as
"Has he wecht, sir?"--quoting Dr. Chalmers; and when he wanted to give
the highest praise, he said certain writing was "strong meat." He had a
warm enthusiasm for the work of other literary men: an artist himself,
he was quick to appreciate and seize upon the witty thing or the
excellent thing wherever he found it, and he was eager to share his
pleasure with the whole world. He reintroduced to the public Henry
Vaughn, the quaint seventeenth-century poet; he wrote a sympathetic
memoir of Arthur Hallam; he imported 'Modern Painters,' and enlightened
Edinburgh as to its merits. His art papers were what Walter Pater would
call "appreciations,"--that is to say, he dwelt upon the beauties of
what he described rather than upon the defects. What he did not admire
he left alone.

As the author of 'Rab' loved the lonely glens on Minchmoor and in the
Enterkin, or where Queen Mary's "baby garden" shows its box-row border
among the Spanish chestnuts of Lake Monteith, so he loved the Scottish
character, "bitter to the taste and sweet to the diaphragm": "Jeemes"
the beadle, with his family worship when he himself was all the family;
the old Aberdeen Jacobite people; Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune, who
in her day bewitched Edinburgh; Rab, Ailie, and Bob Ainslie. His
characters are oddities, but are drawn without a touch of cynicism. What
an amount of playful, wayward nonsense lies between these pages, and
what depths of melancholy under the fun! Like Sir Walter, he had a great
love for dogs, and never went out unaccompanied by one or two of them.
They are the heroes of several of his sketches.

Throughout the English-speaking world, he was affectionately known as
Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh. He stood aloof from political and
ecclesiastical controversies, and was fond of telling a story to
illustrate how little reasoning went to forming partisans. A minister
catechizing a raw plowboy, after asking the first question, "Who made
you?" and getting the answer "God," asked him, "How do you know that God
made you?" After some pause and head-scratching, the reply came, "Weel,
sir, it's the clash [common talk] o' the kintry." "Ay," Brown added,
"I'm afraid that a deal of our belief is founded on just 'the clash o'
the kintry.'"

* * * * *

MARJORIE FLEMING

From 'Spare Hours'

One November afternoon in 1810--the year in which 'Waverley' was resumed
and laid aside again, to be finished off, its last tw