"You don't agree with your old friend about that policy?"
"No, nor about Greek. But we are friends still. As for discussion, we began that when we first met. How many tens of years ago was that? We have been discussing ever since. Yes, forty years! We met at Dean Ramsey's house. Gladstone was a splendid man to disagree with even then."
As Professor Blackie talked of his friends, the names of nearly all his contemporaries in England, Scotland, and Germany came hurrying forth. But he would n't tell anecdotes about them for two reasons; first, he never remembered good stories; second, "I don't live in the past," he said. He was not a good talker, if good talk means keeping up your end in conversation. He kept up more than his end. He was always ready for a monologue. He did n't converse, he exploded. His utterances were volcanic. There would come an eruption of short sentences blazing with philosophy; then a kindly glow over it all, and the discharge would subside quickly with a gentle rumty-tum, or a snatch from some old Scotch ballad. We had been talking of education. Suddenly the table shook under a smiting hand, and these words were shot at me:
"Teaching! We are teaching our young men everything except this: to teach themselves, and to look the Lord Jesus Christ in the face! You are doing it in America, too. You are as bad as we are in Britain." And then immediately, and with a seraph's smile, "May I pass you a wing?"
He quoted from one of his books, a recent one: "Of all the chances that can befall a young man at his first start in the race of life, the greatest unquestionably is to be brought into contact, and, if possible, to enter into familiar relations with a truly great man. For this is to know what manhood means, and a manly life, not by grave precept, or wise proverb, or ideal picture; but to see the ideal in complete equipment and compact in reality before you, as undeniably and as efficiently as the sun that sheds light from the sky, or the mountain that sheds waters into the glen."
Strong influences were about Blackie's life in his youth, and he became, in his turn, a great influence in other lives. He was the son of a Scotch banker, and was born in Glasgow. He had his first schooling in Aberdeen, and he entered college at twelve and the University of Edinburgh at fifteen. At the latter place he studied under John Wilson ("Christopher North"). At Aberdeen he had the best Latin instruction of his time. There they were famous Latinists. At the University of Edinburgh it was mainly religion with him, and the Bible his favourite reading. At twenty he went to Germany, the Germany that is dead. His strong grave face would light up when he spoke of the men he had known there.
"Niebuhr was the biggest man Germany has produced, but Bunsen was the greatest all round. Bunsen looked like Goethe. I told him so, and found that others thought so. But Bunsen had a sweeter mouth than Goethe. My father's teaching, the nature that God gave me, and Bunsen's influence, have been the shaping forces of my life.
"I returned to Scotland, was called to the bar at twenty-five, and ran away from it at thirty. I was not meant for a lawyer. Aberdeen University made me its Professor of Latin Literature, and I kept at that till 1852, when Edinburgh appointed me Professor of Greek. I was thirty years at that time. A few years ago I retired. There is the story of my life."
No. Only the story of the shell of his life. It said nothing of what he had done.
"Done!" exclaimed the old man. "If you live to be as old as John Blackie, you 'll find it less important to know what a man has done than to know what he is. Done? I 've taught Greek, written a little, preached a good deal!"