to be placed 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 was 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." {4}

The man who wrote this, and many another passage as true and tender,
might surely have been famous in fiction, if he had turned his powers
that way. He had imagination, humour, pathos; he was always studying and
observing life; his last volume, especially, is like a collection of
fragments that might have gone toward making a work, in some ways not
inferior to the romances of Scott. When the third volume of Essays was
published, in the spring of his last year, a reviewer, who apparently had
no personal knowledge of Dr. Brown, asked why he did not write a novel.
He was by that time over seventy years of age, and, though none guessed
it, within a few weeks of his death. What he might have done, had he
given himself to literature only, it is impossible to guess. But he
caused so much happiness, and did so much good, in that gentle profession
of healing which he chose, and which brought him near to many who needed
consolation more than physic, that we need not forget his deliberate
choice. Literature had only his _horae subsecivae_, as he said:
_Subseciva quaedam tempora quae ego perire non patior_, as Cicero writes,
"shreds and waste ends of time, which I suffer not to be lost."

The kind of life which Dr. Brown's father and his people lived at Biggar,
the austere life of work, and of thought intensely bent on the real aim
of existence, on God, on the destiny of the soul, is perhaps rare now,
even in rural Scotland. We are less obedient than of old to the motto of
that ring found on Magus Moor, where Archbishop Shairp was murdered,
_Remember upon Dethe_. If any reader has not yet made the acquaintance
of Dr. Brown's works, one might counsel him to begin with the "Letter to
John Cairns, D.D.," th