Sydney Smith, in his delightful and valuable Sketches of Lectures on Moral Philosophy, to which I have referred, makes a touching and impressive confession of the evil to the rest of a man's nature from the predominant power and cultivation of the ludicrous. I believe Charles Lamb could have told a like, and a sadder story. He started in life with all the endowments of a great, ample, and serious nature, and he, greatly from the awful shadow that haunted his life, ended in being chiefly the incomparable joker and humourist, but always, and to the end, a being of 'large discourse.'1 1 Many good and fine things have been said of this wonderful and unique genius, but I know none better or finer than these lines by my friend John Hunter of Craigcrook. They are too little known, and no one will be anything but pleased to read them, except their author. The third line might have been Elia's own :— Humour, wild wit, Quips, cranks, puns, sneers, -with clear sweet thought profound; The subtlest lines of ALL fine powers, split To their last films, then marvellously spun In magic web, whose million hues are ONE!' I knew one man who was almost altogether and absolutely comic, and yet a man of sense, fidelity, courage, and worth, but over his entire nature the comic ruled supreme-the late Sir Adam Ferguson, whose very face was a breach of solemnity; I daresay, even in sleep he looked a wag. This was the way in which everything appeared to him first, and often last too, with it might be a serious enough middle. I saw him not long before his death, when he was of great age and knew he was dying; there was no levity in his manner This Preface was written, and I had a proof ready for his pencil, when I was summoned to the death of him to whom I owe my life. He had been dying for months, but he and I hoped to have got and to have given into his hands a copy of these Hora, the correction of which had often whiled away his long hours of languor and pain. God thought otherwise. I shall miss his great knowledge, his loving and keen eye-his ne quid nimis-his sympathy-himself. or thoughtlessness about his state; he was kind, and shrewd as ever; but how he flashed out with utter merriment when he got hold of a joke, or rather when it got hold of him, and shook him, not an inch of his body was free of its power-it possessed him, not he it. The first attack was on showing me a calotype of himself by the late Adamson (or Hill and Adamson, the Vandyck and Raeburn of photography), in the corner of which he had written, with a hand trembling with age and fun, 'Adam's-sun fecit'-it came back upon him and tore him without mercy. Then, his blood being up, he told me a story of his uncle, the great Dr. Black the chemist; no one will grudge the reading of it in my imperfect record, though it is to the reality what reading music is to hearing it. Dr. Black, when Professor of Chemistry in Edinburgh University, had a gruff old man as his porter, a James Alston. James was one of the old school of chemistry, and held by phlogiston, but for no better reason than the endless trouble the new-fangled discoveries brought upon him in the way of apparatus. The professor was lecturing on Hydrogen Gas, and had made arrangements for showing its lightness-what our preceptor, Dr. Charles Hope, called, in his lofty way, its 'principle of absolute levity.' He was greatly excited, the good old man of genius. James was standing behind his chair, ready and Let me be thankful that it was given to me assidere valetudini, fovere deficientem, satiari vultu, complexu. Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore extinguuntur magnæ animæ; placide quiescas! Or, in more sacred and hopeful words, which, put there at my father's request, may be found at the close of the paper on young Hallam: 'O man greatly beloved, go thou thy way till the end; for thou sulky. His master told his young friends that the bladder he had filled with the gas must, on principle, ascend; but that they would see practically if it did, and he cut the string. Up it rushed, amid the shouts and upturned faces of the boys, and the quiet joy of their master; James regarding it with a glum curiosity. Young Adam Ferguson was there, and left at the end of the hour with the rest, but finding he had forgotten his stick, went back; in the empty room he found James perched upon a lofty and shaky ladder, trying, amid much perspiration and blasphemy, and want of breath, to hit down his enemy, who rose at each stroke, the old battling with the new. Sir Adam's reproduction of this scene, his voice and screams of rapture, I shall never forget. Let me give another pleasant story of Dr. Black and Sir Adam, which our Principal (Dr. Lee) delights to tell; it is merely its bones. The doctor sent him to the bank for £5— four in notes, and one in silver; then told him that he must be paid for his trouble with a shilling, and next proceeded to give him good advice about the management of money, particularly recommending a careful record of every penny spent, holding the shilling up before him all the time. During this address, Sir Adam was turning over in his mind all the trash he would be able to purchase with the shilling, and his feeling may be imagined when the doctor finally returned it to his pocket! shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.' It is not for a son to speak what he thinks of his father so soon after his death. I leave him now with a portrait of his spiritual lineaments, by Dr. Cairns : 'As he was of the Pauline type of mind, his Christianity ran into the same mould. A strong, intense, and vehement nature, with masculine intellect and unyielding will, he accepted the Bible in its literal simplicity as an absolute revelation, and then showed the strength of his character in subjugating his whole being to this decisive influence, and in projecting the same convictions into other minds. He was a believer in the sense of the old Puritans, and, amid the doubt and scepticism of the nineteenth century, held as firmly as any of them by the doctrines of atonement and grace. He had most of the idiosyncrasy of Baxter, though not without the contemplation of Howe. The doctrines of Calvinism, mitigated but not renounced, and received simply as dictates of Heaven, without any effort or hope to bridge over their inscrutable depths by philosophical theories, he translated into a fervent, humble, and resolutely active life. There was a fountain of tenderness in his nature as well as a sweep of impetuous indignation; and the one drawn out, and the other controlled by his Christian faith, made him at once a philanthropist and a reformer, and both in the highest departments of human interest. The union of these ardent elements, and of a highly devotional temperament, not untouched with melancholy, with the patience of the scholar, and the sobriety of the critic, formed the singularity and almost the anomaly of his personal character. These contrasts were tempered by the discipline of experience; and his life, both as a man. and a Christian, seemed to become more rich, genial, and harmonious as it approached its close.'-Scotsman, October 20th. 23 RUTLAND STREET, October 30, 1858. J. B. |