of the father gave place to a cultured humanity of almost feminine
tenderness and charm. All his life long he was passionately devoted to
literature, to art, to children. He collected rare books and prints with
avidity, but was no less generous in giving them away. Indifferent to
money, he hated to see a scrap of paper wasted. He had a neat touch in
epigrams, and a boyish delight in grotesque rhymes. But there was no
lack of grit in this accomplished, fresh-minded, and lovable man. He had
the tough fibre of his race; only it was the wrongs of others that
called out its tenacity, not his own. While holding an appointment on
his mother's West Indian estate, he braved the fierce resentment of the
whole colony by teaching a negro-boy to read; and finally incurred
disinheritance rather than draw a livelihood from slave-labour. This
Shelleyan act involved for him the resignation of his intellectual and
artistic ambitions; and with the docility characteristic of him, where
only his own interests were concerned, he forthwith entered the fairly
well-paid but unexciting service of the Bank.

In 1811 he married, and on May 7 of the following year his eldest son,
Robert, was born. His wife was the daughter of a German shipowner,
William Wiedemann, who had settled and married at Dundee. Wiedemann is
said to have been an accomplished draughtsman and musician, and his
daughter, without herself sharing these gifts, probably passed them on
to her son. Whether she also communicated from her Scottish and German
ancestry the "metaphysical" proclivities currently ascribed to him, is a
hypothesis absolutely in the air.[1] What is clear is that she was
herself intellectually simple and of few ideas, but rich in the
temperament, at once nervous and spiritual, which when present in the
mother so often becomes genius in the son. "She was a divine woman,"
such was her son's brief sufficing tribute. Physically he seems to have
closely resembled her,[2] and they were bound together by a peculiarly