** This tendency was curiously seen in his love of
portraits, especially of men whose works he had and liked.
He often put portraits into his books, and he seemed to
enjoy this way of realizing their authors; and in
exhibitions of pictures he was more taken up with what is
usually and justly the most tiresome department, the
portraits, than with all else. He was not learned in
engravings, and made no attempt at collecting them, so that
the following list of portraits in his rooms shows his
liking for the men much more than for the art which
delineated them. Of course they by no means include all his
friends, ancient and modern, but they all were his friends:—
Robert Hill—Dr. Carey—Melanchthon—Calvin—Pollok—Erasmus
—(very like "Uncle Ebenezer")—John Knox—Dr. Waugh—John
Milton (three, all framed)—Dr. Dick—Dr. Hall—Luther
(two)—Dr. Heugh—Dr. Mitchell—Dr. Balmer—Dr. Henderson—
Dr. Wardlaw—Shakspere (a small oil painting which he had
since ever I remember)—Dugald Stewart—Dr. Innes—Dr.
Smith, Biggar—the two Erskines and Mr. Fisher—Dr. John
Taylor of Toronto—Dr. Chalmers—Mr. William Ellis, Rev.
James Elies—J. B. Patterson—Vinet—Archibald M'Lean—Dr.
John Erskine—Tholuck—John Pym—Gesenius—Professor
Finlayson—Richard Baxter—Dr. Lawson—Dr. Peddie (two, and
a copy of Joseph's noble bust); and they were thus all about
him for no other reason than that he liked to look at and
think of them through their countenances.
He delighted to possess books which any of them might have held in their hands, on which they had written their names. He had a number of these, some very curious; among others, that wild soldier, man of fashion and wit among the reformers, Ulric von Hutten's autograph on Erasmus' beautiful folio Greek Testament, and John Howe's (spelt How) on the first edition of Milton's Speech on Unlicensed Printing. *
* In a copy of Baxter's Life and Times, which he picked up
at Maurice Ogle's shop in Glasgow, which had belonged to
Anna, Countess of Argyll, besides her autograph, there is a
most affecting and interesting note in that venerable lady's
handwriting. It occurs on the page where Baxter brings a
charge of want of veracity against her eldest and name-
daughter who was perverted to Popery. They are in a hand
tremulous with age and feeling:—"I can say with truth I
never in all my lyff did hear trewly, and what she said, if
it was not trew, it was by others sugested to hir, as yt she
wold embak on Wedensday. She belived she wold, bot thy took
hir, allés! from me who never did sie her mor. The minester
of Cuper, Mr. John Magill, did sie hir at Paris in the
convent. Said she was a knowing and vertuous person, and hed
retined the living principels of our relidgon, which made
him say it was good to grund young persons weel in ther
relidgion, as she was one it appired weel grunded."
The following is Lord Lindsay's letter, on seeing this
remarkable marginal note:—
Edinburgh, Douglas' Hotel,
26th December 1856.
My dear Sir,—I owe you my sincerest thanks for your
kindness in favouring me with a sight of the volume of
Baxter's Life, which formerly belonged to my ancestrix,
Anna, Countess of Argyll. The ms. note inserted by her in it
respecting her daughter is extremely interesting. I had
always been under the impression that the daughter had died
very shortly after her removal to France, but the contrary
appears from Lady Argyll's memorandum. That memorandum
throws also a pleasing light on the later life of Lady Anna,
and forcibly illustrates the undying love and tenderness of
the aged mother, who must have been very old when she penned
it, the book having been printed as late as 1696.
I am extremely obliged to you for communicating to me this
new and very interesting information.—Believe me, my dear
Sir, your much obliged and faithful servant,
Lindsay,
John Brown, Esq., M.D.
He began collecting books when he was twelve, and he was collecting up to his last hours. He cared least for merely fine books, though he enjoyed, no one more so, fine type, good binding, and all the niceties of the book-fancier. What he liked were such books as were directly useful in his work, and such as he liked to live in the midst of; such, also, as illustrated any great philosophical, historical, or ecclesiastical epoch. His collection of Greek Testaments was, considering his means, of great extent and value, and he had a quite singular series of books, pamphlets, and documents, referring not merely to his own body—the Secession, with all its subdivisions and reunions—but to Nonconformity and Dissent everywhere, and, indeed, to human liberty, civil and religious, in every form,—for this, after the great truths, duties, and expectations of his faith, was the one master passion of his life—liberty in its greatest sense, the largest extent of individual and public spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all risk of obscuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688—the right and power of the English people to be their own lawgivers, and to appoint their own magistrates, of whom the sovereign is the chief.
His conviction of the sole right of God to be Lord of the conscience, and his sense of his own absolute religious independence of every one but his Maker, were the two elements in building up his beliefs on all church matters; they were twin beliefs. Hence the simplicity and thoroughness of his principles. Sitting in the centre, he commanded the circumference. But I am straying out of my parish into yours. I only add to what you have said, that the longer he lived, the more did he insist upon it being not less true and not less important, that the Church must not intermeddle with the State, than that the State must not intermeddle with the Church. He used to say, "Go down into the world, with all its complications and confusions, with this double-edged weapon, and you can cut all the composite knots of Church and State." The element of God and of eternity predominates in the religious more than in the civil affairs of men, and thus far transcends them; but the principle of mutual independence is equally applicable to each. All that statesmen, as such, have to do with religion, is to be themselves under its power; all that Christians, as such, have to do with the State, is to be good citizens.
The fourth epoch of his personal life I would date from his second marriage. As I said before, no man was ever happier in his wives. They had much alike in nature,—only one could see the Divine wisdom of his first wife being his first, and his second his second; each did best in her own place and time. His marriage with Miss Crum was a source of great happiness and good not only to himself, but to us his first children. She had been intimately known to us for many years, and was endeared to us long before we saw her, by her having been, as a child and girl, a great favourite of our own mother. The families of my grandfather Nimmo, and of the Crums, Ewings, and Maclaes, were very intimate, I have heard my father tell, that being out at Thornliebank with my mother, he asked her to take a walk with him to the Rouken, a romantic waterfall and glen up the burn. My mother thought they might take "Miss Margaret" with them, and so save appearances, and with Miss Crum, then a child of ten, holding my father's hand, away the three went!
So you may see that no one could be nearer to being our mother; and she was curiously ingenious, and completely successful in gaining our affection and regard. I have, as a boy, a peculiarly pleasant remembrance of her, having been at Thornliebank when about fourteen, and getting that impression of her gentle, kind, wise, calm, and happy nature—her entire loveableness—which it was our privilege to see ministering so much to my father's comfort. That fortnight in 1824 or 1825 is still to me like the memory of some happy dream; the old library, the big chair in which I huddled myself up for hours with the New Arabian Nights, and all the old-fashioned and unforgotten books I found there, the ample old garden, the wonders of machinery and skill going on in "the works," the large water-wheel going its stately rounds in the midst of its own darkness, the petrifactions I excavated in the bed of the burn, ammonites, etc., and brought home to my museum (!); the hospitable lady of the house, my hereditary friend, dignified, anxious and kind; and above all, her only daughter who made me a sort of pet, and was always contriving some unexpected pleasure,—all this feels to me even now like something out of a book.
My father's union with Miss Crum was not only one of the best blessings of his life,—it made him more of a blessing to others, than it is likely he would otherwise have been. By her cheerful, gracious ways, her love for society as distinguished from company, her gift of making every one happy and at ease when with her, and her tender compassion for all suffering, she in a measure won my father from himself and his books, to his own great good, and to the delight and benefit of us all. It was like sunshine and a glad sound in the house. She succeeded in what is called "drawing out" the inveterate solitary. Moreover, she encouraged and enabled him to give up a moiety of his ministerial labours, and thus to devote himself to the great work of his later years, the preparing for and giving to the press the results of his life's study of God's Word. We owe entirely to her that immense armamentarium libertatis, the third edition of his treatise on Civil Obedience.
One other source of great happiness to my father by this marriage was the intercourse he had with the family at Thornliebank, deepened and endeared as this was by her unexpected and irreparable loss. But on this I must not enlarge, nor on that death itself, the last thing in the world he ever feared—leaving him once more, after a brief happiness, and when he had still more reason to hope that he would have "grown old with her, leaning on her faithful bosom." The urn was again empty—and the only word was vale! he was once more viduus, bereft.
"God gives us love; something to love