"You'll hear of them before ten years are gone, Sir John, or I'm mistaken."
I have said thus much of this to me memorable man, not only because he was my father's closest and most powerful personal friend, but because by his word he probably changed the whole future course of his life. Devotion to his friends was one of the chief ends of his life, not caring much for, and having in the affection of his heart a warning against the perils and excitement of distinction and energetic public work, he set himself far more strenuously than for any selfish object, to promote the triumphs of those whom his acquired instinct—for he knew a man as a shepherd knows a sheep, or "Caveat Emptor" a horse—picked out as deserving them. He rests in Colinton churchyard,
"Where all that mighty heart is lying still,"—
his only child William Henry buried beside him. I the more readily pay this tribute to Dr. Belfrage, that I owe to him the best blessing of my professional and one of the best of my personal life—the being apprenticed to Mr. Syme. This was his doing. With that sense of the capacities and capabilities of other men, which was one of his gifts, he predicted the career of this remarkable man. He used to say, "Give him life, let him live, and I know what and where he will be thirty years hence and this long before our greatest clinical teacher and wisest surgeon, had made the public and the profession feel and acknowledge the full weight of his worth.
Another life-long and ever-strengthening friendship was that with James Henderson, D.D., Galashiels, who survived my father only a few days. This remarkable man, and exquisite preacher, whose intellect and worth had for nearly fifty years glowed with a pure, steady, and ever-growing warmth and lustre in his own region, died during the night, and probably asleep, when, like Moses, no one but his Maker was with him. He had for years laboured under that form of disease of the heart called angina pectoris (Dr. Arnold's disease), and for more than twenty years lived as it were on the edge of instant death; but during his later years his health had improved, though he had always to "walk softly," like one whose next step might be into eternity. This bodily sense of peril gave to his noble and leonine face a look of suffering and of seriousness, and of what, in his case, we may truly call godly fear, which all must remember. He used to say he carried his grave beside him. He came in to my father's funeral, and took part in the services. He was much affected, and we fear the long walk through the city to the burial-place was too much for him; he returned home, preached a sermon on his old and dear friend's death of surpassing beauty. The text was, "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." It was, as it were, his own funeral sermon too, and there was, besides its fervour, depth, and heavenly-minded-ness, a something in it that made his old hearers afraid —as if it were to be the last crush of the grapes. In a letter to me soon after the funeral, he said:—"His removal is another memento to me that my own course is drawing near to its end. Nearly all of my contemporaries and of the friends of my youth are now gone before me. Well! I may say, in the words of your friend Vaughan—
"They are all gone to that world of light,
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory's calm and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth cheer."
The evening before his death he was slightly unwell, and next morning, not coming down as usual, was called, but did not answer; and on going in, was found in the posture of sleep, quite dead: at some unknown hour of the night abiit ad plures—he had gone over to the majority, and joined the famous nations of the dead. Tu vero felix non vito tantum claritate, sed etiam opportunitate mortis! dying with his lamp burning, his passport made out for his journey; death an instant act, not a prolonged process of months, as with his friend.