But it was the fortune of William Nelson, in those happy days of student life, to find himself among a rare band of undergraduates, many of whom subsequently won a name for themselves in ampler fields. Edward Forbes was then a zealous volunteer on the staff of the University Maga, contributing with pen and pencil, in prose and verse, to its columns. He had a rare power of winning co-operation in whatever he set on foot; and he gathered around him a band of kindred spirits, who, as sharers in the exuberant frolic and satire of the Maga, formed themselves at length into the Magi, or members of the Maga Club. Out of this grew the famous “Brotherhood of the Friends of Truth,” with its archimagus, its ribbon, and its mystic motto:-
ΟΙΝΣ ΕΡΩΣ ΜΑΘΗΣΙΣ,
which still survives under its later guise of the Red Lions of the British Association gatherings. There was a curious admixture of youthful exuberance and frolic with a lofty earnestness of aim in the Brotherhood. The search after truth was declared, in its programme, not only to be man’s noblest occupation, but his duty; and the spirit of the order is thus set forth: “This brotherhood is a union of the searchers after truth, for the glory of God, the good of all, and the honour of the order, to the end that mind may hold its rightful sway in the world.”
Of the youthful band of undergraduates, John Goodsir, Bennett, Blackie, Lyon Playfair, George Wilson, and Edward Forbes, all ultimately filled chairs in their own university. Day succeeded to a professorship in St. Andrews, and Struthers to one in Aberdeen. Henry Goodsir, a youth of high ability, accompanied Sir John Franklin as naturalist in the ill-fated Arctic expedition, from which none returned. Dr. Stanger distinguished himself, with better fortune, in the Niger expedition of 1844; Andrew Ramsay rose to be chief of the Geological Survey; and other fellow-students and members of the order have occupied professors’ chairs in Canada and in India, have represented their university in Parliament, or made their mark in no less useful ways. Among the latter the name of William Nelson claims an honourable rank. For the scheme of the brotherhood required each member “to devote his time and his energies to the department for which he feels and proves himself best fitted, communicating his knowledge to all, so that all may benefit thereby, casting away selfishness, and enforcing precepts of love.” Assuredly when those maxims came to be tested in the daily business of life, no one gave their spirit of unselfishness more practical manifestation than the subject of this memoir.
In Professor Pillans’s class he maintained the standing which he had achieved at the High School. His foremost but unequal rival in the composition of Latin verse was the late George Paxton Young, the esteemed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Toronto. It was while William Nelson was still a student that John Cairns—the friend and fellow-student both at Edinburgh and Berlin of his younger brother, John Nelson, and now the venerable Principal and Professor of Systematic Theology in the Divinity Hall of the United Presbyterian Church—came fresh from the pastoral hills of Berwickshire to win for himself a distinguished place among the men of his time.
Amid the stimulus and rivalry of such competitors for fame, the young student devoted himself with renewed zeal to the classics, with undefined visions of some honourable professional or academic reward as his life-prize; and fulfilled the high anticipations of his earlier career. But while thus steadily pursuing a course which gave abundant promise of triumph, his father was suddenly prostrated by disease; and William, as the eldest son of a large family, abandoned all the bright prospects of his university career, and the dream of professional or academic achievements, to grapple with the unfamiliar difficulties of a commercial enterprise, till then conducted on a scale commensurate with the modest aims of an elder generation in the Old Town of Edinburgh.
The business of Mr. Thomas Nelson was a curious survival of the system borrowed from the great fairs of the Middle Ages, and grafted on to their older traffic by the successors of Guttenburg and Fust; of Caxton, Wynkin de Worde, and Chepman and Miller. Allan Ramsay had followed in their steps, with his booth at the sign of the Mercury, opposite the head of Niddry’s Wynd, from whence he transferred it to the Luckenbooths at the City Cross. It was in just such another luckenbooth at the Bowhead that Mr. Thomas Nelson originated the business which has since developed into such great proportions.
William Nelson threw himself at once, with characteristic singleness of aim, into his new vocation; nor did he ever express regret at his enforced desertion of scholarship for trade. But few men have carried away from school or college a keener sense of the attachments of student life. To the last the plea of an old schoolmate ever presented an irresistible claim which scarcely any demerit could cancel. The fate of one whose life, by his own misconduct, had closed in miserable failure is thus charitably noted in one of his letters: “Poor —— died two days ago of congestion of the lungs; and it is a wonder that he hung on so long, as he has been in a very dilapidated condition for years. The last time I saw him, his condition was truly pitiable. I sent him a fresh bolster and bedding, for the ones he had were hard and foul. Poor fellow! he did a great deal to hasten the approach of the last enemy.” His loyalty to early friends was unfailing. He kept a record of his classmates in the High School, and noted with keenest interest their success or failure in life. He told with kindly humour of the refusal of a liberal “tip” offered to a porter at Cairo who had been specially serviceable, and then claimed fellowship by reminding him of old High School doings. B—— was the ne’er-do-weel of Mackay’s class, who had thus found his vocation in the land of the Pharaohs. His sympathy was unbounded in any honour or good fortune achieved by a schoolmate; and latterly, as he watched the rapidly diminishing numbers of the old group of school and college companions, he recorded at the close of each year the minutes of Death’s roll-call. To one who entered so keenly into academic life, and whose career was so replete with promise, it was a trying ordeal to abandon college for the uncongenial drudgery of a trading venture for which such experiences seemed to promise no helpful training. But in Scotland a university career is by no means regarded as unsuitable preparation for trade and commerce; and William Nelson was speedily to show what success the classical gold medalist of the High School and the best writer of Latin verse in the College could achieve in business life.
CHAPTER IV.
THE CASTLE HILL.
WITH characteristic energy the young student, now in his nineteenth year, set himself to grapple with the novel difficulties of the book-trade. Neither the irksome drudgery nor the uncongenial demands incident to the business daunted the youthful adventurer, who had so recently found his highest vocation in the mastery of Latin quantities, and the triumphs of competitive hexameters after the models of Horace and Virgil. In the summer of 1880, the present writer spent some weeks with his old schoolmate at Philiphaugh, in the vale of Yarrow, famous as the scene of Montrose’s last battle. During an excursion to Berwick, with the special object of visiting another schoolmate, he pointed out more than one book-store in the old Border town, familiar to him in association with his first experiences as a commercial traveller, and humorously described those early ventures in the disposal of his literary wares. According to Johnson of Liverpool, his journey extended to that city, and Mr. Johnson gave him his first large order for books. He had already succeeded in overcoming the prejudices of the regular trade, and fixed a scale of prices which disarmed their antagonism.