3 
 
THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
/ 
 

 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS, 
 
 BY JOHN BROWN, M.D. 
 
LETTER.* 
 
 23 RUTLAND STREET, 15th August. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, When, at the urgent re- 
 quest of his trustees and family, and in accord- 
 ance with what I believe was his own wish, you 
 undertook my father's Memoir, it was in a mea- 
 sure on the understanding that I would furnish 
 you with some domestic and personal details. 
 This I hoped to have done, but was unable. 
 
 Though convinced more than ever how littk 
 my hand is needed, I will now endeavour to ful- 
 fil my promise. Before doing so, however, you 
 must permit me to express our deep gratitude 
 to you for this crowning proof of your regard 
 for him 
 
 " Without whose life we had not been ;" 
 
 to whom for many years you habitually wrote 
 as " My father," and one of whose best bless- 
 ings, when he was " such an one as Paul the 
 aged," was to know that you were to him 
 " mine own son in the gospel." 
 
 With regard to the manner in which you 
 
 * To the Rev. John Cairns, I>.D., Berwick-on-Tweed. 
 2 D 
 
410 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 have done this last kindness to the dead, I can 
 say nothing more expressive of our feelings, 
 and, I am sure, nothing more gratifying to you, 
 than that the record you have given of my 
 father's life, and of the series of great public 
 questions in which he took part, is done in the 
 way which would have been most pleasing to 
 himself that which, with his passionate love 
 of truth and liberty, his relish for concentrated, 
 just thought and expression, and his love of 
 being loved, he would have most desired, in 
 any one speaking of him after he was gone. 
 He would, I doubt not, say, as one said to 
 a great painter, on looking at his portrait, 
 "It is certainly like, but it is much better 
 looking ;" and you might well reply as did the 
 painter, " It is the truth, told lovingly " and 
 all the more true that it is so told. You have, 
 indeed, been enabled to speak the truth, or as 
 the Greek has it, a\r)6eviiv ev ayd-Try to truth it 
 
 in love. 
 
 I have over and over again sat down to try and 
 do what I promised and wished to give some 
 faint expression of my father's life ; not of what 
 he did or said or wrote not even of what he 
 was as a man of God and a public teacher ; but 
 what he was in his essential nature what he 
 would have been had he been anything else 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 411 
 
 than what he was, or had lived a thousand 
 years ago. 
 
 Sometimes I have this so vividly in my mind 
 that I think I have only to sit down and write 
 it off, and do it to the quick. " The idea of 
 his life," what he was as a whole, what was 
 his self, all his days, w r ould, to go on with 
 words which not time or custom can ever wither 
 or make stale, 
 
 " Sweetly creep 
 Into my study of imagination ; 
 And every lovely organ of his life 
 Would come apparelled in more precious habit 
 More moving delicate, and full of life, 
 Into the eye and prospect of my soul, 
 Than when he lived indeed," 
 
 as if the sacredness of death and the bloom 
 of eternity were on it ; or as you may have seen 
 in an untroubled lake, the heaven reflected with 
 its clouds, brighter, purer, more exquisite than 
 itself; but when you try to put this into words, 
 to detain yourself over it, it is by this very act 
 disturbed, broken and bedimmed, and soon 
 vanishes away, as would the imaged heavens 
 in the lake, if a pebble were cast into it, or 
 a breath of wind stirred its face. The very 
 anxiety to transfer it, as it looked out of the 
 clear darkness of the past, makes the image 
 grow 7 dim and disappear. 
 
 Every one whose thoughts are not seldom 
 
412 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 with the dead, must have felt both these condi- 
 tions ; how, in certain passive, tranquil states, 
 there comes up into the darkened chamber of 
 the mind, its " chamber of imagery" un- 
 called, as if it blossomed out of space, exact, 
 absolute, consummate, vivid, speaking, not 
 darkly as in a glass, but face to face, and 
 "moving delicate" this "idea of his life;" 
 and then how an effort to prolong and perpetu- 
 ate and record all this, troubles the vision and 
 kills it ! It is as if one should try to paint in a 
 mirror the reflection of a dear and unseen face ; 
 the coarse, uncertain, passionate handling and 
 colour, ineffectual and hopeless, shut out the 
 very thing itself. 
 
 I will therefore give this up as in vain, and 
 try by some fragmentary sketches, scenes, and 
 anecdotes, to let you know in some measure 
 what manner of man my father was. Anecdotes, 
 if true and alive, are always valuable ; the man 
 in the concrete, the totus quis comes out in 
 them ; and I know you too well to think that 
 you will consider as trivial or out of place any- 
 thing in which his real nature displayed itself, 
 and your own sense of humour as a master and 
 central power of the human soul, playing about 
 the very essence of the man, will do more than 
 forgive anything of this kind which may crop 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 413 
 
 out here and there, like the smile of wild-flowers 
 in grass, or by the wayside. 
 
 My first recollection of my father, my first 
 impression, not only of his character, but of his 
 eyes and face and presence, strange as it may 
 seem, dates from my fifth year. Doubtless I 
 had looked at him often enough before that, and 
 had my own childish thoughts about him ; but 
 this was the time when I got my fixed, compact 
 idea of him, and the first look of him which I 
 felt could never be forgotten. I saw him, as it 
 were, by a flash of lightning, sudden and com- 
 plete. A child begins by seeing bits of every- 
 thing ; it knows in part here a little, there a 
 little ; it makes up its wholes out of its own littles, 
 and is long of reaching the fulness of a whole ; 
 and in this we are children all our lives in 
 much. Children are long of seeing, or at least 
 of looking at what is above them ; they like 
 the ground, and its flowers and stones, its " red 
 sodgers" and lady-birds, and all its queer 
 things ; their world is about three feet high, 
 and they are more often stooping than gazing 
 up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or 
 cared to see, the ceilings of the rooms in the 
 manse at Biggar. 
 
 On the morning of the 28th May 1816, my 
 eldest sister Janet and I were sleeping in the 
 
414 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 kitchen-bed with Tibbie Meek,* our only ser- 
 vant. We were all three awakened by a cry of 
 pain sharp, insufferable, as if one were stung. 
 Years after we two confided to each other, sit- 
 ting by the burnside, that we thought that 
 " great cry " which arose at midnight in Egypt 
 must have been like it. We all knew w r hose 
 voice it was, and, in our night-clothes, we ran 
 into the passage, and into the little parlour 
 to the left hand, in which was a closet-bed. 
 We found my father standing before us, erect, 
 his hands clenched in his black hair, his eyes 
 full of misery and amazement, his face white as 
 that of the dead. He frightened us. He saw 
 this, or else his intense will had mastered his 
 agony, for, taking his hands from his head, he 
 said, slowly and gently, " Let us give thanks/' 
 and turned to a little sofa-f* in the room ; there 
 lay our mother, dead. She had long been ailing. 
 
 * A year ago, I found an elderly country woman, a widow, waiting 
 forme. Rising up, she said, "D'ye mind me?" I looked at her, 
 but could get nothing from her face ; hut the voice remained in my 
 ear, as if coming from "the fields of sleep," and I said by a sort of 
 instinct, " Tibbie Meek ! " I had not seen her or heard her voice 
 for more than forty years. She had come to get some medical advice. 
 Voices are often like the smells of flowers and leaves, the tastes of 
 wild fruits they touch and awaken memory in a strange way. 
 " Tibbie" is now living at Thankerton. 
 
 f This sofa, which was henceforward sacred in the house, he had 
 always beside him. He used to tell us he set her down upon it 
 when he brought her home to the manse. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 415 
 
 I remember her sitting in a shawl, an Indian 
 one with little dark green spots on a light 
 ground, and watching her growing pale with 
 what I afterwards knew must have been strong 
 pain. She had, being feverish, slipped out of 
 bed, and "grandmother," her mother, seeing 
 her " change come," had called my father, and 
 they two saw her open her blue, kind, and true 
 eyes, "comfortable" to us all "as the day" I 
 remember them better than those of any one I 
 saw yesterday and, with one faint look of 
 recognition to him, close them till the time of 
 the restitution of all things. 
 
 " She had another morn than ours." 
 
 Then were seen in full action his keen, pas- 
 sionate nature, his sense of mental pain, and 
 his supreme will, instant and unsparing, mak- 
 ing himself and his terrified household give 
 thanks in the midst of such a desolation, and 
 for it. Her warfare was accomplished, her 
 iniquities were pardoned ; she had already 
 received from her Lord's hand double for all 
 her sins : this was his supreme and over-mas- 
 tering thought, and he gave it utterance. 
 
 No man was happier in his wives. My 
 mother was modest, calm, thrifty, reasonable, 
 tender, happy-hearted. She was his student- 
 love, and is even now remembered in that pas- 
 
416 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 toral region, for " her sweet gentleness and wife- 
 like government." Her death and his sorrow 
 and loss, settled down deep into the heart of the 
 countryside. He was so young and bright, so 
 full of fire, so unlike any one else, so devoted 
 to his work, so chivalrous in his look and man- 
 ner, so fearless, and yet so sensitive and self- 
 contained. She was so wise, good and gentle, 
 gracious and frank. 
 
 His subtlety of affection, and his almost cruel 
 self-command, w r ere shown on the day of the 
 funeral. It was to Symington, four miles off, 
 a quiet little churchyard, lying in the shadow 
 of Tinto ; a place where she herself had wished 
 to be laid. The funeral was chiefly on horseback. 
 We, the family, were in coaches. I had been 
 since the death in a sort of stupid musing and 
 wonder, not making out what it all meant. I 
 knew my mother was said to be dead. I saw 
 she was still, and laid out, and then shut up, and 
 didn't move ; but I did not know that when she 
 was carried out in that long black box, and we 
 all went with her, she alone was never to return. 
 
 When we got to the village all the people 
 were at their doors. One woman, the black- 
 smith Thomas Spence's wife, had a nursing 
 baby in her arms, and he leapt up and crowed 
 with joy at the strange sight, the crowding 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 417 
 
 horsemen, the coaches and the nodding plumes 
 of the hearse. This was my brother William, 
 then nine months old, and Margaret Spence was 
 his foster-mother. Those with me were over- 
 come at this sight ; he of all in the world whose, 
 in some ways, was the greatest loss, the least 
 conscious, turning it to his own childish glee. 
 
 We got to the churchyard and stood round 
 the open grave. My dear old grandfather was 
 asked by my father to pray ; he did. I don't 
 remember his words ; I believe he, through his 
 tears and sobs, repeated the Divine words, " All 
 flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the 
 flower of the grass ; the grass withereth, and 
 the flower thereof falleth away, but the word 
 of the Lord endureth for ever ;" adding, in 
 his homely and pathetic way, that the flower 
 would again bloom, never again to fade ; that 
 what was now sown in dishonour and weakness, 
 would be raised in glory and power, like unto 
 His own glorious body. Then to my surprise 
 arid alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers, was 
 placed over that dark hole, and I watched with 
 curious eye the unrolling of those neat black 
 bunches of cords, which I have often enough 
 seen since. My father took the one at the head, 
 and also another much smaller springing from 
 the same point as his, which he had caused to 
 
418 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 be put there, and unrolling it, put it into my 
 hand. I twisted it firmly round my fingers, 
 and awaited the result ; the burial men with 
 their real ropes lowered the coffin, and when 
 it rested at the bottom, it was too far down for 
 me to see it the grave was made very deep, as 
 he used afterwards to tell us, that it might hold 
 us all my father first and abruptly let his cord 
 drop, followed by the rest. This was too much. 
 I now saw what w^as meant, and held on and fixed 
 my fist and feet, and I believe my father had 
 some difficulty in forcing open my small fingers ; 
 he let the little black cord drop, and I remember, 
 in my misery and anger, seeing its open end 
 disappearing in the gloom. 
 
 My mother's death was the second epoch in 
 my father's life ; it marked a change at once 
 and for life ; and for a man so self-reliant, so 
 poised upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful 
 the extent of change it made. He went home, 
 preached her funeral sermon, every one in the 
 church in tears, himself outw r ardly unmoved."* 
 But from that time dates an entire, though 
 always deepening, alteration in his manner of 
 preaching, because an entire change in his way of 
 dealing with God's Word. Not that his abiding 
 
 * I have been told that once in the course of the sermon his voice 
 trembled, and many feared he was about to break do\vn. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 419 
 
 religious views and convictions were then ori- 
 ginated or even altered I doubt not that from 
 a child he not only knew the Holy Scriptures, but 
 was "wise unto salvation" but it strengthened 
 and clarified, quickened and gave permanent 
 direction to, his sense of God as revealed in His 
 Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing ; 
 he got a new and adamantine point to the in- 
 strument with which he bored, and with a fresh 
 power with his whole might, he sunk it right 
 down into the living rock, to the virgin gold. 
 His entire nature had got a shock, and his 
 blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chil- 
 led ; but fuel was heaped all the more on the 
 inner fires, and his zeal, that Oep^ov irpa^^a, 
 burned with a new ardour ; indeed had he not 
 found an outlet for his pent-up energy, his brain 
 must have given way, and his faculties have 
 either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful 
 splendour and combustion, or dwindled into 
 lethargy.* 
 
 The manse became silent ; we lived and 
 slept and played under the shadow of that 
 
 * There is a story illustrative of this altered manner and matter 
 of preaching. He had been preaching when very young, at Gala- 
 shiels, and one wife said to her "neebor," "Jean, what think ye 
 o' the lad?" " Ifs maist o't tinsel wark" said Jean, neither relish- 
 ing nor appreciating his fine sentiments and figures. After my 
 mother's death, he preached in the .same place, and Jean, running 
 to her friend, took the first word, " It's a 1 gowd noo." 
 
420 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 death, and we saw, or rather felt, that he was 
 another father than before. No more happy 
 laughter from the two in the parlour, as he was 
 reading Larry, the Irish postboy's letter in 
 Miss Edgeworth's tale, or the last Waverley 
 novel ; no more visitings in a cart with her. 
 he riding beside us on his white thorough- 
 bred pony, to Kilbucho, or Rachan Mill, or 
 Kirklawhill. He went among his people as 
 usual when they were ill ; he preached better 
 than ever they were sometimes frightened to 
 think how wonderfully he preached ; but the 
 sunshine was over the glad and careless look, 
 the joy of young life and mutual love. He was 
 little with us, and, as I said, the house was still, 
 except when he was mandating his sermons for 
 Sabbath. This he always did, not only viva 
 voce, but with as much energy and loudness as 
 in the pulpit ; we felt his voice was sharper, 
 and rang keen through the house. 
 
 What we lost, the congregation and the world 
 gained. He gave himself wholly to his work. 
 As you have yourself said, he changed his entire 
 system and fashion of preaching ; from being 
 elegant, rhetorical, and ambitious, he became 
 concentrated, urgent, moving (being himself 
 moved), keen, searching, unswerving, authori- 
 tative to fierceness, full of the terrors of the Lord, 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 421 
 
 if lie could but persuade men. The truth of 
 the words of God had shone out upon him 
 with an immediateness and infinity of mean- 
 ing and power, which made them, though the 
 same words he had looked on from childhood, 
 other and greater and deeper words. He then 
 left the ordinary commentators, and men who 
 write about meanings and flutter around the 
 circumference and corners ; he was bent on the 
 centre, on touching with his own fingers, on 
 seeing with his own eyes, the pearl of great price. 
 Then it was that he began to dig into the 
 depths, into the primary and auriferous rock of 
 Scripture, and take nothing at another's hand : 
 then he took up with the word " apprehend ;" 
 he had laid hold of the truth, there it was, 
 with its evidence, in his hand ; and every one 
 wiio knew him must remember well how r , in 
 speaking with earnestness of the meaning of 
 a passage, he, in his ardent, hesitating way, 
 looked into the palm of his hand as if he actually 
 saw there the truth he was going to utter. This 
 word apprehend played a large part in his lec- 
 tures, as the thing itself did in his processes 
 of investigation, or, if I might make a word, 
 indagation. Comprehension, he said, was for 
 few ; apprehension was for every man who 
 had hands and a head to rule them, and an 
 
422 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 eye to direct them. Out of this arose one 
 of his deficiencies. He could go largely into 
 the generalities of a subject, and relished 
 greatly others doing it, so that they did do it 
 really and well ; but he was averse to abstract 
 and wide reasonings. Principles he rejoiced 
 in : he worked with them as with his choicest 
 weapons ; they were the polished stones for 
 his sling, against the Goliaths of presumption, 
 error, and tyranny in thought or in polity, 
 civil or ecclesiastical ; but he somehow divined 
 a principle, or got at it naked and alone, rather 
 than deduced it and brought it to a point from 
 an immensity of particulars, and then rendered 
 it back so as to bind them into one cosmos. One 
 of my young friends now dead, who afterwards 
 went to India, used to come and hear him in 
 Broughton Place with me, and this word appre- 
 hend caught him, and as he had a great love for 
 my father, in writing home to me, he never 
 forgot to ask how " grand old Apprehend" was. 
 From this time dates my father's possession 
 and use of the German Exegetics. After my 
 mother's death I slept with him ; his bed was 
 in his study, a small room/" with a very small 
 
 * On a low chest of drawers in this room there lay for many years 
 my mother's parasol, by his orders I daresay, for long, the only one 
 iu Biggar. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 423 
 
 grate ; and I remember well his getting those 
 fat, shapeless, spongy German books, as if one 
 would sink in them, and be bogged in their 
 bibulous, unsized paper ; and watching him as 
 he impatiently cut them up, and dived into 
 them in his rapid, eclectic way, tasting them, and 
 dropping for my play such a lot of soft, large, 
 curled bits from the paper-cutter, leaving the 
 edges all shaggy. He never came to bed when 
 I was awake, which was not to be wondered 
 at ; but I can remember often awaking far 
 on in the night or morning, and seeing that 
 keen, beautiful, intense face bending over these 
 Rosenmullers, and Ernestis, and Storrs, and 
 Kuinoels the fire out, and the grey dawn 
 peering through the window ; and when he 
 heard me move, he would speak to me in the 
 foolish words of endearment my mother was 
 wont to use, and come to bed, and take me, 
 warm as I was, into his cold bosom. 
 
 Vitringa in Jesaiam I especially remember, 
 a noble folio. Even then, with that eager- 
 ness to communicate what he had himself 
 found, of which you must often have been 
 made the subject, he went and told it. He 
 would try to make me, small man as I was, 
 "apprehend" what he and Vitringa between 
 them had made out, of the fifty- third chapter 
 
424 MEMOIR OF JOHX BRoWX, D.D. 
 
 of his favourite prophet, the princely Isaiah/'' 
 Even then, so far as I can recal, he never took 
 notes of what he read. He did not need this, 
 his intellectual force and clearness were so great ; 
 he was so totus in illo, whatever it was, that 
 he recorded by a secret of its own, his mind's 
 results and victories and memoranda, as he 
 went on ; he did not even mark his books, at 
 least very seldom ; he marked his mind. 
 
 * His reading aloud of everything from John Gilpiu to John 
 Howe was a fine and high art, or rather gift. Henderson could not 
 have given 
 
 " The dinner waits, and we are tired ;" 
 Says Gilpin, " So am I," 
 
 better ; and to hear him sounding the depths and cadences of the 
 Living Temple, " bearing on its front this doleful inscription, ' Here 
 God once dwelt,'" was like listening to the recitative of Handel. But 
 Isaiah was his masterpiece ; and I remember quite well his startling 
 us all when reading at family worship " His name shall be called 
 Wonderful, the Counsellor, the mighty God," by a peremptory, ex- 
 plosive sharpness, as of thunder overhead, at the words " the mighty 
 God," similar to the rendering now given to Handel's music, and 
 doubtless so meant by him ; and then closing with "the Prince of 
 Peace," soft and low. No man who wishes to feel Isaiah, as well as 
 understand him, should be ignorant of Handel's " Messiah." His 
 prelude to " Comfort ye " its simple theme, cheerful and infinite as 
 the ripple of the unsearchable sea gives a deepened meaning to the 
 words. One of my father's great delights in his dying months was 
 reading the lives of Handel and of Michael Angelo, then newly out. 
 He felt that the author of "He was despised," and "He shall feed 
 his flock," and those other wonderful airs, was a man of profound 
 religious feeling, of which they were the utterance ; and he rejoiced 
 over the warlike airs and choruses of "Judas Maccabseus." You 
 have recorded his estimate of the religious nature of him of the 
 terribile via; he said it was a relief to his mind to know that such a 
 mighty genius walked humbly with his God. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 425 
 
 He was thus every year preaching with more 
 and more power, because with more and more 
 knowledge and " pureness ;" and, as you say, 
 there were probably nowhere in Britain such 
 lectures delivered at that time to such an audi- 
 ence, consisting of country people, sound, devout, 
 well-read in their Bibles and in the native divi- 
 nity, but quite unused to persistent, deep, critical 
 thought. 
 
 Much of this most of it was entirely his 
 own, self-originated and self-sustained, and done 
 for its own sake, 
 
 " All too happy in the pleasure 
 Of his own exceeding treasure." 
 
 But he often said, with deep feeling, that one 
 thing put him always on his mettle, the know- 
 ledge that "yonder in that corner, under the 
 gallery, sat, Sabbath after Sabbath, a man who 
 knew his Greek Testament better than I did." 
 This was his brother-in-law, and one of his 
 elders, Mr. Robert Johnston, married to his 
 sister Violet, a merchant and portiorier in Big- 
 gar, a remarkable man, of whom it is difficult 
 to say to strangers what is true, without being 
 accused of exaggeration. A shopkeeper in that 
 remote little town, he not only intermeddled 
 fearlessly with all knowledge, but mastered more 
 than many practised and University men do in 
 2 E 
 
4^G MK.MOU: MK JOHN ni:o\vN, n.n. 
 
 their own linos. Mathematics; astronomy, and 
 especially what may be called telcnoloyii, or the 
 doctrine of the moon, and the higher geometry 
 and physics ; Hebrew, Sanscrit, Greek, and 
 Latin, to the veriest rigours of prosody and 
 metre; Spanish and Italian, German, French, 
 and any odd language that came in his Avav : 
 all these he knew more or less thoroughly, and 
 acquired them in the most leisurely, easy, cool 
 sort of way, as if he grazed and browsed per- 
 petually in the field of letters, rather than made 
 formal meals, or gathered for any ulterior pur- 
 pose, his fruits, his roots, and his nuts he espe- 
 cially liked mental nuts much less bought them 
 from any one. 
 
 With all this, his knowledge of human, and 
 especially of I'iggnr human nature, the ins and 
 outs of its little secret ongoings, the entire 
 ip of the place, was like a, woman's ; more- 
 over, every personage great or small, heroic or 
 comic, in Homer whose poems he made it a 
 matter of coii.M-iencc to read once every four 
 years Plautus, Suetonius, Plutarch, Tacitus, 
 and Lueiau, down through Boccaccio and Bon 
 Quixote, which he knew by heart and from the 
 living Spanish, to Joseph Andrews, the Spec- 
 tator, Goldsmith and Swift, Miss Austen. .Miss 
 Kdgeworth, and Miss Ferrier, Gait and Sir 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS 427 
 
 Walter, he was as familiar with, as with David 
 Crockat the nailer, or the parish minister, the 
 town-drummer, the mole-catcher, or the poach- 
 ing weaver, who had the night before leistered a 
 prime kipper at Rachan Mill, by the flare of a 
 tarry wisp, or brought home his surreptitious 
 grey hen or maiikln from the wilds of Dunsyre 
 or the dreary Lang Whang/'" 
 
 This singular man came to the manse every 
 Friday evening for many years, and he and 
 my father discussed every thing and everybody : 
 beginning with tough, strong head work 
 a bout at wrestling, be it Caesar's Bridge, the 
 Epistles of Phalaris, the import of pev and Se, the 
 Catholic question, or the great roots of Christian 
 faith ; ending with the latest joke in the town, 
 or the West Raw, the last effusion by A ffleck, 
 tailor and poet, the last blunder of ^Esop the apo- 
 thecary, and the last repartee of the village fool, 
 with the week's Edinburgh and Glasgow news 
 by their respective carriers ; the w r hole little life, 
 sad and humorous who had been born, and 
 who was dying or dead, married or about to be, 
 for the past eight days.f 
 
 * With the practices of this last worthy, when carried on moder- 
 ately, and for the sport's sake, he had a special sympathy. 
 
 + I helieve this was the true though secret source of much of my 
 father's knowledge of the minute personal history of every one in his 
 region, which, to his people, knowing his reserved manner and his 
 
428 MEMOIK OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 This amused, and, in the true sense, diverted 
 my father, and gratified his curiosity, which was 
 great, and his love of men, as well as for man. 
 He was shy, and unwilling to ask what he longed 
 to know, liking better to have it given him with- 
 out the asking ; arid no one could do this better 
 than " Uncle Johnston/' 
 
 You may readily understand what a thorough 
 exercise and diversion of an intellectual and 
 social kind this was, for they were neither of 
 them men to shirk from close gripes, or trifle and 
 flourish with their weapons : they laid on and 
 spared not. And then my uncle had generally 
 some special nut of his own to crack, some thesis 
 to fling down and offer battle on, some " par- 
 ticle " to energize upon ; for though quiet and 
 calm, he was thoroughly combative, and en- 
 joyed seeing his friend's blood up, and hearing 
 his emphatic and bright speech, and watching 
 his flashing eye. Then he never spared him ; 
 criticised and sometimes quizzed for he had 
 great humour his style, as well as debated and 
 weighed his apprehendings and exegeses, shak- 
 ing them heartily to test their strength. He 
 was so thoroughly independent of all authority, 
 
 devotion to his studies, and his so rarely meeting them or speaking to 
 them except from the pulpit, or at a diet of visitation, was a perpetual 
 wonder, and of which he made great use in his dealings with his 
 afflicted or erring " members." 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 429 
 
 except that of reason and truth, and his own 
 humour ; so ready to detect what was weak, 
 extravagant, or unfair ; so full of relish for in- 
 tellectual power and accuracy, and so attached 
 to and proud of my father, and bent on his 
 making the hest of himself, that this trial was 
 never relaxed. His firm and close-grained 
 mind was a sort of whetstone on which my 
 father sharpened his wits at this weekly " set- 
 ting." 
 
 The very difference of their mental tempers 
 and complexions drew them together the one 
 impatient, nervows, earnest, instant, swift, vehe- 
 ment, regardless of exertion, bent on his goal, 
 like a thoroughbred racer, pressing to the mark ; 
 the other leisurely to slowness and provoking- 
 ness, with a constitution which could stand a 
 great deal of ease, unimpassioned, still, clear, 
 untroubled by likings or dislikings, dwelling and 
 working in thought and speculation and obser- 
 vation as ends in themselves, and as their own 
 rewards :* the one hunting for a principle or a 
 
 * He was curiously destitute of all literary ambition or show ; like 
 the cactus in the desert, always plump, always taking in the dew 
 of heaven, and caring little to give it out. He wrote many papers 
 in the Repository and Monitor, an acute and clever tract on the volun- 
 tary controversy, entitled Calm Answers to Angry Questions, and 
 was the author of a capital bit of literary banter a Congratulatory 
 Letter to the Minister of Liberton, who had come down upon my 
 father in a pamphlet, for his sermon on " There remaineth much land 
 
430 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 " divine method '" the other sapping or shelling 
 from a distance, and for his pleasure, a position, 
 or gaining a point, or settling a rule, or verifying 
 a problem, or getting axiomatic and proverbial. 
 
 In appearance they were as curiously unlike ; 
 my uncle short and round to rotundity, homely 
 and florid in feature. I used to think Socrates 
 must have been like him in visage as well as 
 in much of his mind. He was careless in his 
 dress, his hands in his pockets as a rule, and 
 strenuous only in smoking or in sleep; with a 
 large, full skull, a humorous twinkle in his 
 cold, blue eye, a soft, low voice, expressing 
 every kind of thought in the same, sometimes 
 plaguily douce tone ; a great power of quiet and 
 telling sarcasm, large capacity of listening to and 
 of enjoying other men's talk, however small. 
 
 My father tall, slim, agile, quick in his move- 
 ments, graceful, neat to nicety in his dress, with 
 much in his air of w^hat is called style, with a 
 face almost too beautiful for a man's, had not his 
 eyes commanded it and all who looked at it, 
 and his close, firm mouth been ready to say 
 
 to be possessed." It is a mixture of Swift and Arbuthnot. I remem- 
 ber one of the flowers he culls from him he is congratulating, in 
 which my father is characterized as one of those "shallow, sallow 
 souls that would swallow the bait, without perceiving the cloven 
 foot !" But a man like this never is best in a book ; he is always 
 greater than his work. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 431 
 
 what the fiery spirit might bid ; his eyes, when at 
 rest, expressing more than almost any other's 
 I ever saw sorrow and tender love, a desire 
 to give and to get sympathy, and a sort of 
 gentle, deep sadness, as if that was their per- 
 manent state, and gladness their momentary 
 act ; but when awakened, full of fire, peremp- 
 tory, and riot to be trifled with ; and his smile, 
 and flash of gaiety and fun, something no one 
 could forget ; his hair in early life a dead black; 
 his eyebrows of exquisite curve, narrow and in- 
 tense ; his voice deep when unmoved and calm ; 
 keen and sharp to piercing fierceness when vehe- 
 ment and roused in the pulpit,at times a shout, 
 at times a pathetic wail ; his utterance hesitat- 
 ing, emphatic, explosive, powerful, each sen- 
 tence shot straight and. home ; his hesitation 
 arising from his crowd of impatient ideas, and 
 his resolute will that they should come in their 
 order, and some of them not come at all, only 
 the best, and his settled determination that 
 each thought should be dressed in the very and 
 only word which he stammered on till it came, 
 it was generally worth his pains and ours. 
 
 Uncle Johnston, again, flowed on like Csesar's 
 Arar, incredibili lenitate, or like linseed out of a 
 poke. You can easily fancy the spiritual and 
 bodily contrast of these men, and can fancy too, 
 
432 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 the kind of engagements they would have with 
 their own proper weapons on these Friday 
 evenings, in the old manse dining-room, my 
 father showing uncle out into the darkness of 
 the back-road, and uncle, doubtless, lighting 
 'his black and ruminative pipe. 
 
 If my uncle brought up nuts to crack, mv 
 father was sure to have some difficulties to 
 consult about, or some passages to read, some- 
 thing that made him put his whole energy 
 forth ; and when he did so, I never heard such 
 reading. To hear him read the story of Joseph, 
 or passages in David's history, and Psalms 
 6th, llth, and 15th, or the 52d, 53d, 54th, 
 55th, 63d, 64th, and 40th chapters of Isaiah, 
 or the Sermon on the Mount, or the Journey 
 to Em maus, or our Saviour's prayer in John, 
 or Paul's speech on Mars' Hill, or the first 
 three chapters of Hebrews and the latter part 
 of the llth, or Job, or the Apocalypse ; or, to 
 pass from those divine themes Jeremy Taylor, 
 or George Herbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, or 
 Milton's prose, such as the passage beginning 
 " Come forth out of thy royal chambers, 
 thou Prince of all the kings of the earth!" and 
 " Truth, indeed, came once into the world 
 with her divine Master," or Charles Wesley's 
 Hymns, or, most loved of all, Cowper, from the 
 
LETTER TO EEV. DR. CAIRNS. 433 
 
 rapt "Come thou, and, added to thy many 
 crowns," or " that those lips had language !" 
 to the Jackdaw, and his incomparable Letters ; 
 or Gray's Poems, Burns's " Tarn O'Shanter," or 
 Sir Walter's "Eve of St. John,"* and "The 
 Grey Brother." 
 
 But I beg your pardon : Time has run back 
 with me, and fetched that blessed past, and 
 awakened its echoes. I hear his voice ; I feel 
 his eye ; I see his whole nature given up to what 
 he is reading, and making its very soul speak. 
 
 Such a man then as I have sketched, or washed 
 faintly in, as the painters say, was that person 
 who sat in the corner under the gallery every 
 Sabbath-day, and who knew his Greek Testa- 
 ment better than his minister. He is dead too, 
 a few months ago, dying surrounded with his 
 cherished hoard of books of all sizes, times, and 
 tongues tatterdemalion many; all however 
 drawn up in an order of his own ; all thoroughly 
 
 * Well do I remember when driving him from Melrose to Kelso, 
 long ago, we came near Sandyknowe, that grim tower of Smailholm, 
 standing erect like a warder turned to stone, defying time and change, 
 his bursting into that noble ballad 
 
 " The Baron of Smaylho'me rose with day, 
 
 He spurr'd his courser on, 
 Without stop or stay, down the rocky way, 
 That leads to Brotherstone ;" 
 
 and pointing out the " Watchfold height," " the eiry Beacon Hill," 
 and " Brotherstone." 
 
434 MEMOIR OF JOHX BROWX, D.D. 
 
 mastered and known ; among them David 
 Hume's copy of Shaftesbury's Characteristics, 
 with his autograph, which he had picked up 
 at some stall. 
 
 I have said that my mother's death was the 
 second epoch in my father's life. I should per- 
 haps have said the third ; the first being his 
 mother's long illness and death, and the second 
 his going to Elie, and beginning the battle of 
 life at fifteen. There must have been some- 
 thing very delicate and close and exquisite in 
 the relation between the ailing, silent, beauti- 
 ful and pensive mother, and that dark-eyed, 
 dark-haired, bright and silent son ; a sort of 
 communion it is not easy to express. You can 
 think of him at eleven slowly writing out that 
 small book of promises in a distinct and minute 
 hand, quite as like his mature hand, as the shy, 
 lustrous-eyed boy was to his after self in his 
 manly years, and sitting by the bedside while 
 the rest were out and shouting, playing at hide- 
 and-seek round the little church, with the 
 winds from Benlomond or the wild uplands of 
 Ayrshire blowing through their hair. He played 
 seldom, but when he did run out, he jumped 
 higher and farther, and ran faster than any of 
 them. His peculiar beauty must have come 
 from his mother. He used at rare times, and 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 435 
 
 with a sort of shudder, to tell of her when a 
 lovely girl of fifteen, having been seen by a 
 gentleman of rank, in Cheapside, hand in hand 
 with an evil woman, who was decoying her to 
 ruin, on pretence of showing her the way home ; 
 and how he stopped his carriage, and taking in 
 the unconscious girl, drove her to her uncle's 
 door. But you have said all this better than 
 1 can. 
 
 His time with his mother, and the necessary 
 confinement and bodily depression caused by it, 
 I doubt not deepened his native thoughtful turn, 
 and his tendency to meditative melancholy, as 
 a condition under which he viewed all things, 
 and quickened and intensified his sense of the 
 suffering of this world, and of the profound 
 seriousness and mystery in the midst of which 
 we live and die. 
 
 The second epoch was that of his leaving 
 home with his guinea, the last he ever got from 
 any one but himself ; and his going among utter 
 strangers to be master of a school one half of 
 the scholars of which were bigger and older than 
 himself,and all rough colts wilful and unbroken. 
 This was his first fronting of the world. Besides 
 supporting himself, this knit the sinews of his 
 mind, and made him rely on himself in action 
 as well as in thought. He sometimes, but not 
 
436 MEMOIP OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 often, spoke of this, never lightly, though he 
 laughed at some of his predicaments. He could 
 not forget the rude shock. Generally those 
 familiar revelations were at supper, on the Sab- 
 bath evening, when, his work over, he enjoyed 
 and lingered over his meal. 
 
 From his young and slight, almost girlish 
 look, and his refined, quiet manners, the boys 
 of the school were inclined to annoy and bully 
 him. He saw this, and felt it was now or never, 
 nothing between. So he took his line. The 
 biggest boy. much older and stronger, was the 
 rudest, and infected the rest. The " wee maister" 
 ordered him, in that peremptory voice we all 
 remember, to stand up and hold out his hand, 
 being not at all sure but the big fellow might 
 knock him down on the word. To the astonish- 
 ment of the school, and to the big rebel's too, 
 he obeyed and was punished on the instant, and 
 to the full ; out wentthe hand, down came the 
 " taws" and bit like fire. From that moment 
 he ruled them by his eye, the taws vanished. 
 
 There was an incident at this time of his life 
 which I should perhaps not tell, and yet I don't 
 know why I shouldn't, it so perfectly illustrates 
 his character in many ways. He had come 
 home during the vacation of his school to Lang- 
 rig, and was about to go back ; he had been 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 437 
 
 renewing his intercourse with his old teacher 
 and friend whom you mention, from whom 
 he used to say he learned to like Shakspere, 
 and who seems to have been a man of genuine 
 literary tastes. He went down to bid him 
 good-bye, and doubtless they got on their old 
 book loves, and would be spouting their pet 
 pieces. The old dominie said, " John, my man, 
 if you are walking into Edinburgh, I'll convoy 
 you a bit/' " John" was too happy, so next 
 morning they set off, keeping up a constant 
 fire of quotation and eager talk. They got 
 past Mid-Calder to near East, when my father- 
 insisted on his friend returning, and also on 
 going back a bit with him ; on looking at 
 the old man, he thought he was tired, so on 
 reaching the well-known " Kippen's Inn/' he 
 stopped and insisted on giving him some re- 
 freshment. Instead of ordering bread and 
 cheese and a bottle of ale, he, doubtless full of 
 Shakspere, and great upon sack and canary, 
 ordered a bottle of wine ! Of this you may be 
 sure, the dominie, as he most needed it, had 
 the greater share, and doubtless it warmed the 
 cockles of his old heart. " John" making him 
 finish the bottle, and drink the health of "Gentle 
 Will," saw him off, and went in to pay the 
 reckoning. What did he know of the price of 
 
438 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 wine ! It took exactly every penny he had ; 
 I doubt not, most boys, knowing that the land- 
 lord knew them, would have either paid a part, 
 or asked him to score it up. This was not his 
 way ; he was too proud and shy and honest for 
 such an expedient. By this time, what with 
 discussing Shakspere, and witnessing his master's 
 leisurely emptying of that bottle, and releasing 
 the 
 
 " Dear prisoned spirits of the impassioned grape," 
 
 he found he must run for it to Edinburgh, 
 or rather Leith, fourteen miles ; this he did, 
 and was at the pier just in time to jump into 
 the Elie pinnace, which was already off. He 
 often wondered what he would have done if he 
 had been that one moment late. You can 
 easily pick out the qualities this story unfolds. 
 His nature, capable as it was of great, per- 
 sistent, and indeed dogged labour, was, from 
 the predominance of the nervous system in his 
 organization, excitable, and therefore needed 
 and relished excitement the more intense the 
 better. He found this in his keen political tastes, 
 in imaginative literature, and in fiction. In the 
 highest kind of poetry he enjoyed the sweet 
 pain of tears ; and he all his life had a steady 
 liking, even a hunger, for a good novel. This 
 refreshed, lightened, and diverted his mind 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 
 
 from the sti'aiu of his incessant exegesis. He 
 used always to say that Sir Walter and Gold- 
 smith, and even Fielding, Miss Edgeworth, Miss 
 Austen, and Miss Ferrier, were true benefactors 
 to the race, by giving such genuine, such secure 
 and innocent pleasure ; and he often repeated 
 with admiration Lord Jeffrey's words on Scott, 
 inscribed on his monument. He had no turn for 
 gardening or for fishing or any field sports or 
 games : his sensitive nature recoiled from the 
 idea of pain, and above all, needless pain. He 
 used to say the lower creation had groans 
 enough, and needed no more burdens ; indeed, 
 he was fierce to some measure of unfairness 
 against such of his brethren Dr. Wardlaw, for 
 instance'" as resembled the apostles in fish- 
 ing for other tilings besides men. 
 
 But the exercise and the excitement he of 
 most all others delighted in, was riding ; and 
 had he been a country gentleman and not a 
 clergyman, I don't think he could have resisted 
 fox-hunting. With the exception of that great 
 genius in more than horsemanship, Andrew 
 Ducrow, I never saw a man sit a horse as he 
 did. He seemed inspired, gay, erect, full of the 
 joy of life, fearless and secure. I have heard a 
 
 * After a tight discussion between these two attached friends, Dr. 
 Wanllaw said-, " Well, I can't answer you, but fish I must and shall." 
 
440 MEMOFl OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 farmer friend say if he had not been a preacher 
 of the gospel he would have been a cavalry 
 officer, and would have fought as he preached. 
 He was known all over the Upper Ward and 
 down Tweeddale for his riding. " There goes 
 the minister," as he rode past at a swift canter. 
 He had generally well-bred horses, or as I 
 would now call them, ponies ; if he had not, his 
 sufferings from a dull, hard-mouthed, heavy- 
 hearted and footed, plebeian horse were almost 
 comic. On his grey mare, or his little blood 
 bay horse, to see him setting off and indulging 
 it and himself in some alarming gambols, and 
 in the midst of his difficulties, partly of his 
 own making, taking off his hat or kissing his 
 hand to a lady, made one think of "young 
 Harry with his beaver up." He used to tell 
 with much fun, how, one fine summer Sabbath 
 evening, after preaching in the open air for 
 a collection, in some village near, and having 
 put the money, chiefly halfpence, into his hand- 
 kerchief, and that into his hat, he was taking a 
 smart gallop home across the moor, happy and 
 relieved, when three ladies I think, the Miss 
 Bertrams of Kersewell came suddenly upon 
 him ; off went the hat, down bent the head, 
 and over him streamed the cherished collection, 
 the ladies busy among the wild grass and heather 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 441 
 
 picking it up, and he full of droll confusion and 
 laughter. 
 
 The grey mare he had for many years. I can 
 remember her small head and large eyes ; her 
 neat, compact body, round as a barrel ; her 
 finely flea-bitten skin, and her thoroughbred 
 legs. I have no doubt she had Arabian blood. 
 My father's pride in her was quite curious. 
 Many a wild ride to and from the Presbytery 
 at Lanark, and across flooded and shifting fords, 
 he had on her. She was as sweet tempered 
 and enduring, as she was swift and sure ; and 
 her powers of running were appreciated and 
 applied in a way which he was both angry and 
 amused to discover. You know what riding 
 the Iruse means. At a country wedding the 
 young men have a race to the bridegroom's 
 home, and he who wins, brings out a bottle arid 
 glass and drinks the young wife's health. I 
 wish Burns had described a bruse ; all sorts of 
 steeds, wild, unkempt lads as well as colts, 
 old broken-down thoroughbreds that did won- 
 ders when soopled, huge, grave cart horses 
 devouring the road with their shaggy hoofs, 
 wilful ponies, etc. You can imagine the wild 
 hurry-skurry arid fun, the comic situations and 
 upsets over a rough road, up and down places 
 one would be giddy to look at. 
 2 P 
 
442 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 Well, the young farmers were in the habit of 
 coming to my father, and asking the loan of the 
 mare to go and see a friend, etc., etc., praising 
 knowingly the fine points and virtues of his dar- 
 ling. Having through life, with all his firmness 
 of nature, an abhorrence of saying " No " to 
 any one, the interview generally ended with ? 
 ' : Well, Robert, you may have her, but take care 
 of her, and don't ride her fast/' In an hour or 
 two Robert was riding the bruse, and flying away 
 from the crowd, Grey first, and the rest nowhere, 
 and might be seen turning the corner of the 
 farm-house with the victorious bottle in his up- 
 lifted hand, the motley pack panting vainly up 
 the hill. This went on for long, and the grey 
 was famous, almost notorious, all over the Upper 
 Ward ; sometimes if she appeared, no one 
 would start, and she trotted the course. Partly 
 from his own personal abstraction from outward 
 country life, and partly from Uncle Johnston's 
 sense of waggery keeping him from telling 
 his friend of the grey's last exploit at Hartree 
 Mill, or her leaping over the " best man " at 
 Thriepland, my father was the last to hear of this 
 equivocal glory of " the minister's meer." In- 
 deed, it was whispered she had once won a w r hip 
 at Lanark races. They still tell of his feats on 
 this fine creature, one of which he himself never 
 
LETTER TO KEY. DR. CAIRNS. 443 
 
 alluded to without a feeling of shame. He had 
 an engagement to preach somewhere beyond the 
 Clyde on a Sabbath evening, and his excellent 
 and attached friend arid elder, Mr. Kello of Lind- 
 say-lands, accompanied him on his big plough 
 horse. It was to be in the open air, on the river 
 side. When they got to the Clyde they found 
 it in full flood, heavy and sudden rains at the 
 head of the water having brought it down in a 
 wild spate. On the opposite side w r ere the 
 gathered people and the tent. Before Mr. Kello 
 knew where he was, there was his minister on 
 the mare swimming across, and carried down 
 in a long diagonal, the people looking on in ter- 
 ror. He landed, shook himself, and preached 
 with his usual fervour. As I have said, he 
 never liked to speak of this bit of hardihood, 
 and he never repeated it ; but it was like the 
 man there were the people, that was what he 
 would be at, and though timid for anticipated 
 danger as any woman, in it he was without fear. 
 One more illustration of his character in con- 
 nexion with his riding. On coming to Edin- 
 burgh he gave up this kind of exercise ; he had 
 no occasion for it, and he had enough, and more 
 than enough of excitement in the public questions 
 in which he found himself involved, and in the 
 miscellaneous activities of a popular town mini- 
 
444 MEMOIR OF JOHN BEOWX, D.D. 
 
 ster. I was then a young doctor it must have 
 been about 1840 and had a patient, Mrs. 
 James Robertson, eldest daughter of Mr. Pirie, 
 the predecessor of Dr. Dick in what was then 
 Shuttle Street congregation, Glasgow. She was 
 one of my father's earliest and dearest friends, 
 a mother in the Burgher Israel, she and her 
 cordial husband " given to hospitality," espe- 
 cially to " the Prophets." She was hopelessly ill 
 at Juniper Green, near Edinburgh. Mr. George 
 Stone, then living at Muirhouse, one of my 
 father's congregation in Broughton Place, a man 
 of equal originality and worth, and devoted to 
 his minister, knowing my passion for riding, 
 offered me his blood-chestnut to ride out and 
 make my visit. My father said, "John, if 
 you are going I would like to ride out with 
 you ;" he wished to see his dying friend. " You 
 ride !" said Mr. Stone, who was a very York- 
 shireman in the matter of horses. te Let him 
 try," said I. The upshot was, that Mr. Stone 
 sent the chestnut for me, and a sedate pony 
 called, if I forget not, Goliath for his minister, 
 with all sorts of injunctions to me to keep him 
 off the thoroughbred, and on Goliath. 
 
 My father had not been on a horse for nearly 
 twenty years. He mounted and rode off. He 
 soon got teased with the short, pattering steps 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 445 
 
 of Goliath, and looked wistfully up at me, and 
 longingly to the tall chestnut, stepping once for 
 Goliath's twice, like the Don striding beside San- 
 cho. I saw what he was after, and when past the 
 toll he said in a mild sort of way, " John, did you 
 promise absolutely I was not to ride your horse ?" 
 "No, father, certainly not. Mr. Stone, I daresay, 
 wished me to do so, but I didn't." " Well then, 
 I think we'll change ; this beast shakes me." 
 So we changed. I remember how noble he 
 looked ; how at home : his white hair and his 
 dark eyes, his erect, easy, accustomed seat. 
 He soon let his eager horse slip gently aw r ay. 
 It was first evasit, he was off, Goliath and I 
 jogging on behind ; then erupit, and in a twink- 
 ling evanuit. I saw them last flashing through 
 the arch under the Canal, his white hair flying. 
 I was uneasy, though from his riding I knew 
 he was as yet in command, so I put Goliath 
 to his best, and having passed through Slate- 
 ford, I asked a stonebreaker if he saw a gentle- 
 man on a chestnut horse. " Has he white hair?" 
 " Yes." " And eeri like a gled's T " Yes." 
 " Weel then, he's fleein' up the road like the 
 wund ; he'll be at Little Vantage" (about nine 
 miles off) " in nae time if he haud on." I ne\ 7 er 
 once sighted him, but on coming into Juniper 
 Green there was his steaming chestnut at the 
 
44 G MEMOIi* OF JOHX BROWS', D.D. 
 
 gate, neighing cheerily to Goliath. I went in, 
 he was at the bedside of his friend, and in the 
 midst of prayer ; his words as I entered were, 
 " When thou passest through the waters I will 
 be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall 
 not overflow thee ;" and he was not the less in- 
 stant in prayer that his blood was up with his 
 ride. He never again saw Mrs. Robertson, or 
 as she was called when they were young, Sibbie 
 (Sibella) Pirie. On coming out he said nothing, 
 but took the chestnut, mounted her, and we 
 came home quietly. His heart was opened ; he 
 spoke of old times and old friends ; he stopped 
 at the exquisite view at Hailes into the valley, 
 and up to the Pentlands beyond, the smoke of 
 Kate's Mill, rising in the still and shadowy air, 
 and broke out into Cowper's words : Yes, 
 
 " HE sets the bright procession on its way, 
 And marshals all the order of the year ; 
 And ere one flowery season fades and dies, 
 Designs the blooming wonders of the next." 
 
 Then as we came slowly in, the moon shone 
 behind Craiglockhart hill among the old Scotch 
 firs ; he pulled up again, and gave me Collins' 
 Ode to Evening, beginning 
 
 " If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song, 
 May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, 
 Thy springs, and dying gales ;" 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 447 
 
 repeating over and over some of the lines, as 
 
 " Thy modest ear, 
 Thy springs, and dying gales." 
 
 " And marks o'er all 
 Thy dewy fingers draw 
 The gradual dusky veil." 
 
 And when she looked out on us clear and full, 
 " Yes 
 
 " The moon takes up the wondrous tale, 
 And nightly to the listening earth 
 Repeats the story of her Lirth." 
 
 As we passed through Slateford, he spoke of 
 Dr. Belfrage, his great-hearted friend, of his 
 obligations to him, and of his son, my friend, 
 both lying together in Colinton churchyard; 
 and of Dr. Dick, who was minister before him, 
 of the Coventrys, and of Stitchel and Sprous- 
 ton, of his mother, and of himself, his doubts 
 of his own sincerity in religion, his sense 
 of sin, of God reverting often to his dying 
 friend. Such a thing only occurred to me 
 with him once or twice all my life ; and then 
 when we were home, he was silent, shut up, 
 self-contained as before. He was himself con- 
 scious of this habit of reticence, and what may 
 be called selfism, to us his children, and la- 
 mented it. I remember his saying in a sort 
 of mournful joke, " I have a well of love, I 
 know it; but it is a well, and a draw-well, to 
 
448 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWX, D.D. 
 
 your sorrow and mine, and it seldom overflows, 
 but," looking with that strange power of ten- 
 derness as if he put his voice and his heart into 
 his eyes, "you may always come hither to 
 draw ;" he used to say he might take to him- 
 self Wordsworth's lines, 
 
 " I am not one who much or oft delights 
 To season my fireside with personal talk." 
 
 And changing " though" into " if :" 
 
 " A well of love it may be deep, 
 I trust it is, and never dry ; 
 What matter, though its waters sleep 
 In silence and obscurity ?" 
 
 The expression of his affection was more like 
 the shock of a Ley den jar, than the continuous 
 current of a galvanic circle. 
 
 There w r as, as 1 have said, a permanent chill 
 given by my mother's death, to what may be 
 called the outer surface of his nature, and we at 
 home felt it much. The blood was thrown in 
 upon the centre, and went forth in energetic and 
 victorious work, in searching the Scriptures and 
 saving souls ; but his social faculty never re- 
 covered that shock ; it was blighted ; he was 
 always desiring to be alone, and at his work. A 
 stranger who saw him for a short time, bright, 
 animated, full of earnest and cordial talk, pleas- 
 ing and being pleased, the life of the company, 
 
LETTER TO EEV. DE. CAIRNS. 449 
 
 was apt to think how delightful he must always 
 be, and so he was ; but these times of bright 
 talk were like angels' visits ; and he smiled 
 with peculiar benignity on his retiring guest, as 
 if blessing him not the less for leaving him to 
 himself. I question if there ever lived a man so 
 much in the midst of men, and in the midst of 
 his own children, * in whom the silences, as Mr. 
 Carlyle would say, were so predominant. Every 
 Sabbath he spoke out of the abundance of his 
 heart, his whole mind ; he was then communi- 
 cative and frank enough : all the week, before 
 and after, he would not unwillingly have never 
 opened his mouth. Of many people we may 
 say that their mouth is always open except 
 when it is shut ; of him that his mouth was 
 always shut except when it was opened. Every 
 one must have been struck with the seeming in- 
 consistency of his occasional brilliant, happy, 
 energetic talk, and his habitual silentness his 
 difficulty in getting anything to say. But, as 
 I have already said, what we lost, the world and 
 the church gained. 
 
 When travelling he w T as always in high spirits 
 and full of anecdote and fun. Indeed I knew 
 more of his inner history in this one way, than 
 during years of living with him. I recollect his 
 
 * He gave us all the education \ve got at Biggar. 
 
450 MEMOIP. OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 taking me with him to Glasgow when I must 
 have been about fourteen ; we breakfasted in 
 " The Ram's Horn Tavern" and I felt a new re- 
 spect for him at his commanding the waiters. 
 He talked a great deal during our short tour, 
 and often have I desired to recal the many 
 things he told me of his early life, and of his 
 own religious crises, my mother's death, his fear 
 of his own death, and all this intermingled with 
 the drollest stories of his boy and student life. 
 
 We went to Paisley and dined, I well remem- 
 ber, we two alone, and, as I thought, magnifi- 
 cently, in a great apartment in " The Saracen's 
 Head" at the end of which was the county ball- 
 room. We had come across from Dunoon and 
 landed in a small boat at the Water Neb along 
 with Mrs. Dr. Hall, a character Sir Walter or 
 Gait would have made immortal. My father, 
 with characteristic ardour took an oar, for the 
 first time in his life, and I believe for the last, 
 to help the old boatman on the Cart, and wish- 
 ing to do something decided, missed the water, 
 and went back head over heels to the immense 
 enjoyment of Mrs. Hall, who said, "Less pith, 
 and mair to the purpose, my man." She didn't 
 let the joke die out. 
 
 Another time it was when his second mar- 
 riage was fixed on, to our great happiness and 
 
LETTEK TO EEV. DR. CAIKNS. 451 
 
 his I had just taken my degree of M.D., and 
 he took Isabella, William, and myself to Moffat. 
 By a curious felicity we got into Miss Geddes' 
 lodgings, where the village circulating library 
 was kept, the whole of which we aver he read in 
 ten days. I never saw him so happy, so open 
 and full of fun, reading to us, and reciting the 
 poetry of his youth. 
 
 His manners to ladies, arid indeed to all 
 women, was that of a courtly gentleman ; they 
 could be romantic in their empressement and 
 devotion, and I used to think Sir Philip Sydney, 
 or Ariosto's knights and the Paladins of old, 
 must have looked and moved as he did. He 
 had great pleasure in the company of high-bred, 
 refined, thoughtful women ; and he had a pecu- 
 liar sympathy with the sufferings, the necessary 
 mournfulness of women, and with all in their lot 
 connected with the fruit of that forbidden tree 
 their loneliness, the sorrows of their time, and 
 their pangs in travail, their peculiar relation to 
 their children. I think I hear him reading the 
 words, " Can a woman forget her sucking child, 
 that she should not have compassion on the son 
 of her womb ? Yea" (as if it was the next thing 
 to impossible), "she may forget, yet will not I 
 forget thee." Indeed, to a man who saw so 
 little of, and said so little to his own children, 
 
452 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 perhaps it may be because of all this, his sym- 
 pathy for mothers under loss of children, his 
 real suffering for their suffering, not only 
 endeared him to them as their minister, their 
 consoler, and gave him opportunities of drop- 
 ping in divine and saving truth and comfort, 
 when the heart was full and soft, tender, 
 and at his mercy, but it brought out in his 
 only loss of this kind, the mingled depth, ten- 
 derness, and also the peremptoriness of his 
 nature. 
 
 In the case of the death of little Maggie a 
 child the very image of himself in face, lovely 
 and pensive, and yet ready for any fun, with a 
 keenness of affection that perilled everything 
 on being loved, who must cling to some one 
 and be clasped, made for a garden, for the 
 first garden, not for the rough world, the child 
 of his old age this peculiar meeting of oppo- 
 sites was very marked. She was stricken with 
 sudden illness, malignant sore throat ; her 
 mother was gone, and so she was to my father 
 as a flower he had the sole keeping of; and his 
 joy in her wild mirth, his watching her childish 
 moods of sadness, as if a shadow came over 
 her young heaven, were themselves something 
 to watch. Her delicate life made no struggle 
 with disease ; it as it were declined to stay on 
 
LETTER TO EEV. DR. CAIRNS. 453 
 
 such conditions. She therefore sunk at once 
 and without much pain, her soul quick and 
 unclouded, and her little forefinger playing to 
 the last with my father's silvery curls, her eyes 
 trying in vain to brighten his : 
 
 " Thou wert a dew-drop which the morn brings forth, 
 Not fitted to be trailed along the soiling earth ; 
 But at the touch of wrong, without a strife, 
 Slips in a moment out of life." 
 
 His distress, his anguish at this stroke, was not 
 only intense, it was in its essence permanent ; 
 he went mourning and looking for her all his 
 days ; but after she was dead, that resolved 
 will compacted him in an instant. It was on 
 a Sabbath morning she died, and he was all day 
 at church, not many yards from where lay her 
 little corpse alone in the house. His colleague 
 preached in the forenoon, and in the afternoon 
 he took his turn, saying before beginning his 
 discourse : " It has pleased the Father of 
 Lights to darken one of the lights of my dwell- 
 ing had the child lived I would have remained 
 with her, but now I have thought it right to 
 arise and come into the house of the Lord and 
 worship." Such violence to one part of his na- 
 ture by that in it which was supreme, injured 
 him : it was like pulling up on the instant an 
 express train; the whole inner organization is 
 
454 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 minutely, though it may be invisibly hurt ; its 
 molecular constitution damaged by the cruel 
 stress and strain. Such things are not right ; 
 they are a cruelty and injustice and injury from 
 the soul to the body, its faithful slave, and they 
 bring down, as in his case they too truly did, 
 their own certain and specific retribution. A 
 man who did not feel keenly might have 
 preached ; a man whose whole nature was torn, 
 shattered, and astonished as his was, had in 
 a high sense no right so to use himself; and 
 when too late he opened his eyes to this. It 
 was part of our old Scottish severe unsparing 
 character calm to coldness outside, burning 
 to fierceness, tender to agony within. 
 
 I was saying how much my father enjoyed 
 women's company. He liked to look on thsm, 
 and watch them, listening* to their keen, un- 
 connected, and unreasoning, but not unrea- 
 sonable talk. Men's argument, or rather 
 arguing, and above all debating, he disliked. 
 
 * One day my mother, and her only sister, Agnes married to 
 James Aitken of Cullands, a man before his class and his time, for 
 long the only Whig and Seceder laird in Peeblesshire, and with whom 
 my father shared the Edinburgh fieview from its beginning the 
 two sisters who were, the one to the other, as Mary was to Martha, 
 sat talking of their household doings ; my aunt was great upon some 
 things she could do; my father looked up from his book, and said, 
 " There is one thing, Mrs. Aitken, you cannot do you cannot turn 
 the heel of a stocking;" and he was right, he had noticed her make 
 over this " kittle" turn to her mother. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 455 
 
 He had no turn for it. He was not comba- 
 tive, much less contentious. He was, however, 
 warlike. Anything that he could destroy, any 
 falsehood or injustice, he made for, not to dis- 
 cuss, but to expose and kill. He could not fence 
 with his mind much less with his tongue, and 
 had no love for the exploits of a nimble dia- 
 lectic. He had no readiness either in thought 
 or word for this ; his way was slowly to think 
 out a subject, to get it well " bottomed," as Locke 
 would say ; he was not careful as to recording 
 the steps he took in their order, but the spirit of 
 his mind was logical, as must be that of all minds 
 who seek and find truth, for logic is nothing else 
 than the arithmetic of thought ; having there- 
 fore thought it out, he proceeded to put it into 
 formal expression. This he did so as never 
 again to undo it. His mind seemed to want 
 the wheels by which this is done, vestigia nulla 
 retrorsum, and having stereotyped it, he was 
 never weary of it ; it never lost its life and fresh- 
 ness to him, and he delivered it as emphatically 
 thirty years after it had been cast, as the first 
 hour of its existence. 
 
 I have said he was no swordsman, but he was 
 a heavy shot ; he fired off his ball, compact, 
 weighty, the maximum of substance in the mini- 
 mum of bulk ; he put in double charge, pointed 
 
456 MEMOIP OF JOHN BROWX, D.D. 
 
 the muzzle, and fired, with what force and sharp- 
 ness we all remember. If it hit, good : if not. all 
 he could do was to load again, with the same 
 ball, and in the same direction. You must come 
 to him to be shot, at least you must stand still. 
 for he had a want of mobility of mind in great 
 questions. He could not stalk about the field 
 like a sharpshooter ; his was a great 68-pounder, 
 and it was not much of a swivel. Thus it was that 
 he rather dropped into the minds of others his 
 authoritative assertions, and left them to breed 
 conviction. If they gave them entrance and 
 cherished them, they would soon find how full of 
 primary truth they were, and how well they 
 would serve them, as they had served him. With 
 all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and 
 cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, 
 when he was speaking off-hand, of quick, snell 
 remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often 
 too unexpected, like lightning flashing, smiting 
 and gone. In Church Courts this was very 
 marked. On small ordinary matters, a word 
 from him would settle a long discussion. He 
 would, after lively, easy talk with his next neigh- 
 bour, set him up to make a speech, which was 
 conclusive. But on great questions he must move 
 forward his great gun with much solemnity and 
 effort, partly from his desire to say as much of 
 
LETTER TO KEY. DR. CAIRNS. 457 
 
 the truth at once as he could, partly from the 
 natural concentration and rapidity of his mind 
 in action, as distinguished from his slowness 
 when incubating, or in the process of thought, 
 and partly from a sort of self-consciousness 
 I might almost call it a compound of pride 
 and nervous diffidence which seldom left him. 
 He desired to say it so that it might never need 
 to be said again or otherwise by himself, or any 
 one else. 
 
 This strong personality, along with a pre- 
 vailing love to be alone, and dwell with thoughts 
 rather than with thinkers, pervaded his en- 
 tire character. His religion was deeply per- 
 sonal,* not only as affecting himself, but as 
 due to a personal God, and presented through 
 the sacrifice and intercession of the God- 
 man ; and it was perhaps owing to his 
 " conversation " being so habitually in heaven 
 his social and affectionate desires filling 
 themselves continually from " all the fulness of 
 God," through living faith and love that he 
 the less felt the need of giving and receiving 
 human affection. I never knew any man who 
 
 * In his own words, " a personal Deity is the soul of Natural Re- 
 ligion ; a personal Saviour the real living Christ is the soul of 
 Revealed Religion." 
 
 2G 
 
458 MEMO T R OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 lived more truly under the power, and some- 
 times under the shadow of the world to 
 come. This world had to him little reality 
 except as leading to the next ; little inter- 
 est, except as the time of probation and sen- 
 tence. A child brought to him to be baptized 
 was in his mind, and in his words, '' a young 
 immortal to be educated for eternity ;" a birth 
 was the beginning of what was never to end ; 
 sin his own and that of the race was to him, 
 as it must be to all men who can think, the 
 great mystery, as it is the main curse of time. 
 The idea of it of its exceeding sinfulness 
 haunted and oppressed him. He used to say 
 of John Foster, that this deep and intense, but 
 sometimes narrow and grim thinker, had, in his 
 study of the disease of the race, been, as it were, 
 fascinated by its awful spell, so as almost to 
 forget the remedy. This was not the case with 
 himself. As you know, no man held more 
 firmly to the objective reality of his religion 
 that it was founded upon fact. It was not the 
 pole-star he lost sight of, or the compass he 
 mistrusted ; it was the sea- worthiness of the 
 vessel. His constitutional deficiency of hope, 
 his sensibility to sin, made him not unfrequently 
 stand in doubt of himself, of his sincerity and 
 safety before God, and sometimes made exist- 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 459 
 
 euce the being obliged to continue to be a 
 doubtful privilege. 
 
 When oppressed with this feeling, "the 
 burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible 
 world," the hurry of mankind out of this brief 
 world into the unchangeable and endless next, 
 I have heard him repeat, with deep feeling, 
 Andrew Marvell's strong lines : 
 
 " But at my back I always hear 
 Time's winged chariots hurrying near ; 
 And yonder all before me He 
 Deserts of vast eternity." 
 
 His living so much on books, and his strong per- 
 sonal attachment to men, as distinct from his 
 adhesion to their principles and views, made 
 him, as it were, live and commune with the 
 dead made him intimate, not merely with 
 their thoughts, and the public events of their 
 lives, but with themselves Augustine, Milton, 
 Luther, Melanchthon, George Herbert, Baxter, 
 Howe, Owen, Leigh ton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip 
 and Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, 
 Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray, 
 Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume,"* Jortin, 
 Boston, Ben gel, Neander, etc., not to speak 
 
 * David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature he knew thoroughly, 
 and read it carefully during his last illness. He used to say it not 
 only was a miracle of intellectual and literary power for a man of 
 twenty-eight, but contained the essence of all that was best on the 
 philosophy of mind ; " It's all there, if you will think it out." 
 
460 MEMOTIl OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 of the apostles, and above all, his chief 
 friend the author of the Epistle to the Romans, 
 whom he looked on as the greatest of men, 
 with all these he had personal relations as 
 men, he cordialized with them. He had 
 thought much more about them would have 
 had more to say to them had they met, than 
 about or to any, but a very few living men.* 
 He delighted to possess books which any of 
 them might have held in their hands, and on 
 which they had written their names. He had 
 a number of these, some very curious ; among 
 
 * This tendency was curiously seen in his love of portraits, especially 
 of men whose works he had and liked. He often put portraits into 
 his books, and he seemed to enjoy this way of realizing their authors ; 
 and in exhibitions of pictures he was far more taken up with what is 
 usually and justly the most tiresome department, the portraits, than 
 with all else. He was not learned in engravings, and made no at- 
 tempt at collecting them, so that the following list of portraits in his 
 rooms shows his liking for the men much more than for the art which 
 delineated them. Of course they by no means include all his friends 
 ancient and modern, but they all were his friends : 
 
 Kobert Hall Dr. Carey Melanchthon Calvin Pollok Eras- 
 mus (very like "Uncle Ebenezer") John Knox Dr. Waugh 
 John Milton (three, all framed) Dr. Dick Dr. Hall Luther (two) 
 Dr. Heugh Dr. Mitchell Dr. Balmer Dr. Henderson Dr. 
 Wardlaw Shakspere (a small oil painting which he had since ever 
 I remember) Dugald Stewart Dr. Innes Dr. Smith, Biggar 
 the two Erskines and Mr. Fisher Dr. John Taylor of Toronto 
 Dr. Chalmers Mr. William Ellis Eev. James Elles J. B. Patter- 
 son Vinet Archibald M'Lean Dr. John Erskine Tholuck 
 John Pym Gesenius Professor Finlayson Richard Baxter Dr. 
 Lawson Dr. Peddie (two, and a copy of Joseph's noble bust) ; and 
 they were thus all about him for no other reason than that he liked 
 to look at and think of them through their countenances. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 461 
 
 others, that wild soldier, man of fashion and 
 wit among the Reformers, Ulric von Hiitten's 
 autograph on Erasmus' beautiful folio Greek 
 Testament, and John Howe's (spelt How) 
 on the first edition of Milton's Speech on Un- 
 licensed Printing.* He began collecting books 
 
 * In a copy of Baxter's Life and Times, which he picked up at 
 Maurice Ogle's shop in Glasgow, which had belonged to Anna, 
 Countess of Argyll, besides her autograph, there is a most affecting 
 and interesting note in that venerable lady's handwriting. It occurs 
 on the page where Baxter brings a charge of want of veracity against 
 her eldest and name-daughter, who was perverted to Popery. They 
 are in a hand tremulous with age and feeling : " I can say w* truth 
 I neuer in all my lyff did hear hir ly, and what she said, if it was not 
 trew, it was by others sugested to hir, as y* she wold embak on 
 Wedensday. She belived she wold, hot thy took hir, alles ! from me 
 who never did sie her mor. The minester of Cuper, Mr. John Magill, 
 did sie hir at Paris in the convent. Said she was a knowing and 
 vertuous person, and hed retined the living principels of our relidgon, 
 which made him say it was good to grund young persons weel in 
 ther relidgion, as she was one it appired weel grunded." 
 
 The following is Lord Lindsay's letter, on seeing this remarkable 
 marginal note : 
 
 EDINBURGH, DOUGLAS' HOTEL, 
 26th December 1856. 
 
 MY DEAR SIR, I owe you my sincerest thanks for your kindness 
 in favouring me with a sight of the volume of Baxter's Life, which 
 formerly belonged to my ancestrix, Anna Countess of Argyll. The 
 MS. note inserted by her in it respecting her daughter is extremely 
 interesting. I had always been under the impression that the daugh- 
 ter had died very shortly after her removal to France, but the con- 
 trary appears from Lady Argyll's memorandum. That memorandum 
 throws also a pleasing light on the later life of Lady Anna, and for- 
 cibly illustrates the undying love and tenderness of the aged mother, 
 who must have been very old when she penned it, the book having 
 been printed as late as 1696. 
 
 I am extremely obliged to you for communicating to me this new 
 
462 MEMOin OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 when he was twelve, and he was collecting up 
 to his last hours. He cared least for merely 
 fine books, though he enjoyed, no one more so, 
 fine type, good binding, and all the niceties of 
 the book-fancier. What he liked were such 
 books as were directly useful in his work, and 
 such as he liked to live in the midst of ; such, 
 also, as illustrated any great philosophical, his- 
 torical, or ecclesiastical epoch. His collection 
 of Greek Testaments was, considering his 
 means, of great extent and value, and he had 
 a quite singular series of books, pamphlets, 
 and documents, referring not merely to his own 
 body the Secession, with all its subdivisions 
 and reunions but to Nonconformity and Dis- 
 sent everywhere, and, indeed, to human liberty, 
 civil and religious in every form, for this, after 
 the great truths, duties, and expectations of 
 his faith, was the one master passion of his life 
 liberty in its greatest sense, the largest ex- 
 tent of individual and public spontaneity con- 
 sistent with virtue and safety. He was in this 
 as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Syd- 
 ney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his 
 admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a 
 
 and very interesting information. Believe me, my dear Sir, your 
 much obliged and faithful servant, 
 
 LINDSAY. 
 JOHN BROAVN, Esq., M.D. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 463 
 
 man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great 
 as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to 
 him for having placed permanently on record, 
 beyond all risk of obscuration or doubt, the 
 doctrine of 1688 the right and power of the 
 English people to be their own lawgivers, and to 
 appoint their own magistrates, of whom the 
 sovereign is the chief. 
 
 His conviction of the sole right of God to 
 be Lord of the conscience, and his sense of 
 his own absolute religious independence of 
 every one but his Maker, were the two ele- 
 ments in building up his beliefs on all church 
 matters ; they were twin beliefs. Hence 
 the simplicity and thoroughness of his prin- 
 ciples. Sitting in the centre, he commanded 
 the circumference. But I am straying out of 
 my parish into yours. I only add to what you 
 have said, that the longer he lived, the more did 
 he insist upon it being not less true and not less 
 important, that the Church must not inter- 
 meddle with the State, than that the State must 
 not intermeddle with the Church. He used to 
 say, " Go down into the world, with all its com- 
 plications and confusions, with this double- 
 edged weapon, and you can cut all the compo- 
 site knots of Church and State." The element 
 of God and of eternity predominates in the re- 
 
464 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 ligious more than in the civil affairs of men, and 
 thus far transcends them ; but the principle of 
 mutual independence is equally applicable to 
 each. All that statesmen, as such, have to do 
 with religion, is to be themselves under its 
 power ; all that Christians, as such, have to do 
 with the State, is to be good citizens. 
 
 The fourth epoch of his personal life I would 
 date from his second marriage. As I said be- 
 fore, no man was ever happier in his wives. 
 They had much alike in nature, only one could 
 see the Divine wisdom of his first wife being 
 his first, and his second his second ; each did 
 best in her own place and time. His marriage 
 with Miss Crum was a source of great happi- 
 ness and good not only to himself, but to us 
 his first children. She had been intimately 
 known to us for many years, and was endeared 
 to us long before we saw her, by her having 
 been, as a child and girl, a great favourite of 
 our own mother. The families of my grand- 
 father Nimmo. and of the Crums, E wings, and 
 Maclaes, were very intimate. I have heard my 
 father tell, that being out at Thornliebank with 
 my mother, he asked her to take a walk with 
 him to the Rouken, a romantic waterfall and 
 glen up the burn. My mother thought they 
 might take " Miss Margaret" with them, and so 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 465 
 
 save appearances, and with Miss Crum, then a 
 child of ten, holding my father's hand, away the 
 three went ! 
 
 So you may see that no one could be nearer 
 to being our mother ; and she was curiously in- 
 genious, and completely successful in gaining 
 our affection and regard. I have, as a boy, a 
 peculiarly pleasant remembrance of her, having 
 been at Thorn liebank when about fourteen, and 
 getting that impression of her gentle, kind, wise, 
 calm, and happy nature her entire loveable- 
 ness which it was our privilege to see minis- 
 tering so much to my father's comfort. That 
 fortnight in 1824 or 1825 is still to me like 
 the memory of some happy dream ; the old 
 library, the big chair in which I huddled 
 myself up for hours with the new Arabian 
 Nights, and all the old-fashioned and un for- 
 gotten books I found there, the ample old 
 garden, the wonders of machinery and skill 
 going on in " the works," the large water-wheel 
 going its stately rounds in the midst of its 
 own darkness, the petrifactions I excavated in 
 the bed of the burn, amnwnites, etc., and brought 
 home to my museum (!) ; the hospitable lady of 
 the house, my hereditary friend, dignified, anxi- 
 ous and kind ; and above all, her only daughter 
 who made me a sort of pet, and was always 
 
466 MEMOIP OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 contriving some unexpected pleasure, all this 
 feels to me even now like something out of a 
 book. 
 
 My father's union with Miss Crura was not 
 only one of the best blessings of his life, it 
 made him more of a blessing to others, than it 
 is likely he would otherwise have been. By her 
 cheerful, gracious ways, her love for society as 
 distinguished from company, her gift of making 
 every one happy and at ease when with her, 
 and her tender compassion for all suffering, she 
 in a measure won my father from himself and 
 his books, to his own great good, and to the 
 delight and benefit of us all. It was like sun- 
 shine and a glad sound in the house. She 
 succeeded in what is called " drawing out" the 
 inveterate solitary. Moreover, she encouraged 
 and enabled him to give up a moiety of his 
 ministerial labours, and thus to devote himself to 
 the great work of his later years, the preparing 
 for and giving to the press the results of his 
 life's study of God's Word. We owe entirely to 
 her that immense armamentarium libertatis, the 
 third edition of his treatise on Civil Obedience. 
 
 One other source of great happiness to my 
 father by this marriage was the intercourse he 
 had with the family at Thornliebank, deepened 
 and endeared as this was by her unexpected 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 467 
 
 and irreparable loss. But on this I must not 
 enlarge, nor on that death itself, the last thing 
 in the world he ever feared leaving him once 
 more, after a brief happiness, and when he had 
 still more reason to hope that he would have 
 "grown old with her, leaning on her faithful 
 bosom." The urn was again empty and the 
 only word was vale ! he was again viduus, 
 bereft. 
 
 " God gives us love ; something to love 
 
 He lends us ; but, when love is grown 
 To ripeness, that on which it throve 
 
 Falls off, and love is left alone. 
 This is the curse of time" 
 
 But still 
 
 " 'Tis better to have loved and lost, 
 Than never to have loved at all." 
 
 It was no easy matter to get him from home 
 and away from his books. But once off, he 
 always enjoyed himself, especially in his visits 
 to Thornliebank, Busby, Crofthead, Biggar, and 
 Melrose. He was very fond of preaching on these 
 occasions, and his services were always peculiarly 
 impressive. He spoke more slowly and with less 
 vehemence than in his own pulpit, and, as I 
 often told him, with all the more effect. When 
 driving about Biggar, or in the neighbour- 
 hood of Langrig, he was full of the past, show- 
 
468 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 ing bow keenly, with all his outward reserve r 
 he had observed and felt. He had a quite 
 peculiar interest in his three flocks, keeping his 
 eye on all their members, through long years of 
 absence. 
 
 His love for his people and for his " body" 
 was a special love ; and his knowledge of the 
 Secession, through all its many divisions and 
 unions, his knowledge, not only of its public 
 history, with its immense controversial and 
 occasional literature, but of the lives and pecu- 
 liarities of its ministers, was of the most minute 
 and curious kind. He loved all mankind, and 
 especially such as were of "the household of 
 faith ;" and he longed for the time when, as there 
 was one Shepherd, there would be but one sheep- 
 fold ; but he gloried in being not only a Seceder, 
 but a Burgher; and he often said, that take them 
 all in all, he knew no body of professing Chris- 
 tians in any country or in any time, worthier 
 of all honour than that which was founded by 
 the Four Brethren, not only as God-fearing, 
 God-serving men, but as members of civil so- 
 ciety ; men who on every occasion were found 
 on the side of liberty and order, truth and 
 justice. He used to say he believed there 
 was hardly a Tory in the Synod, and that no 
 one but He whose service is perfect freedom. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 469 
 
 knew the public good done, and the public evil 
 averted, by the lives and the principles, and 
 when need was, by the votes of such men, all 
 of whom were in the working classes, or in the 
 lower half of the middle. The great Whig 
 leaders knew this, and could always depend on 
 the Seceders. 
 
 There is no worthy portrait of my father in 
 his prime. I believe no man was ever more 
 victimized in the way of being asked to 
 " sit ;" indeed, it was probably from so many 
 of them being of this kind, that the oppor- 
 tunity of securing a really good one was lost. 
 The best the one portrait of his habitual ex- 
 pression is Mr. Harvey's, done for Mr. Crum 
 of Busby: it was taken when he was fail- 
 ing, but it is an excellent likeness as well as 
 a noble picture ; such a picture as one would 
 buy without knowing anything of the subject. 
 So true it is, that imaginative painters, men 
 gifted and accustomed to render their own ideal 
 conceptions in form and colour, grasp and im- 
 press on their canvas the features of real men 
 more to the quick, more faithfully as to the 
 central qualities of the man, than professed 
 portrait painters. 
 
 Steell's bust is beautiful, but it is wanting 
 in expression. Slater's, though rude, is better. 
 
470 MEMOIP OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 Angus Fletcher's has much of his air, but is 
 too much like a Grecian god. There is a mini- 
 ature by Mrs. Robertson of London, belonging 
 to my sister, Mrs. Young, which I always liked, 
 though more like a gay, brilliant French Abbe, 
 than the Seceder minister of Rose Street, as he 
 then was. It gives, however, more of his exqui- 
 site brightness and spirit, the dancing light in his 
 dark eyes, and his smile, when pleased and de- 
 siring to please, than any other. I have a 
 drawing by Mr. Harvey, done from my father 
 for his picture of the Minister's Visit, which I 
 value very much, as giving the force and depth, 
 the momentum, so to speak, of his serious look. 
 He is sitting in a cottar's house, reading the 
 Bible to an old bed-ridden woman, the farm 
 servants gathered round to get his word. 
 
 Mungo Burton painted a good portrait which 
 my brother William has ; from his being drawn 
 in a black neckcloth, and standing, he looks, 
 as he sometimes did, more like a Member of 
 Parliament than a clergyman. The print from 
 this is good and very scarce. Of Photographs, I 
 like D. 0. Hill's best, in which he is represented 
 as shaking hands with the (invisible) Free 
 Church it is full of his earnest, cordial power ; 
 that by Tunny, from which the beautiful en- 
 graving by Lumb Stocks in this Memoir was 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 471 
 
 taken, is very like what he was about a year 
 and a half before his death. All the other por- 
 traits, as far as I can remember, are worthless 
 and worse, missing entirely the true expression. 
 He was very difficult to take, partly because he 
 was so full of what may be called spiritual 
 beauty, evanescent, ever changing, and requiring 
 the highest kind of genius to fix it ; and partly 
 from his own fault, for he thought it was neces- 
 sary to be lively, or rather to try to be so to his 
 volunteering artist, and the consequence was, 
 his giving them, as his habitual expression, one 
 which was rare, and in this particular case more 
 made than born. 
 
 The time when I would have liked his look 
 to have been perpetuated, was that of all others 
 the least likely, or indeed possible ; it was, 
 when after administering the Sacrament to 
 his people, and having solemnized every 
 one, and been himself profoundly moved by 
 that Divine, everlasting memorial, he left the 
 elders' seat and returned to the pulpit, and after 
 giving out the psalm, sat down wearied and 
 satisfied, filled with devout gratitude to his 
 Master his face pale, and his dark eyes looking 
 out upon us all, his whole countenance radiant 
 and subdued. Any likeness of him in this state, 
 more like that of the proto-martyr, when his 
 
472 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 face was as that of an angel, than anything I 
 ever beheld, would have made one feel what it 
 is so impossible otherwise to convey, the min- 
 gled sweetness, dignity, and beauty of his face. 
 When it was winter, and the church darkening, 
 and the lights at the pulpit were lighted so as 
 to fall upon his face and throw the rest of the 
 vast assemblage into deeper shadow, the effect 
 of his countenance was something never to 
 forget. 
 
 He was more a man of power than of genius in 
 the ordinary sense. His imagination was not a 
 primary power; it was not originative, though in 
 a quite uncommon degree receptive, having the 
 capacity of realizing the imaginations of others, 
 and through them bodying forth the unseen. 
 When exalted and urged by the understanding, 
 and heated by the affections, it burst out with 
 great force, but always as servant, not master. 
 But if he had no one faculty that might be, to 
 use the loose words of common speech, original, 
 he was so as a whole, such a man as stood 
 alone. No one ever mistook his look, or would, 
 had they been blind, have mistaken his voice 
 or words, for those of any one else, or any one 
 else's for his. 
 
 His mental characteristics, if I may venture 
 on such ground, were clearness and vigour, in- 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 473 
 
 tensity, concentration, penetration, and per- 
 severance, more of depth than width. The 
 moral conditions under which he lived were the 
 love, the pursuit, and the practice of truth in 
 everything ; strength and depth, rather than 
 external warmth of affection ; fidelity to prin- 
 ciples and to friends. He used often to speak 
 of the moral obligation laid upon every man to 
 think truli/, as well as to speak and act truly, 
 and said that much intellectual demoralization 
 and ruin resulted from neglecting this. He was 
 absolutely tolerant of all difference of opinion, 
 so that it was sincere ; and this was all the more 
 remarkable from his being the opposite of an 
 indifferentist, being very strong in his own con- 
 victions, holding them keenly, even passionately, 
 while, from the structure of his mind, he was 
 somehow deficient in comprehending, much less 
 of sympathizing with, the opinions of men who 
 greatly differed from him. This made his hom- 
 age to entire freedom of thought all the more 
 genuine and rare. In the region of theological 
 thought he was scientific, systematic, and autho- 
 ritative, rather than philosophical and specula- 
 tive. He held so strongly that the Christian 
 religion was mainly a religion of facts, that he 
 perhaps allowed too little to its also being a 
 philosophy that was ready to meet out of its own 
 2H 
 
474 MEMOIR OP JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 essence and its ever unfolding powers any new 
 form of unbelief, disbelief, or misbelief, and must 
 front itself to them as they moved up. 
 
 With devotional feeling with everything 
 that showed reverence and godly fear he cor- 
 dialized wherever and in whomsoever it was 
 found, Pagan or Christian, Romanist or Pro- 
 testant, bond or free ; and while he disliked, 
 and had indeed a positive antipathy to intellec- 
 tual mysticism, he had a great knowledge of and 
 relish for such writers as Dr. Henry More, Cul- 
 verwel, Scougall, Madame Guy on, whom (besides 
 their other qualities) I may perhaps be allowed 
 to call affectionate mystics, and for such poets as 
 Herbert and Vaughan, whose poetry was pious, 
 and their piety poetic. As I have said, he was 
 perhaps too impatient of all obscure thinking, 
 from not considering that on certain subjects, 
 necessarily in their substance, and on the skirts 
 of all subjects, obscurity and vagueness, diffi- 
 culty and uncertainty, are inherent, and must 
 therefore appear in their treatment. Men 
 who rejoiced in making clear things obscure, 
 and plain things the reverse, he could not abide, 
 and spoke with some contempt of those who 
 were original merely from their standing on 
 their heads, and tall from walking upon stilts. 
 As you have truly said, his character mellowed 
 and toned down in his later years, without in 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 475 
 
 any way losing its own individuality, and its 
 clear, vigorous, unflinching perception of and 
 addiction to principles. 
 
 For the " heroic" old man of Haddington 
 my father had a peculiar reverence, as in- 
 deed we all have as well we may. He was 
 our king, the founder of our dynasty; we 
 dated from him, and he was "hedged" accord- 
 ingly by a certain sacredness or " divinity." 
 I well remember with what surprise and pride 
 I found myself asked by a blacksmith's wife, 
 in a remote hamlet among the hop gardens of 
 Kent, if I was " the son of the Self-interpreting 
 Bible." I possess, as an heirloom, the New 
 Testament which my father fondly regarded as 
 the one his grandfather, when a herd laddie, 
 got from the Professor who heard him ask for 
 it, and promised him it if he could read a verse ; 
 and he has in his beautiful small hand written 
 in it what follows : " He (John Brown of Had- 
 dington) had now acquired so much of Greek 
 as encouraged him to hope that he might at 
 length be prepared to reap the richest of all re- 
 wards which classical learning could confer on 
 him, the capacity of reading in the original 
 tongue the blessed New Testament of our Lord 
 and Saviour. Full of this hope, he became 
 anxious to possess a copy of the invaluable 
 
476 MEMGIE OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 volume. One night, having committed the 
 charge of his sheep to a companion, he set out 
 on a midnight journey to St. Andrews, a dis- 
 tance of twent} r -four miles. He reached his 
 destination in the morning, and went to the. 
 bookseller's shop asking for a copy of the Greek 
 Xew Testament. The master of the shop, sur- 
 prised at such a request from a shepherd boy, 
 was disposed to make game of him. Some of 
 the professors coming into the shop questioned 
 the lad about his employment and studies. 
 After hearing his tale, one of them desired the 
 bookseller to bring the volume. He did so, and 
 drawing it down, said, ' Boy, read this, and you 
 shall have it for nothing/ The boy did so, ac- 
 quitted himself to the admiration of his judges, 
 and carried off his Testament, and w^hen the 
 evening arrived, was studying it in the midst 
 of his flock on the braes of Abernethy." Me- 
 moir of Rev. John Brown of Haddington, by 
 Rev. J. B. Patterson. 
 
 " There is reason to believe this is the Xew 
 Testament referred to. The name on the op- 
 posite page was written on the fly-leaf. It is 
 obviously the writing of a boy, and bears a re- 
 semblance to Mr. Brown's handwriting in mature 
 life. It is imperfect, wanting a great part of 
 the Gospel of Matthew. The autograph at the 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 477 
 
 end is that of his son, Thomas, when a youth 
 at college, afterwards Rev. Dr. Thomas Brown 
 of Dalkeith. J. B." 
 
 I doubt not my father regarded this little 
 worn old book, the sword of the Spirit which 
 his ancestor so nobly won, and wore, and 
 warred with, with not less honest veneration and 
 pride than does his dear friend James Douglas 
 of Cavers the Percy pennon borne away at 
 Otterbourne. When I read, in Uncle William's 
 admirable Life of his father, his own simple 
 story of his early life his loss of father and 
 mother before he was eleven, his discovering (as 
 true a discovery as Dr. Young's of the characters 
 of the Rosetta stone, or Rawlinson's of the 
 cuneiform letters) the Greek characters, his de- 
 fence of himself against the astonishing and base 
 charge of getting his learning from the devil 
 (that shrewd personage would not have em- 
 ployed him on the Greek Testament), his eager, 
 indomitable study, his running miles to and back 
 again to hear a sermon after folding his sheep at 
 noon, his keeping his family creditably on never 
 more than 50, and for long on 40 a year, giv- 
 ing largely in charity, and never wanting, as he 
 said, " lying money " when I think of all 
 this, I feel what a strong, independent, manly 
 nature he must have had. We all know his 
 
478 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 saintly character, his devotion to learning, 
 and to the work of preaching and teaching ; 
 but he seems to have been, like most com- 
 plete men, full of humour and keen wit. 
 Some of his snell sayings are still remembered. 
 A lad of an excitable temperament waited on 
 him, and informed him he wished to be a 
 preacher of the gospel. My great-grandfather, 
 finding him as weak in intellect as he was 
 strong in conceit, advised him to continue in 
 his present vocation. The young man said, 
 " But I wish to preach and glorify God." " My 
 young friend, a man may glorify God making 
 broom besoms ; stick to your trade, and glorify 
 God by your walk and conversation." 
 
 The late Dr. Husband of Dunfermline called 
 on him when he was preparing to set out for 
 Gifford, and was beginning to ask him some 
 questions as to the place grace held in the 
 Divine economy. " Come away wi' me, and 
 I'll expound that ; but when I'm speaking, look 
 you after my feet." They got upon a rough 
 bit of common, and the eager and full-minded 
 old man was in the midst of his unfolding the 
 Divine scheme, and his student was drinking in 
 his words, and forgetting his part of the bar- 
 gain. His master stumbled and fell, and get- 
 ting up, somew r hat sharply said, " James, the 
 
LETTER TO KEY. DR. CAIRNS. 47.9 
 
 grace o' God can do much, but it canna gi'e 
 a man common sense ;" which is as good theo- 
 logy as sense. 
 
 A scoffing blacksmith seeing him jogging up 
 to a house near the smithy on his pony, which 
 was halting, said to him, " Mr. Brown, ye're in 
 the Scripture line the day 'the legs o' the 
 iarne are not equal/ ;; " So is a parable in the 
 mouth of a fool." 
 
 On his coming to Haddington, there was one 
 man who held out against his " call." Mr. 
 Brown meeting him when they could not avoid 
 each other, the non-content said, " Ye see, sir, I 
 canna say what I dinna think, and I think ye're 
 ovver young and inexperienced for this charge." 
 " So I think too, David, but it would never do 
 for you and me to gang in the face c> the hale 
 congregation /" 
 
 The following is a singular illustration of 
 the prevailing dark and severe tone of the 
 religious teaching of that time, and also of its 
 strength : A poor old woman, of great worth 
 and excellent understanding, in whose conver- 
 sation Mr. Brown took much pleasure, was on 
 her death-bed. Wishing to try her faith, he 
 said to her, " Janet, what would you say if, after 
 all He has done for you, God should let you 
 drop into hell T " E'en's (even as) he likes ; 
 
480 MEMO T R OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 if he does, He'll lose mair than Til do." There 
 is something not less than sublime in this reply. 
 Than my grandfather and " Uncle Ebenezer," 
 no two brothers could be more different in nature 
 or more united in affection. My grandfather was 
 a man of great natural good sense, well read 
 and well knowledged, easy but not indolent, 
 never overflowing but never empty, homely but 
 dignified, and fuller of love to all sentient crea- 
 tures than any other human being I ever 
 knew. I had, when a boy of ten, two rabbits, 
 Oscar and Livia: why so named is a secret I 
 have lost ; perhaps it was an Ossianic union of 
 the Roman with the Gael. Oscar was a broad- 
 nosed, manly, rather brusque husband, who 
 used to snort when angry, and bite too ; Livia 
 was a thin-faced, meek, and I fear, deceitfullish 
 wife, who could smile, and then bite. One even- 
 ing I had lifted both these worthies, by the ears 
 of course, and was taking them from their clover 
 to their beds, when my grandfather, who had 
 been walking out in the cool of the evening met 
 me. I had just kissed the two creatures, out 
 of mingled love to them, and pleasure at hav- 
 ing caught them without much trouble. He 
 took me by the chin, and kissed me, and then 
 Oscar and Livia ! Wonderful man, I thought, 
 and still think ! doubtless he had seen me 
 
LETTER TO EEV. DR. CAIRNS. 481 
 
 in my private fondness, and wished to please 
 me. 
 
 He was for ever doing good in his quiet yet 
 earnest way. Not only on Sunday when he 
 preached solid gospel sermons, full of quaint 
 familiar expressions, such as I fear few of my 
 readers could take up, full of solemn, affectionate 
 appeals, full of his own simplicity and love, the 
 Monday also found him ready with his every- 
 day gospel. If he met a drover from Lochaber 
 who had crossed the Campsie Hills, and was 
 making across Carnwath Moor to the Calstane 
 Slap, and thence into England by the drove- 
 road, he accosted him with a friendly smile, 
 gave him a reasonable tract, and dropped 
 into him some words of Divine truth. He was 
 thus continually doing good. Go where he 
 might, he had his message to every one ; to a 
 servant lass, to a poor wanderer on the bleak 
 streets, to gentle and simple he flowed for ever 
 pleno rivo. 
 
 Uncle Ebenezer,on the other hand, flowed per 
 saltum ; he was always good and saintly, but he 
 was great once a week ; six days he brooded over 
 his message, was silent, withdrawn, self-involved ; 
 on the Sabbath, that downcast, almost timid 
 man, who shunned men, the instant he was in 
 the pulpit, stood up a son of thunder. Such a 
 
482 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 voice ! such a piercing eye ! such an inevitable 
 forefinger, held out trembling with the terrors 
 of the Lord ; such a power of asking questions 
 and letting them fall deep into the hearts of 
 his hearers, and then answering them himself, 
 with an " ah, sirs !" that thrilled and quivered 
 from him to them. 
 
 I remember his astonishing us all with a sud- 
 den burst. It was a sermon upon the apparent 
 plus of evil in this world, and he had driven 
 himself and us all to despair so much sin, so 
 much misery when, taking advantage of the 
 chapter he had read, the account of the uproar 
 at Ephesus in the Theatre, he said, " Ah, sirs ! 
 what if some of the men who, for ' about the 
 space of two hours/ cried out ' Great is Diana of 
 the Ephesians/ have for the space of eighteen 
 hundred years and more been crying day and 
 night, ' Great and marvellous are thy works, 
 Lord God Almighty; just and true are all thy 
 ways, thou King of saints ; who shall not fear 
 thee, Lord, and glorify thy name 1 for thou 
 only art holy.' ;; 
 
 You have doubtless heard of the story of Lord 
 Brougham going to hear him. It is very cha- 
 racteristic, and as I had it from Mrs. Cuning- 
 hame, who was present, I may be allowed to tell 
 it. Brougham and Denman were on a visit 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 483 
 
 to James Stuart of Dunearn, about the time 
 of the Queen's trial. They had asked Stuart 
 where they should go to church ; he said 
 he would take them to a Seceder minister at 
 Inverkeithing. They went, and as Mr. Stuart 
 had described the saintly old man, Brougham 
 said he would like to be introduced to him, and 
 arriving before service time, Mr. Stuart called, 
 and left a message that some gentlemen wished 
 to see him. The answer was that "Maister" 
 Brown saw nobody before divine worship. He 
 then sent in Brougham and Denman's names. 
 " Mr. Brown's compliments to Mr. Stuart, and 
 he sees nobody before sermon/' and in a few 
 minutes out came the stooping shy old man, and 
 passed them, unconscious of their presence. 
 They sat in the front gallery, and he preached 
 a faithful sermon, full of fire and of native force. 
 They came away greatly moved, and each wrote 
 to Lord Jeffrey to lose not a week in coming to 
 hear the greatest natural orator they had ever 
 heard. Jeffrey came next Sunday, and often 
 after declared he never heard such words, such a 
 sacred, untaught gift of speech. Nothing was 
 more beautiful than my father's admiration and 
 emotion when listening to his uncle's rapt pas- 
 sages, or than his childlike faith in my father's 
 exegetical prowess. He used to have a list of 
 
484 MEMCKR OF JOHN BROWX, D.D. 
 
 difficult passages ready for " my nephew," and 
 the moment the oracle gave a decision, the old 
 man asked him to repeat it, and then took a 
 permanent note of it, and would assuredly 
 preach it some day with his own proper unction 
 and power. One story of him I must give ; my 
 father, who heard it not long before his own 
 death, was delighted with it, and for some days 
 repeated it to every one. Uncle Ebenezer, 
 with all his mildness and general complaisance, 
 was like most of the Browns, tenax propositi, 
 firm to obstinacy. He had established a week- 
 day sermon at the North Ferry, about two miles 
 from his own town, Inverkeithing. It was, I 
 think, on the Tuesdays. It was winter, and a 
 wild, drifting, and dangerous day ; his daughters 
 his wife was dead besought him not to go ; 
 he smiled vaguely, but continued getting into his 
 big-coat. Nothing would stay him, and away 
 he and the pony stumbled through the dumb 
 and blinding snow. He was half-way on his 
 journey, and had got into the sermon he was 
 going to preach, and was utterly insensible to 
 the outward storm: his pony getting its feet 
 balled, staggered about, and at last upset his 
 master and himself into the ditch at the road- 
 side. The feeble, heedless, rapt old man might 
 have perished there, had not some carters, 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 485 
 
 bringing up whisky casks from the Ferry, seen 
 the catastrophe, arid rushed up, raising him, 
 and dichtin' him, with much commiseration and 
 blunt speech " Puir auld man, what brocht ye 
 here in sic a day 1" There they were, a rough 
 crew, surrounding the saintly man, some putting 
 on his hat, sorting and cheering him, and others 
 knocking the balls off the pony's feet, and stuffing 
 them with grease. He was most polite and 
 grateful, and one of these cordial ruffians having 
 pierced a cask, brought him a horn of whisky, 
 and said, " Tak that, it'll hearten ye." He took 
 the horn, and bowing to them, said, " Sirs, let us 
 give thanks ! " and there, by the road-side, in 
 the drift and storm, with these wild fellows, he 
 asked a blessing on it, and for his kind deliver- 
 ers, and took a tasting of the horn. The men 
 cried like children. They lifted him on his 
 pony, one going with him, and when the 
 rest arrived in Inverkeithing, they repeated the 
 story to everybody, and broke down in tears 
 whenever they came to the blessing. " And to 
 think o j askin' a blessin' on a tass o' whisky I" 
 Next Presbytery day, after the ordinary busi- 
 ness was over, he rose up he seldom spoke 
 and said, " Moderator, 1 have something per- 
 sonal to myself to say. I have often said, that 
 real kindness belongs only to true Christians, 
 
486 MEMO T R OF JOHX BROWN, D.D. 
 
 but" and then be told the story of these men ; 
 " but more true kindness I never experienced 
 than from these lads. They may have had the 
 grace of God, I don't know ; but I never mean 
 again to be so positive in speaking of this 
 matter." 
 
 When he was on a missionary tour in the 
 north, he one morning met a band of High- 
 land shearers on their way to the harvest; he 
 asked them to stop and hear the word of God. 
 They said they could not, as they had their 
 wages to work for. He offered them what they 
 said they would lose ; to this they agreed, and 
 he paid them, and closing his eyes engaged 
 in prayer ; when he had ended, he looked up, 
 and his congregation had vanished ! His shrewd 
 brother Thomas, to w r hom he complained of this 
 faithlessness, said, " Eben, the next time ye pay 
 folk to hear you preach, keep your eyes open, 
 and pay them when you are done." I re- 
 member, on another occasion, in Bristo Church, 
 with an immense audience, he had been going 
 over the Scripture accounts of great sinners 
 repenting and turning to God, repeating their 
 names, from Manasseh onwards. He seemed to 
 have closed the record, when, fixing his eyes on 
 the end of the central passage, he called out 
 abruptly, " I see a man !" Every one looked to 
 
LETTER TO EEV. DR. CAIRNS. 487 
 
 that point. " I see a man of Tarsus ; and he 
 says, 'Make mention of me !" It must not be 
 supposed that the discourses of " Uncle Ebe- 
 nezer," with these abrupt appeals and sudden 
 starts, were unwritten or extempore ; they were 
 carefully composed and written out, only these 
 flashes of thought and passion came on him sud- 
 denly when writing, and were therefore quite 
 natural when delivered they came on him again. 
 
 The Rev. John Belfrage, M.D., had more power 
 over my father's actions and his relations to 
 the world, than any other of his friends ; over 
 his thoughts and convictions proper, not much, 
 few living men had, and even among the 
 mighty dead, he called no man master. He 
 used to say that the three master intellects 
 devoted to the study of divine truth since the 
 apostles, were Augustine, Calvin, and Jonathan 
 Edwards ; but that even they were only primi 
 inter pares, this by the bye. 
 
 On all that concerned his outward life as a 
 public teacher, as a father, and as a member of 
 society, he consulted Dr. Belfrage, and was 
 swayed greatly by his judgment, as, for in- 
 stance, the choice of a profession for myself, 
 his second marriage, etc. He knew him to be 
 his true friend, and not only wise and honest, 
 but pre-eminently a man of affairs, capax rerum. 
 
488 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 Dr. Belfrage was a great man in posse, if ever 
 I saw one, " a village Hampden." Greatness 
 was of his essence ; nothing paltry, nothing 
 secondary, nothing untrue. Large in body, 
 large and handsome in face, lofty in manner 
 to his equals or superiors ;~* homely, familiar, 
 cordial with the young and the poor, I never 
 met with a more truly royal nature more native 
 and endued to rule, guide, and benefit mankind. 
 He was for ever scheming for the good of others, 
 and chiefly in the way of helping them to help 
 themselves. From a curious want of ambition 
 his desire for advancement was for that of his 
 friends, not for his own ; and here he w r as ambi- 
 tious and zealous enough, from non-concentra- 
 tion of his faculties in early life, and from an 
 affection of the heart which ultimately killed 
 him it w r as too big for his body, and, under the 
 relentless hydrostatic law, at last shattered the 
 tabernacle it moved, like a steam-engine too 
 powerful for the vessel it finds itself in, his 
 mental heart also was too big for his happi- 
 ness, from these causes, along with a love 
 
 * Oil one occasion, Mr. Hall of Kelso, an excellent but very odd 
 man, in whom the ego was very strong, and who, if he had been a 
 Spaniard, would, to adopt Coleridge's story, have taken off or touched 
 his hat whenever he spoke of himself, met Dr. Belfrage in the lobby 
 at the Synod, and drawing himself up as he passed, he muttered, 
 " high and michty !" " There's a pair of us, Mr. Hall." 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 489 
 
 for gardening, which was a passion, and an in- 
 herited competency, which took away what John 
 Hunter calls " the stimulus of necessity," you 
 may understand how this remarkable man in- 
 stead of being a Prime Minister, a Lord Chan- 
 cellor, or a Dr. Gregory, a George Stephenson, 
 or likeliest of all, a John Howard, without some 
 of his weaknesses, lived and died minister of the 
 small congregation of Slateford, near Edinburgh. 
 It is true that he was also a physician, and an 
 energetic and successful one, and got rid of some 
 of his love of doing good to and managing human 
 beings in this way ; he was also an oracle in his 
 district, to whom many had the wisdom to go 
 to take as well as ask advice, and who was never 
 weary of entering into the most minute details, 
 and taking endless pains, being like Dr. Chalmers 
 a strong believer in " the power of littles." It 
 would be out of place, though it would be not 
 uninteresting, to tell how this great resident 
 power this strong will and authority, this capa- 
 cious, clear, and beneficent intellect dwelt in 
 its petty sphere, like an oak in a flower-pot ; 
 but I cannot help recalling that signal act of 
 friendship and of power in the matter of my 
 father's translation from Rose Street to Brough- 
 ton Place, to which you have referred. 
 
 It was one of the turning-points of my father's 
 2 I 
 
490 MEMOxR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 history. Dr. Belfrage, though seldom a speaker 
 in the public courts of his Church, was always 
 watchful of the interests of the people and of 
 his friends. On the Rose Street question he had 
 from the beginning formed a strong opinion. 
 My father had made his statement, indicating 
 his leaning, but leaving himself absolutely in 
 the hands of the Synod. There was some 
 speaking, all on one side, and for a time the 
 Synod seemed to incline to be absolute, and 
 refuse the call of Broughton Place. The house 
 was everywhere crowded, and breathless with 
 interest, my father sitting motionless, anxious, 
 and pale, prepared to submit without a word, 
 but retaining his own mind ; everything looked 
 like a unanimous decision for Rose Street, when 
 Dr. Belfrage rose up and came forward into 
 the " passage," and with his first sentence and 
 look, took possession of the house. He stated, 
 with clear arid simple argument, the truth and 
 reason of the case ; and then having fixed him- 
 self there, he took up the personal interests and 
 feelings of his friend, and putting before them 
 what they were about to do in sending back 
 my father, closed with a burst of indignant 
 appeal " I ask you now, not as Christians, I 
 ask you as gentlemen, are you prepared to do 
 this 1" Every one felt it was settled, and so it 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 491 
 
 was. My father never forgot this great act of 
 his friend. 
 
 This remarkable man, inferior to my father 
 in learning,, in intensity, in compactness and in 
 power of so to speak -focussing himself,- ad- 
 miring his keen eloquence, his devotedness to 
 his sacred art, rejoicing in his fame, jealous of 
 his honour w r as, by reason of his own massive 
 understanding, his warm and great heart, and 
 his instinctive knowledge of men, my father's 
 most valued friend, for he knew best and most 
 of what my father knew least; and on his death, 
 my father said he felt himself thus far unpro- 
 tected and unsafe. He died atRothesay of hyper- 
 trophy of the heart. I had the sad privilege of 
 being with him to the last ; and any nobler spec- 
 tacle of tender, generous affection, high courage, 
 child-like submission to the Supreme Will, and 
 of magnanimity in its true sense, I do not again 
 expect to see. On the morning of his death he 
 said to me, " John, come and tell me honestly 
 how this is to end ; tell me the last symptoms 
 in their sequence." I knew the man, and was 
 honest, and told him all I knew. "Is there 
 any chance of stupor or delirium T " I think 
 not. Death (to take Bichat's division) will 
 begin at the heart itself, and you will die con- 
 scious." " I am glad of that. It was Samuel 
 
492 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 Johnson, wasn't it, who wished not to die un- 
 conscious, that he might enter the eternal world 
 with his mind unclouded ; but you know, John, 
 that was physiological nonsense. We leave 
 the brain, and all this ruined body, behind ; 
 but I would like to be in my senses when I take 
 my last look of this wonderful world," looking 
 across the still sea towards the Argyleshire hills, 
 lying in the light of sunrise, " and of my friends 
 of you," fixing his eyes on a faithful friend and 
 myself. And it was so ; in less than an hour he 
 was dead, sitting erect in his chair his disease 
 had for weeks prevented him from lying down, 
 all the dignity, simplicity, and benignity of 
 its master resting upon, and, as it were, sup- 
 porting that " ruin/' which he had left. 
 
 I cannot end this tribute to my father's friend 
 and mine, and my own dear and earliest friend's 
 father, without recording one of the most extra- 
 ordinary instances of the power of will, under the 
 pressure of affection, I ever witnessed or heard 
 of. Dr. Belfrage was twice married. His second 
 wife was a woman of great sweetness and deli- 
 cacy, not only of mind, but, to his sorrow, of con- 
 stitution. She died, after less than a year of 
 singular and unbroken happiness. There was 
 no portrait of her. He resolved there should 
 be one ; and though utterly ignorant of drawing, 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 493 
 
 he determined to do it himself. No one else 
 could have such a perfect image of her in his 
 mind, and he resolved to realize this image. He 
 got the materials for miniature painting, and, 
 I think, eight prepared ivory plates. He then 
 shut himself up from every one, and from every- 
 thing, for fourteen days, and came out of his 
 room, wasted and feeble, with one of the plates 
 (the others he had used and burnt), on which 
 was a portrait, full of subtle likeness, and drawn 
 and coloured in a way no one could have dreamt 
 of having had such an artist. I have seen it ; 
 and though I never saw the original, I felt that 
 it must be like, as indeed every one who knew 
 her said it was. I do not, as I said before, 
 know anything more remarkable in the history 
 of human sorrow and resolve. 
 
 I remember well that Dr. Belfrage was the 
 first man I ever heard speak of Free-trade in 
 religion and in education. It was during the 
 first election after the Reform Bill, when Sir 
 John Dalrymple, afterwards Lord Stair, was 
 canvassing the county of Mid-Lothian. They 
 were walking in the doctor's garden, Sir 
 John anxious and gracious. Dr. Belfrage, like, 
 I believe, every other minister in his body, 
 was a thorough-going Liberal, what was then 
 called a Whig ; but partly from his natural 
 
494 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 sense of humour and relish of power, and partly, 
 I believe, for my benefit, he was putting the 
 Baronet through his facings with some strict- 
 ness, opening upon him startling views, and 
 ending by asking him, " Are you, Sir John, 
 for free trade in corn, free trade in education, 
 free-trade in religion 1 I am." Sir John said, 
 " Well, doctor, I have heard of free-trade in 
 corn, but never iix the other two." " You'll 
 hear of them before ten years are gone, Sir John, 
 or I'm mistaken." 
 
 I have said thus much of this to me memorable 
 man, not only because he was my father's closest 
 and most powerful personal friend, but because 
 by his word he probably changed the whole 
 future course of his life. Devotion to his friends 
 was one of the chief ends of his life, not caring 
 much for, and having in the affection of his 
 heart a warning against the perils and excite- 
 ment of distinction and energetic public work, 
 he set himself far more strenuously than for 
 any selfish object, to promote the triumphs of 
 those whom his acquired instinct for he knew 
 men as a shepherd knows his sheep, or " Caveat 
 Emptor" a horse picked out as deserving them. 
 He rests in Colinton churchyard, 
 
 " Where all that mighty heart is lying still," 
 
 his only child William Henry buried beside him. 
 
LETTER TO EEV. DR. CAIRNS. 495 
 
 But you will think I am writing more about 
 my father's friends and myself than about him. 
 In a certain sense we may know a man by his 
 friends ; a man chooses his friends from har- 
 mony, not from sameness, just as we would 
 rather sing in parts than all sing the air. One 
 man fits into the mind of another not by meet- 
 ing his points, but by dovetailing; each finds in 
 the other what he in a double sense wants. This 
 was true of my father's friends. Dr. Balmer was 
 like him in mucn more than perhaps any, in 
 love of books and lonely study, in his general 
 views of divine truth, and in their metaphysical 
 and literary likings, but they differed deeply. 
 Dr. Balrner was serene and just rather than 
 subtle and profound ; his was the still, trans- 
 lucent stream, my father's the rapid, and it 
 might be deep ; on the one you could safely 
 sail, the other hurried you on, and yet never 
 were two men, during a long life of intimate 
 intercourse, more cordial. 
 
 But I must close the list ; one only and 
 the best, the most endeared of them all, 
 Dr. Heugh. He was, in mental constitution 
 and temper, perhaps more unlike my father 
 than any of the others I have mentioned. 
 His was essentially a practical understanding ; 
 he was a man of action, a man for men more 
 
496 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 than for man, the curious reverse in this of 
 my father. He delighted in public life, had 
 a native turn for affairs, for all that society 
 needs and demands, clear-headed, ready, in- 
 trepid, adroit; with a fine temper, but keen and 
 honest, with an argument and a question and 
 a joke for every one ; not disputatious, but de- 
 lighting in a brisk argument, fonder of wrest- 
 ling than of fencing, but ready for action; not 
 much of a long shot, always keeping his eye on 
 the immediate, the possible, the attainable, but 
 in all this guided by genuine principle and the 
 finest honour and exactest truth. He excelled 
 in the conduct of public business, saw his way 
 clear, made other men see theirs, was for ever 
 getting the Synod out of difficulties and confu- 
 sions, by some clear, tidy, conclusive " motion ;" 
 and then his speaking, so easy and bright 
 and pithy, manly and gentlemanly, grave when 
 it should be, never when it should not mo- 
 bile, fearless, rapid, brilliant as Saladin his 
 silent, pensive, impassioned and emphatic friend 
 was more like the lion-hearted Richard, with 
 his heavy mace ; he might miss, but let him 
 hit, and there needed no repetition. Each 
 admired the other ; indeed Dr. Heugh's love of 
 my father was quite romantic ; and though they 
 were opposed on several great public questions, 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 497 
 
 such as the Apocrypha controversy, the Atone- 
 ment question at its commencement ; and 
 though ihej were both of them too keen and too 
 honest to mince matters or be mealy-mouthed, 
 they never misunderstood each other, never 
 had a shadow of estrangement, so that our 
 Paul and Barnabas, though their contentions 
 were sometimes sharp enough, never " departed 
 asunder ;" indeed they loved each other the 
 longer the more. 
 
 Take him all in all, as a friend, as a gentle- 
 man, as a Christian, as a citizen, I never 
 knew a man so thoroughly delightful as Dr. 
 Heugh. Others had more of this or more of 
 that, but there was a symmetry, a compact- 
 ness, a sweetness, a true delight/illness about 
 him, I can remember in no one else. No man, 
 with so much temptation to be heady and 
 high-minded, sarcastic, and managing, from his 
 overflowing wit and talent, was ever more natu- 
 ral, more honest, or more considerate, indeed 
 tender-hearted. He was full of animal spirits 
 and of fun, and one of the best wits and jokers 
 I ever knew ; and such an asker of questions, 
 of posers ! We children had a pleasing dread 
 of that nimble, sharp, exact man, who made 
 us explain and name everything. Of Scotch 
 stories he had as many original ones as would 
 
498 MEMOlii OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 make a second volume for Dean Ramsay. How 
 well I remember the very corner of the room 
 in Biggar manse, forty years ago, when from 
 him I got the first shock and relish of humour ; 
 became conscious of mental tickling ; of a word 
 being made to carry double, and being all the 
 lighter of it. It is an old story now, but it was 
 new then : a big, perspiring countryman rushed 
 into the Black Bull coach-office, and holding the 
 door, shouted, " Are yir insides a' oot 1" This 
 was my first tasting of the flavour of a joke. 
 
 Had Dr. Heugh, instead of being the admir- 
 able clergyman he was, devoted himself to public 
 civil life, and gone into Parliament, he would 
 have taken a high place as a debater, a practical 
 statesman and patriot. He had many of the 
 best qualities of Canning, and our own Pre- 
 mier,\vith purer and higher qualities than either. 
 There is no one our Church should be more 
 proud of than of this beloved and excellent 
 man, the holiness and humility, the jealous, 
 godly fear, in whose nature was not known 
 fully even to his friends, till he was gone, when 
 his private daily self-searchings and prostra- 
 tions before his Master and Judge were for the 
 first time made known. There are few cha- 
 racters both sides of which are so unsullied, so 
 pure, and without reproach. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 499 
 
 1 am back at Biggar at the old sacramental 
 times ; I see and hear my grandfather, or Mr. 
 Home of Braehead, Mr. Leckie of Peebles, Mr. 
 Harper of Lanark, as inveterate in argument as 
 he was warm in heart, Mr. Comrie of Penicuik, 
 with his keen Voltaire-like face, and much of 
 that unhappy and unique man's wit, and sense, 
 and perfection of expression, without his darker 
 and baser qualities. I can hear their hearty 
 talk, can see them coming and going between the 
 meeting-house and the Tent on the side of the 
 burn, and then the Monday dinner, and the 
 cheerful talk, and the many clerical stones and 
 pleasantries, and the going home on their hardy 
 little horses, Mr. Comrie leaving his curl- papers 
 till the next solemnity, and leaving also some 
 joke of his own, clear and compact as a diamond, 
 and as cutting. 
 
 I am in Rose Street on the monthly lecture, 
 the church crammed, passages and pulpit stairs. 
 Exact to a minute, James Chalmers the old 
 soldier and beadle, slim, meek, but incorrup- 
 tible by proffered half-crowns from ladies who 
 thus tried to get in before the doors opened 
 appears, and all the people in that long pew rise 
 up, and he, followed by his minister, erect and 
 engrossed, walks in along the seat, and they 
 struggle up to the pulpit. We all know what 
 
500 MEM01II OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 he is to speak of; he looks troubled even to dis- 
 tress ; it is the matter of Uriah the Hittite. 
 He gives out the opening verses of the 51st 
 Psalm, and offering up a short and abrupt 
 prayer, which every one takes to himself, an- 
 nounces his miserable and dreadful subject, 
 fencing it, as it were, in a low, penetrating 
 voice, daring any one of us to think an evil 
 thought ; there was little need at that time of 
 the warning, he infused his own intense, pure 
 spirit, into us all. 
 
 He then told the story without note or com- 
 ment, only personating each actor in the 
 tragedy with extraordinary effect, above all, the 
 manly, loyal, simple-hearted soldier. I can 
 recall the shudder of that multitude as of one 
 man when he read, " And it came to pass in the 
 morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and 
 sent it by the hand of Uriah. And he wrote 
 in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the fore- 
 front of the hottest battle, and retire ye from 
 him, that he may be smitten and die." And 
 then, after a long and utter silence, his exclaim- 
 ing, " Is this the man according to God's own 
 heart ? Yes, it is ; we must believe that both 
 are true." Then came Nathan. " There were 
 two men in one city ; the one rich, and the other 
 poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks 
 
LETTER TO EEV. DR. CAIRNS. 501 
 
 and herds ; but the poor man had nothing, save 
 one little ewe lamb" arid all that exquisite, that 
 divine fable ending, like a thunder-clap, with 
 " Thou art the man !" Then came the retribu- 
 tion, so awfully exact and thorough, the misery 
 of the child's death ; that brief tragedy of the 
 brother and sister, more terrible than anything 
 in ^Eschylus, in Dante, or in Ford ; then the re- 
 bellion of Absalom, with its hideous dishonour, 
 and his death, and the king covering his 
 face, and crying in a loud voice, " my son 
 Absalom ! Absalom ! my son ! my son !"- 
 and David's psalm, " Have mercy upon me, 
 God, according to thy loving- kindness ; accord- 
 ing unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot 
 blot out my transgressions," then closing with, 
 "'Yes; when lust hath conceived, it bringeth 
 forth sin ; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth 
 forth death/ ' Do not err/ do not stray, do not 
 transgress, * my beloved brethren/, for it is first 
 4 earthly, then sensual, then devilish / " he shut 
 the book, and sent us all away terrified, shaken, 
 and humbled, like himself. 
 
 I would fain say a few words on my father's 
 last illness, or rather on what led to it, and I wish 
 you and others in the ministry would take to 
 heart, as matter of immediate religious duty, 
 much of what I am going to say. My father was 
 
502 MEMOIU OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 a seven months' child, and lay, I believe, for a 
 fortnight in black wool, undressed, doing little 
 but breathe and sleep, not capable of being fed. 
 He continued all his life slight in make, and 
 not robust in health, though lively, and capable 
 of great single efforts. His attendance upon 
 his mother must have saddened his body as 
 well as his mind, and made him willing and 
 able to endure, in spite of his keen and ardent 
 spirit, the sedentary life he in the main led. 
 He was always a very small eater, and nice in 
 his tastes, easily put off from his food by any 
 notion. He therefore started on the full work 
 of life with a finer and more delicate mechanism 
 than a man's ought to be, indeed, in these re- 
 spects he was much liker a woman ; and being 
 very soon " placed," he had little travelling, and 
 little of that tossing about the world, which in 
 the transition from youth to manhood, hardens 
 the frame as well as supples it. Though deli- 
 cate, he was almost never ill. I do not re- 
 member, till near the close of his life, his ever 
 being in bed a day. 
 
 From his nervous system, and his brain 
 predominating steadily over the rest of his 
 body, he was habitually excessive in his pro- 
 fessional work. As to quantity, as to quality, as 
 to manner and expression, he flung away his 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 503 
 
 life without stint every Sabbath-day, his ser- 
 mons being laboriously prepared, loudly man- 
 dated, and at great expense of body and mind, 
 and then delivered with the utmost vehemence 
 and rapidity. He was quite unconscious of the 
 state he worked himself into, and of the loud 
 piercing voice in which he often spoke. This I 
 frequently warned him about, as being, I knew, 
 injurious to himself, and often painful to his 
 hearers, and his answer always was, that he 
 was utterly unaware of it ; and thus it continued 
 to the close, and very sad it was to me who knew 
 the peril, and saw the coming end, to listen to 
 his noble, rich, persuasive, imperative appeals, 
 and to know that the surplus of power, if re- 
 tained, would, by God's blessing, retain him, 
 while the effect on his people would, I am 
 sure, not have lost, but in some respects have 
 gained, for much of the discourse which was 
 shouted and sometimes screamed at the full 
 pitch of his keen voice, was of a kind to be 
 better rendered in his deep, quiet, settled tones. 
 This, and the great length of his public services, 
 I knew he himself felt, when too late, had in- 
 jured him, and many a smile he had at my 
 proposal to have a secret sub-congregational 
 string from him to me in the back seat, to be 
 authoritatively twitched when I knew he had 
 
504 MEMOIK OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 done enough ; but this string was never pulled, 
 even in his mind. 
 
 He went on in this expensive life, sleeping 
 very little, and always lightly, eating little, 
 never walking except of necessity ; little in com- 
 pany, when he would have eaten more, and been, 
 by the power of social relish made likelier to get 
 the full good out of his food ; never diverting 
 his mind by any change but that of one book 
 or subject for another ; and every time that any 
 strong affliction came on him, as when made 
 twice a widower, or at his daughter's death, or 
 from such an outrage upon his entire nature 
 and feelings, as the Libel, then his delicate ma- 
 chinery was shaken and damaged, not merely by 
 the first shock, but even more by that unrelent- 
 ing self-command by which he terrified his 
 body into instant submission. Thus it was, and 
 thus it ever must be, if the laws of our bodily 
 constitution, laid down by Him who knows our 
 frame, and from whom our substance is not hid, 
 are set at nought, knowingly or not if know- 
 ingly, the act is so much the more spiritually 
 bad but if not, it is still punished with the same 
 unerring nicety, the same commensurate meting 
 out of the penalty, and paying " in full tale," as 
 makes the sun to know his time, and splits an 
 erring planet into fragments, driving it into space 
 
LETTEE TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 505 
 
 " with hideous ruin and combustion." It is a 
 pitiful and a sad thing to say, but if ray father 
 had not been a prodigal in a true but very dif- 
 ferent meaning, if he had not spent his sub- 
 stance, the portion of goods that fell to him, the 
 capita] of life given him by God, in what we 
 must believe to have been needless and there- 
 fore preventable excess of effort, we might have 
 had him still with us, shining more and more, 
 and he and they who were with him would have 
 been spared those two years of the valley of the 
 shadow, with its sharp and steady pain, its fall- 
 ings away of life, its longing for the grave, its 
 sleepless nights, and days of weariness and 
 languor, the full expression of which you will 
 find nowhere but in the Psalms and in Job. 
 
 I have said that though delicate he was 
 never ill : this was all the worse for him, for, 
 odd as it may seem, many a man's life is 
 lengthened by a sharp illness ; and this in seve- 
 ral ways. In the first place, he is laid up, out of 
 the reach of all external mischief and exer- 
 tion, he is like a ship put in dock for repairs ; 
 time is gained. A brisk fever clarifies the 
 entire man : if it is beaten and does not beat, 
 it is like cleaning a chimney by setting it on 
 fire ; it is perilous but thorough. Then the 
 effort to throw off the disease often quickens 
 2 K 
 
506 MEMOIIi OF JOHN" BROWN, D.D. 
 
 and purifies and corroborates the central powers 
 of life ; the flame burns more clearly ; there is 
 a cleanness, so to speak, about all the wheels 
 of life. Moreover, it is a warning, and makes a 
 man meditate on his bed, and resolve to pull up, 
 and it warns his friends, and likewise if he is a 
 clergyman, his people, who if their minister is 
 always with them, never once think he can be 
 ever anything but as able as he is. 
 
 Such a pause, such a breathing time my 
 father never got during that part of his life and 
 labours when it would have availed most, and 
 he was an old man in years, before he was a 
 regular patient of any doctor. He was during 
 life subject to sudden headaches, affecting his 
 memory and eyesight, and even his speech ; 
 these attacks were, according to the thought- 
 less phrase of the day, called bilious ; that is, he 
 was sick, and was relieved by a blue pill and smart 
 medicine. Their true seat was in the brain ; 
 the liver suffered because the brain was ill, 
 and sent no nervous energy to it, or poisoned 
 what it did send. The sharp racking pain in the 
 forehead was the cry of suffering from the an- 
 terior lobes, driven by their master to distraction, 
 and turning on him wild with weakness and fear 
 and anger. It was well they did cry out ; in 
 some brains (large ones) they would have gone 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 507 
 
 on dumb to sudden and utter ruin, as in apo- 
 plexy or palsy ; but he did not know, and no 
 one told him their true meaning, and he set 
 about seeking for the outward cause in some 
 article of food, in some recent and quite inade- 
 quate cause. 
 
 He used, with a sort of odd shame and 
 distress, to ask me why it was that he was sub- 
 jected to so much suffering from what he called 
 the lower and ignoble regions of his body ; and 
 I used to explain to him that he had made them 
 suffer by long years of neglect, and that they 
 were now having their revenge, and in their own 
 way. I have often found, that the more the 
 nervous centres are employed in those offices of 
 thought and feeling the most removed from 
 material objects, the more the nervous energy 
 of the entire nature is concentrated, engrossed, 
 and used up in such offices, so much the more, 
 and therefore s are those organs of the body which 
 preside over that organic life, common to our- 
 selves and the lowest worm, defrauded of their 
 necessary nervous food, and being in the organic 
 and not in the animal department, and having 
 no voice to tell their wants and wrongs, till they 
 wake up and annoy their neighbours who have 
 a voice, that is, who are sensitive to pain, they 
 may have been long ill before they come into 
 
508 MEMOiR OF JOHX BROWN, D.D. 
 
 the sphere of consciousness. This is the true 
 reason along with want of purit} 7 and change 
 of air, want of exercise,* want of shifting the 
 work of the body why clergymen, men of let- 
 ters, and all men of intense mental application, 
 are so liable to be affected with indigestion, 
 constipation, lumbago, and lowness of spirits, 
 melancholia black bile. The brain may not 
 for a long time give way, because for a time 
 the law of exercise strengthens it ; it is fed high, 
 gets the best of everything, of blood and ner- 
 vous pabulum, and then men have a joy in the 
 victorious work of their brain, and it has a joy 
 of its own, too, which deludes and misleads. 
 
 All this happened to my father. He had no 
 formal disease when he died no structural 
 change ; his sleep and his digestion would have 
 been quite sufficient for life even up to the last ; 
 the mechanism was entire, but the motive 
 power was gone it was expended. The silver 
 cord was not so much loosed as relaxed. The 
 golden bowl, the pitcher at the fountain, the 
 wheel at the cistern, were not so much broken 
 as emptied and stayed. The clock had run 
 
 * " The youth Story was in all respects healthy, and even robust ; 
 he died of overwork, or rather, as I understand, of a two years' 
 almost total want of exercise, which it was impossible to induce him 
 to take." Arnold's Report to the Cummiittc of Council on Educa- 
 tion, 1860. 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 509 
 
 clown before its time, and there was no one 
 but He who first wound it up and set it who 
 could wind it up again ; and this He does not 
 do, because it is his law an express injunction 
 from Him that, having measured out to his 
 creatures each his measure of life, and left him 
 to the freedom of his own wall and the regula- 
 tion of his reason, He also leaves him to reap as 
 he sows. 
 
 Thus it was that my father's illness was not 
 a disease, but a long death ; life ebbing away, 
 consciousness left entire, the certain issue never 
 out of sight. This, to a man of my father's or- 
 ganization with a keen relish for life, and its 
 highest pleasures and energies, sensitive to im- 
 patience, and then over-sensitive of his own im- 
 patience ; cut to the heart with the long watching 
 and suffering of those he loved, who, after all, 
 could do so little for him ; with a nervous 
 system easily sunk, and by its strong play 
 upon his mind darkening and saddening his 
 most central beliefs, shaking his most solid 
 principles, tearing and terrifying his tenderest 
 affections ; his mind free and clear, ready for 
 work if it had the power, eager to be in its 
 place in the work of the world and of its Master, 
 to have to spend two long years in this ever- 
 descending road here was a combination of 
 
510 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 positive and negative suffering not to be thought 
 of even now, when it is all sunk under that 
 exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 
 
 He often spoke to me freely about his health, 
 went into it with the fearlessness, exactness, and 
 persistency of his nature ; and I never wit- 
 nessed, or hope to witness, anything more 
 affecting than when, after it had been dawning 
 upon him, he apprehended the true secret of 
 his death. He was deeply humbled, felt that 
 he had done wrong to himself, to his people, to 
 us all, to his faithful and long-suffering Master ; 
 and he often said, with a dying energy lighting 
 up his eye, and nerving his voice and gesture, 
 that if it pleased God to let him again speak 
 in his old place, he would not only proclaim 
 again, and, he hoped, more simply and more 
 fully, the everlasting gospel to lost man, but 
 proclaim also the gospel of God to the body, the 
 religious and Christian duty and privilege of 
 living in obedience to the divine laws of health. 
 He was delighted when I read to him, and 
 turned to this purpose that wonderful passage 
 of St. Paul " For the body is not one member, 
 but many. If the whole body were an eye, 
 where were the hearing ? if the whole were 
 hearing, where were the smelling ? But now 
 hath God set the members every one of them 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 511 
 
 in the body, as it hath pleased him. And the 
 eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need 
 of thee ; nor again the head to the feet, I have 
 no need of you. Nay, much more those mem- 
 bers of the body, which seem to be more feeble, 
 are necessary ;" summing it all up in words 
 with life and death in them "That there should 
 be no schism in the body ; but that the mem- 
 bers should have the same care one for another. 
 And whether one member suffer, all the mem- 
 bers suffer with it ; or one member be honoured, 
 all the members rejoice with it." 
 
 The lesson from all this is, Attend to your 
 bodies, study their structure, functions, and laws. 
 This does not at all mean that you need be an 
 anatomist, or go deep into physiology, or the 
 doctrines of prevention and cure. Not only has 
 each organism a resident doctor, placed there by 
 Him who can thus heal all our diseases ; but this 
 doctor, if watched and waited on, informs any 
 man or woman of ordinary sense what things to 
 do, and what things not to do. And I would 
 have you, who, I fear, not unfrequently sin 
 in the same way, and all our ardent, self- 
 sacrificing young ministers, to reflect whether, 
 after destroying themselves and dying young, 
 they have lost or gained. It is said that God 
 raises up others in our place. God gives you 
 
512 MEMOIR OF JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 no title to say this. Men such men as I have 
 in my mind are valuable to God in proportion 
 to the time they are here. They are the older, 
 the better, the riper and richer, and more en- 
 riching. Nothing will make up for this abso- 
 lute loss of life. For there is something which 
 every man who is a good workman is gaining 
 every year just because he is older, and this 
 nothing can replace. Let a man remain on his 
 ground, say a country parish, during half a 
 century or more let him be every year getting 
 fuller and sweeter in the knowledge of God 
 and man, in utterance and in power can the 
 power of that man for good over all his time, 
 and especially towards its close, be equalled by 
 that of three or four young, and, it may be, 
 admirable men, who have been succeeding each 
 other's untimely death, during the same space 
 of time ? It is against all spiritual, as well as 
 all simple arithmetic, to say so. 
 
 You have spoken of my father's prayers. 
 They were of two kinds : the one, formal, care- 
 ful, systematic, and almost stereotyped, remark- 
 able for fulness and compression of thought ; 
 sometimes too manifestly the result of study, 
 and sometimes not purely prayer, but more of 
 the nature of a devotional and even argumenta- 
 tive address ; the other, as in the family, short, 
 
LETTER TO KEY. DR. CAIRNS. 513 
 
 simple, and varied. He used to tell of his 
 master, Dr. Lawson, reproving him, in his honest 
 but fatherly way, as they were walking home 
 from the Hall. My father had in his prayer 
 the words, " that through death he might de- 
 stroy him that had the power of death, 
 that is the devil." The old man, leaning on 
 his favourite pupil, said, " John, my man, you 
 need not have said ' thai is the devil;' you 
 might have been sure that He knew whom you 
 meant." My father, in theory, held that a 
 mixture of formal, fixed prayer, in fact, a 
 liturgy, along with extempore prayer,, was the 
 right thing. As you observe, many of his pas- 
 sages in prayer, all who were in the habit of 
 hearing him could anticipate such as " the en- 
 lightening, enlivening, sanctifying, and comfort- 
 ing influences of the good Spirit," and many 
 others. One in especial you must remember ; 
 it was only used on very solemn occasions, 
 and curiously unfolds his mental peculiarities ; 
 it closed his prayer " And now, unto Thee, 
 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the one Jeho- 
 vah and our God, we would as is most meet 
 with the church on earth and the church in 
 heaven, ascribe all honour and glory, dominion 
 and majesty, as it was in the beginning, is now, 
 and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." 
 2 L 
 
514 MEMOIP OF JOHN BEOWN, M.D. 
 
 Nothing could be liker him than the interjection, 
 " as is most meet." Sometimes his abrupt, short 
 statements in the Synod were very striking. 
 On one occasion, Mr. James Morison having 
 stated his views as to prayer very strongly, deny- 
 ing that a sinner caw pray, my father, turning to 
 the Moderator, said " Sir, let a man feel him- 
 self to be a sinner, and, for anything the uni- 
 verse of creatures can do for him, hopelessly 
 lost, let him feel this, sir, and let him get a 
 glimpse of the Saviour, and all the eloquence 
 and argument of Mr. Morison will not keep that 
 man from crying out, ' God be merciful to me, 
 a sinner.' That, sir, is prayer that is accept- 
 able prayer." 
 
 There must be, I fear, now and then an ap- 
 parent discrepancy between you and me, espe- 
 cially as to the degree of mental depression 
 which at times overshadowed my father's 
 nature. You will understand this, and I hope 
 our readers will make allowance for it. Some 
 of it is owing to my constitutional tendency to 
 overstate, and much of it to my having had 
 perhaps more frequent, and even more private, 
 insights into this part of his life. But such 
 inconsistency as that I speak of the co-exist- 
 ence of a clear, firm faith, a habitual sense of 
 God and of his infinite mercy, the living a life 
 
LETTER TO REV. DR. CAIRNS. 515 
 
 of faith, as if it was in his organic and inner life, 
 more than in his sensational and outward is 
 quite compatible with that tendency to distrust 
 himself, that bodily darkness and mournfulness, 
 which at times came over him. Any one who 
 knows " what a piece of work is man ;" how 
 composite, how varying, how inconsistent human 
 nature is, that each of us are 
 
 " Some several men, all in an hour," 
 
 will not need to be told to expect, or how to 
 harmonize these differences of mood. You see 
 this in that wonderful man, the apostle Paul, the 
 true typical fulness, the humanness,Bo to speak, of 
 whose nature comes out in such expressions of 
 opposites as these " By honour and dishonour, 
 by evil report and good report : as deceivers, 
 and yet true ; as unknown, and yet well known ; 
 as dying, and, behold, we live ; as chastened, 
 and not killed ; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoic- 
 ing ; as poor, yet making many rich ; as having 
 nothing, and yet possessing all things." 
 
 I cannot, and after your impressive and exact 
 history of his last days, I need not say anything 
 of the close of those long years of suffering, 
 active and passive, and that slow ebbing of 
 life ; the body, without help or hope, feeling its 
 doom steadily though slowly drawing on ; the 
 mind mourning for its suffering friend, com- 
 panion, and servant, mourning also, some- 
 
516 MEMjTR OF JOHN BROWX, D.D. 
 
 times, that it must be " unclothed/' and take 
 its flight all alone into the infinite unknown ; 
 dying daily, not in the heat of fever, or in the 
 insensibility or lethargy of paralytic disease, 
 but having the mind calm and clear, and the 
 body conscious of its own decay, dying, as 
 it were, in cold blood. One thing I must 
 tell. That morning when you were obliged to 
 leave, and when "cold obstruction's apathy'' 
 had already begun its reign when he knew us, 
 and that was all, and when he followed us with 
 his dying and loving eyes, but could not speak 
 the end came ; and then, as through life, his 
 will asserted itself supreme in death. With 
 that love of order and decency which was a law 
 of his life, he deliberately composed himself, 
 placing his body at rest, as if setting his house 
 in order before leaving it, and then closed his 
 eyes and mouth, so that his last look the look 
 his body carried to the grave and faced disso- 
 lution in was that of sweet, dignified self-pos- 
 session. 
 
 I have made this letter much too long, and 
 have said many things in it I never intended 
 saying, and omitted much I had hoped to be 
 able to say. But I must end. 
 
 Yours ever affectionately, 
 
 J. BROWN. 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER 
 
 TO THE LIFE OF 
 
 REV. JOHN BROWN, D.D. 
 
 A LETTER TO REV. JOHN CAIRNS, D.D. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN BROWN, M.D. 
 
 EDINBURGH: 
 EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. 
 
 1860. 
 
YC134998