“His defect in conversation was that he was a bad listener. His own part was well sustained. His enormous store of varied information poured forth naturally and easily, and was interspersed with a wonderful stock of lively anecdotes and jokes. But he always lacked that greatest power of the conversationalist, the subtle ready sympathy which draws forth the best powers of others. He was invaluable at a dull dinner-table, furnishing the whole frais de la conversation himself.... His mode of life at that time [during his residence at Lauriston Place and at Craighouse] was to repair to the office of the Prison Board, in George Street, about eleven. He remained there till four, and made it a matter of conscience neither to do any extra-official writing nor to receive visits during those hours.... Returning from his office to dinner at five, he would, after dinner, retire to the library for twenty minutes or half-an-hour’s perusal of a novel as mental rest. His taste in novels has been already described. Although he would read only those called exciting, they did not, apparently, excite him, for he read them as slowly as if he was learning them by heart. He would return to the drawing-room to drink a large cup of extremely strong tea, then retire again to the library to commence his day of literary work about eight in the evening. He would read or write without cessation, and without the least appearance of fatigue or excitement, till one or two in the morning.... Constitutionally irritable, energetic, and utterly persistent, Dr. Burton did not know what dulness or depression of spirits was. With grief he was indeed acquainted, and while such a feeling lasted it engrossed him; but his spirits were naturally elastic, and both by nature and on principle he discouraged in himself and others any dwelling on the sad or pathetic aspects of life. He has said that the nearest approach he had ever felt to low spirits was when he had finished some great work and had not yet begun another.... John Hill Burton can never have been handsome, and he so determinedly neglected his person as to increase its natural defects. His greatest mental defect was an almost entire want of imagination. From this cause the characters of those nearest and dearest to him remained to his life’s end a sealed book.... Dr. Burton was excessively kind-hearted within the limits placed by this great want. To any sorrow or suffering which he could understand he craved with characteristic impatience to carry immediate relief; and the greatest enjoyment of his life, especially of its later years, was to give pleasure to children, poor people, or the lower animals. Many humble folks will remember the bunches of flowers he thrust silently into their hands, and the refreshment he never failed to press on their acceptance in his own peculiar manner. He was liberal of money to a fault. He never refused any application even from a street beggar.... No printer’s devil or other chance messenger failed to receive his sixpence or shilling, besides a comfortable meal.... Many of the ‘motley crew’ along with whom Dr. Burton received his education fell into difficulties in the course of their lives. Application from one of them always met with a prompt response. To send double the amount asked on such occasions was his rule, if money was the object desired. In his earlier life he would also spare no trouble in endeavouring to help these unfortunates to help themselves. As he grew older he was less zealous, probably from being less sanguine of success, in this service.”
The illustrations that accompany the Memoir deserve a word. The portrait of Dr. Burton, etched by Mr. W. B. Hole, A.R.S.A., after a photograph, and representing him walking away, with a book in his hand, from an old book-stall near Candlemaker Row, is done to the life, slightly tidied perhaps in the look of the costume, but catching his gait and the keen expression of his eyes and face with wonderful fidelity. Very faithful and pleasing, also, are the vignettes of Craighouse Avenue and Craighouse itself, the view of a nook in the library of Craighouse, and the vignette of Dalmeny Churchyard, where Dr. Burton lies buried, all drawn by his daughter Miss Rose Burton, and engraved by her sister Miss E. P. Burton.
DR. JOHN BROWN OF EDINBURGH[[50]]
Since the last session of our University, Edinburgh has lost two of her citizens of literary mark. Dr. John Brown died, in his house in Rutland Street, on the 11th of May, in the seventy-second year of his age; and his friend, Dr. William Hanna, died in London on the 24th of the same month, aged seventy-three. They were both buried in Edinburgh. As I had the honour of knowing them both well, I cannot let the present occasion pass without asking you to join with me in remembering them affectionately. I could say much to you of Dr. Hanna, the son-in-law and biographer of Dr. Chalmers. I could dwell on the merits of his Life of that great man and of his other well-known works, and on his fine liberality of intellect and the keen and warm geniality of his Scoto-Irish heart. In this place, however, it is naturally of Dr. John Brown that I feel myself entitled to speak at some length. He was, in a sense, during the latter part of his life, peculiarly our Edinburgh man of letters, the man most fondly thought of in that character by many people at a distance. They had begun, long before his death, to call him “The Scottish Charles Lamb”; and the name is applied to him still by English critics.
Born at Biggar in Lanarkshire, in 1810, the son of the Secession minister of that town, and of a family already in the third generation of its remarkable distinction in the Scottish religious world as “The Browns of Haddington,” our friend came to Edinburgh in 1822, when he was twelve years old. His father had then removed from Biggar, to assume that pastorate of the Rose Street Secession Church in this city in which, and subsequently in his ministry in the Broughton Place Church, and in his Theological Professorship in connection with the Associate Synod, he attained his celebrity. When I first knew Edinburgh there was no more venerable-looking man in it than this Dr. John Brown of Broughton Place Church. People would turn in the streets to observe his dignified figure as he passed; and strangers who went to hear him preach were struck no less by the beauty of his appearance in the pulpit, the graceful fall of the silver locks round his fine head and sensitive face, than by the Pauline earnestness of his doctrine. At that time, the phrase “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh,” if used in any part of Scotland away from the metropolis, would have been taken as designating this venerable Calvinistic clergyman, and not his son.
The son, meanwhile, it is true, was becoming well enough known within Edinburgh on his own account. Having been educated at the High School and the University, and having chosen the medical profession, and been apprenticed for some time to the famous surgeon, Syme, he had taken his degree of M.D. in 1833, and had then,—with no other previous medical experience out of Edinburgh than a short probation among the sailors at Chatham,—settled down permanently in Edinburgh for medical practice. From that date, therefore, on to the time when I can draw upon my own first recollections of him,—say about 1846,—there had been two Dr. John Browns in Edinburgh, the father and the son, the theological doctor and the medical doctor. It was the senior or theological doctor, as I have said, that was then still the “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” par excellence, and the name had not transferred itself to the younger with its new signification. He was then about thirty-six years of age, with some little practice as a physician; and my remembrance of him at that time is of a darkish-haired man, of shorter stature than his father, with fine soft eyes, spirited movement, and very benignant manner, the husband of a singularly beautiful young wife, and greatly liked and sought after in the Edinburgh social circles in which he and she appeared. This was partly from the charm of his vivid temperament and conversation, and partly because of a reputation for literary ability that had been recently gathering round him on account of occasional semi-anonymous articles of his in newspapers and periodicals, chiefly art-criticisms. For the hereditary genius of “The Browns of Haddington” had, in this fourth generation of them, turned itself out of the strictly theological direction, to work in new ways. While Dr. Samuel Brown, a younger cousin of our Dr. John, had been astonishing Edinburgh by his brilliant speculations in Chemistry, Dr. John himself, in the midst of what medical practice came in his way, had been toying with Literature. Toying only it had been at first, and continued to be for a while; but, by degrees,—and especially after 1847, when the editorship of the North British Review, which had been founded in 1844, passed into the hands of his friend Dr. Hanna,—his contributions to periodical literature became more various and frequent. At length, in 1858, when he was forty-eight years of age, and had contributed pretty largely to the periodical named and to others, he came forth openly as an author, by publishing a volume of what he called his Horæ Subsecivæ, consisting mainly of medical biographies and other medico-literary papers collected from the said periodicals, but including also his immortal little Scottish idyll called “Rab and His Friends.” His father had died in that year, so that thenceforward, if people chose, the designation “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” could descend to the son without ambiguity.
And it did so descend. For eleven years before that appearance of the first collection of his Horæ Subsecivæ, with “Rab and His Friends” included in it, I had been resident in London, and I remained there for seven years more. During all those eighteen years, therefore, my direct opportunities of cultivating his acquaintance had ceased; and, while I could take note through the press of the growth of his literary reputation, it was only by hearsay at a distance, or by a letter or two that passed between us, or by a glimpse of him now and then when I came north on a visit, that I was kept aware of his Edinburgh doings and circumstances. Not till the end of 1865, when I resumed residence in Edinburgh, were we brought again into close neighbourhood and intercourse. Then, certainly, I found him, at the age of five-and-fifty, as completely and popularly our “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” in the new sense as ever his father had been in the old one. His pen had been still busy in newspapers and periodicals, the subjects ranging away more and more from the medical; another volume of his Horæ Subsecivæ, or collected articles, had been published; and some of his papers, selected from that volume or its predecessor, or taken more directly from the manuscript, had been brought out separately, in various forms, under the discerning care of his friend and publisher, Mr. David Douglas, and had been in circulation almost with the rapidity of one of the serial parts of a novel by Dickens. Of both his Minchmoor and his Jeems the Doorkeeper more than 10,000 copies had been sold; his Pet Marjorie had passed the sale of 15,000 copies; and Rab and His Friends was already in its 50th thousand.
With all this applause beating in upon him from the reading public, in Scotland, in England, and in America, there he still was in his old Edinburgh surroundings: a widower now for some years, domesticated with his two children, and more solitary in his habits than he had been; but to be seen walking along Princes Street of a forenoon, or sometimes at some hospitable dinner-table of an evening, always the same simple, wise, benevolent, lovable, and much-loved Dr. John. And so for sixteen years more, and to the very end. The sixties crept upon him after the fifties, and the white touch of the first seventies followed, and the vivid darkish-haired Dr. John of my first memory had changed into the bald-headed and spectacled veteran you may see in the later photographs,—the spectacles before his fine eyes if he were looking to the front, but raised over the placid forehead if he were looking downwards at a print or a book. But these changes had come softly, and with a mellowing rather than withering effect; and, as late as last winter, what veteran was there in our community whose face and presence in any company was more desired or gave greater pleasure? If a stranger of literary tastes visited Edinburgh, about whom did he inquire more curiously, or whom was he more anxious to see, if possible, than Dr. John Brown? We knew, most of us, that his calm face concealed sorrows; we remembered his long widowerhood; we were aware too of the occasional glooms and depressions that withdrew him from common society; but, when he did appear among us, whether in any public gathering or in more private fashion, how uniformly cheerful he was, how bright and sunny! It has been stated, in one obituary notice of him, that his medical practice declined as his literary reputation increased. I doubt the truth of the statement, and imagine that the reverse might be nearer the truth. To the end he loved his profession; to the end he practised it; to the end there were not a few families, in and about Edinburgh, who would have no other medical attendant, if they could help it, than their dear and trusted Dr. John. My impression rather is that he was wrapt up in his profession more and more in his later days, using his pen only for a new trifle now and then as the whim struck him, and content in the main with the continued circulation of his former writings or their reissue in new shapes. It was on the 12th of April in the present year, or only a month before his death, that he put the last prefatory touch to the first volume of that new edition of his Horæ Subsecivæ in three volumes in which his complete literary remains are now accessible.
The title Horæ Subsecivæ, borrowed by Dr. John from the title-pages of some old volumes of the minor English literature of the seventeenth century, indicates, and was intended to indicate, the nature of his writings. They are all “Leisure Hours,” little things done at times snatched from business. There are between forty and fifty of them in all, none of them long, and most of them very short. It is vain in his case to repeat the regret, so common in similar cases, that the author did not throw his whole strength into some one or two suitable subjects, and produce one or two important works. By constitution, I believe, no less than by circumstances, Dr. John Brown was unfitted for large and continuous works, and was at home only in short occasional papers. One compensation is the spontaneity of his writings, the sense of immediate throb and impulse in each. Every paper he wrote was, as it were, a moment of himself, and we can read his own character in the collected series.
A considerable proportion of his papers, represented most directly by his Plain Lectures on Health addressed to Working People, his little essay entitled Art and Science, and his other little essays called Excursus Ethicus and Education through the Senses, but also by his Locke and Sydenham and others of his sketches of eminent physicians, are in a didactic vein. Moreover, they are all mainly didactic on one string. When these papers are read, it is found that they all propound and illustrate one idea, which had taken such strong hold of the author that it may be called one of his characteristics. It is the idea of the distinction or contrast between the speculative, theoretical, or scientific habit of mind, and the practical or active habit. In medical practice and medical education, more particularly, Dr. John Brown thought there had come to be too much attention to mere science, too much faith in mere increase of knowledge and in exquisiteness of research and apparatus, and too little regard for that solid breadth of mind, that soundness of practical observation and power of decision in emergencies, that instinctive or acquired sagacity, which had been conspicuous among the best of the older physicians. As usual, he has put this idea into the form of humorous apologue:—