himself clearly audible without a speaking trumpet, ruffling the
while with a proper vanity in his achievement. He had a habit of
eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and
a little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a
survival from some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore,
when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may
have pointed with these minute guns his allocutions to the bench.
His humour was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach of fate;
gout, rheumatism, stone and gravel might have combined their forces
against that frail tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday
evening, he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor's LIFE OF CHRIST and
greet me with the same open brow, the same kind formality of
manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the man almost to a
decade. He had begun life, under his mother's influence, as an
admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had transferred his
admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be
punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a
Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I
attempted the colloquial, I should certainly, be shamed: the remark
was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume. Scott was too
new for him; he had known the author - known him, too, for a Tory;
and to the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a
trouble. He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he
was proud to tell, played a certain part in the history of
Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully pressed on Murray,
of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare's
fairy pieces with great scenic display. A moderate in religion, he
was much struck in the last years of his life by a conversation
with two young lads, revivalists "H'm," he would say - "new to me.
I have had - h'm - no such experience." It struck him, not with