely by a feeble human arm." But
" it is not freedom but the use of freedom
that ennobles man. Savages and nomads
have always more freedom than civilised
societies."*
As for Equality, here is an illustration
of its non-existence: "Take a class, we
shall say, of one hundred young men
learning Greek in the University of Edin-
burgh : my experience is that out of these
one hundred there will be only one man
of decided eminence, and not more than
half-a-dozen of superior talent ; and that
the difference between those who have
* Essays on Social Subjects.
His Politics. 169
least and those who have most will be
much greater at the end of six months'
teaching than it was at the beginning." *
You see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, and stares, and a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that.
For a' that, and a' that,
Their dignities and a' that,
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that !
" The man who wrote this," said Blackie,
" was the prophet of democratic equality
in the only true sense. So, also, was the
Apostle Peter. f Honour all men * in
their several places, and in the perform-
ance of their several functions ; but in no-
wise worship rank. Specially, as St. Paul
has it, f Mind not high things, but conde-
scend to men of low estate.' " f " Fix
this in your minds, before all things, that
there are few things in social life more
contemptible than a rich man who stands
upon his riches. He acquires a certain
social position, and from this perhaps gets
M.P. tagged to his name ; but take the
* Political Tracts, 1868 : " On Government."
t Essays on Social Subjects.
170 Professor SlacJcie.
creature down from his artificial elevation
and look him fairly in the face, and you
will find that he is a figure too insignificant
to measure swords with." *
The House of Lords, with its existing
constitution " repugnant alike to the
plainest dictates of common-sense and
the spirit of the age," Blackie declared
to be an anomaly which, "even in this
land of multifarious anomalies, will not
bear a moment's consideration." And
yet, he continued, "I believe that an
Upper House founded on common-sense
principles, such as the Eoman Senate
and the Spartan yepovo-ia, is absolutely
necessary for the safety and the sound-
ness of legislation ; and I am convinced,
with Aristotle, that all extremes are
wrong, and that for this reason any
democratic body is then best when it acts
under the check of an aristocratic body,
while in the same way every aristocratic
body then commands the greatest amount
of influence when it is wisely seasoned by
an infusion of the democratic element.
Let, then, the House of Lords have the
* Self -Culture.
His Politics. 171
sense and the courage to reform them-
selves on the principles of Aristotle and
common-sense, and all the Radicals in
Oldham and Birmingham will not be able
to prevail against them." " I am not a
Radical," he once said, "but I see that
some things are radically wrong."
Fraternity might be a dream, an ideal,
but it was one which his religion held up
for realisation. In "Four Phases of
Morals " the author says :- " If there is
only one God, the Father of the whole
human race, then there is only one
family; all men are brethren; nationality
ceases; philanthropy, or love of men in
the widest sense of the word, becomes
natural ; mere patriotism has now only a
relative value."
Blackie had no more admiration for the
doctrines of modern socialism than for the
shibboleth of the French Revolution. But
he had much sympathy for those who are
trying to bring fraternity out of dream-
land. Writing to an ardent if not very
theoretical socialist a couple of years ago
he said, "I have read your article
with full assent. The great difficulty in
172 Professor Blackie.
organising society is to reconcile a certain
systematic enforced order with that
greatest possible number of the greatest
variety of free individuals which, so far as
one can see, is the principle on which the
creative Force in this wonderful world
proceeds. Christianity has now been on
the field as the prime mover in all social
matters for nearly 2,000 years ; and yet
how little of that dydirr) asserts itself in
our social surroundings, which, as St.
Paul says, is the -jr^pw^a vopov."
" You cannot honour all men," he said,
many years ago, " unless you try to know
all men ; and you know no man till you
have looked with the eye of a brother into
the best that is in him." *
The extreme individualist was as far as
the extreme socialist from Blackie's stand-
point. e ' With your proudest pretensions
and highest accomplishments you remain
a very small creature in a very big world,
and no more capable of standing alone or
acting merely for yourself than a single
note is in a harmony over which the
constructive genius of a Beethoven or a
Self-Culture.
His Politics. 173
Wagner presides." He was delighted to
see the property of the individual drawn
upon for the benefit of the community,
and especially for large and imperial
purposes. " Taxes," he declared, in one
of his twenty-four maxims, " are one of
the grand distinctions between civilised
men and savages." "The progress of
civilisation in its natural and healthy
career is the progress of limitation and
the curtailment in various ways of that
freedom which originally belonged to
every member of the community." *
Freedom to get as much out of another
man, in the form of labour or rent, as he
can be driven to yield, is no man's right.
"Pay a man fairly, according to the
quantity and quality of the work done
this is simply justice ; pay him a little
more, and justice rises into the region of
Christian love ; while anything like
squeezing out of the labourer the greatest
possible amount of labour for the lowest
possible wage is in the highest degree
both inhuman and un-Christian." f
* What does History Teach ?
f Essays on Social Subjects.
174 Professor BlacJcie.
With this notable declaration we may
end the chapter : " In all cases of general
discontent, social fret, and illegal violence,
the parties who are accused of stirring
class against class are not the agitators
who appear on the scene, but the malad-
ministrators who made their appearance
necessary. , . . There is no truth in
the philosophy of history more certain
than that whenever the multitude of the
ruled rebel against their rulers, the
original fault I do not say the whole
blame but the original fault and
germinative cause of discontent and revolt
unquestionably lies with the rulers."
XV.
THE HIGHLANDERS' CHAMPION.
OF all the chapters of an always honour-
able career, this one deserves to be printed
in letters of gold : the story of his fight for
the Highland peasantry. He carried on
the struggle with none but the highest
motives brotherly love for the weak and
oppressed, combined with patriotic jealousy
for the honour and interests of his country
and the empire at large. He was content
to forfeit the friendship of some whom he
honoured, rather than slacken his zeal in
a cause which demanded the fervour of a
prophet. Nevertheless, his words were
not more vigorous than the cause was
urgent. His denunciations were not in-
discriminate, and his judgments were
tempered by charity.
It is nearly half-a-century since Blackie
stepped into the vacant position of the
Crofters' Champion. His early explora-
176 Professor Blackie.
tions of the Highlands brought him face
to face with evils which no appeal to
conventional phrases or unjust laws could
excuse. On one of his expeditions from
Aberdeen, for instance, he came to
" Aultnaharra, almost the very central
point of Sutherlandshire, and, resting there
for a night, next day walked down the
whole length of bonnie Strathnaver to
the sea. During this walk," he tells us,
" I came upon vast heaps of the ruined
clachans, whence the people had been
driven to make way for the economical
reform commonly called the big farm
system ; and, when arrived at the bottom
of the strath on the seacoast, I found my-
self in the midst of one of those marine
cities of refuge into which the ousted
crofters had been huddled ; those of them
at least who had not found their way to
America.
" Bonnie Strathnaver ! Sutherland's pride,
Sweet is the breath of the hirks on thy side ;
But where is the blue smoke that curled from the
glen
When thy lone hills were dappled with dwellings
of men ? " *
* Lays of the Highlands and Islands.
The Highlanders' Champion. 177
He found, as lie says, a certain relief to
his sorrow in lyrical utterance ; but a friend
suggested that he should send a plain
prose statement of the case to "The
Times." This he did, and a leading: article
* o
was published in consequence. Con-
siderable search has failed to identify
this article ; but a stirring " leader "
appeared on June 4th, 1845, after a
Special Commissioner of the paper had
investigated the clearance of Glen Calvie.
This event "The Times" denounced as an
" inhuman process," a case of " heartless
oppression," and not distinguishable from
hundreds of others. As soon as it became
known that Professor Blackie had taken
up the question, he found his breakfast-
table loaded day after day with accounts
from all parts of the world describing
"the process by which the very pith and
marrow of rural life in the Highlands bad
been sacrificed to economic theories alike
inhuman and impolitic.'* The more he
eaw and inquired, the more keenly he felu
the bitter injustice and the folly of de-
stroying our reserves of manhood. Here
are two scraps of letters, the first from
12
178 Professor BlacJcie.
Braemar in the forties, and the second
from Oban in 1869: "The only draw-
back to the beauty of the Highlands with
me and it is a great one is the diminu-
tion of the population, and the dominance
of an overgrown landed aristocracy, which
cares more for deer than for men, and has,
in the space of a single generation, been
willing to forget the splendid services
which these poor despised cotters did to
our country in Spain and at Waterloo."
" The one-sided, loveless policy of a certain
school of economists, acting along with
the stupidity and greed of landlords, has
' improved ' this country into a solitude
that pays the rent; without life or love, or
memory or hope. We have lost our people :
and Bens and glens, which satisfy the
painter's eye, cannot feed the human
heart. However, I make the best of
it, being convinced that all grumbling
is sin."
His way of making the best of it was
to make it better. His tongue and pen,
busy as they were with other affairs,
were placed freely at the service of the
Highlanders. No small share of the
The Highlanders' Champion. 179
credit for the Crofters' Commission and
the resulting legislation imperfect as that
legislation still is belonged to the Pro-
fessor of Greek in the University of
Edinburgh. He was not carried off his
feet by sentiment. He recognised that
"there were, and there still may be,
cases where a certain amount of emi-
gration is as beneficial to those who
leave the country as to those who
remain in it. But weeding is one
thing, and extirpation is another."*
" The sacrifice of the Highlanders to the
selfishness or carelessness or ignorance
of landlords armed with partial and
one-sided land laws, and to a political
economy, falsely so called, which mis-
takes the wealth of the few for the
well-being of the many, is one of the
greatest blots on the face of our modern
civilisation. That is the decided sentence
of Sismondi, Roscher, and other Conti-
nental economists who have preserved
their minds untainted by that commercial
spirit which in this country has turned
political economy into a pretentious
* Lays of the Highlands and Islands,
180 Professor Blackie.
sophistry for the purpose of giving scien-
tific names to the most heartless forms of
social selfishness." "It is a very sad
business, and not calculated to excite in
the beholder a very high idea of the
capability of the British Government to
perform the highest function of all govern-
ment the protection of the weak against
the strong."
He refused to tar all landlords with the
same brush, and one of his books dealing
largely with this subject "Altavona,"
published by Mr. Douglas in 1882 was
written in dialogue to ensure the pre-
sentation of both sides.
Throughout he acted on the principle
that " offence, though it must sometimes
be given, ought never to be courted.
Nevertheless," as he well said, " there are
occasions when a man must speak boldly
out, even at the risk of plucking the beard
of fair authority somewhat rudely. If he
does not do so he is a coward and a
poltroon, and not the less so because he
has nine hundred and ninety-nine lily-
livered followers at his back." * In this
* Self-Culture.
The Highlanders' Champion. 181
spirit he wrote the famous sonnet on
<( Absentee Proprietors":
Who owns these ample hills ? A lord who lives
Ten months in London, and in Scotland two ;
O'er the wide moors with gun in hand he drives :
And, Scotland, this is all he knows of you !
Your tongue, your thoughts, your soul, are
strange to him ;
Your faith, your courage and your patience true
Touch him as near as when with hasty limb
He brushes from his boot the mountain dew.
Your sober church, your priestless sacraments
He loveth not who loveth these to kill
The guarded game and swell the squandered rents.
These be thy masters, Scotland ! These the men
Who make thy people vanish from the glen ! *
Blackie's most important work on this
subject is one which students of the land
question cannot afford to leave unread.
It was published in 1885 under the title
*' The Scottish Highlanders and the Land
Laws ; an Historico-Economical Inquiry,"
and was dedicated " To John Bright, the
eloquent denouncer of Irish wrongs."
Some idea of the severe and thorough
research that went to the making of this
valuable book may be got from the fact
* Lays and Legends ; and in Messis Vitse.
182 Professor Blackie.
that the author read all the books and
pamphlets he could get on rural economy
and the land laws, inquired systematically
into the rural economics and agrarian
legislation of various countries of Europe,
and made journeys of investigation to the
Channel Islands, to Ireland, and to Italy :
"the analogy of the usurpation of the
lands of the Italian yeomanry by the
aristocracy in the latter days of the
Roman Republic, with the consequent
patriotic struggle of the Gracchi to
restore the land to the people," having
flashed with a painful vividness on his
mind.
Blackie was not very hopeful of success
in this crusade, and even the report
of the Crofters' Commission was an agree-
able surprise to him. " The report," he
wrote to a correspondent in Canada, " is
much more kindly than I expected, thanks
to Lord Napier, who has livsd too long in
India to have his type of social philosophy
made after the image of John Bull's
insular tradition. Whether any thing will
be done is a different question. Our
Government never does a thing because it
The Highlanders' Champion. 183
ought to be done, but because they are
forced to do it. In Ireland the force was
strong enough to wrench justice from
them; in the Highlands, I feav, it will
prove too weak. They will likely let the
report lie on the table and do nothing, as
they did many years with the Irish reports
before Gladstone forced justice down their
throats."
Legislation came, as we know. It did
not meet all the country's requirements,
or rise to Professor Blackie's standard.
" If we had a Moses or Lycurgus amongst
us he would undoubtedly enact (1) That
all deer forests, as luxuries of the richest
class of society, should be severely
taxed ; " (2) that the animals should all
be well fenced in from the crops of their
human neighbours ; and (3) that a Govern-
ment Board should keep such forests within
their natural bounds, and prevent them
encroaching on land " that could be profit-
ably occupied by a rural population."
"Property in land is in an altogether
different position from properly in
movables ; " it " exists," as he had said
elsewhere, tf for the sake of the people."
184 Professor Blackie.
"It is not the primary business of a
landholder to make money," but to
"support upon his property as large
an amount of a rural population as it can
conveniently maintain." The land laws
of Scotland, being " made by the land-
lords, in the interest of their own class
mainly," had fostered a mercantile notion
that a landlord " could do what he liked
with his own " ;* an entirely damnable
doctrine, but one that the people might
now demolish without further help
from a Greek professor. In a letter
written early in 1886 he says: "The
Highlanders may now be left to speak for
themselves, having half a dozen of M.P.'s
of their own choice ; and I hope they will
have sense to desire only what is reason-
able and practicable, and not follow their
Irish cousins in demanding that the
existing world shall be turned upside
down and inside out for their convenience.
I mean now to let them look for help to
their own kin and clan."
* Appendix to his inaugural address as Chief of
the Gaelic Society at Perth, October 7th, 1880.
(Douglas.)
XVI.
THE CELTIC CHAIR.
BLACKIE'S sayings and doings for the High-
landers cannot aptly be told in a single
chapter. His indignation at their material
woes was not more fruitful than his
sorrow for their disappearing language
and neglected literature.
" There are very few districts of my
native land," the Professor was able to
say at the age of sixty-three, " from the
green graves of the two drowned Margarets
in Wigtown to the bleak and black
savageness of Cape Wrath, and the Fuggla
Bock in Shetland, which I have not
visited." But the Lowlander by birth
was a Celt by temperament, a Highlander
at heart, and he found his divinest
inspirations in the mountain air. " The
features of many of our most beautiful
Highland districts, under their most beau-
tiful aspects, with all the best emotions
186 Professor BlacJcie.
which a familiarity with them can create,
and all the patriotic associations with
which they are intertwined, have become
part of my life and of the atmosphere
which I breathe." *
For many years the Professor and Mrs.
Blackie spent their summers on the west
coast, at Oban. There they built a house
in 1865, with the sea and the isles in
front, the moors and the mountains in
rear. Indeed, he once responded at a
Highland gathering to the toast of
the Highland landlords his qualification
being the ownership of the acre bearing
his Highland home. He called it Altna-
craig, " the stream by the rock." Beside
the splendour of shore and ocean, inland
beauties paled. " I am delighted to hear
you are so satisfied with the beauty of
Aberfeldy," he wrote from Oban to a
friend deep in the heart of Perthshire;
" but if you come here you will see THE
BEAUTIFUL + THE SUBLIME = PERFEC-
TION ! " The village of Aberfeldy itself
annoyed him, as a blot on the face of fair
Strath-Tay ; for twenty years ago there was
* Lays of the Highlands and Islands.
The Celtic Chair. 187
" only one handsome building in it," he
declared, "the new Independent Church,
with which, thank God, I had something
to do that will mingle with a sweet echo
in my deathbed hymn." But Aberfeldy
became pretty familiar with the Professor's
" Ciamar tha sibh J n diugh ? " and the
village streets were picturesque at any rate
when he marched through them. The
"breastful of good-natured scolding" that
he gave them as a lecture, while on a visit
to "that dashing Amazon, the Countess of
Bread al bane," and the little skirmish with
his Highland brother-in-law orer the
Celtic superstitions which the minister's
minister-father had done much to dispel,
are shining items in the annals of the
place.
He was very happy at Oban. He rejoiced
in forest and flower, sea and rock, storm-
wrack and sunshine. " The sea i's roaring
like a cauldron," he writes with gusto,
"the white crests chasing one another like
snowdrifts ; the trees tossing their arms
like frantic women in a shipwreck, and
the windows of Heaven are opened in-
deed." " After a few days' cessation the
188 Professor Blackie.
Prince of the Power of the Air is again
exercising his function here most diaboli-
cally." To himself this was a small
matter, but " Alas for the poor cotters ! "
Here is a scrap of this letter in facsimile, as
it was not often the Professor turned artist :
He rejoiced, too, in some of the human
creatures who flocked to Oban his own
presence being one of the attractions.
<f From all parts of the world," he writes
in 1869, " everybody comes to Oban. We
have had President Davis here, and Dean
Stanley, and Lady Augusta Stanley, and
a host of minor notabilities. Dr. Caird,
the great preacher, lives in a neighbouring
mansion. He is really a great preacher :
force, dignity, grace, and substantiality.
His brother, the Professor of Moral Philo-
The Celtic Chair. 189
sophy in Glasgow, is also here a great
Anglican. Dr. Norman Macleod was near
us for six weeks. I had a glorious meeting
with him, when he sang some excellent
songs of his own composition one espe-
cially of which the text was the amount
of suggestive wisdom and profound philo-
sophy which lies in the wagging of a dog's
tail." This was the man whose biography
the Professor once described as " an ocean
of splendour : St. Paul + Aristophanes " ;
and whose " Annals of a Highland Parish,"
Blackie said, " are replete with more of
the fresh breath, vivid colouring, and
stirring action of a thoroughly manly style
of life than any that I know outside of
Homer."
It was from Oban that Blackie used to
go off for a fortnight's walk on what he
called " the one-shirt expedition." There
was not a high mountain in Scotland that
he did not get to the top of, at some time
or other ; and the " Lays of the Highlands
and Islands," which he published with
some instruction on geology and other
useful matters for the benefit of tourists,
were composed, he tells us, " with no con-
190 Professor Blackie.
scious purpose at all, but merely to pour
forth the spontaneous happy moods of my
own soul, as they came upon me during
many years' rambling among the Bens and
Glens of my Scottish fatherland."
On one of these <f frequent vagabond
flights through the Highland hills," he
says, "I took up my quarters for some
weeks at Kinloch-Ewe, and then and
there I picked up my first mustard-seed
of the rare old language."* The Pro-
fessor was by this time about fifty-
five an elderly man, as years go. He
never acquired a perfect Eighland accent ;
but the fact that he mastered the Gaelic
when far past middle life is a striking
sign of his irresistible will, his wise
methods, and his natural gifts. As far
back as 1831, when he came home from
the Continent, he could freely speak Latin,
Greek, Italian, German, English, and even
French, though it was "too snippy,
scrappy, and polished " for his taste and
all had been acquired in the same
natural way. He added Gaelic to his
* Language and Literature of the Scottish
Highlands.
The Celtic Chair. 191
list by talking with the Gaels, and then he
plunged into their literature with the zest
of an explorer opening a new continent.
" I can see him now," says Dr. Macgregor,
" walking along the shores of the loch
with a Gaelic book and dictionary in his
hand." Blackie never despised the dic-
tionary, Greek or Gaelic. He found his
new language "not harsh and unpro-
nounceable," as some imagine who
judge by its spelling, "but soft, vocalic,
mellifluous," and specially adapted for
music. " Highland songs," he discovered,
"beat English and German hollow for
variety and character." As for Ossian's
poems the only piece of Gaelic literature
of which the Southerner has heard
Blackie arrived at the rational belief that
they were " in the main, both in tone and
materials, much more ancient than Mac-
pherson's time." He laughed at the
"absurdity of pious trifling" that seriously
derives " Jehovah " from the Gaelic Dhe
(meaning God), Tha (is), and Bha (was) ;
but he could honestly admit that Gaelic
was " one of the oldest and least mongrel
types of the great Aryan family of
192 Professor Blackie.
speech." As long ago as 1864 lie
opened his Greek class for the Session by
a lecture on " The Gaelic Language : Its
Classical Affinities and Distinctive Char-
acter." "It has become impossible," as
he said in a preface to a book of Gaelic
conversations, " to teach any one language
scientifically without having some just
regard to the peculiarities of all the
members of the family to which that
language belongs."
In 1876 he introduced the Englishman
and Lowlander to the unfamiliar beauties
of the Northern tongue, in his genially
erudite way, by the volume called, " The
Language and Literature of the Scottish
Highlands." It was not his purpose
" to exhaust a subject, but only to excite
an interest and open a vista " ; and this
he did, for many a grateful Sassenach.
In the English renderings of Gaelic
poetry which illustrate the work, Blackie
tf endeavoured to follow the spirited
freedom of Dry den and our old masters,
rather than the curious literalness which
has been lately fashionable." But the
one specimen that can find room here
The Celtic Chair. 193
is from another volume, Altavona. It
is just a verse from Ms "Nutbrown
Maiden," a dainty translation of " Ho-ro
mo nighean donn bhoidheach " :
Her eye so mildly beaming,
Her look so frank and free,
In waking and in dreaming.
Is evermore with me.
Ho-ro, my nut-brown maiden,
Hi-ri, my nut-brown maiden,
Ho-ro, my nut-brown maiden,
O, she's the maid for me !
As might have been expected, the lash
of Blackie's whip fell smartly on the
shoulders of those Highlanders who let
their mother-tongue slip from them, who
at most " content themselves with vapour-
ing about Ossian, whom they never read,
and eulogising Duncan Ban, whom they
do not sing."* "They are in a great
measure themselves to blame," he wrote
in a letter about the same time, " for not
getting the Gaelic taught in the schools."
The great idea of education, the Pro-
fessor saw, was to draw out of a
man's soul what God put in him, namely,
* Address to the Gaelic Society, Perth.
13
194 Professor Blackie.
the best thoughts that were in his
heart; and for the Highlanders that
could be done best by Gaelic music,
Gaelic songs, and Gaelic Bibles. But
" they are overridden by strangers ; fashion
deludes, and necessity compels. They
call their own language * common and
unclean* (Acts x. 14), and whosoever
presents himself to be kicked in this
world will surely get kicks enough."
In face of the betrayal and ejection of
the people by their landlords, and the
desertion of their language and customs
by the people themselves, the annual
"Gathering" got up "for the amuse-
ment of tourists, deerstalkers, and
absentee lairds," was to Blackie but " a
silly thing ; not silly in itself, but because
it has no real life and soul in it." Writ-
ing to his sister, who had invited him
to visit her in Wales, he said: "The
Eisteddfod is a gathering intellectually
and morally far superior to our Highland
exhibitions of the same kind; for the
Welsh are a people, but ' the Highlands '
is now only a country that lives by show-
ing itself to shoals of idle tourists and
The Celtic Chair. 195
selling itself to a few Saxon hunters and
English Nimrods. Often have I wished
to be a part of such a sound-hearted
popular manifestation : but it is a popular
error largely entertained in regard to
your excellent brother that he is possessed
of ubiquity. The fact is I am no more
possessed of ubiquity than a flea :
though both of us, I confess, are very
mobile little animals, and not very easy
to catch."
If he could not stir up the degenerate
Highland imagination to a revival of the
Gaelic speech, Blackie did what mortal
man could and what most others could
not to save the language from utter
oblivion. In a letter written on the 1st of
December, 1867, at Kensington he had
been " seduced up here by the solicitations
of the kilted Celts of London " to attend
some patriotic assembly he says : " I
assisted to do a little piece of academical
business besides. The academical busi-
ness was, according to the suggestion of
Sir Patrick Colquhoun, late Chief Judge
at Ceylon, a zealous Celt, to start the
idea of a Celtic Chair in some Scottish
196
Professor Blackie.
University if possible, Edinburgh. This
I could do con amore, and may possibly
live to see the idea realised." Dr. James
Macgregor, Professor of Theology in Edin-
burgh New College, made an attempt
of this sort, but with next to no result.
In 1870 the Council of Edinburgh Uni-
versity decided that a Celtic Chair was
desirable, and appointed a committee on
the subject. Gradually the work of the
committee fell, as the work of committees
has a habit of falling, into the hands of a
single member, in this case the Professor
of Greek, whom a kinsman accordingly
sketched in kilts, thus :
The Celtic Chair. 197
"With Celtic impetuosity and Saxon
perseverance Blackie carried this new
mission to complete success. The amount
of workj not always of the pleasantest,
required for the collection of a 12 ,,000
endowment fund is not to be expressed in
words. Only an amateur collector of
voluntary taxation who has tried to
raise 200 for some object less urgent
than the relief of sickness and starvation
can realise a sixtieth part of the Pro-
fessor's labour. If anything could have
cured him of his epistolary propensities,
it would have been the years he spent in
the wholesale manufacture of begging-
letters. But so far was he from tiring
at his task; or suffering his genius to lag
and his phrases to sink into the hack-
neyed commonplaces of mendicity^ that
his latest appeals rose into Blackian verse.
Look at this for a begging-letter in
excelsis :
"24, HILL STREET, 29th March.
"Noblesse oblige ! the Frenchman says,
Which means, who stands in honour pay* ;
And still, the more he rises, he
Must pay more tax for his degree.
So, COLSTON, you, some time ago
198 Professor Blaclcie.
Known but as Bailie, meek and low,
Now mounted high, and proud to stand
With all the learned of the land ;
In academic Court assessor,
No Principal, preacher, or professor
Can outshine you ; therefore, I say,
"Tis plain, my dear sir, you must pay.
Which means, of course, for me, you must
Grandly fling down the shining dust,
With Earls and Marquises and Dukes,
And West-End swells of lofty looks,
And learned scholars crammed with books,
And Judges wigged with whalebone hair,
Aud kilted Thanes and ladies fair,
All proud a patriotic part to bear
In building up the CELTIC CHAIB ! J. S. B.
" In your position of assessor you cannot
subscribe less than 5 5s., nor go beyond
25, for 50 would be assuming the
dignity of Earls, and 100 would mingle
you with Dukes ! The only cause of the
delay in constituting the Chair is our wise
caution in providing a gentlemanly salary.
Ill-paid Chairs are open to jobbery ; and
are, in fact, a bribe to inferior men. I
am, therefore, still seeking occasional
subscriptions, and shall account myself
honoured by your patronage. Ever yours
sincerely, J. S. BLACKIE."
The Celtic Chair. 199
As Bailie Colston replied in metre to
match, the Professor honoured him with
a poetic receipt thus :
" 6th April, 188L
" Received from Bailie Colston, five
Guineas, to keep old lore alive,
That philologic poor may thrive
On learned honey in Celtic hive.
Some men believe in princes ; I
Henceforth on Bailies will rely,
With Bailie Colston in the van,
To fork out like a gentleman
What he can spare,
To memorise the Celtic Clan
By Celtic Chair.
" J. S. BIM.CKIB,
u Solicitor-General for the Highlands.' 9
He cast his nets far and wide. Not his
friends only, but his friends' friends, were
laid under contribution ; that is, if they
were Scotsmen, for at least in one case
Blackie refused an introduction to an
Englishman with 20,000 a-year. As long
as seven years before Bailie Colston re-
ceived his poetic honours the Professor had
been writing thus to his brother-in-law :
"Mr DEAR THEOLOGIAN! D.D. ! D.D.!!
" I am appearing in the fifth act of my
200 Professor Blackie.
life-drama, in the character of a Beggar-
Apostle. . . I only wish to know whether
you can lay your finger on any MAC with
large heart and open purse, and not frosted
by vulgar Scotch utilitarianism, who will
help me in this matter. It is an affair
which depends on the intelligent en-
thusiasm of individuals ; not on the
righteousness of the ol TTO\\OI or the
patronage of the Scribes and Pharisees.
Ever yours, JOHN S. BLACKIE.
" P.S. Our University is in a wonderful
flow of prosperity this year : nearly 1,900
enrolled already ! Very opportune for me,
as I had 100 to pay for my last book
[Horse Helleniese] and have to pay 100
a year for" a certain benevolent object,
"with 50 to the Celtic Chair, and half-a-
dozen more such affairs."
Blackie's red-hot enthusiasm kindled
gome dusky glow in every Scottish heart,
and in a great many the fire of fruitful
gratitude. The cause and its champion
appealed effectively to great and small.
Poor Highland farmers and their wives
sent shillings, and Her Majesty sent 200.
When the Professor was in the thick of
The Celtic Chair. 201
this patriotic business, the Duke of
Argyll asked him to Inverary Castle to
meet the Queen. " After dinner," wrote
the Professor, describing the occasion to
his sister, "without any drinking, we
retired to the drawing-room, and had only
been there a few minutes when in came
the Duke of Argyll with the Queen, and
said, ' The Queen, Professor Blackie,' and
'Professor Blackie, the Queen,' and
Professor Blackie, of course, made a most
graceful inclination of his small body, to
which Majesty replied by a most gracious
smile of her good-humoured face. She
asked about the Celtic Chair, and I
answered in the most easy way with rose-
colour replies. The dear Princess Louise
was standing beside, and asked me how
I expected to get the rest of the money, to
which I replied, ' Faith removes moun-
tains.' That is all. Her Majesty went
about talking with Lord Dufferin and
other notables, and then, like the ghosts in
tragedy, made her exit by the same door
through which she had entered. In about
half an hour afterwards the dearly-beloved
Marchioness brought me the Queen's book
202 Professor Blackie.
into which she gets the names of persons
whom she delights to honour, with their
birthday and autograph, and requested me
to add my name to the illustrious list.
Of course I did so in the most proudly-
modest way possible, and not only gave
my name, but wrote beneath it two
mottoes for the edification of Majesty, the
one in Greek, the other in Gaelic. The
Greek one was '^alpetv /zero, j^aipovrcov,
Kai /c\aiiv fjuGTa fc\aiovTc0v ' 'Rejoice
with those that do rejoice and weep with
those that weep ' and the Gaelic was
' Cruaidh mar am fraoch, buan mar an
darach,' which, being interpreted, means
'Hard as the heather and lasting as the oak.'
This was the Second Act. Afterwards the
dear Princess whom I love as warmly
as a Professor is entitled to love a
Marchioness informed me that Her
Majesty had expressed great satisfaction
with my mottoes. That is the Third Act,
and, as Aristotle says, three is the first
number that has a beginning, a middle,
and an end, and so makes a complete whole.
. . P.S. The Celtic Chair is now 6,500."
The Queen, as might be imagined,
The Celtic Chair. 203
fully realised and appreciated Professor
Blackie's life-long work on behalf of
everything identified with the nationality
of Scotland, and joined in the universal
regret at the loss which his country
sustained by his death.
By the spring of 1880 Blackie was able
to report to the Edinburgh University
Council that 12,528 had been obtained
and invested. He recommended that no
immediate appointment should be made,
so that the money might accumulate for
a while. He anticipated that the students
would not be very many, and that they
would be the poorest in the University.
Fees, therefore, could only supplement
to a very small extent the Professor's
salary. It was not till 1882 that the
Chair of " Celtic Languages, History,
Literature, and Antiquities " was actually
instituted. The patrons, consisting of the
Curators of the University and Blackie
himself now an ex-Professor elected
Mr. Donald Mackinnon, M.A., to the
Chair, which he has ably filled ever
since. The class has been well attended,
and the Professor is a regular con-
204 Professor Blackie.
tributor to periodical literature on Celtic
subjects.
" What I have done in this cause,"
wrote Blackie when near the end of the
Celtic campaign, " has been an episode in
my life into which I was drawn by external
circumstances over which I had no control,
and by deep moral instincts that are
stronger than circumstances ; but there is
no act of my life on which, now that the
thing is done, I look back with greater
satisfaction. It was a sad thing for me to
hear the poor Highlanders, just because
they were poor, hardly ever mentioned
except to be made the subject of vulgar
jests and shallow slanders ; it was a sad
thing to see the systematic desolation of
our beautiful glens and the dwindling
away of our stoutest population; and
saddest of all to contemplate the in-
gratitude of Britain to the men who had
fought her most critical battles and
performed her most glorious achievements
in war, in commerce, and in geographical
exploration."
xvn.
THE SCOTTISH NATIONALIST.
THE Professor's patriotism was never
narrow, but always intense. From the
day when he first exposed the educational
leanness of the land, he criticised his
country's defects as keenly as he praised
her virtues. His appreciation, too, of the
strong points in other nations was generous
and sincere. John Bull himself got many
a handsome compliment along with
Blackie's thumping blows. What more
could an Englishman desire than the
description of his country in the preface
to <( Lays of the Highlands and Islands " ?
Is our country bare and barren ? asks the
Scottish author. Yes ; with " your wide
seas of luxuriant leafage, a continuity of
gardens and orchards, your soft velvety
lawns, your perpetual air of cleanness
and comfort and shining prosperity we
willingly concede to you the privilege of
206 Professor Blackie.
toasting that you live in the finest country
in the world. Thank God, therefore, in
the first place, that you were born in
England; but thank Him also that you
will die one day having seen Scotland.
As for us, meagre mountaineers, we shall
continue, with God's grace, to make the
best of our granite rocks and our
heather braes, turning our physical dis-
advantages, if we are wise, into the
means of strengthening our character;
for man is an animal easily spoiled by
much softness."
Indeed, the Professor loved England
only less than he loved Scotland ; and he
never hid from himself the greatness of
their common interests. But in the interest
of both he demanded that neither should
swallow up the other or blot out its charac-
teristic features. He was a Unionist of
the most enlightened kind: for he was
also a Nationalist. " Even when working
with Greek and German tools," he could
say, " I have always had the improvement
and elevation of my country present to my
mind as the only legitimate object of all
foreign study."
The Scottish Nationalist. 207
It is many, many years since Blackie
first was heard pleading with his fellow-
countrymen to be what they were born
namely Scotsmen, and not to hide their
natural selves in the livery prescribed by
English fashion. The speech he made on
" Scottish Literature " in 1861, when the
foundation-stone of the Wallace Monument
was laid on the crag by Stirling and Ban-
nockburn, was a trumpet-blast of warning
to his nation and defiance to its enemies.
The Anglicised West-Endism of Edin-
burgh, as a traitor in the very citadel, had
to hear many stinging truths about itself.
A certain able editor had refused to join
in the Monument scheme. " But the best
men have their defects," said Blackie ;
"the Edinburgh Whigs were always a
somewhat prosaic generation, and
reads too many blue-books and lacks
chivalry." "I have never seen a more
beautiful city than Edinburgh," he said
in later years, "but it is a city of big-
wigs, and always looking to London for
a chance of bigger ! "
As one most potent means of arousing
a healthy national feeling, Blackie
208 Professor Blackie.
laboured unceasingly to revive a taste for
the national songs. It was sad to think,
he used to say, that he was the only Pro-
fessor of Scottish song in all Scotland. At
the Wallace celebration he asked why the
songs of Scotland should not be habitually
sung in all our highest schools, gym-
nasiums, and colleges. "I have a great
respect," he said, tf for Latin and Greek,
both as a trader in that line and for philo-
sophical reasons ; but if the choice were
to be made between two alternatives,
classical education and Scottish song, I
would say at once burn Homer, burn
Aristotle, fling Thucydides into the sea,
but let us by all means on our Scottish
hills and by our Scottish streams have
( Highland Mary,' ' Auld Lang Syne,' and
f Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.' *
In the last year of his life, to a corre-
spondent who had sent him a Latin poem,
he wrote : " Why should young English-
men and Scotsmen have their ears tuned
to a strange music, which is no longer the
natural organ of the expression of the
highest culture of the age to which they
belong? Why should not our form of
The Scottish Nationalist. 209
expressing the beautiful be as closely con-
nected with ourselves as the heather with
the brae, the birch with the crag, and the
gowan with the lea? Personally, I am
not ashamed to say that I have through
life got more healthy stimulus to the
best part of my nature from half-a-
dozen of Scottish popular songs than from
all the volumes that I ever spurred my
way through of Roman and Hellenic
minstrelsy."
He had heard certain Scotch ladies ob-
serve that it was "vulgar " to sing Scotch
songs. We should like to have heard his
reply. This is the answer he gave in a
public lecture afterwards : " Is it vulgar
to be true to Nature, and to call a spade
a spade ? Is it vulgar to be patriotic, and
to love the songs and the sentiments which
came to us from our father's blood and
with our mother's milk ? Is it vulgar to
sing songs of native growth, as fresh, and
bright, and strong as the purple heather
on our Scottish hills songs full of bone,
and sap, and marrow, in the most musical
dialect of the noble English tongue in-
stead of piping forth shallow sentiment-
14
210 Professor BlacJeie.
alities to tickle the ears of prim girls and
feckless fops in a big West-end drawing-
room ? No ! No ! No ! I'll tell you what
is vulgar : to pretend to be what you are
not, and what God and Nature did not
make you or intend you to be, by bedizen-
ing yourselves with strange plumes bor-
rowed from a distance. There is nothing
more vulgar than to despise the language
of the common people."
Giving a pat on the back, a few years
ago, to a Bailie and a Councillor who were
moving the Edinburgh Police Band to
play more national music, the Professor
said : " In all parts of the kingdom I have
never failed to find Scottish music charm
the ear and stir the heart of a popular
audience. Next to their quiet Sabbaths,
and their personal study of the Bible, the
Scottish people certainly possess no more
powerful engine of the best moral culture
than their rich inheritance of national
song ; and the most suicidal act they
could commit against their noble nation-
ality is to do anything that, either in the
domain of school education or of public
recreation, could be construed to imply a
The Scottish Nationalist. 211
misprision or a neglect of this great
national treasure. The unworthy fashion
of subordinating our native Scottish song
to everj pretty French conceit or whiff of
Metropolitan sentiment that may be blown
across the Border against which I have
not seldom had occasion to inveigh is, I
hope, confined to a small class of vain
mothers, silly girls, shallow puppies, and
other devotees of a spurious gentility in
the West End of our large towns. The
mass of the people is, I believe, thoroughly
sound on this point ; but should it unfor-
tunately be otherwise, then let Edinburgh
cease to put forward any claim to be called
the capital of an independent kingdom,
and have its glory in the praise of being,
as the Eev. J. MacNeil wittily said, ( the
most East windy and the most West Endy '
city of the Northern province of England
called Scotland."
In his latest years Professor Blackie
found a new instrument for the salvation
of his country from such a doom. It was
early in 1886 that an Edinburgh citizen,
Mr. Charles Waddie, started what soon
became known as the Scottish Home Rule
212 Professor Blackie.
movement. Every Scotsman and every
thinking Englishman admits the incon-
venience to put it mildly of the present
legislative system, under which no law,
however local, can be made or altered
except by a Parliament mainly representing
other localities and always choked with
other business. By what plan, short of
disunion, can the evil of centralisation be
cured? Blackie was one of those who
faced this question and sought an answer.
He attended the meeting in St. Andrew's
Square at which the Scottish Home Rule
Association was formed. At the first
conference, held in Glasgow two years
later, he was elected Chairman of Com-
mittee of the Association, and this post
he held to the end, presiding not only
at meetings in Scotland but over a con-
ference in London itself. One of the
last letters he wrote was one strongly,
commending the Home Rule Association
and enclosing a double subscription for
its treasury.
Blackie had no rigid theory, to be uni-
versally and unchangeably applied, though
he believed it to be "desirable that as
The Scottish Nationalist. 213
much local individuality as possible should
be preserved in the component parts of a
great empire as much as was consistent
with unity of action and subordination to
a central authority in all matters of
general concern." The neglect of this, he
saw, produced a monotonous uniformity in
the people, the characteristic trait of
despotism. At first, indeed, the Professor
was inclined to refuse to Ireland what he
claimed for Scotland. Mr. Gladstone, he
once said, was to be thanked for taking
up the question, but not for the way in
which he took it up. The process of
showing in practice how good a thing
local or national government was should
begin, he thought, with " a sober-minded,
sensible nation like the Scotch ! " At
another time he declared that he had
nothing to do with Ireland he did not
know the Irish. He did know the Scotch,
and he knew that they were fit for Home
Rule and ought to have it. As for details,
he felt no call to be a maker of constitu-
tions (except, perhaps, for Hellenic
societies !). Still, he had his preferences,
and the plan he liked best was one first
214 Professor Blackie.
hinted at about twelve years ago. If the
present Scottish members of Parliament
and representative peers were to sit
together in Edinburgh for the despatch of
distinctively Scottish business for six
weeks or two months before their duties
at Westminster began, the problem would
be solved without any multiplication of
legislators. Blackie came to admit that
some such plan would have to be adopted
for the western as well as the northern
partner in the United Kingdom. He
never allowed his dislike for Irish methods
to modify his judgment of English
methods in Ireland. Writing in 1884 to
a correspondent in Montreal, he said :
" As to the French in Canada, no doubt
the government of one race by another is
always a difficult problem ; but it has
constantly to be done, and we must make
the best of it. In Ireland John Bull has
made not the best but the worst of it ;
and when the worst is once produced it is,
like a hereditary disease, very difficult,
sometimes impossible, to be cured." And
in the following letter to Mr. Blackie
the publisher, written only a fortnight
The Scottish Nationalist. 215
before the end, lie declared himself in
favour of " Home Rule all round " :
" 9 Douglas Crescent, Feb. 15, 1895.
" MY DEAR SIB, Accept my best thanks
for your last instalment of the History of
the Scottish People. I am a strong
advocate for the Union of the three King-
doms of the Empire, but this Union should
be a genuine Union of the three peoples ;
each with its own head a Scottish Parlia-
ment to meet in Edinburgh, an Irish Par-
liament in Dublin, an English Parliament
in London and a British Parliament there
as well. This would be a bond fide Union,
a brotherly Union, not a swallowing up of
the smaller by the one great member, by
a monstrous centralisation which is the
destroyer of all variety : and variety is the
wealth of the moral as well as of the
physical world. Ever yours,
" J. S. BLACKIE."
The Professor summed up his opinions
on Scottish Nationality in one of his
" Essays on Social Subjects," thus :
" 1. Stamp in your souls the strong con-
viction that, as matters now stand, there
216 Professor BlacJde.
is something rotten in the state of Scot-
land ; and that, unless a decided stand be
made at the present moment, you are in
great danger of losing your two most
valuable possessions your inheritance of
a distinctive type of manhood from the
past, and your estimation in the eye of
Europe as a political factor of no vulgar
significance.
" 2. Screw your middle schools and uni-
versities up to such a level as that there
shall be no excuse for any father of a
hopeful Scottish son saying that he sends
his son to England because he cannot find
for him in Scotland the education of a
gentleman.
"3. Give your native Presbyterian
Church services such graces and embellish-
ments as may prevent any desertion to the
Episcopacy from purely sesthetical motives.
"4. Remove the double reproach of
multitudinous babblement and insolent
centralisation from the British Parliament,
and let Scottish business be transacted
in Edinburgh, either by a separate
national Parliament for Scotland, in the
fashion of the States' Parliaments in
The Scottish Nationalist. 217
America, or, what I personally would
much prefer, by a session of the Scottish
members of the present Parliament of
Great Britain, to be held for two months,
or six weeks, as the case might require,
in Edinburgh, for the despatch of specially
Scotch business, with an executive, in
either case resident in the historical
capital of Scotland, for the administra-
tion of Scottish affairs/'
xvm.
POET AND VEESEMAKER.
IT was not only for their effect on slumber-
ing patriotism that Blackie loved and
praised his country's songs. He found
in song at once the nourishment and the
expression of his highest moral qualities ;
and what he had found he believed that
others could find. In an address to his
Edinburgh students he said: "If you
wish to be happy in this world there are
only three things that can secure you
of your aim the love of God, the
love of truth, and the love of your
fellow-men j and of this divine triad
the best and most natural exponent, in
my estimate, is neither a sermon, nor
even a grand article in a quarterly review,
but just simply a good song."
" The devil remains a stranger
To breasts that teem with song,"
Poet and Versemaker. 219
says Blackie ; and he even assures us that
" the devil cannot sing ! " " There are
only three patent ways," he wrote in
1887, "to keep the devil at bay a
prayer, a song, and hard work. By
God's grace I use all the three largely,
and so am by many accounted the happiest
man in Edinburgh an opinion which I
hope is not altogether true, but has a good
deal of truth in it." A severe musical
critic would say that Blackie could not
sing, at any rate in his later years ;
but it is no less true that Blackie did
sing, all the time and everywhere. Dr.
Macgregor and he once lived for some
time together in the Highlands. "His
room was next to mine," says the minister.
ft He sang the first thing in the morning
and the last thing at night. I never
knew a man who more habitually carried
out the Apostle's injunction, f Eejoice in
the Lord alway ; and again I say, Eejoice ! '
His whole life was a song. He sang to
himself all day, wherever he was, on the
road or in the tramway car. He sang,
like the birds, because he could not help
it." There we have it. Though he
220 Professor Blackie.
rigorously did one thing at a time " Make
clean work and leave no tags " was one of
his mottoes the hardest mental labour
was punctuated by snatches of song.
There was no inconsistency in that. He
breathed in song. Sydney Dobell was
walking in his garden once when Blackie,
his guest, was writing indoors. Suddenly
he heard the Professor's jovial voice at
an upper window trolling forth :
" Maxwellton braes are bonnie
Where early fa's the dew,
And 'twas there that "
Then there was a long pause while the
pen sped over the paper ; but at last a full
stop came, and then
" Annie Laurie
Gi'ed me her promise true "
Another silence, while the pen flew
on; then another line or two of Annie
Laurie, and so on to the end of the
chapter.
He sang in private and he sang in
public, and he always delighted his audi-
ence, which is more than can be said of
all singers approved by the critics. In
Poet and Versemalcer. 221
a letter from his sister mention occurs
of a visit she had just paid to her
aunt, Miss Stodart, then ninety-eight
years of age. The old lady was " quite
bright and cheery, and said the Pro-
fessor had been calling in the after-
noon and had sung her a song and been
in great glee," mere boy of seventy-
three that he was. As for his public
performances, who that ever heard him
lecture on Scottish Song will forget the
musical illustrations. Their style, if not
inimitable, was imitable only by the
late David Kennedy, whom Blackie
heard singing in church one Sunday and
advised to adopt the career that took
him singing the songs of Scotland
round the world. Who could forget the
Professor's "Kelvin Grove," "A man's
a man for a' that," or " The Barrin' o*
the Door"?
But the Professor was a writer as well
as a singer of songs ; and that which he
most wished to become popular may be
given here in full. It was written early
in the forties and appeared in his volume
of "Lyrical Poems," published by Edmon-
222 Professor Blaclcie.
ston and Douglas in 1860 and now out of
print :
THE SONG OP MRS. JENNY GEDDES.
(Tune: "British Grenadiers.")
Some praise the fair Queen Mary, and some the
good Queen Bess,
And some the wise Aspasia, beloved by Pericles ;
But o'er all the world's brave women, there's one
that bears the rule,
The valiant Jenny Geddes, that flung the three-
legged stool.
With a row-dow at them now !
Jenny fling the stool !
'Twas the twenty-third of July, in the sixteen-
thirty-seven,
On Sabbath morn from high St. Giles' the solemn
peal was given :
King Charles had sworn that Scottish men should
pray by printed rule ;
He sent a book, but never dreamt of danger from
a stool.
With a row-dow yes, I trow 1
There's danger in a stool !
The Council and the Judges, with ermined pomp
elate,
The Provost and the Bailies in gold and crimson
state,
Poet and Versemaker. 223
Fair silken-vested ladies, grave Doctors of the
school,
Were there to please the King, and learn the
virtue of a stool.
With a row-dow yes, I trow !
There's virtue in a stool 1
The Bishop and the Dean came in wi' mickle
gravity,
Right smooth and sleek, but lordly pride was
lurking in their e'e ;
Their full lawn sleeves were blown and big, like
seals in briny pool ;
They bore a book, but little thought they soon
should feel a stool.
With a row-dow yes, I trow 1
They'll feel a three-legged stool !
The Dean he to the altar went, and, with a solemn
look,
He cast his eyes to heaven, and read the curious-
printed book.
In Jenny's heart the blood up-welled with bitter
anguish full ;
Sudden she started to her legs, and stoutly grasped
the stool !
With a row-dow at them now 1
Firmly grasp the stool 1
As when a mountain wild-cat springs on a rabbit
small,
So Jenny on the Dean springs, with gush of holy
gall;
224 Professor Blackie.
" "Wilt thou say the mass at my lug, thou Popish-
puling fool P
No ! no ! " she said, and at his head she flung the
three-legged stool.
With a row-dow at them now !
Jenny fling the stool !
A bump, a thump ! a smash, a crash ! now gentle
folks beware !
Stool after stool, like rattling hail, came tirling
through the air,
With, Well done, Jenny ! Bravo, Jenny ! That's
the proper tool !
When the Deil will out, and shows his snout, just
meet him with a stool !
With a row-dow at them now !
There's nothing like a stool !
The Council and the Judges were smitten with
strange fear,
The ladies and the Bailies their seats did deftly
clear ;
The Bishop and the Dean went, in sorrow and in
dool,
And all the Popish flummery fled, when Jenny
showed the stool !
With a row-dow at them now 1
Jenny show the stool !
And thus a mighty deed was done by Jenny's
valiant hand,
Black Prelacy and Popery she dravefrom Scottish
land;
Poet and Versemaker. 225
King Charles he was a shuffling knave, priest
Laud a meddling fool,
But Jenny was a woman wise, who beat them with
a stool !
With a row-dow yes, I trow,
She conquered by the stool !
The reader with half an imagination
can picture to himself the venerable Pro-
fessor, in the midst of a dramatic render-
ing of this ballad, seizing the nearest
chair, and hurling it along the platform
with an aim worthy of Mrs. Jenny Geddes
herself.
In 1870, his German sympathies were
roused into rhythmic force by the war
with France, and he published a book on
the "War Songs of the Germans, with
Historical Illustrations of the Liberation
War and the Ehine Boundary Question."
With the prose part of the book we can
have nothing to do here ; but we must
dip into the verse and bring out a few
lines, such as these from the translation
of the Sword Song :
I in my sheath am ringing,
I from my sheath am springing,
Wild, wild with battle glee !
15
226 Professor Blackie.
Or these, the opening Hues of the " Wacht
am Rhein " :
A loud cry swells like thunder peal,
Like roaring ware, like clashing steel
The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine 1
"Who'll come to watch the German Rhine ?
Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine :
Brave hearts and true shall watch the Rhine !
From heart to heart the quick thrill flies,
And lightning leaps from countless eyes,
Where each true German, sword in hand,
Guards the old border of the land.
Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine,
Brave hearts and true shall watch the Rhine I
A year before, the Professor had dedi-
cated to the students of Edinburgh
University a book of student songs called
" Musa Burschicosa," the offspring of a
pure spirit of enjoyment of life ; and in
"The Scottish Students' Song Book,"
published only six years ago, eight of the
pieces, including a Latin version of " God
Save the Queen," are by John Stuart
Blackie. We must quote a verse or
two of his Doric, though the Latin
may go.
Poet and Versemaker. 227
This is from "Capped and Doctored
and a' " :
I yince was a light-headed laddie,
A dreamin' an' daunderin' loon,
Just escaped from the rod o' my daddie
And the skirts o' my mither's broun goun.
But now I cut loftier capers
An' the beer that I drink is na' sma',
When I see my ain name in the papers,
Capped and doctored and a'.
And this from the better-known " Sam'l
Sumph " :
Sam'l Sumph cam' here for Greek.
Ha, ha, the Greeking o't !
Frae Dunnet Head he cam' for Greek.
Ha, ha, the Greeking o't !
Brains he had na unco' much,
His schooling was a crazy crutch,
But like the crab he had a clutch ;
Ha, ha, the Greeking o't!
Plucked twice, Sam'l made a pathetic
appeal to the Professor, whose discipline
melted under tears and let the poor fellow
through. Now behold,
In the Kirk Assembly he
Sits as big as big can be,
Moderator Sam, D.D.
That's the crown o' the Greeking o't !
228 Professor Blackie.
The Professor wrote much in many
metres. His pen dropped into .verse as
naturally as his voice into song ; and as
he " piped more for pleasure than for
fame " he disdained the chipping and
changing and trimming and polishing
carried on in some poetical workshops.
Naturally, therefore, some of his verse
lacks " distinction," and is deprived of its
power over the imagination by the occa-
sional cropping up of a phrase prosaic to
the verge of commonplace. It may be
urged that Blackie was too didactic to be
a great poet. He himself said that " a
poet even in modern times, when the great
public contains every possible variety of
small publics, can ill afford to be a
preacher ; and if he carries his preaching
against the vices of the age beyond a
certain length he changes his genus and
becomes, like Coleridge, a metaphysician,
or, like Thomas Carlyle, a prophet." No
temptation would have made Blackie a
metaphysician ; but a prophet he was, and
his message to the world was delivered
in verse as often as in prose. The poetic
element, however, was not always driven
Poet and VersemaJcer. 229
out by the prophetic, or even enslaved and
enfeebled by it. Some of his verses,
therefore, which go to illustrate his
religious teaching in the next chapter
might have been given here with equal
fitness to show the variety of his poetic
gifts.
His earliest book of verse, published in
1857, was called " Lays and Legends of
Ancient Greece." These lines may be
taken as the envoi :
Muse of old Hellas, wake again !
Thou wert not born to die
Ajid mingle sweet the classic strain
With Gothic minstrelsy.
Though sober friends forbid the verse,
My old Greek rhyme I will rehearse,
Like a lone wandering bee
On a hillside, that sips sweet dew
From fragrant blooms of purple hue,
And drones sweet minstrelsy.
The modest lay be slow to blame,
Piped more for pleasure than for fame :
Music to harmless souls belongs
Gold worldly hearts are scant of songs.
About half the book consisted of " other
poems," chosen from those " great screeds
230 Professor Blackie.
of poetry " we hear of him writing under
the influence of the mountain breezes
when he had <f shaken off the book-dust "
of Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
In 1860, as we saw, came the " Lyrical
Poems " ; in 1869, Musa Burschicosa ; in
1870, the German War Songs; in 1872,
Lays of the Highlands and Islands; in
1876, " Songs of Religion and Life," some
of which were reprinted from earlier
volumes; in 1877 the "Wise Men of
Greece," already noticed; and in 1886
"Messis Vitse; or, Gleanings of Song
from a Happy Life," dedicated, " in the
love of the good, the beautiful, and the
true," to the students of the Scottish
Universities. In 1889 came (( A Song of
Heroes," in which he " selects a sequence
of the most notable names in European
and West Asian history during more than
3,000 years, and gives a sketch of their
lives, as the exponents of the significant
ages to which they belong," from Abra-
ham, Alexander, Caesar and Paul, to
Cromwell, who " seized the helm and gave
it guidance with a right direct from God."
Open any of these books at random, espe-
Poet and VersemaJcer. 231
cially the more miscellaneous volumes, and
you can hardly fail to be struck by the
lyrical ease and the vigour of the lines.
Manliness, and warm human sympathy for
all sorts and conditions of men, you will of
course expect ; but you may be surprised,
if you have not known him well, at his
genius for entering into and expressing
the most varied aspects of nature, wild
and magnificent or dainty and serene.
Blackie had his direct inspirations many
and large. Even his adaptations and
imitations are more in form than material,
and the Blackie spirit glows all through
them. Still, no account of his poetical
works should go forth without a reference
to the other poets who influenced him the
most. Of great English writers, he tells
us, Wordsworth held the most powerful
sway over his early years. "From the
day I became acquainted with Words-
worth," he says,* " I regarded Byron only
as a very sublime avatar of the devil, and
would have nothing to do with him.
With the years of riper manhood the
* " Books That Have Influenced Me," in the
" British Weekly."
232 Professor BlacTcie.
influence of Wordsworth passed away,
because I had appropriated and turned
into blood and bone all the nutriment he
could give me. I now sought guidance
from a man who could help me to achieve
for what the Germans call the objective
half of my nature what the Bible and
Wordsworth had done for the subjective.
I saw the necessity of getting out of
myself and steering free of the besetting
sin of thoughtful young men, viz., philo-
sophising about life, instead of actually
living. In this my need as Shakespeare
was still too big for me what Deus ex
machina could have come to my aid more
effective than the sunny cheerfulness,
strong healthy vitality, Catholic human
sympathy, deep-rooted patriotism, fine
pictorial eye, and rare historic furniture
of Walter Scott P To the poetry of this
greatest literary Scot, whom I soon learned
to associate in sesthetical bonds with the
sunny sobriety of Homer and the great
Greeks, I owe in no small measure that
close connection with the topography and
the local history of my country which
appears in my poetical productions, and
Poet and Versemaker. 233
which, if these are destined in any smallest
degree to live in the memory of my
countrymen, will be the element that has
most largely contributed to their vitality."
After all, as the poet-professor knew
and said, " to live poetry is better than
to write it ; " and he did both. " A
poetical life is just a life opposed to all
sameness and all selfishness; eagerly
seizing upon the good and beautiful from
all quarters." " What live we but for
this ? " he asked in one of his noblest
sonnets, on the death of General Gordon :
What lire we but for this P
Into the sour to breathe the soul of sweetness,
The stunted growth to rear to fair completeness,
Drown sneers in smiles, kill hatred with a kiss,
And to the sandy waste bequeath the fame
That the grass grew behind us when we oame.
XIX.
THE GOOD, THE TRUE, AND
THE BEAUTIFUL.
IT has always been a marvel that a
strictly orthodox country like Scotland
should have developed a love and admira-
tion so intense for a heretic, above all for
a heretic militant, whose spear was for
ever pricking orthodoxy between the ribs.
To explain this, it is not enough to say
that his genius, his charming personality,
his patriotic achievements, were allowed
to cover a multitude of metaphysical sins.
"I remember," an old student says,
"a good old Highlander, one of the old
school of rigid Calvinists, making the
remark one afternoon: ( Eh, sic a man,
he's naether orthodox, nor heterodox, nor
ony ither kind o' " dox," but jist himselV "
But being "jist himseP " would scarcely
have averted the anger of the orthodox,
if he had not, as sometimes milder heretics
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 235
have not, been able to make his nation
feel the essential unity between the core
of his religion and of theirs.
No man ever had a more consuming
abhorrence of shams, or was less hindered
by conventional considerations from pub-
licly opposing what he thought untrue.
All the more significant, therefore, were
those " foundations of belief " which he
felt and declared to be solid under his
feet. There were things which he could
not understand, could not even know ; but
he did not make a fetish of agnosticism,
persuading himself that facts as clear and
powerful as any in human experience
should be neglected as unknowable.
" The irreligious man," in Blackie's
judgment, " is an imperfect creation ; the
irreligious woman is a monster." " Reli-
gion is as essential to human nature as
poetry." " Atheists," he says in another
place, "whether speculative or practical,
are mostly crotchet-mongers and puzzle-
brains ; fellows who spin silken ropes in
which to strangle themselves. There is
something that stands above all fingering,
all microscopes, and all curious diagnosis,
236 Professor BlacMe.
and that is simply LIFE; and life is
simply energising Reason ; and energising
Reason is only another name for God."
In a f< Hymn for British Workmen " he
wrote :
Time was when ye were not ;
Through lightless depths forlorn
The Eternal Father shot
His ray, and ye were born.
Eyen Him praise ye,
Whose quickening light
Redeems from night
All things that be !
At a meeting of the Royal Society of
Edinburgh five years ago a discussion
arose on human evolution, and Professor
Rutherford made some remark as to the
possible production of thought by the
evolution of molecular mechanism in the
brain. Then Blackie rose. There were
various kinds of nonsense, he remarked
metaphysical, theological, and scientific,
and what had been talked at that meeting
was scientific nonsense. Flourishing his
stick and striding over to the offending
physiologist, he exclaimed, " Evolution of
everything out of nothing ! It is utter
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 237
nonsense. Did you ever see a web without
a weaver? Without God no Rutherford
is possible, no Eojal Society is possible."
Long before, in 1856, he described him-
self as " wielding the cudgel for old
Plato against all materialists, utilitarians,
French encyclopaedists, f practical men,'
and persons who have a retail trade in
the tangible." But he had no quarrel
with science, no desire to clip its wings :
he only refused to " look for the good, the
true, and the beautiful on the insides of
worms and oysters."
He did not trouble himself with meta-
physical problems the solution of which,
if solution could be found, would have no
practical result. " The Bible is a practical
book," he said, " and he who does not use
it practically had better not read it."
Some poor brain had been puzzling over
" the origin of evil." The origin of evil ?
said Blackie,
Evil exists that you may make it good ;
Else had the saints on earth scant work to do !
What would you have P In Paradise, no doubt,
Weeds grandly grew, and Adam plucked them
out.
238 Professor Blackie.
Close by our door is fruitful work to do ;
Accept the task and own the work Divine :
Sow, plant, or build, drain fields, or cleave the
clod,
But spend no time in arguing with God.
The literary and theological problems
so keenly discussed by Biblical critics he
put aside with an equally contented mind.
In a letter to his brother-in-law, who had
been writing on " The Unity of Isaiah,"
Blackie said : " I am a man of action,
and must have terra firma to stand on,
and therefore have systematically eschewed
all slippery questions, whether in philo-
logical criticism or theological dogma,
which, however answered, can lead with
me to no practical result, or, rather, from
the character of my mental constitution,
must end as they began in doubt."
He was not uninterested in the study of
comparative religion, however, nor in-
capable of forming an opinion in which
common sense and learning were combined.
At the foot of a letter to the same cor-
respondent, asking information as to the
religious beliefs of savage races, this post-
script appears : " Buddha certainly was
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 239
a very sublime driveller. Nothing more
ridiculous than virtue when it enters into
a war with nature."
The Professor's book called "Four
Phases of Morals" is an elaborate com-
parison, full of wisdom, of the Socratic,
Aristotelian, Christian and Utilitarian
systems. We have heard his terse opinion
of Utilitarianism. His conclusions on the
subject of Christianity must be quoted.
Christianity, he says, "is essentially an
ethical religion ; other religions favour
certain virtues, or give a certain sanction
to all virtues; but Christianity is morality."
It " is not a special training which pious
persons are to go through in order to
prepare themselves for a future world."
" Neither, again, does the famous doctrine
of St. Paul, that men are saved by faith,
not by works, in any wise contradict the
essentially ethical character of the faith
which he preached. The works which in
the Epistle to the Romans he so uncon-
ditionally denounces are works either of
self-conceit or of sacerdotal imposition."
From the eleventh chapter of Hebrews,
" the only part of the New Testament, by
240 Professor BlacTcie.
the way, in which a formal definition of
faith is given," " it is plain to any child
that faith is merely a religious synonym
for what we in secular language call moral
heroism a heroism peculiarly marked as
Christian only by the distinct recognition
on the part of the actor that the moral
law which he obeys is the accredited
will of the Moral Governor whom he
serves."
As religion was the best of possessions,
so he saw Christianity was the best of
religions. But he was scrupulously fair to
the religious men of non-Christian times.
"I hope," he once wrote to a friend,
"you will never allow yourself to speak
slightingly of those noble heathens, Plato,
Zeno, Socrates, and hundreds more. They
were witnesses to the highest truths in a
practical style from which many of our
modern talking and sentimentalising
evangelists might learn a great deal."
Two of these noble heathen, along with
a Christian apostle and a modern philo-
sopher, supplied the mottoes with which
the Professor covered the fly-leaf of an
autograph book for the present writer in
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 241
1881. This is a reduced facsimile of the
page :
The mottoes may be rendered thus :
From heaven comes all that makes for human
excellence; from the gods come wise men, and
men of mighty hand and eloquent speech.
PlNDAE.
16
242 Professor Blackie.
It is by our work that we purchase all good
things from the gods. EPICHARMOS.
All noble things are as difficult as they are
rare. SPINOZA.
" Hard as the heather, lasting as the fir."
GAELIC PROVERB.
Speaking the truth in love. PAUL.
In answer to a letter from his sister the
Professor wrote : " What you say about
Psalm xxx. is true ; but not only there
everywhere in the Psalms we find piety
coupled with a lusty and triumphant
humanity. David was a complete MAN.
Our modern religionists are too often
melancholy fragments. I prefer a jolly
heathen to your puling lily-livered Chris-
tians of a certain type, who count it a
virtue to be always dreaming about the
future world because they have not pith to
live effectually in the present. Sancte
Socrates, or a pro nobis ! "
It was in the daring form of a litany to
that heathen saint that he flung out the
sorrow of his soul for the unlovely narrow-
ness of men who think themselves
Christians. He saw the same fault in high
Calvinist and high Sacerdotalist. Once
The Good, True, and Beautiful* 243
he told a story of a Highland boy, in the
neighbourhood of Dingwall, to whom a
young lady was showing a series of small
pictures representing human figures. A
grim and gigantic warrior, in the act of
dealing a heavy blow with his club, caught
the boy's eye, and immediately he came
out with the question : " Is this God ? "
" A more pregnant satire," said Blackie,
f ' on the grim theology of the Caledonian
Calvinists cannot be conceived. Out of
the mouth of babes and sucklings Thou
hast perfected reproof ! "
Having passed "the grim waste of a
prickly scholastic theology," he was
anxious to help others across. tc Tests
and orthodoxy," in his experience, " have
done more harm to the growth of true
Christian piety in this country than any-
thing that I know." The test having
been abolished in the case of professors,
let it now be abolished in the case of
ministers. " If it be manifestly through
all the physical world a prime purpose in
the mind of the Supreme Reason to create
as great a variety of differentiated indivi-
duals as possible, under a common type,
244 Professor BlacJcie.
it cannot be according to His will that
absolute identity, and with it monotony,
should prevail in the moral world. The
fact is that, if honestly carried out, as
a sacerdotal pedant like Laud or a stiff
old Calvinist like the late Dr. Begg would
carry it out, the unqualified subscription
would result in filling the Church with a
motley troop of the most unthinking,
servile, superficial, shallow, sophistical,
and hypocritical persons that could be
found in the country."
While he criticised all the churches, not
one would he utterly condemn. ff I love
them all with a perfect love," he said;
and he went to them all, or to a sufficient
variety of them. He had the breadth of
his mother, who often went to hear
Methodist and other dissenting preachers,
being dissatisfied with the Established
ministrations. Her son " always regarded
Methodism as a potent spur in the lazy
flanks of John Bull," and thought it not
entirely misplaced even in the capital of
Scotland, where we hear of him presiding
at a Methodist meeting and writing a
sonnet to the minister. He has been seen,
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 245
for that matter, on the same platform
with General Booth and his "hallelujah
lasses." So far was he from being
annoyed at the existence of Dissent, he
approved of it on principle. Bead this
remarkable passage in his " Four Phases " :
<f Priests are not known in the Church.
The people only are the priesthood ; each
individual in the congregation has the
value and the dignity of a priest. Prom this
equality of personal dignity before God
two remarkable phenomena have flowed,
both specially characteristic of modern
society the abolition of slavery and the
rivalry of religious sects. . . . The
external unity after which some religious
persons sigh existed naturally under
heathenism, where the individual con-
science was merged in the State, exists
now also in Popish countries, where the
same conscience is merged in the priest-
hood ; but in the Christianity of the early
Church, founded as it was on a direct
appeal to the conscience of the individual
sinner, such a purely external and
mechanical idea could find no place. The
right to exist at all as a Church estab-
246 Professor BlacJcie.
lished the right to dissent from other
churches by asserting its own convictions
when such assertion seemed necessary.
. . . Christianity has thus become the
great mother of moral individualism, and
the many sects, which are so apt to annoy
us with their petty jealousies, are, when
more closely viewed, merely a true index
to the intensity of our spiritual life."
" Dissent from any dominant body, even
though it may proceed from the exagger-
ated importance given to a secondary
matter, will always produce the good re-
sult that the dominant body will thereby
be stirred to greater activity and greater
watchfulness; so that, in this view, we
may lay it down as one of the great lessons
of history that the best form of church
government is a strong establishment
qualified by a strong dissent." *
Not that he was blind to the advantages
of unity. " Unity," as he said, "is the
indispensable condition of all common
action," and he was scandalised, as others
are, at the failure of Christian societies to
act in common for the suppression of the
* What does History Teach ?
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 247
evils denounced by their common Leader.
But why should common action be put
off till amalgamation and uniformity
were attained supposing these to be
desirable 9 " A harmony is achieved," he
said, referring to the history of religion in
Scotland since 1843, "in the common
action of two divided forces that to the
undivided unity was denied." * And writ-
ing to a friend in the southern kingdom,
he said: "I have never been able to
understand why Churchmen a.nd Dissen-
ters should not live together like brethren,
as only different varieties of the same
species, each having its peculiar and in-
communicable excellence." "Let the
churches be different and love one another,
and until they learn that they have not
learnt their A B C."
One matter on which the Churches
might agree to differ, he thought, was the
form of church organisation. "I am a
good Presbyterian," he wrote in "Alma
Mater" six years ago, "but have no quarrel
with Episcopacy, or even Popery, as a
mere form of government in the Church.
* Christianity and the Ideal of Humanity.
248 Professor Blackie.
But if any man assert that one special
form of church government, Popery, Pres-
bytery, or Episcopacy, is of Divine institu-
tion and of universal obligation, against
such doctrine I protest, both as a reveren-
tial student of the course of God's doings
in Providence, and as a philologer trained
to the just interpretation of historical
writings." " The form of social existence
which the early Church assumed was that
which naturally belongs to a brotherly
association, democratic ; . . . but all
that the Apostles required was that all
things should be done decently and in
order."*
"Only in one point," he says in a
private letter, "I can agree with the
democratic theories of the hour, that if
democracy is practicable anywhere it is in
the Christian Church; because in that
Church, or perhaps in the very idea of the
Christian religion, there are principles and
tendencies which go right in the teeth of
* "Christianity and the Ideal of Humanity";
including also articles on the " Place of Women,"
"The Scottish Covenanters," "Wisdom," and
"David, King of Israel."
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 249
that rebellious individualism and inor-
ganic confusion and factious hostility
which sooner or later drive democracy
into its natural culmination of absolute
despotism."
Blackie's personal position in the matter
of church fellowship was peculiar. " I
support the Established Church in policy,
but I attend the Free," was his own way of
putting it. He was a strong opponent of
disestablishment. In a letter written during
the Irish Church controversy of 1868, he
expressed his opinion that disestablish-
ment would be (f extremely unwise " even
in England, and " an unmixed evil in
Scotland." In the same letter, however,
he said : tf I do not anticipate much harm
from the contemplated overthrow of the
Established Churches of this country."
When he came to live in Edinburgh in
1852 the Professor became a regular at-
tendant at the St. John's Free Church, be-
cause Dr. Guthrie was the minister a man
whom he coupled with another reverend
nobleman, Norman Macleod : " Two men,
the large human breadth, the sunny cheer-
fulness, the strong good sense, and the
250 Professor BlacJcie.
dignified grace of whose preaching will
remain deeply engraven on every Scottish
heart as long as Scotland is Scotland."
The stricter State-Churchmen did not
accept this excuse from the man they had
supported for the Greek Chair; but he
cared nothing for their cavillings. He
" could not see the difference between
Free Kirk and State Kirk without a
microscope." In later years the Professor
generally attended the Free High Church,
finding edification both in the public
ministry and the private friendship of the
poet-preacher, Dr. Walter C. Smith.
If a preacher were earnest, Blackie
could tolerate him; and any preacher
blest with honesty and sense could be
sure of a warm appreciation. No preach-
ing, however wonderful, could satisfy him
if it were not practical. What, he asked,
would Christ say of our
Slowness to love, and hot haste to be rich,
Folly high-throned, and wisdom in the ditch ?
What would he think of our " gilded
parades," and " sense conjured into non-
sense in God's name"? "It is not by
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 251
acts of formal imputation of the righteous-
ness of the Saviour that Christians are
rendered worthy of eternal life," this
prophet said in the last book he wrote ;
" it is by living faith in a divinely com-
missioned teacher, manifested in the
career of a Christlike life of devotion to
the cause of humanity and the offspring
of a Divine Father." "One thing is
needful," he had said twenty years be-
fore; " money is not needful; power
is not needful ; cleverness is not need-
ful; fame is not needful; liberty is
not needful; even health is not the
one thing needful; but character alone
a thoroughly cultivated will is that
which can truly save us; and if we are
not saved in this sense we must certainly
be damned." * This is what he had in
mind when he declared that " No educa-
tion is complete of which Christianity is
not an integral part." The heresies that
fill the whole vision of some educationists
were of quite secondary importance in
Blackie's eyes. "Nothing is more cer-
tain," he wrote in 1887, " than that the
* Self- Culture.
252 Professor Blackie.
early confessors and martyrs never were
called upon to commit themselves to any
such doctrinal subtleties " as we find in the
creeds; "and in the Epistles of the
Apostles a man must be strangely blinded
who does not see that the ' heresies '
which they most sweepingly condemn are
not defections from intellectual doctrine,
but from a holy life.
" Creeds and confessions P Well, I will confess
An honest creed. Where'er I look abroad
I see the living form and face of God,
Which men call Nature ; all whose loveliness
I garner in my soul with pious care ;
And when I look within, in thoughtful hour,
I feel a shaping presence and a power
That makes me know the same great God is there.
What more P That were enough, had men been
true
To their best selves ; but, by base lust enticed,
They fell : till God stretched forth His hand, and
drew
Them from the mire, by His own Son the Christ.
Leave me to Him, in His bright face to see
God's imaged will, from gloss and dogma free ! " *
Among Blackie's heresies that of which
he heard most perhaps because other
* In "The Pall Mall Gazette."
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 253
folk heard most of it was his anti-
Sabbatarianism. On one Sunday evening,
eleven years ago, he gave a lecture in
Glasgow on "The Philosophy of Love."
When he came to speak of the love songs
of Scotland he waved prejudice aside and
burst out with " Kelvin Grove" by way
of illustration. A few days afterwards an
anonymous artist sent him a sketch of
himself, the Sabbath-breaking Professor,
carried off on the back of Auld Hornie.
But while Blackie was no believer in rigid
rules for the observance of Sabbath or
any other day, he urged, as a practical
man, that the day of rest should be used
for quiet and steady thought as well as
for genuine recreation. His own Sunday
mornings he generally spent in studying
the Bible, especially the Psalms and the
New Testament, which few if any ministers
knew more thoroughly. Later in the day
he went to church, and this was no mere
concession to conventionality. " He is not a
wise man," he said, " who does not devote
at least one part of the Christian Sabbath
to the serious work of moral self-review.
Not a few severe criticisms have been
254 Professor BlacJcie.
made by foreigners on what has been
called the { bitter observance* of the
Sunday by the Scotch, but these hasty
critics ought to have reflected how much
of the solidity, sobriety, and general re-
liability of the Scottish character is owing
to their serious and thoughtful observ-
ance of these recurrent periods of sacred
rest."*
Even his love of beauty was a stumbling-
block to many of his fellow-countrymen.
If he had kept his sesthetical apostleship
away from the kirk, well and good. But
when he told the Scottish people to ex-
press their religious feelings through
beautiful services in beautiful churches,
his doctrine seemed to savour of papistry.
He once asked some Dingwall folks why
they did not cultivate a few flowers around
their church, and was told " The lust of
the eye is dangerous." " If we are not
to appreciate beauty," said he, " why did
God Almighty make so many bonnie
lasses P " " Giving a graceful dress to a
good thing is surely a part of wisdom,
inasmuch as it never can be consistent
* Self-Culture.
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 255
either with reason or love to present a
good thing to the eye in a repulsive aspect.
If mere outward beauty in itself is of
little value, when accompanied with in-
ward virtue it is always, as Aristotle says,
a good introduction, and deserves where-
ever possible to stand in the foreground."
An ugly dress, an ugly building, or any
other blot on the face of town or country,
roused the Professor's indignation. " In
this world, everything which we see, or
which we are, either is beautiful, or tends
towards beauty, or has fallen away from
beauty ; a calculated tendency to, or
normal aspiration after ugliness, is no
part of the system of things to which we
belong. Deformity is in no case the essen-
tial type, but only the accidental variety,
of created things."*
Beautiful world!
Though bigots condemn tnee,
My tongue finds no words
For the graces that gem thee
Beaming with sunny light,
Bountiful ever,
Streaming with gay delight,
Full as a river !
* Discourses on Beauty.
256 Professor Blaclcie.
Bright world ! Brave world !
Let cavillers blame th.ee.
I bless thee and bend
To the God who did frame thee ! *
He loved beauty in every aspect, just as
he loved religion in all the churches.
Name the leaves on all the trees,
Name the waves on all the seas,
Name the notes of all the groves-
Thus thou namest all my loves.
I do love the stately dame
And the sportive girl the same ;
Every changeful phase between
Blooming cheek and brow serene.
Paris was a pedant fool,
Meting beauty by a rule ;
Pallas? JunoP Yenus P he
Should have chosen all the three.f
The public became acquainted with the
Professor's doctrine of the beautiful
chiefly in the form of pungent sayings
dropped in the course of lectures on that
or any other subject; and the public
laughed and clapped its hands. But
anything like a complete summary of
* Songs of Religion and Life.
t In Rogers's " Scottish Minstrel."
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 257
his views, always interesting, on this
extremely interesting subject, must be
sought in the book he published in 1858,
" On Beauty : Three Discourses de-
livered in the University of Edinburgh,
with an exposition of the Doctrine of the
Beautiful according to Plato." In this
work he traced the British scepticism re-
garding beauty to several causes : " 1. The
general irreligious and materialistic type
of opinion dominant in this country during
the last century, partly inherited from the
court of Charles II. and the low morality
of the Cavaliers, and partly imported from
France. 2. The character of the philoso-
phy of Locke, who had nothing of the
aesthetic element in his mental constitu-
tion." A third explanation specially
concerned Scotland. " We had proclaimed
a divorce," he said, " between religion and
the fine arts, for no better reason than
because their marriage had been cele-
brated by the Pope." " We were, more-
over, a very practical and utilitarian
people. Our people were ignorant; our
clergy were indifferent; our professors
were cold ; our best men of culture lived
17
258 Professor Blackie.
under the freezing influence of the
'Edinburgh Review.' Thus Beauty was
publicly butchered in the streets of the
'Modern Athens' in the beginning of
the eighteenth century, as heretics were
wont to be burnt in Rome ; and no man
wept."
The writer of such words and of such
verses as we have just read naturally took
a warm interest in the Chair of Fine
Art established in his university in 1879.
Professor Baldwin Brown, in a public
reference to this a few months ago, said
that Blackie had lived to see some of the
fruit of his labour, at any rate in the
churches. And this brings us back from
what, if the beautiful could be separated
from the good and the true, would be a
digression. In Blackie's healthy mind
there was no such separation; he would
allow no rupture of "the holy alliance
between sweet sounds and a saintly life."
With artistic exaggeration he declares,
" without any disparagement to Chalmers
and other great masters of pulpit elo-
quence, that no sermons ever preached
so powerfully bring forth the fulness of
TJie Good, True, and Beautiful. 259
devout emotion in the soul as the oratorios,
anthems and hymns of our great musical
composers." This feeling helped him to
see good in " even the Puseyites," though
These square caps
Give their free right hand to the Pope to us
With grudging grace their left :
men whose " genuflexions and grimaces "
seemed to him but dry husks from which
the juice was squeezed in bygone centuries.
Writing many years ago from an English
town, he says : " I see nothing but zeal
and propriety wherever I go ; and even the
Puseyites, who are natural enemies to my
free nature, show so much purity and
truth that I cannot think a church ripe
for destruction where so many various
types of good stand forth. If the world
can be saved by churches, established or
dissenting, I think this country looks
prosperous. But there are many things
which churches cannot do ; and I confess
I look for a new prophet who will write
the economical, the philosophical, and the
moral into one great whole, for the con-
struction of which the materials are being
260 Professor BlacJde.
now collected. However, the age is a
very good age, and the doctrine not all
a bad doctrine, though it does not satisfy
me I can afford to live without having
a perfectly correct theory of life."
He had, what is far more to the purpose,
two sources of inspiration: the Bible,
"the book of my life," as he called it,
and prayer, in which he engaged before
every serious act of his life, "not as a
cold form, but as a fervid reality." These
were " extenuating circumstances " that
few Scotsmen could set aside in judging
John Stuart Blackie; and there was a
third virtue which turned the scale in his
favour with all but the dourest critics. A
more striking proof of Blackie's catho-
licity could hardly be conceived than his
love for the Scottish Covenanters. One
man, repelled by their gloomy creed and
unlovely ways, might compel himself as
an act of justice to admit their courage
and stubborn consistency. Another, a hot
partisan of the Covenant, might in the
same way give a grudging recognition to
the truths and beauties they trampled
underfoot. Blackie had inherited Jacobite
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 261
blood through his Stuart ancestry and Cov-
enanting blood through the Naismiths ;
and his enthusiasm was on both sides.
We have heard his vehement condem-
nation of the theological and sesthetical
defects we inherit from these puritans.
We must listen to his praise of their
virtues, his bold defence of their rudest
methods, to his eager appreciation of the
boons they conferred upon Scotland.
Praise and blame came equally without
stint and without partiality. With all
his natural leaning towards the picturesque
and anti-puritan side, he could declare
that the true heroes in the great struggle
between king and people were the
Covenanters and not the Cavaliers.
The king lost his head fools may whimper and
whine;
But he lost it, believe me, by judgment divine.
Our kings were the godly, the grey-plaided men,
Who preached on the mountains and prayed in
the glen.
We met Mrs. Jenny Geddes in the last
chapter. A minister who once heard him
eing in her praise recalls the Professor's
262 Professor Blackie.
epilogue : " She was quite right. The
Pope himself would object to a religion
being thrust down his throat ! " A Pope
with a sense of humour would at any rate
enjoy that remark.
There is no room here for a companion
song to Jenny Geddes, " The Merry Ballad
of Stock Geill." It is the story of a
" papistical " image that set out on a
procession through Edinburgh streets,
but never came home again : (( a merry
gest that gave the Pope a shog," when " we
dashed his bones against the stones and
his stump in flinders flew ! " There is
one Covenanting ballad, however, in
" Lyrical Poems " that must have a place
here :
THE TWO MEEK MARGARETS.
It fell on a day in the blooming month of May,
When the trees were greenly growing,
That a captain grim went down to the brim
O' the sea, when the tide was flowing.
Twa maidens he led, that captain grim,
Wi' his red-coat loons behind him,
Twa meek-faced maids, and he sware that he
In the salt sea-swell should bind them.
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 263
And a' the burghers of Wigton town
Came down full sad and cheerless,
To see that ruthless captain drown
Those maidens meek and fearless.
O what had they done, these maidens meek,
What crime all crimes excelling,
That they should be staked on the ribbed sea-sand,
And drowned, where the tide was swelling ?
O wae's me, wae ! but the truth I maun say !
Their crime was the crime of believing
Not man, but God, when the last false Stuart
His Popish plot was weaving.
O spare them ! spare them ! thou captain grim !
No ! No ! to a stake he hath bound them,
Where the floods as they flow, and the waves as
they grow,
Shall soon be deepening round them.
The one had threescore years and three ;
Far out on the sand they bound her,
Where the first dark flow of the waves as they grow
Is quickly swirling round her.
The other was a maiden fresh and fair ;
More near to the land they bound her,
That she might see by slow degree
The grim waves creeping round her.
O captain, spare that maiden grey,
She's deep in the deepening water !
No, no she's lifted her hand to pray,
And the choking billow caught her !
264 Professor BlacTcie.
See, see, young maid, cried the captain grim,
The wave shall soon ride o'er thee !
She's swamped in the brine, whose sin was like
thine;
See that same fate before thee !
I see the Christ who hung on a tree
When His life for sins He offered ;
In one of His members, even He
With that meek maid hath suffered.
captain, save that meek young maid ;
She's a loyal farmer's daughter !
Well, well ! let her swear to good King James,
And I'll hale her out of the water !
1 will not swear to Popish James,
But I pray for the head of the nation,
That he and all, both great and small,
May know God's great salvation !
She spoke ; and lifted her hands to pray,
And felt the greedy water,
Deep and more deep, around her creep,
Till the choking billow caught her.
O Wigton, Wigton ! I'm wae to sing
The truth o' this waesome story ;
But God will sinners to judgment bring,
And His saints shall reign in glory.
With such horrors as this in his mind,
who can wonder that Blackie's " Lines
written at Magus Muir " became an
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 265
apology for the murderers of an arch-
bishop :
Lament who will the surplice rent,
And mitre trampled low ;
I cannot think the blow misspent
That felled our priestly foe.
Who sent him here P A perjured king.
His work ? With churchman's art
To bind young Freedom's mounting wing
And crush a people's heart.
* *
So perish all who join the name
Of Christ with tyranny !
Prate not of law and lawyer's art !
When kingly sin is rife
The law is in a people's heart
That whets the needful knife.
O Scotland ! O my country ! Thou
Through blood hast waded well ;
From glorious Bannockburn till now
The tyrant hears his knell
Rung from thy iron heart. And we,
In lone rock-girdled glen,
Or purple heath, erect and free,
From harsh knife-bearing men
Inherit peace. Lament who will
The mitre trampled low
Not all are murderers who kill :
The cause commends the blow.
266 Professor Blackie.
A doubtful doctrine this, for easy
times ; but the poet saw with the eyes of
seventeenth-century Scotsmen, and felt the
iron that had entered into their soul. As
he put it in prose, writing to commend
the project of a monument for Peden the
Prophet, " There cannot be a doubt in the
mind of any intelligent student of history
that, as we owe our political independence
to the valour and stout endurance of
Wallace and Bruce, so the rights of con-
science were secured to us by the perse-
vering efforts of the men who, from John
Knox downwards, based our Scottish Pro-
testantism, not on the ordinances of the
monarch, but on the convictions of the
people." The Peden Monument was
inaugurated by the Professor on his visit
to Cumnock in 1892, when he also made
a pilgrimage to Richard Cameron's grave
on the battlefield of Ayrsmoss. Nearly
thirty years before he had been one of
the chief speakers at the erection of an
obelisk to mark the spot, in Sanquhar,
where Cameron and his followers de-
clared war against the Stuart dynasty in
1680.
The Goody True, and Beautiful. 267
Far back in the story we saw John
Stuart Blackie, after mounting the pulpit
stair, turn back without entering and
come down again. This seems a con-
venient place to say that he did stand
in the pulpit after all, with his neck free
from bands and his name from "the
reverend." A volume of " Lay Sermons,"
published in 1881, he describes as origin-
ating in a series of Sunday evening
addresses which he gave to the Young
Men's Association connected with Dr.
Guthrie's congregation. The book con-
tains, however, at least two discourses
preached on Sunday ovenings in St.
David's Established Church, of which
the Rev. Alexander Webster was minister.
"At a meeting of the Hellenic Club,"
Mr. Webster says, "Blackie made some
kindly allusions to myself, and I in
return said it was a great pity he
was not a minister, for I was sure he
could preach as well as most ministers.
'Yes,' said he, 'I think I could, and I
don't mind trying in your church.' He
did try, and his first sermon was on ' The
Politics of Christianity ' ; the second was on
268 Professor Blackie.
'The Land Laws,' and a very racy discourse
it was." His other subjects included f ( The
Creation/' "The Jewish Sabbath,"
"Faith," "The Utilisation of Evil,"
"The Dignity of Labour," "The Scottish
Covenanters," and " Symbolism, Cere-
monialism, Formalism, and the New
Creature." From any or all of these
might be quoted his now familiar views in
bright and original setting ; but we must
leave Blackie the Preacher. With Blackie
the inspirer of preachers we have been
dealing all along. Scotland has been
often taught by him unawares through
other lips. Here is one instance of a
prompting more direct than that which
came to many sermon-makers through
his books. Some time ago a minister
received from the Professor a series
of te:sts, with a few " heads " and
"versicles" to suggest the outline of
possible sermons thereon. The texts
themselves are very suggestive of the
Professor's own way of thinking : Judge
not according to appearance, but judge
a righteous judgment ; Mind not high
things, but condescend to men of low
The Good, True, and Beautiful. 269
estate ; " The woman whom Thou gavest
to be with me, she gave me of the tree
and I did eat " :
When you are blamed as God blamed Adam,
Blame yourself and not your madam ;
My brethren, be not many teachers;
Praise the Lord with dance ; As a jewel
of gold in a swine's mouth, so is a fair
woman without discretion ; Speaking evil
of dignities ; Speaking the truth in love ;
Let every soul be subject to the higher
powers ; Be not ye called Eabbi !
This account of Blackie as a teacher of
religion cannot better be closed than by a
prayer of his own according to one who
loved him much, " the sweetest and most
pathetic thing he ever wrote " :
O for a beart from self set free,
And doubt and fret and care,
Ligbt as a bird, instinct with glee,
That fans the breezy air !
O for a mind whose virtue moulds
All sensuous fair display,
And, like a strong commander, holds
A world of thoughts in sway!
270 Professor BlacTcie.
O for an eye that's clear to see,
A hand that waits on Fate,
To pluck the ripe fruit from the tree,
And never comes too late !
O for a life with firm- set root
And breadth of leafy green,
And flush of blooming wealth and fruit
That glows with mellow sheen !
O for a death from sharp alarms
And bitter memories free :
A gentle death in God's own arms,
Whose dear Son died for me
SELF-CULTURE," AND SOME
OTHER BOOKS.
<( THE pen always makes me serious," said
Blackie ; but it never made him dull. Pew
writers have had the gift of treating at
once so sunnily and so seriously important
topics that are generally disfigured with
gloom. Sir William Hamilton, who has
been described as " knowing everything,"
wrote to Blackie in 1852, " Your writings
display, with much curious learning,
remarkable originality and force." This
judgment needs no discounting, though
it was a testimonial. Blackie him-
self said little of his literary pro-
ductions ; but his answer to a recent
interviewer may be quoted: "Of my
philological works the Horse Hellenicse
and the ' Wise Men of Greece,'
and my f Homer and the Iliad,' contain
some of my best work; while in poetry
272 Professor Blackie.
the ( Wise Men of Greece ' and the
' Lays of the Highlands and t Islands *
seem to have pleased; but these things
don't trouble me much ! "
Most of his books have been already
mentioned and many of them laid under
contribution in the telling of this story ;
but several demand more notice. " Self-
Culture " in particular refuses to be dis-
missed in a summary fashion. Few of
its companions had a very wide circle of
readers ; but this book has run through
twenty-four editions, not to speak of a
shorthand version, in this country ; it has
been well pirated in the United States;
and it has been translated into French,
German, Italian, Greek, in fact almost
every European language and I believe
several others. The book was written as
a holiday amusement in a summer month,
and the Professor at first meant it for
a trio of lectures to his students
in Edinburgh. The students doubtless
got most of its wisdom in the course of
lectures on Greek literature; and the
second thoughts of the author gained him
a world-wide audience of students old and
"Self-Culture," and Other Books. 273
young. The financial profit on this little
book of ninety pages, the smallest of all
his works, handsomely made up for the
author's loss on his largest, the four-
volume Homer. "The little book is
really a wonder," the author wrote to a
friend soon after its issue. " Hath not
God chosen the foolish things of this
world to confound the wise, and the little
books to take the breath out of the big
ones ! " It was not for money he wrote,
however. Excluding " Self -Culture " on
the one hand and "Bomer" on the
other, the total sales of his books did
not reach the cost of their produc-
tion. He wrote, as he sang, because he
must. He had a message to give, and he
could not hold it back. "It seems my
destiny to be a bookmaker," he wrote
in 1883, " and no man need try to escape
his destiny any more than to jump out of
his skin." Such reward as he cared about
he found in the improvement and the
gratitude of his fellow-men. Letters of
thanks for the strengthening, stimulating
and brightening influences of his little
book came from e^ery class of society
18
274 Professor BlacTcie.
and all quarters of the globe. "I
have often looked upon Self-Culture,"
a poor minister's wife wrote lately, " as
coming next to my Bible. Years ago I
could, by having frequently read it, repeat
many portions by heart." A few scraps
added here to the previous quotations may
help to create an appetite for the whole
production. No attempt is made to sum-
marise the whole book, or to follow the
Professor's careful classification, which
largely adds to the usefulness of the book
as " a Vade Mecum for Young Men and
Students, on Self-Culture, Intellectual,
Physical, and Moral."
" An idle man is like a housekeeper who
keeps the doors open for any burglar. It
is a grand safeguard when a man can say,
* Variety of occupation is my greatest
pleasure, and when my task is finished I
know how to lie fallow, and with soothing
rest prepare myself for another bout of
action/ J:
" It is a great loss to a man when he
cannot laugh; but a smile is useful
specially in enabling us lightly to shake
off the incongruous, not in teaching us to
"Self-Culture," and Other Boolcs. 275
cherish it. Life is an earnest matter ; and
no man was ever made great or good bj a
diet of broad grins. There is no more sure
sign of a shallow mind than the habit of
seeing always the ludicrous side of things ;
for the ludicrous, as Aristotle remarks, is
always on the surface."
" The modern Prussians, like the ancient
Greeks, understand the value of military
drill, and make every man serve his time
in the army ; but we rush prematurely
into the shop, and our citizenship and our
manhood suffer accordingly."
11 To prevent the contagion of bookish-
ness, the best thing a young man can do
is to join a volunteer corps, the drill con-
nected with which will serve the double
purpose of brushing off all taint of pedantry
and girding the loins stoutly for all the
duties that belong to citizenship and active
manhood."
Of games and gymnastics he advises
" for boys and young men, cricket; for
persons of a quiet temperament, and staid
old bachelors, bowls ; for all persons and
all ages, the breezy Scottish game of
golf."
276 Professor Blackie.
" They tell me lie's a great man," once
said a caddie on St. Andrew's links, when
Blackie was playing, " but it takes a man
with a great head to play at golf ! " This
in parenthesis. The Professor resumes :
"In rainy weather, billiards is out of
sight the best game. In comparison with
this, cards are stupid, which at best, in
whist, only exercise the memory. Chess
can scarcely be called an amusement ; it is
a study, and a severe brain exercise, which
for a man of desultory mental activity may
have a bracing virtue but to a systematic
thinker can scarcely act as a relief."
The game to which Blackie himself used
to sit down when the day's work ended
was backgammon. f ' To sip a cup of tea
with Lucian or Aristophanes in one hand
may be both pleasant and profitable ; but
dinner is a more serious affair, and must
be gone about with a devotion of the
whole man." It should be " seasoned
with agreeable conversation, but never
mingled with severe cogitations or per-
plexing problems."
" As for drink, I need not say that a
glass of good beer or wine is always
" Self-Culture," and Other Books. 277
pleasant, and in certain cases may even
be necessary to stimulate digestion; but
healthy young men can never require such
stimulus ; and the more money that a
poor Scotch student can spare from un-
necessary and slippery luxuries, such as
drink and tobacco, the better. Honest
water certainly has this merit, that it
never made any man a sinner ; and of
whisky it may be said that, however bene-
ficial it may be on a wet moor or on the
top of a frosty Ben in the Highlands,
when indulged in habitually it never made
any man either fair or fat. He who
abstains from it altogether will never die
in a ditch, and will always find a penny in
his pocket to help himself and his friend
in an emergency."
This was as far as the Professor went
in his later years as a temperance
reformer. Forty-five years earlier his
hostility to whisky was nothing short of
fanatical, in his father's eyes, and this was
one of the reasons why the young man
was sent to Germany ; though Alexander
Blackie himself had begun life with an
aversion to drinking, and had acquired
278 Professor BlacJcie.
the taste for wine as a social duty ! The
Professor's will was of stubborn metal,
in no danger from our drinking customs,
and he did not always appreciate the
magnitude of the danger to the average
young man.
"Drinking songs," he says in his
book on Highland literature, " are out of
fashion nowadays, and perhaps with no
great loss. It is difficult, however," he
adds, " to conceive the typical Highlander
without whisky. Like a German who
does not drink beer, a Scotsman who
takes no part in ecclesiastical politics, or
an Englishman who does not read " The
Times," he may be a very excellent person
but cannot be accepted as a normal
specimen of the type to which he
belongs." That is the pity of it.
Happily there has been a great change
even in Scotland since the beginning of
the century, when a minister would get
drunk at a funeral.
The book "Four Phases of Morals"
was an expansion of four lectures de-
livered in 1869 before the Eoyal In-
" Self-Oulture," and Other Books. 279
stitution in London, and was dedicated
to the president of that body, Sir Henry
Holland. It has passed through two
editions at home, but it has been of
still greater use abroad. In Kussii, for
instance, it was translated soon after its
first appearance, and was for many years
very popular among students and such
reading public as there is ; but its career
was cut short by administrative order.
Mr. Jaakoff Prelooker, formerly a State
teacher in Odessa, has told the story. He
was announced to lecture on "The
Eeligion of Count Tolstoi" in Old
Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh, a couple
of years ago ; and Professor Blackie, who
had introduced and even entertained
Prince Krapotkin in 1886, had readily con-
sented to preside. The Eussian began
by saying he was particularly glad to
meet the author of a book which had been
condemned to an auto-da-fe by the same
spirit that had driven him, the lecturer,
out of his native land. Up sprang the
chairman, caught the lecturer by his
shoulders, and began to shake him, ex-
claiming, " Dear me, dear me ! What
280 Professor BlacJcie.
book have they interdicted ? " It appeared
that in 1885, "when the reactionary
policy of the late Tsar took a decided
turn for the worse, it was found that the
' Four Phases of Morals ' were not based
on Greek orthodox ethics and did not
even contain any reference to them. And
so the poor book was suppressed by the
censorship and condemned to an auto-da-fe
along with the works of J. S. Mill/*
Blackie's old friend and antagonist, " and
a number of similar works. Apparently,'*
Mr. Prelooker says, " the author of f Four
Phases ' was neither aware of the popu-
larity of his work in Russia nor of its
final suppression there."
Next to Self-Culture, Blackie's Life of
Robert Burns has had a larger circulation
than any of his other works. In a letter
written at the end of 1887 the Professor
says : " I am just putting through the
press a Life of Burns for the ' Great
Writers ' series, which I hope will be
found sympathetic and equitable, and free
from the extremes of patriotic idol wor-
ship and Pharisaic sourfacedness." This
" Self-Culture," and Other Books. 281
was the only book Blackie ever wrote to
order. "I was asked to do it," he told
an interviewer* last year, " and at first I
refused, for I can never do work to order.
I have never done it. But then I thought
a little, and I said to myself : There are
two kinds of persons who may write that
life first, the blind hero-worshipper, who
will write a useless blatant kind of work,
and then another much worse person who
will play the self-righteous moralist with
Burns, and probably look at him through
his own myopic lenses. I felt that I under-
stood Burns, and consented, feeling that
I could find the medium course." The
poet, as the Professor once said, " knew
very well how to preach, but his practice
was a most miserable performance."
The biographer was careful to avoid an
exaggeration of praise even when looking
at Burns as a poet. Nothing, he said,
could be a greater mistake than to
imagine that Burns was the creator of the
lyrical art of his country. " The most
common Scottish song-book is studded
over with songs of first-rate excellence
* For the " English Illustrated Magazine."
282 Professor Blackie.
which derive no inspiration from Burns,
and which Burns, with the loftiest flight
of his genius, could not have surpassed : " *
some of which, indeed, he could not have
equalled.
In 1883, the year after his retirement
from the University, Blackie returned to
that study of German literature which
had brought him his early fame, and which
he had never altogether abandoned. He
now published " The Wisdom of Goethe,"
a selection of passages from the poet's
writings, translated, classified, and pre-
faced by an estimate of the poet's character.
The editor's object was "to impress on
young men with all seriousness " and on
authority which they would respect " that
life, though a pleasant thing, is no joke ;
and that, if they will go to sea without
chart, compass, or pilot, they have a fair
chance to be wrecked." The personal
imperfections of the authority in question
his Scottish admirer does not hide, though
he does explain and extenuate. This
* Preface to " Minstrelsy of the Merse ; the Poets
and Poetry of Berwickshire." 1893.
"Self-Culture," and Other BooJcs. 283
" manual of wise words for guidance in
fruitful action and sound thinking" is
dedicated " to the Rev. Walter Chalmers
Smith, D.D., a large-hearted preacher, a
generous theologian, and a healthy-minded
poet," by " his old friend the editor."
Blackie as a " Scotch reviewer" we have
known in the early days, and we have
seen him modestly thankful that he had
not to go on magazine-writing for a liveli-
hood. But he never deserted the maga-
zines for long. They were a necessary
channel of communication with the great
public to whom the prophet was sent.
The main stream of his message over-
flowed from book and lecture, to form
articles in the magazines, letters to the
newspapers, and sonnets for both.
Mr. Blackwood, in a farewell article last
April, recalled the fact that John Stuart
Blackie had been a contributor to the
pages of "Maga" since 1832. He was
" the oldest contributor, the f aithf ullest
friend, by whom the tradition of the
* Maga ' of the beginning of the century
was handed on to the present day." " H e
284 Professor Blackie.
would come in like a fresh breeze into the
old Saloon, his voice coming before him,
perhaps with a ' Hallo ! ' and stir of
greeting perhaps with an old song:
anyhow and always the most agreeable
interruption."
" Perhaps," Mr. Blackwood says, in a
tone excusably doubtful, "it is a great
deal better that we should have professors
who never heard of Ambrose's nay, that
there should be no Ambrose's, no Nocfces,
no wild talk or laughter such as used to
echo over half the world : but only tea-
drinking and Greek plays, and things
elegant and classical and adapted to the
taste of a more refined generation." ' ' We
liked something that could stand sturdily
against the wind which, alas ! is too fond
of Edinburgh fronting the very East
with a laugh and a shout, not blown off
Southward with all its academic skirts
blowing before it, as soon as the moment
of relief comes."
XXI.
ENGLISH EXCURSIONS.
BLACKIE'S career as a public lecturer
dates from the first half of the century.
The burst of platform activity that
followed his release from class -room duties
in 1882 was only the culmination of an
old habit, restrained at first by diffidence
and always by conflicting duties. Five
years before he left Aberdeen we hear of
him refusing an invitation to speak at the
Watt festival in Dundee. " I might make
a bad speech after all/' he wrote. " A man
should never travel seventy miles unless he
is sure of making a good speech, and my
speaking depends generally so much on
the impulse of the moment that I cannot
calculate on this." " The most telling
things I do," he once remarked, " are acci-
dental." Another invitation to Dundee
next year was accepted, but he would not
promise to speak about any particular
286 Professor Blackie.
topic. " If I were to foreclose myself at
present by fixing a subject, I might have
cause to repent it afterwards," he said ;
and he added, " I never expected you to
pay my expenses, but as the professors
of Marischal College are not remarkable
for wealth, it were affectation in me to
reject the offer when made." The time
came when institutions could afford to
offer his expenses and a good deal more,
regardless of subjects. It came to be an
understood thing that Blackie might do
as he liked with his subject. If he lec-
tured on education he was sure to enter-
tain the audience with a dozen digressions
on matters more or less closely related, such
as Scottish song or the politics of a tiger.
If he lectured on Scottish song, digres-
sions on education were equally certain.
It is a mistake to suppose that he never
prepared his discourses. He would have
the various "heads" scrawled across a
sheet of foolscap, in his pocket if not in
his hand ; and if the sudden digressions
were more slashing the considered sen-
tences were not less pungent and epigram-
matic. Whatever he said, his way of
English Excursions. 287
saying it was unique. The one thing his
audience knew they might expect was the
unexpected ; and an element of personal
risk always lent excitement to the occa-
sion. If the Professor did not stop before
a young lady as he strode up and down the
platform, and demand an answer to some
question he had just thrown out, he would
at least give the chairman a shaking or
nourish a staff within an inch of his
head. In England as well as in Scotland
the Professor's lectures were in great
demand. John Bull heard himself de-
nounced as an insolent monster, and only
cheered.
Where Blackie went the air seemed to
freshen and the clouds to lift. The dis-
tinction of his presence, the kindly keenness
of his tongue, redeemed any London draw-
ing-room from the commonplace. Mr.
Blackwood has this reminisceace : " We
remember once his entrance into the laro-e
o
dim dining-room of the Deanery at West-
minster, in the midst of a decorous party,
faintly literary, in the days of Dean
Stanley who, as is well known, took
Scotland under his protection generally
288 Professor Blackie.
where Blackie's sudden appearance was
like a fresh breeze, the very atmosphere
of the open day amid the subdued tones
of the place."
One of the Professor's London letters
shows him in the more distant company of
another Broad Churchman : " We heard
Maurice last Sunday at Lincoln's Inn
rery beautiful and pious, and harmoniously
thoughtful, but not great or effective.
There seems to be a kind of choking gas
in the English Church which prevents
even superior men from using the bellows
of their lungs in a natural way." This
reminds one of Blackie's eulogy upon the
Scottish pulpit, in his famous speech at
the Wallace Monument stone-laying.
" In the English pulpit," he said, by way
of contiu"t, "the natural vigour and
power of sturdy John Bull seldom appears ;
your Anglican preacher, in fact, does not
preach he reads from a paper, and that
in as tame and toothless a style as possible,
like some lady's dog in a drawing-room, so
exceedingly well-bred that it can neither
bark nor bite and is utterly useless as a
watch. But in Scotland we preach with
English Excursions. 289
our whole hearts and from lusty lungs/*
as well as from a " rich variety of literary
talent."
One of the friends whom Blackie always
went to see in London was Thomas
Carlyle. This paragraph occurs in a letter
dated May 14, and written in 1874, but
the Professor habitually left out the
year : " I paid a flying visit last night to
the Chelsea prophet. I found him flash-
ing about in his usual style of hilarious
savagery and one-sided wisdom, and was
fain to shelter myself against his emphatic
denunciations of all modern ideas under
the triple shield of Heraclitus, Aristotle,
and Hegel. His hand shakes so now that
he can write only in pencil. Otherwise
he is quite well. To-morrow/' adds
the peripatetic Professor, "I leave for
Oxford, Gloucester, Wales, and Dublin.'*
Carlyle was one of the few men with
whom Blackie found it hard to get a fair
share of the conversation. One Sunday
night he went to Chelsea resolved to have
his say. "I contrived," he says in a
published interview,* "by starting as
* In "The Strand Magazine."
10
290 Professor BlacTde.
soon as I got into the room, to open the
conversation, and went on from topic to
topic till they mounted to a dozen; but
to none of my themes would my stout
old friend give an assenting reply. At
last in desperation I shouted out, ( Very
well, I think you've come to " The Ever-
lasting No," so you and I can't agree.' Off
I went ; but we remained good friends for
all that."
"One night I shook him yes, shook
him. His poor wife used to sit there and
never speak. I was in his room on this
particular Sunday, and his wife particularly
wanted to say something. But there was
not the smallest chance. I got up, took
hold of him, and giving him a good
shaking, cried, ' Let your wife speak, you
monster ! ' ; but for all that he wouldn't."
" He was hard-hearted and hated sinners.
He called here " in Edinburgh " once,
just when the great noise was going on
about the convicts being underfed. He
began talking about them. * Pair fellows !
Pair fellows ! ' he said ; ' give them brown
soup and a footstool, and kick them to the
devil/ "
English Excursions. 291
It was to Carlyle that Blackie naturally
inscribed the "War Songs of the Ger-
mans." " My old and esteemed friend,"
the Professor wrote in his dedication,
" you and I have had many stiff battles
about not a few things ; but in two points
I have always felt that we are at one in
a stern love of justice and a hearty de-
testation of all sickly sentiment ; " and
have arrived by independent roads at the
same conclusion on the political relations
of France and Germany.
A letter written to his sister in 1864,
describing a visit to Alfred Tennyson at
Farringford, may be given with little
abbreviation. "He is a big strong-
built fellow," the Professor writes of
the poet, "dark and sallow, more like
a Spanish captain of privateers or an
Italian brigand than like a hilarious
John Bull blushing with health and
activity and port wine ; with a grand
Ionian head and Herculean shoulders.
In manners he is plain, simple, natural,
and rather quiet. He is no match for me
in play of tongue, and I presume a hundred
small wits from town will dominate over
292 Professor BlacJtie.
him in this way ; but what he says is
significant, and he gives you an impres-
sion of thorough honesty, thoughtfulness,
and truthfulness. He has the common
faults of the poetic temperament : that is,
he is apt to be moody, and sometimes
makes himself miserable with odious
trifles which a practical man would skip
over. He has spent 10,000 (he ought to
be specially grateful to Heaven that being
a poet he ever had it to spend) in buying
up the ground around him to prevent
tasteless shopkeepers and Cockneys from
blocking up his beautiful views. Still,
he is sadly annoyed with the ungraceful
boxes which small shopkeepers who have
made a little money put up at his very gates
certainly the plainest little tasteless
pmall piles of brick that I have ever seen,
and peculiarly inappropriate to the green
Isle of Wight and leafy Freshwater. His
wife is a delicate and lovable but some-
what frail flower; but his children are
princes, with the most gentlemanly grace
of limb, the finest features, the most open
expression and the grandest Apollo-like
locks, which, however, imperious custom
English Excursions. 293
at public schools will certainly cause to
suffer speedy amputation. Hitherto they
have been educated at home. I have
nothing more to say except this that
Tennyson would have been a much
happier man if he had some business in
the world besides being a poet. He feeds
too much on himself, wants variety and
action, and is apt to waste time in
fastidious trifling. Scott and Burns re-
present what appears to me a much
more healthy and useful type of poetry
though of course I estimate Tennyson, in
his peculiar line, very highly."
Six years later, Blackie was in London
speaking at the anniversary dinner of the
Royal Literary Fund, of which corporation
he was a member ; and he was put up to
propose a toast " coupled with the name
of Tom Taylor." " Tom Taylor, and not
Thomas Taylor, Esq.," observed the Pro-
fessor. "His name is known far and
wide. But I am a poor uncultivated un-
covenanted Scot, and I know nothing at
all of Tom Taylor, not having seen any
one of his plays or read any of his artistic
criticisms. Well, then, as I know nothing
294 Professor BlacJcie.
about Tom Taylor, I was informed by the
Secretary that I might enlarge upon the
general subject, and say something about
the drama. I will say, then, that to write
a good play that will seize upon the noble
few without pandering to the base many
is one of the rarest achievements of the
human mind. A good play is a rational
and noble amusement, second only in
utility to a great sermon from the Apostle
Paul. And with regard to that other
function of our excellent friend Tom
Taylor, whom I have yet to know in the
flesh I don't think he can be a very large
man, Tike Ajax or Agamemnon, for no
man with a majestic form could be called
Tom Taylor; with regard to his other
function, that of writing the artistic criti-
cisms of ( The Times,' it is a function even
more useful than that of writing a good
play. For a great number of people in
this world wish to have opinions about
all subjects ; but in regard to pictures
they are far too ignorant, far too stupid,
far too unpractised to have any opinion
of their own ; and therefore, if they went
to an exhibition without any previous
English Excursions. 295
notice of what was a good or what was a
bad picture, they would puzzle themselves
into a state of bemuddlement altogether
intolerable. Therefore a gentleman like
Tom Taylor, who comes forward and tells
them what they can admire with safety to
their own taste and respectability, confers
a most substantial benefit upon these
poor, puzzled, and otherwise altogether
benighted people. I beg leave to say no
more." But he did say more, and hand-
somely made up for his banter, when he
dedicated his "Wise Men of Greece " " to
Tom Taylor, Esquire"; signifying "in
a small way," the Professor says, " the
respect which I entertain for your cha-
racter and efficiency as a literary man."
There is one likely little newspaper
story of Blackie in London that may have
the space of a paragraph. The Professor
went to see the performance of Anderson,
" the Wizard of the North." As he was
making his way in, Blackie " felt some-
thing unusual in his coat pocket. He found
it was an egg, and he took it out and popped
it into the pocket of a young man who was
just before him in the crush. Blackie
296 Professor BlacJcie.
watched the young man to his seat, and
when the wizard asked his fellow professor
to take an egg out of his pocket, Professor
Blackie promptly replied that he had not
such a thing about him, but he believed
that that young man (pointing to his
victim) was ready for such an emergency.
Then there were roars of laughter at the
astonishment of Anderson and of the
youth."
One more incident of an English visit
may be mentioned simply for the glimpse
it gives of Pegasus in hobbles. The
Professor was staying at a hydropathic
institution in Yorkshire shortly after he
left Aberdeen. There was "no less a
thing than a journal or paper called c The
Ben Rhydding Ariel,' " he wrote to his
sister, " of which I was appointed editor
and to which I gave not a few contri-
butions both in prose and verse. I had
also to write the whole or two-thirds of
the whole clearly out, above forty pages.
This was no small labour, you may
imagine, to an impatient devil like me "
(no holiday task for an angel, he might
English Excursions. 297
have said) ; " but I was advised by the good
example of my wife always to find a joy in
making myself useful to others." Perhaps
it was on this occasion, if he ever had
time for a walk, that he came across the
big-boned Yorkshire swine-herd who has
since been immortalised in a tract on edu-
cation. To some complimentary remark
of the Professor's, the swine-herd proudly
answered : " I am the harchitect of those
pigs 1 "
xxn.
FARTHEK AFIELD.
IN these gadding days, with Japan grown
stale, American experience a drug in the
book-market, and the explorers of all
nations treading on each other's heels in
Africa, the Professor's journeys seem
insignificant enough. He had no ambition
to measure his miles by the thousand.
But, comparison aside, he travelled much
and often abroad in the intervals of his
Scottish explorations. He could sing
I've wandered east, I've wandered west,
In gipsy-wise a random roamer ;
Of men and minds I've known the best,
Like that far-travelled King in Homer.
I've seen the domes of Moscow far,
In green and golden glory gleaming ;
And stood where sleeps the mighty Czar,
By Neva's flood so grandly streaming.
I've stood on many a storied spot,
Where blood of heroes flowed like rivers,
Farther Afield. 299
Where Deutschland rose at Gravelotte
And dashed the strength of Gaul to shivers.
I've stood where stands in pillared pride
The shrine of Jove's spear-shaking daughter,
And humbled Persia stained the tide
Of free Greek seas with heaps of slaughter.
I've stood upon the rocky crest
Where Jove's proud eagle spread his pinion,
Where looked the god far east, far west,
And all he saw was Rome's dominion.
I've fed my eyes by land and sea,
With sights of grandeur streaming o'er me,
But still my heart remains with thee,
Dear Scottish land that stoutly bore me.
O ! for the land that bore me,
O ! for the stout old land,
With mighty Ben, and winding glen,
Stout Scottish land, my own dear land ! *
Perhaps his most celebrated journey,
though it was not of a kind to bring him
under the spectacles of the Royal Geo-
graphical Society, was the three months'
Mediterranean cruise of 1878. We can
imagine the astonishment of the Egyptians,
filled with " curiosity, and from their
point of view a quite laudable curiosity,'*
as he admitted in one of his descriptive
* Songs of Eeligion and Life.
300 Professor Blackie.
letters to "The Scotsman," "to comprehend
the nature and to make researches into the
character of a strange-looking white-haired .
old gentleman, walking on his own legs,
with a many-coloured Turkish sash about
his loins, and having his head topped
with " a ventilator cap of a conical shape,
" very much like the headgear of those for-
midable gentlemen the Prussian soldiers."
"We can hear through his ears "the
camel's surly groaning," "the water-
wheel's dull moaning,"
the yelping crew
That howl and yowl the long night through
at Luxor, where he wrote " The Litany of
the Nile."
From the host of grinning creatures,
Naked boys with sooty features,
Good Osiris, save us !
Ho ro ! Little naked
Paunchy boys on Nile-stream !
To the land of breezy weather,
Freshing showers, purple heather,
Bring us back, Osiris !
Ho ro ! Good Osiris,
Heather-bloom and breezes !
He saw little of flies, fleas, mosquitoes,
Farther Afield. 301
and scorpions, but the hot wind was to
him as had as all the rest, and doubtless
helped to inspire those remarks about
Egypt that worshippers of the past
have found so shockingly irreverent. He
manfully resisted the three Arabs who
tried to drag him up the Great Pyramid
in the usual fashion. With the help of his
own arms he got to the top. There, with
two other Caledonians, he lustily sang
"Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,"
declaring Burns a much bigger man than
Cheops, and fulfilled a vow by writing a
letter to the Principal of Edinburgh Uni-
versity. The descent, he said, required
caution, but he "had done far more
slippery things in Mull and Skye."
After his return to Edinburgh we find
him " making a study of the great German
work of Brugsch," and composing, " as a
sort of rhythmical amusement," "The
Eoll of the Kings of Egypt," to be sung,
if any one wants to sing it, to the Gaelic air
"AgushoMhorag!"
But he did not rush off to Scotland as
soon as he had shaken the dust of the
desert from his feet. Sailing northward
302 Professor Blackie.
he came to Smyrna, where he was amused
by the frequency of "HOMER" on the
shop-signs. He found, however, that the
modern bearer of the ancient name " did
not pretend to deduce his genealogy from
the great Mseonian minstrel with the same
zealous accuracy that a Highland Maclean
or Maclucas would set down his descent
from the Apostle John or the Evangelist
Luke."
"The lions, specially and properly
so-called, of Smyrna," he says, " I did not
see. I have a strong natural aversion to
being pulled by the nose in regular form
to see local lions, even of the loudest
roar." There was one lion, however, that
he had set his heart on seeing, and taking
a railway ticket to Ephesus he rode over
the ground once dignified by the temple
of Diana, now a "medley of ruin." "I
study living men and women, not dead
bones," said Blackie, when an ambulatory
talk was interrupted by the suggestion
that he should stop and examine a pre-
historic mound. No associations, however
venerable, could obscure in a healthy
modern mind like his the present wretched-
Farther Afield. 303
ness of the countries he was visiting.
" The Turks," he wrote, " evidently know
not how to govern. Everything rots into
rags or pines into decrepitude before
them. They are weighed in the balance
and found wanting." In a private letter
from Messina soon afterwards he wrote :
" I am glad that I have been altogether
outside of that wretched squabblement
and babblement about the war. Both
parties are in the wrong to a certain
extent ; but England much more than
Russia. Turkey is doomed, and England
has too much sense, I hope, to wish to prop it
up. What we should have done is to have
joined Russia against Turkey at the com-
mencement, and then claimed our just
right in the division of the spoil. In
these entanglements the knot is always
cut by the sword, and we kept on signing
protocols."
In Sicily he soon forgot the dust and
heat of Egypt, Sicily, "the pearl of
islands," with its city of Girgenti " in a
situation superior even to that of Edin-
burgh." There were lions round Girgenti,
too, that he made up his mind to visit
304 Professor BlacTcie.
in his usual pedestrian way. "When he
(l set off on foot to make a raid through
the antiquities," he found there was one
lion he had forgotten, and that was
himself. " The good people made a very
marked demonstration of a habit in which
semi-civilised and barbarous people in-
dulge largely the habit of staring
tremendously at a stranger ; " and even,
in this case, following and surrounding
him. With "a little decision," assisted
perhaps by a flourish of the old familiar
stick, the Professor shook off all the
lionizers except two or three. These were
intelligent students in the local gym-
nasium, who got the great foreigner's
leave to accompany him on the excursion.
Perhaps his heart softened towards the
shortcomings of the Scottish universities
as these young men unconsciously revealed
the state of learning in modern Agri-
gentum. They were anxious to know,
among other things, whereabouts Edin-
burgh might be, what political connection
England had with Scotland, and whether
the inhabitants of the foreigner's country-
were Christians. "Noi siamo perfetti
Farther Afield. 305
Cattolici," they innocently said; "We
are perfect Catholics ! " The Professor
assured them that Scotland had the same
faith as Sicily, though blest with neither
Pope nor bishops. After five hours of stiff
walking the little party got back to the
town, the ancient acropolis. " The same
buzzing of human flies," the Professor
tells us, " took place that had accompanied
my departure. They literally formed a
ring about me, and entered the little inn
where I lodged in a crowd to get a.
peep of what to them was evidently
a remarkable sight a white-haired old
perambulator of the country, who could
tpeak fair Italian, and walk for five hours
up hill and down hill, and perhaps be a
Christian. The police now took notice of
the affair, and came into the house to see
that no harm might happen to the stranger.
One of them spoke English, and told me
to take care what I did with my money,
for I was not in ' Inghilterra.' I thanked
him for his good advice, gave him a stave
of ' All the blue bonnets over the Border,*
with an autograph of the distinguished
stranger for a memorial, and then went to
20
306 Professor Blackie,
bed," as the only refuge from the embar-
rassments of popularity. But " these
Agrigentine flies," he is fair enough to
say, "were not of the shameless and
importunate kind which were my habitual
horror on the banks of the Nile."
"Now his troubles all are o'er,
sang the Blackie Brotherhood at their
festival on the next St. John's Day ;
Welcome to the Professor !
Tell the news in brugh and glen,
Blackie he is come agen !
Blackie can do anything,
Sermon preach, or ballad sing,
Write a book, or climb a peak,
Chat in Gaelic or in Greek ;
Ever learning something new,
Holding fast the good and true,
What he trows he tells right free,
ev
While men love the Gaelic tongue
Ever shall his praise be sung ;
More than all their chiefs had done
Blackie for the Gael has won ;
Now the Celtic Muse shall be
Set in place of high degree,
Where the light of lore doth beam
In King James's Academe.
Farther Afield. 307
Now with spirits full of glee
Blackie in his place we see ;
Scotland when he was away
Seemed more empty than to-day :
Let the times be e'er so sad,
Let the world go e'er so mad-
Pious thanks and cheerful mood
Well become this Brotherhood !
Sing then, ye unworldly men,
Blackie he is come agen !
Tell the news in brugh and glen,
Blackie he is come agen !
The Blackie Brotherhood, it may be
explained, was a society more purely
sociable than the Hellenic, though largely
composed of the same men. Dr. John
Brown, the biographer of " Rab and his
friends," was one of the members.
Only four years ago the Professor, his
appetite for travel unappeased by flitting
from corner to corner of this island,
thought he would like to see Constanti-
nople. Away he went to the East, visited
the Turk at headquarters, and finally
landed on the more familiar shores of
Greece, where he had an opportunity of
instructing the Athenians in their own
language. While staying at an hotel
308 Professor Blackie.
in the capital, the adventurous octo-
genarian fell ill, and it was thought
advisable to remove him to the British
Embassy. While this was being done, he
brandished his trusty staff before a waiter
and asked him what it was. " ftTraa-Tovvi,"
said the waiter "mpastouni," one of those
Italian corruptions from which the lan-
guage of Plato is not yet completely
purged. Down came the stick on the
waiter's back, with the reply, " That's
not fA7ra<TTovvi but pa/3So? ! " The story
lies before me in a setting of general
eulogy on a page of the St. Andrew's
University Magazine, across which the
subject of it all has scribbled :
Little Jack Blackie, so crouse and so crackie,
Sat eating his Christmas pie ;
He put in his thumb and pulled out a pluin
And said " "What a good boy am I! "
The Professor paid at least four visits
to Germany after his appointment to the
Greek chair. In 1871 he joined the
Berliners in welcoming the troops on their
return from the war with France ; and a
flying trip to the heart of Russia was an
incident of the same summer.
Farther Afield. 309
More than once Professor Blackie was
urged to visit his multitude of friends on
the other side of the Atlantic, but without
effect. He did not ignore the problems of
Greater Britain, by any means. In a
letter replying to a Canadian invitation he
said : " Seeley's ' Expansion of England '
I have read with great sympathy. It is a
difficult problem how to maintain unity
along with such complex multif ariousness.
For the Colonies, I am inclined to agree
that a free confederation of kindred
states is more likely to be lasting than a
concentrative subjection." As for the
invitation itself, he says : " I have been
a great traveller in my day, but have
instinctively confined myself to my own
country, or countries which have a great
and a fruitful past. New countries
interest me little" like that other
professor, when an American visitor
expatiated on the glories of a certain city
only twenty years old and boasting 20,000
inhabitants. " If it were 20,000 years old
and had only twenty inhabitants," sighed
the Oxonian, " how much more interesting
it would be." "New countries interest
310 Professor Blackie.
me little," said Blackie ; " but might do
so, perhaps, if I were accidentally thrown
into the midst of them and could share in
their young hopes and help on their
struggles. For I am decidedly an active
animal ; and where I cannot act I do not
care to know."
What a welcome he would have met in
the Colonies ! An old student, the son of
a fellow-professor, writes thus in the pages
of " The Liberal " : (t It was the writer's
fortune, once, in the dense Australian
bush, hundreds of miles distant from the
nearest civilisation, to come across a
shingle-splitter, who had seen better days,
but whom the drink-demon had reduced
from the status of a scholar to that of a
waif and a pariah. As we sat beside his
camp-fire watching our f billy ' of tea boil,
as soon as he knew I hailed from Edin-
burgh, he cried, f Man, how's old Blackie ? *
In the very bowels of the earth once, when
down some five hundred feet in the famous
Prince Imperial Gold Mine on the 'Thames
Field,' New Zealand, a humble miner,
who, nevertheless, could write M.A. after
his name, accosted me with the query,
Farther Afield. 311
f l say, mate, were you under good old
Blackie in Edinburgh ? ' Go where you
pleased and I have wandered over a good
part of the world's surface there you
would find men who not only had been
students under the grand old man, but
who loved him and reverenced him even
as sons a father."
xxin.
THE MAN, AND SOME OF HIS
FKIENDS.
WHEN BlacMe left the Greek Chair in
1882, he retired into a holiday of hard
work. His lecturing activity, as we have
seen, redoubled ; and nights by train here,
there, and everywhere had no more effect
on his health than the " one shirt " tramps
of long ago. It was something of a
penance, however, for such ( ' a locomotive
animal " to be shut up for seven or eight
hours in a railway compartment. How
he felt when he could not use his legs we
know from that ff philosophy of limping "
letter in 1851. " Sitting, in fact," as he
told his disciples, "is a slovenly habit,
and ought not to be indulged. A man
will read a play or a poem far more
naturally and effectively while walking up
and down the room than when sitting
f koto by Macara, Edinburgh.
PROFESSOR BLACKIE IN 1877.
The Man, and Some of his Friends. 313
sleepily in a chair" or travelling on a
cell-system railway.
It is hard for any one who never met
him to imagine the extent to which
motion, Perpetual Motion, pervaded the
Professor's existence. His quick but
graceful movements, the free, vivacious
play of features, the elasticity of his
limbs, would have done credit to any
Frenchman, and never ceased to amaze
the solid race inhabiting this island. His
mother was perplexed by his ' ( over-liveli-
ness " when he was seven years old ; and
an Edinburgh lass found the same fault
with him fifty years afterwards. An old
friend looked in at the door of Sir George
Reid's studio in Aberdeen one morning.
He was drawing back, seeing the artist
engaged, but the sitter, who was our
Professor from Edinburgh, at once called
him in.
" Do you think he'll make anything of
it?"
"Yes," said the Aberdonian, "certainly."
" I was thinking he wouldn't," said the
Professor.
"Why not?"
31 4 Professor BlacJcie.
"I'm afraid he's beginning to think
like a bonnie lassie in Edinburgh, the
other day. ' Dinna ye like me ? ' I asked
her. 'Na, I dinna.' 'Hoo's that?'
' Te're ower leevin'.' ' :
As lately as last year the springs of
liveliness were bubbling up as briskly as
ever. When he visited Aberdeen and
gave almost his last lecture, on January
16th, 1894, he said he felt particularly
thankful to God for enabling him at that
stage of his existence eighty-four years
five months and eighteen days to speak
as if he was eighteen and to skip about
the platform. He added, by way of
moral, " To whom much is given of him
very much is required ; and I feel that if
I do not speak the gospel of nature at my
time of life I ought to be shot ! "
The secrets of this wonderful pro-
longation of vigour do not all lie hidden
in the ancestral past. John Stuart Blackie
took care of the constitution he had re-
ceived, and
His best care of all
Was to have no care at all.
He kept the commandment, " Be not
The Man, and Some of his Friends. 315
anxious what ye shall eat, or what ye
shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be
clothed," in all its clauses. Indeed, he
nearly lost his election to the Greek
Chair by the unprofessional clothes he
wore and the unconventional things he
said when paying his " respects " to the
Bailies of Edinburgh. As for food, he ate
what was set before him, and if you asked
him afterwards what he had had, very
likely he would remember nothing but the
sauce piquante of conversation. He drank,
but not freely. He very seldom smoked.
He was a devotee of water externally
applied, and to this, with plenty of open-
air exercise, and a faculty for sleeping,
may be attributed his blessed unconscious-
ness of liver and nerves. That he never
needed spectacles was due, in his own
opinion, to the big straw hat that shaded
his eyes at home and the wideawake when
out of doors.
What the exact connection was between
his physical health and his mental dis-
position, how far the serene and hopeful
spirit kept the body in trim and how far
the healthy body should have credit for
316 Professor BlacTcie.
the healthy mind, may be left for psycho-
logists to puzzle over. It is certain that
each acted on the other. It is also a fact
that for the making of his character there
went not merely inherited gifts and the
influence of good associations, but a well-
reasoned trust in God and a deliberate
and constant self -lifting. To a great ex-
tent Blackie, with a force of will partly
inherited and partly cultivated, formed
his own temperament. He was an
optimist on principle. His nature was
sensitive; a sneer, an unkind word, fell
on no thick skin when it hit John Stuart
Blackie. But he reasoned that sneers and
unkindness were contemptible ; that if
allowed a lodgment in the mind they
would freeze up the sources of happiness
and of energy, and therefore his ears
should be as if sealed against them.
Editorial attacks, which were neither few
nor always good-tempered, he did not
trouble himself by reading. Newspapers,
indeed, were not much in his line; he
would get some one to tell him the
principal news of the day at breakfast,
would perhaps read some article of
The Man, and Some of his Friends. 317
special interest, and would then dash off
to his work. It was wise to be cheerful,
so cheerful he would be, in spite of wrongs
without and within. After a long and
warm theological debate one day with Dr.
Whyte, of Free St. George's Church, the
Professor said, " If you have the writing
of my epitaph, I know what it will be :
* Here lies a man who had every virtue but
a sense of sin.' " " Could Socrates
himself have said it better ? " asks Dr.
Whyte, who knew how little spiritual
pride beset the man behind the speech.
"Woe's me," said Blackie, not entirely
in jest, when he had been learning
to play croquet; "it appears to me the
fittest picture of the difficult game of life.
Woe's me that at both I feel myself
right so often by accident and wrong
by intention ! Alas, poor Pro ! ** But
" alas " was a rare word on Blackie's lips,
and woe a very casual visitor in his heart.
Long ago, he came singing into a room
where Dr. Macgregor was. The minister
did not know him so well then as in after
years. " Sit down, my friend," he said,
" and I will diagnose you : Up in the
318 Professor BlacJcie.
heights to-day, down in the depths
to-morrow." "No," saidBlackie, "never
in the depths, never in the depths ! "
Entwined with this sunny optimism,
generally deemed the endowment of
irresponsible natures, was an intense
moral seriousness. The world he found
a beautiful place, but there were blots
upon it to be wiped out. The root of all
evil was unwisdom, and to the uprooting
of unwisdom he devoted his energies :
unwisely now and then, if you will. The
eccentricities which marred his work, in
the opinion of the straitlaced, and con-
cealed it altogether from the eyes of
the superficial, were simply flashes of
the internal fire that made all his
highest achievements possible. A friend
who charged him with being eccentric
received an indignant denial. " I am
not eccentric," he said; "I am just
natural," The common use of the word
implies a reproach that he was cer-
tainly entitled to resent. No two men
are alike. Every man has his own centre
to revolve around. If Blackie had forced
himself out of his natural orbit because
The Man, and Some of his Friends. 319
it cut across the plane ' on which Mrs.
Grundy and the bulk of mortals move, he
would have been truly eccentric. Blackie
did not love to be singular : he simply
lacked the hatred of singularity that moves
his fellow-men from the orbits marked out
for them by nature. When Blackie,
walking with a minister through the
streets of Ayr, suddenly sat down on the
nearest doorstep to cut the pages of a
book; when, coming to the house of a
kinsman, and finding no one but an old
lady who had served in the family since
he and she had been in their teens nigh
sixty years before, he took her out for a
walk in the garden and gave her a swing
in the children's playground, he was just
being himself. A more guileless, simple
soul than Blackie could hardly be found
above the age of twelve. With the mind
of a seer he had the heart of a child.
Blackie's public peculiarities, as a
matter of fact, had one very happy result.
They attracted notice to matters from
which the public habitually turns its listless
eyes, and gilded many a most wholesome
pill. " There is more sense in Blackie's
320 Professor BlacJcie.
nonsense than in some other folks' sense,"
he once said when taken to task. And
here Dr. Whyte's description of his friend
must be quoted once more: "Like
Socrates, he was not unlike those Athenian
busts of Silenus which had pipes and
flutes in their mouths ; but open them,
and there was always the image of a god
within ! How often have I said to myself,
after hearing the soundest sense, the
deepest and the most apt and pertinent
truth, and the most sweet and loving
wisdom from my friend, how often have I
said, f Can this be the same man who was
disporting on that platform amid such
loud laughter last night?' till the
Silenus mask, and the god within, came
again to my mind. They who did not
know our Socrates intimately and lovingly
did not know him at all."
Greater men than Blackie were proud
to have this intimate friendship with him ;
and few men had such a brilliant list of
visitors and correspondents. Gladstone,
Carlyle, Buskin "a small edition of
Carlyle, but a delicate and dainty edition "
Browning, Froude, Max Miiller, F. W.
The Man, and Some of his Friends. 321
Newman and his brother at whose
creation as Cardinal the Professor was
present, Bunsen, the Duke of Argyll,
Lord Rosebery "the wise young Laird
of Dalmeny," Sir David Brewster, Sir
William Hamilton, Dean Ramsay, George
Macdonald, Cardinal Manning, Kingsley,
Guthrie, Macleod, Blaikie, "Christopher
North/' Dr. Trench, Lord Neaves, Mrs.
Bishop, Sir Noel Paton, Sir George Reid,
Sir Henry Irving, Miss Mary Anderson,
and his neighbour Principal Rainy, "a
fellow incapable of talking nonsense "
these are a few of the names. Blackie
used to correspond with Browning on
postcards in Greek, puzzling the inquis-
itive postman with such a signature
as 'Iwdvwrjs Qlfcov6fj,o<; MeAai>('oTC09. His
favourite motto, aXyQevav ev dya-n-p or
7r\rjp(i)fj,a VO/JLOV 17 dyaTn] (" love is the
fulfilling of the law"), appeared on a
corner of every envelope he addressed.
Sometimes the legitimate curiosity of the
Post Office authorities would be equally
baffled by his English. That a letter to
an old student at the University of Jena,
found its way to Java instead is quite
21
322 Professor Blackie.
comprehensible. There were words in his
letters which neither life-long intimacy
nor skill in deciphering the undecipher-
able could make head or tail of.
It was only to be expected that much
of Professor Blackie's correspondence
should find its way to Professor Blaikie,
and vice versa ; for the similarity of the
names was aggravated by Blackie's shabby
treatment of his distinctive "c." Every
now and then the Free Church Professor
would receive some such covering note
as this from the Professor of Greek : " My
dear Doppel-ganger, or second self, as the
Germans say, I suppose the enclosed must
be meant for you.
" Blind eyes, that blindly could mistake in me
A talking Sophist for a grave D.D. ! "
When Professor Blaikie was travelling
in America, he constantly had to undeceive
visitors who thought they were seeing and
hearing the champion of oppressed popu-
lations, and who sometimes refused to
be undeceived. At home, when cheques
for the Celtic Chair and letters of mis-
directed thanks were followed by the
The Man, and Some of his Friends. 323
indignation of anonymous ladies at the
theologian's supposed partiality for the
stage, the situation became more than
embarrassing.
Blackie was no. great frequenter of
theatres, but he was fond of a good
play, saying it had more influence than an
ordinary sermon. He thought much the
same of a good novel, though the intoxi-
cations of incessant novel-reading and
incessant playgoing were equally con-
temptible to him. A friend one day
asked him to read " For the Eight." "I
will read the book," he promised, " as
the hens do the heaps of rubbish, picking
out the grains of corn." A little while
afterwards he wrote: "I am quite proud
of myself to-day ! I have finished the book,
not for the sake of the book but for your
sake, and verily I have had my reward.
I used to creep through books; now I
have learnt to march, and to run, and to
gallop, and to jump and skip, in a quite
miraculous manner. Now I shall know
what a good novel means ; it is really a
good sermon, and a great deal better
than most sermons. I have taken down
324 Professor Blaclcie.
three special texts from it." "I have
found," he once said, " not a few excellent
sermons in novels which I should have
sought for in vain in our pulpits."
Sir Henry Irving, it is said, kissed
Blackie on the forehead in gratitude for
his outspoken defence of the drama. In
this the actor only followed the example
of the Professor, whose love for kindred
souls of either sex could not express itself
in our mere insular handshake. " How
he would have enjoyed himself in ancient
Athens," says Professor Laurie. "You
can see him in the Gymnasia striking
right and left at the Sophists, taking off
his sombrero till it touched the ground 011
the approach of the dignified Plato,
slapping Socrates on the back and calling
him a jolly old blade, and then throwing-
his arm round his neck and kissing him.
That was Blackie ! "
The Professor's admiration for Socrates
was not altogether shared by his friend
Mr. Gladstone. " Do you know," said the
statesman to the Professor when they were
chatting last year at Pitlochry, " it has
always seemed to me that Socrates must
The Man, and Some of his Friends. 325
have been a thorough domestic bore, and I
have always felt strong sympathy with
Xanthippe ! " Blackie often disagreed with
Gladstone on other subjects, such
as " politics, and the Hebrew Devil,
and certain of his mythological specula-
tions " in the realm of Homeric theology ;
and in some respects they were as unlike as
two men could be. Yet their common
love for Hellenic studies, and far more
their intense earnestness in contending
for what they believed to be right, were
bonds of union stronger than all the
forces that might have kept them apart.
' ' An essentially noble and upright man,"
was Blackie's description of his friend.
' ' He is the greatest statesman since Pitt ;
nay, he is greater than Pitt." When Mr.
Gladstone was ill, Blackie sent him a
eprig of white heather, with the Gaelic
motto that we saw him inscribing, with
the difference of one word, for the Queen
" Hard as the heather and lasting as
the fir." The two friends often met,
not only in London, but under the roof of
Lord Eosbery, the "statesman, patriot,
and thinker," to whom Blackie dedi-
326 Professor BlacJcie.
cated his book of social and moral essays
in 1890. Lord Bosebery was glad to
get the Professor out to Dalmeny
to give Mr. Gladstone "a little Homeric
relaxation" from the toils of a Mid-
lothian campaign; and in the campaign
itself they were not always divided.
No one who saw the two stalwart octo-
genarians meet and greet each other on
the platform of the Edinburgh Corn
Exchange will ever forget the sight or the
cheer of two-fold affection to which the
multitude was stirred. The elder of the
two has gone, and the younger, in his
retirement, looks back "with interest,
respect, and warm regard upon his life
and acts; so genuine, so simple, so
susceptible of a pure enthusiasm, so
detached from self, so attached to things
kindly, pure, and noble."
In his intercourse with great and small
alike, Blackie tried to practise his favourite
virtues, courage, cheerfulness, and charity
not the first two without the other. " I
strive always," he could honestly say,
" when I most violently condemn, to
appreciate my antagonist's point of view.
The Mail) and Some of Ms Friends. -527
I hate none of God's creatures, not
even liars and cowards and the systematic
whitewashes of unclean things. It is
enough that I must pity them." For one
invaluable habit he thanked his otherwise
barren years at the Bar. "From the
lawyer," he said, ' ' I learned that in all
matters of difference of opinion there are
two contrary statements, each involving a
certain part of the truth, both of which
must be patiently studied and nicely
weighed before a sound judgment can be
arrived at." In almost any society and
he was a very "social animal" his was
naturally the dominating but never a
domineering influence. Under all the
self-assertions inevitable with so lively a
nature lay a real humility of soul
a quality overlooked by the casual or
distant observer, but never appealed to in
vain. This quality of reverence for the
Maker of all, and for all that He has made,
found its expression in, and drew its
nourishment from, a constant habit of
prayer. Family worship was a practice
carefully observed in his home, and was
no mere formality. The Professor himself
328 Professor Blaclcie.
led in the singing of a metrical psalm,
the Old Hundredth, the Hundred and
Twenty-fourth and the Twenty-third
being among his favourites, or a para-
phrase. He knew few tunes, but every
now and then he would learn a new one,
picking it slowly out on the piano, note
after note, and night after night, when the
household had gone to bed. The singing
was followed by a short passage perhaps
another of the Psalms, or a chapter of
Isaiah or of John's Gospel chosen not
indiscriminately, and recited with ex-
pressive reverence ; and, finally, a prayer,
for which the Professor did not always
refuse to read from a printed book.
" From scenes like these old Scotia's
grandeur springs 1 "
XXIV.
THE END.
FOE forty-two years John Stuart Blackie
led this rich and active life in Edinburgh,
or with Edinburgh as headquarters, scat-
tering over the world the wisdom and
sunshine that filled the home. Old, and
very old, he grew, with little or no lessen-
ing of activity. Time wrote the tale of
years upon his face but could neither
cloud the mind nor chain the limbs. " I
am all that can be expected of an old
man," he could write; "healthy and cheer-
ful, and speaking evil of no man." At
last, early in May, 1894, when, among
other businesses, he was " making a
minute study of living Greece from 1821
downwards," he was suddenly attacked
one morning with asthma. Seizure fol-
lowed seizure, each leaving its victim
exhausted. When summer came the
Professor, accompanied by his wife and
330 Professor Blackie.
nephew, Dr. Walker, was able to travel
to Pitlochry; and there, in the end
of July, he wrote this letter to his
sister :
" I have been seized, now four months
gone, as a victim to that most graspful
fiend Asthma (ao-fyia) of course of
Greek descent, as all diseases are; and
not one attack only, but at least half-a-
dozen, from the last of which I ain suffer-
ing sorely now. Once a week at least this
gruff customer comes, and puts his merci-
less grip on my chest and lays me panting
and beating on my back. This lasts for
an hour or a hundred minutes ; and then
the monster walks off. But this is not
all : he leaves me weak, as weak as he is
strong, and I spend a stupid day, trying to
think that I am not more than half dead.
Now you know the worst. He is not
always at my throat, the ruffian ; but the
danger is that like beggars and subscrip-
tion papers he will get into the habit of
using my chest as a sort of club-house,
where he may look in for luncheon any
idle day and leave me unfit for any sub-
stantial work or any profitable sleep for a
The End. 331
night and a day. I enclose what perhaps
may turn out to be my last speech and
dying words in a versified form." This
is what he enclosed :
OUR LIFE DRAMA.
IN FIVE ACTS.
Life's a play a changeful scene
Of good and bad, whose acts are five ;
A fateful strife of God-moved powers
Which make our human dust alive.
First the babe that from the darkness
Greets the light with strange alarm,
And into realms of xuiknown being
Stretches forth its helpless arm.
Then the boy the bright-souled boy-
Quick with eager ring and rattle
To run the race, and toss the ball,
And nourish fist in bloodless battle.
Then the youth, whose hot brain teems
With lofty schemes of gain and glory ;
"I, too, may shake hands with the gods,"
He says, " and stamp my name on story.'*
Next comes the man, with sober plan,
Of measured ground a faithful warden ;
Contented, where he found a waste,
To trim the clod and leave a garden.
332 Professor Blackie.
Now comes the end, when he who long
The stable earth had firmly trod,
Feeble and frail, with tottering steps,
Must bow his head and kiss the sod :
Happy if when he leaves this field
Of wise device and toilsome deed
He to his sons can say, " Reap ye
Where I, thank God, sowed fruitful seed."
A few days later he finished his eighty-
fifth year. He could not venture out
to see the bonfire that the neighbours
kindled in his honour; but his pen
was able to busy itself answering the
messages of love that flowed in upon him
from all parts of the country. " My dear
Podler," he wrote to his sister on the
-5th of August, "your letter of the
25th July was a great delight to me ; and
I have been only too long of sending you
the natural response. But there is a
reason for all things. Shortly after your
letter, the 28th July arrived; and the
good old Scot was forthwith overwhelmed
by an epistolary storm of birthday greet-
ings and gratulations that demanded
an immediate grateful acknowledgment.
Really, I seem to have done some good
The End. 833
to my fellow-countrymen ; but exaggera-
tion in matters that touch the public
pulse, especially in the case of an octo-
genarian, is natural ; and I must tone it
down to something of a more modest
estimate. Here in Pitlochry, along with
the great English 'G.O.M.', they have
been making a god of the small Scottish
'G.O.M.' in a transcendental style."
Though less often visited by violent
asthmatic spasms, he went on to say,
he now felt great weakness; and he
was addressing himself "to a pious cur-
tailment of all hopes and fears and
ambitions belonging to this sublunary
sphere."
From the cottage perched high on a brae
he looked his last on the Highland hills
that he loved so tenderly, and returned to
his Edinburgh home. He was able to
attend the opening of the University
session, but that was his last public ap-
pearance. On the 3rd of December he
wrote, in a very shaky hand : " My feet
are now possessed by gout, a disease which
makes walking difficult and dancing im-
possible. However, I have great reason
334 Professor Blackie.
to look back with thankfulness on a long
life spent in the service of my fellow-
creatures, a service which, as you will see
from the enclosed," one of many published
expressions of sympathy, " is more apt to
be over than under-rated by my good
friends in Ayrshire." That he did not
reckon himself to have attained perfection
was shown, if showing were needed, by
his habit of writing out a fresh Greek text
every night and trying to live up to it
next day.
When the weakness so increased that he
could only write with difficulty, and he
surrendered the pen into the hand of his
wife, his mind went on with its work un-
checked. In February, after reading
Froude's "Erasmus," he dictated two
articles for "The People's Friend," in
which he described the old reformer in
words peculiarly applicable to himself:
" A man of lively wit, pleasant manners,
large social sympathies ; so that wherever
he went he readily made and kept friends.
But he was more than all this. He was a
profound scholar and an earnest man a
man with whom profound learning could
The End. 335
only serve as the root of a branching tree
of large social apostleship."
As February closed, the hope of another
earthly summer died away. Weaker and
weaker grew the body ; but the mind was
alert enough to catch and correct a false
accent when one of his old Greek mottoes
was quoted in his hearing. He asked one
of the maids who watched in the room at
night to sing him his favourite Psalms.
"When she came to the words, "Yea,
though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death," he caught up the verse,
saying brightly, "I will fear no ill!"
On the evening of Friday, March 1st, the
mist fell at length ; and as the light faded
from his mind the last words were
whispered by his lips, "The Psalms of
David, and the songs of Burns but mind,
the Psalmist first ! " Before another noon
the spirit had sunk softly away into the
arms of God.
The funeral ceremony became a national
demonstration. The groups of robed
and official representatives who took their
silent places in St. Giles's Cathedral;
336 . Professor BlacJcie.
the Black Watch pipers who led the pro-
cession to the grave with the exquisite
airs of "The Flowers of the Forest,"
ST. GILES'S CATHEDRAL.
From a Photograph by 3Ir. A. A. Inglit, Edinburgh.
" Lochaber no More," and " The Land o'
the Leal;" the plaid, a gift from the
women of Skye, that took the place of a
pall ; the modest heather that lay between
the wreaths sent by the Prime Minister
and by the Professor's servants ; and, best
of all, the heavy-hearted thousands of
men and women and children who
thronged the streets, expressed a nation's
Tlie End. 337
love and grief. From Scotsmen, and not
from Scotsmen only, in every part of
the world ; from the poor labourer, the
grey-haired scholar, the young student ;
from all sorts and conditions of men came
the same message, that in spirit they
were part of that affectionate throng; a
message telling what he had done for
them and how they loved him.
THE WORKS OF JOHN STUART BLACKIE.
LIST OF BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS.
1831. Intorno un Sarcofago, &o. (Borne.)
1834. Goethe's Fauat. (Blackwood.) 1880. Revised
Edition. (Macmillan.)
1843. On Subscription to Articles of Faith. (William
Tait, Edinburgh.)
1848. University Reform. (Sutherland and Knox,
Edinburgh.) .
1849. The Water Cure in Scotland. (G. Davidson,
Aberdeen.)
1850. Lyrical Dramas of ^Eschylus. 2 Vols. (J. W.
Parker, London.)
1852. The Pronunciation of Greek. (Sutherland and
Knox.)
,, On the Studying and Teaching of Languages.
Two Lectures. (Sutherland and Knox.)
,, Classical Literature in its Relation to the Nine-
teenth Century and Scottish University Edu-
cation. Lecture. (Sutherland and Knox.)
1853. On the Living Language of the Greeks. Lecture.
(Sutherland and Knox.)
1855. On the Advancement of Learning in Scotland. A
letter, &c. (Sutherland and Knox.)
1856. Introduction to Clyde's Greek Syntax. (Suther-
land and Knox.)
Contribution to "Edinburgh Essays." (A. and
C. Black.)
1857. Contribution to "Edinburgh Essays." (A. and
C. Black.)
Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece, with other
Poems. (Sutherland and Knox.)
Works of John Stuart Blaclcie. 339
1858. On Beauty. (Sutherland and Znox.)
1860. Lyrical Poems. (Sutherland and Knox.)
1864. The Gaelic Language : Its Classical Affinities and
Distinctive Character. Lecture. (Edmon-
ston and Douglas.)
1866. Homer and the Iliad. 4 Vols. (Edmonston and
Douglas.)
1867. On Forms of Government. Manchester Lecture.
(Whittaker and Co.)
,, Report of Debate with Ernest Jones on Demo-
cracy. (A. Heywood and Sons.)
1868. Political Tract. On Government. (Edmonston
and Douglas.)
Political Tract. On Education. (Edmonston and
Douglas.)
1869. Musa Burschicosa. (Douglas.)
1870. War Songs of the Germans. (Douglas.)
1871. Four Phases of Morals. (Douglas.)
,, Greek and English Dialogues. (Macmillan.)
1872. Lays of the Highlands and Islands. (Strahan.)
1874. Horse Hellenicsa. (Macmillan.)
On Self-Culture. (Douglas.)
1876. The Language and Literature of the Scottish
Highlands. (Douglas.)
Songs of Religion and Life. (Douglas.)
1877. The Natural History of Atheism. (Daldy,
Isbister, and Co.)
,, The Wise Men of Greece. (Macmillan.)
1879. The Egyptian Dynasties. (J. Thin, Edinburgh.)
1880. Preface to Handbook to Modern Greek. (Mac-
millan .)
,, Introduction to Comhraidhean 'an Gaelig 's 'am
Benrla. (Maclachlan and Stewart, Edin-
burgh.)
,, Gaelic Societies, Highland Depopulation, and
Land Law Reform. (Douglas.)
1881. Lay Sermons. (Macmillan.)
340 Works of John Stuart Blackie.
1882. Altavona. (Douglas.)
1883. The Wisdom of Goethe. (Black wood.)
1885. The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws.
(Chapman and Hall.)
1886. What Does History Teach? (Macmillan.)
Messis Vitse- (Macmillan.)
Introductions to Bacon's Essays and Locke on
Education. (Ward, Lock.)
1887. Introduction to a Dictionary of Place Names, by
his sister, Christina Blackie. (Murray.)
1888. Life of Robert Burns. (W.Scott.)
A Letter to the People of Scotland on the Eeform
of their Academical Institutions. (Douglas.)
1889. Scottish Song. (Blackwood.)
1890. Essays on Subjects of Moral and Social Interest.
(Douglas.)
A Song of Heroes. (Blackwood.)
1891. Greek Primer, Colloquial and Constructive. (Mao-
millan.)
1893. Christianity and the Ideal of Humanity.
(Douglas.)
Preface to Minstrelsy of the Merse. (J. and E.
Parlane, Paisley.)
Sutherland and Knox, and Edmonston and Douglas,
are now represented by Mr. David Douglas, Edinburgh.
ADDENDA.
1834. Disputatio Juridica, Ad Lib. IV. Tit. in.
Digest. De Dolo Malo. (Edinburgh.)
1845. De Latinarum literarum praestantia atque utili-
tate. (Taylor et Walton.)
1846. Letter to the Citizens of Aberdeen.
An Appeal to the People of Scotland.
1850. De linguarum discendarnm ratione.
1872. The Philological Character and Genius of the
Modern Greek Language. Royal Institu-
tion Lecture. (Manchester Greek Club.)
INDEX.
Aberfeldy, 186
Archaeology, 43
Artists, 44
Australasia, 310
Barrie, J.M. 140, 142, 144, 152
Bayne, Dr. P., 68
Beauty: 44; 56; " the lust
of the eye," 254
Biography, v.
Blackie, Alex. : 1; marriage,
2; Aberdeen life, 6, 8;
second marriage, 13 ; al-
lowances from, 47; Mel-
rose, 99 ; letter from, 104 ;
Edinburgh, 108
Blackie. Mrs. Alex. See
"Stodart"
Blackie, Dr. George, 93
Blackie, Helen Stodart, 24,
56, 78, 87 ; marriage, 99 :
100, 194, 291
Blackie, James, 24
Blackie, Marion, 24, 97, 106
Blackie, John Stuart: 6;
descriptions by his mo-
ther, 14, 15, 313 ; and by
himself, 16 ; boy life, 16 ;
college, 20 ; law office, 21 ;
religious state, 22, 24 ;
Edinburgh University, 23 ;
letters to Aberdeen, 24 ;
Marischal College again,
28 ; lessons to the " good-
ers," 31; Germany, 34;
Italy, 41 ; home, 46; called
to the Bar, 48; reviewing,
54; the Latin Chair, 59,
66; marriage, 85; Ger-
many, 94 ; the Greek
Chair, 102 ; educational re-
form, 110; Modern Greek,
122; in class, 136; Hel-
lenio Club, 156 ; politics,
163; the Crofters, 175;
land law investigation,
181 ; travels in Scotland,
57,89,176,185; Oban,186;
the Celtic Chair, 185 ; the
Queen at Inverary, 200 ;
Scottish Nationalism, 205;
his poetry and verse, 218 ;
Apostle of the Good, the
True and the Beautiful,
234 ; Self-Culture, and
some other books, 271 ;
English excursions, 285 ;
the Levant and Sicily,
298; the man, and some
of his friends, 312; last
illness, 329; 85th birth-
day, 332; the end, 335;
a national funeral, 335;
personal characteristics,
v., 88, 158, 160, 312, 321, 326
Blackie Brotherhood, 306
Blackwood's Magazine, 283
Blaikie, Prof., 322
Breakfasts to students, 152
" British Weekly," 231
Browning, 321
Buddha, 238
Bunsen, 39, 41
Burns, Life of, 280
Caird, Dr. and Prof., 188
Canada, 214, 309
Carlyle, 108,289
Celtic Chair : 185 ; Sir P.
Colquhoun's suggestion,
195; begging, 197 j the
Queen, 200
Charity, 167, 326
Colonies, 214, 309
342 Index.
Conjuror outwitted, 295 94 ; roughing it, 96 ; later
Covenantors, 260 visits, 308
Creeds, 63,243, 252 German Literature: Goethe's
Crofters: Strathnaver clear- Faust, 54; Liberation War,
ance, 176 ; " political 56; War Songs, 225; Wis-
economy," 178 ; legisla- dom of Goethe, 282
tion, 183 ; landlords' first Gladstone, 125, 213, 324
duty, 184 Greek, 81 ; Hellenic Society,
Cromwell, 230 82; .ffischylna, 83; Edin-
Democracy : debate on, 164 ; burgh inaugural lecture,
in church, 248 111 ; modern and rational
Disestablishment, 249 Greek, 122; travelling
Dobell, Sydney, 220 scholarships, 130; Homer
Donaldson, James, 78, 111, and the Iliad, 132 ; Lays
158 and Legends, 229 ; in
Drama, 294, 323 Athens, 307 ; Browning
Eating and drinking, 276, postcards, 321
315 Guthrie. Dr., 144, 249
Eccentricity, 318 Hamilton, Sir W., 55, 271
Edinburgh University : stud- Handwriting, 321
ent at, 23; Greek Chair, Health, 25; lame, 96; 307;
102, 315 ; professor, 136 ; 314 ; last illness, 329
snow riots, 149 ; from Hellenic Club meetings, 156
" classes " to " asses," Heroes, vi., 230
151 ; Celtic Chair, 196 ; Highlands : travels in, 89,
Fine Art, 258 176, 185, 189 ; language
Education : University de- and literature of, 190 ;
fects, 20, 36, 37, 74, 76, 95, "Gathering8,"194; 302,330
110, 111 ; legislation, 113 ; Homer, 132, 302
Cram and Shop, 115 ; ex- Home Rule, 211
animations, 119 ; classical Idleness, 274
education, 128 Ireland, 182, 183
Egypt, 299 Irving, Sir Henry, 324
England, 195, 205, 259, 285 Italy : 41 ; Sicily, 303
Ephesus, 302 Kennedy, David, 221
Erasmus, 333 Kennedy, Eev. Dr., 99;
Forbes, Dr. P., 30, 33 letters to, 107, 199
Forbes brothers, with, 34, 39 Kidd, Dr., 66
Four Phases of Morals, Kirchner, Dr., 54
239, 278 Krapotkin, Prince, 279
French, 95, 190 Languages : learning Ger-
Geddes, W. D., 82 man, 34, 36 ; Italian, 44 ;
Germany : Student at Got- Gaelic, 190
tingen, 34 ; Harz Moun- Latin : 29 ; exercise, 32 ; lee-
tains, 39 ; Berlin, 40 ;Bcnn, tures on Reformation, 80
Index.
Laughter, 274
Laurie, Prof., vii., 163, 324
Law : in office, 21 ; Edin-
burgh studies, 47 ; first
cases, 48 ; " Give a Fee,"
53, 327
Lawson, G. M., 151
Lay Sermons, 267
Lecturing: 225, 256; Dun-
dee, 285 ; digressions, &c.,
286; last tour, 314
Literature and finance, 273
Lowe, Charles, 143, 153
Macgregor, Dr., 219, 317
Mackenzie, Fergus, 143,146
Macleod, Donald, 88
Macleod, Norman, 144, 189,
249
Marischal College, Aber-
deen : 20 ; Latin Chair, 59;
in class, 67; friendship
with students, 71 ; bursary
test, 77
Marriage, 86
Martin, Prof., 79
Mathematics, 21
Maurice, F. D., 288
Mearns, Dr., 29
Melvin, Dr.: 61; "Grim,"
74
Military drill, 275
Ministry : mother's wish,
22 ; " stickit," 46 ; in
pulpit at last, 267
Moir,"G., 55
Morality, 38, 239
Motion, 312
Mottoes, 241
Naismiths, 3, 261
Neander, Prof., 40, 41
Newmans, the, 321
Newspapers, 316
Novels, 323
Oban, 186
Optimism, 315
" Pall Mall Gazette," 252
Peden Monument, 266
Physical exercise, 19, 275
Poetry and Verse : 218 ; hia
masters, 231 ; " Give a
Fee," 53 ; class poems, 70,
148; " Angels Holy," 86 :
translations from Greek,
126, 133; Bonnie Strath-
naver, 176 ; Absentee Pro-
prietors, 181; The Nut-
Brown Maiden, 193 ; Jenny
Geddes, 222; Watch on
the Rhine, 226 ; Student
Songs, 227 ; Gordon, 233 ;
Hymn for British Work-
men, 236; Origin of Evil,
237; Creeds and Confes-
sions, 252 ; Beautiful
World, 255 ; " My Loves,"
256; Covenanters, 261 ;
Stock Geill, 262; The Two
Meek Margarets, 262 ;
Magns Muir, 264; " O for
a heart from self set free,"
269 ; Song of Fatherland,
298; Litany of the Nile,
300 ; Our Life Drama, 331
Politics : 58, 162, 163 ;
maxims, 166 ; House of
Lords, 170; foreign policy,
167, 303
Prelooker, Jaakoff, 279
" Punch," i.
Queen, the, and the Celtic
Chair, 200
Eainy, Principal, 321
Bank and riches, 169
Rebellion, 174, 261
Religion : early experiences,
22, 27, 29, 39 ; the Bible,
31, 38, 237, 238, 260;
" jist himseP," 234;
Atheism, 235 ; " scientific
nonsense," 236; Christ.
314
Index.
ianity, 239 ; faith, 239,
251 ; noblfl heathens, 240 ;
Psalms, 242, 335 ; Dingwall
boy's idea, 242 ; tests, 62,
243; dissent, 244; unity
of Christendom, 246 ;
forms of church govern-
ment, 247 ; church attend-
ance, 249 ; heresy, 252;
beauty, 254, 258; Pnsey-
ites, 259; a new prophet
wanted, 259, Covenanters,
260 ; family worship, 327
Rosebery> Earl of, 321, 325
Ruskin, 320
Russia: 279, 308
Sabbatarianism, 253
Schleiermacher, 40
Scottish nationality : 205 ;
Edinburgh West-Endism,
207 ; Scottish Song, 207,
281; Home Eule, 211
Self-Culture, 116, 167, 170,
172, 180, 233, 251, 254
Sicily, 303
Singing : 161, 218 ; song-
writing, 221
Smith, Dr. W. 0., 250, 283
Smyrna, 302
Stevenson, R. L., 136
Stodarts, the, 2
Stodart, Helen : marriage,
2, 6; her letters, 4;
Glasgow and Aberdeen,
6; " Society," 7; appear-
ance, 9 ; family cares,
10 ; death, 13
Stodart, Marion, 12, 13, 26,
221
Stuarts, the, 1, 261
Taxes, 173
Taylor, Tom, 293
Tennyson, 291
" The Times," 123, 177, 294
" The Yonng Man," 16
Turkey, 303, 307
Utilitarianism, 161
Vulgarity, 209
Waddie, Charles, 211
Wages, 173
Wallace Monument, 207
Water Cure : 92 ; at a York-
shire Hydropathic, 296
Webster, Rev. A., 267
Westminster Deanery, 287
White, Dr. J. F., 68, 82
Whyte, Rev. Dr., 317, 320
Wilson, Prof., 26, 28, 55
Wy Id, Eliza: marriage, 85;
88,89
MR. ALEXANDER BLACKIE died in 1856, having been a
w dower since 1847. Of hie first family, the eldest and
the youngest, Miss Christina Blackie and Mrs. Helen
Kennedy, survive. Mrs. Marion Ross died in 1889, at the
age of 70; her brother James lost his life at sea in 1851 ;
and the remaining five died in childhood. There were
five children in the second family : Archibald, Gregory
and George Blackie, Mrs. Jemima Walker, and Mrs.
Agnes Mackay, of whom Mrs. Walker survives. All of
the second family and one member of the first leave
descendants. Miss Marion Stodart died in 1883, in her
99th year.
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