it of eking out his
words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and a little
wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a survival from
some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore, when he was a great
pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have pointed with these
minute guns his allocutions to the bench. His humour was perfectly
equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism, stone and
gravel might have combined their forces against that frail tabernacle,
but when I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside Jeremy
Taylor's _Life of Christ_ and greet me with the same open brow, the
same kind formality of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the
man almost to a decade. He had begun life, under his mother's
influence, as an admirer of Junius,[38] but on maturer knowledge had
transferred his admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire
gravity, to be punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I
was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I
attempted the colloquial, I should certainly be shamed: the remark was
apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume.[39] Scott was too new
for him; he had known the author--known him, too, for a Tory; and to
the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a trouble.
He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he was proud to
tell, played a certain part in the history of Shakespearian revivals,
for he had successfully pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh
Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great
scenic display.[40] A moderate in religion, he was much struck in the
last years of his life by a conversation with two young lads,
revivalists. "H'm," he would say--"new to me. I have had--h'm--no such
experience." It struck him, not with pain, rather with a solemn
philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as he hoped, and a
Christian of so old a standing, should hear these young fellows
talking of his own subject, his own weapons that he had fought the
battle of life with,--"and--h'm--not understand." In this wise and
grateful attitude he did justice to himself and others, reposed
unshaken in his old beliefs, and recognised their limits without anger
or alarm. His last recorded remark, on the last night of his life, was
after he had been arguing against Calvinism[41] with his minister and
was interrupted by an intolerable pang. "After all," he said, "of all
th