e of Rochefoucauld's--"_nous avons tous assez de
force pour supporter les maux d'autrui_." {2}

He did not bear easily the misfortunes of others, and the evils of his
own lot were heavy enough. They saddened him; but neither illness, nor
his poignant anxiety for others, could sour a nature so unselfish. He
appeared not to have lost that anodyne and consolation of religious hope,
which had been the strength of his forefathers, and was his best
inheritance from a remarkable race of Scotsmen. Wherever he came, he was
welcome; people felt glad when they had encountered him in the
streets--the streets of Edinburgh, where almost every one knows every one
by sight--and he was at least as joyously received by the children and
the dogs as by the grown-up people of every family. A friend has kindly
shown me a letter in which it is told how Dr. Brown's love of dogs, his
interest in a half-blind old Dandy which was attached to him, was evinced
in the very last hours of his life. But enough has been said, in general
terms, about the character of "the beloved physician," as Dr. Brown was
called in Edinburgh, and a brief account may be given, in some detail, of
his life and ways.

Dr. John Brown was born in Biggar, one of the gray, slaty-looking little
towns in the pastoral moorlands of southern Scotland. These towns have
no great beauty that they should be admired by strangers, but the
natives, as Scott said to Washington Irving, are attached to their "gray
hills," and to the Tweed, so beautiful where man's greed does not pollute
it, that the Border people are all in love with it, as Tyro, in Homer,
loved the divine Enipeus. We hold it "far the fairest of the floods that
run upon the earth." How dear the border scenery was to Dr. John Brown,
and how well he knew and could express its legendary magic, its charm
woven of countless ancient spells, the music of old ballads, the sorcery
of old stories, may be understood by readers of his essay on "Minchmoor."
{3} The father of Dr. Brown was the third in a lineage of ministers of
the sect called Seceders. To explain who the Seceders were, it would be
necessary to explore the sinking morasses of Scotch ecclesiastical
history. The minister was proud of being not only a "Seceder" but a
"Burgher." He inherited, to be brief, the traditions of a most
spiritually-minded and most spirited set of men, too much bent, it may
appear to us, on establishing delicate distinctions of opinions,