Another volume of 'Horæ Subsceivæ' appeared two years after, and some selections from it, and others from unpublished manuscript, were printed separately in the volume entitled 'Spare Hours.' They met with instant and unprecedented success. In a short time ten thousand copies of 'Minchmoor' and 'James the Doorkeeper' were sold, fifteen thousand copies of 'Pet Marjorie,' and 'Rab' had reached its fiftieth thousand. With all this success and praise, and constantly besought by publishers for his work, he could not be persuaded that his writings were of any permanent value, and was reluctant to publish. In 1882 appeared a third volume of the 'Horæ Subsceivæ,' which included all his writings. A few weeks after its publication he died.
The Doctor's medical essays, which are replete with humor, are written in defense of his special theory, the distinction between the active and the speculative mind. He thought there was too much science and too little intuitive sagacity in the world, and looked back longingly to the old-time common-sense, which he believed modern science had driven away. His own mind was anti-speculative, although he paid just tributes to philosophy and science and admired their achievements. He stigmatized the speculations of the day as the "lust of innovation." But the reader cares little for the opinions of Dr. Brown as arguments: his subject is of little consequence if he will but talk. By the charm of his story-telling these dead Scotch doctors are made to live again. The death-bed of Syme, for instance, is as pathetic as the wonderful paper on Thackeray's death; and to-day many a heart is sore for 'Pet Marjorie,' the ten-year-old child who died in Scotland almost a hundred years ago.
As an essayist, Dr. Brown belongs to the followers of Addison and Charles Lamb, and he blends humor, pathos, and quiet hopefulness with a grave and earnest dignity. He delighted, not like Lamb "in the habitable parts of the earth," but in the lonely moorlands and pastoral hills, over which his silent, stalwart shepherds walked with swinging stride. He had a keen appreciation for anything he felt to be excellent: his usual question concerning a stranger, either in literature or life, was "Has he wecht, sir?"--quoting Dr. Chalmers; and when he wanted to give the highest praise, he said certain writing was "strong meat." He had a warm enthusiasm for the work of other literary men: an artist himself, he was quick to appreciate and seize upon the witty thing or the excellent thing wherever he found it, and he was eager to share his pleasure with the whole world. He reintroduced to the public Henry Vaughn, the quaint seventeenth-century poet; he wrote a sympathetic memoir of Arthur Hallam; he imported 'Modern Painters,' and enlightened Edinburgh as to its merits. His art papers were what Walter Pater would call "appreciations,"--that is to say, he dwelt upon the beauties of what he described rather than upon the defects. What he did not admire he left alone.
As the author of 'Rab' loved the lonely glens on Minchmoor and in the Enterkin, or where Queen Mary's "baby garden" shows its box-row border among the Spanish chestnuts of Lake Monteith, so he loved the Scottish character, "bitter to the taste and sweet to the diaphragm": "Jeemes" the beadle, with his family worship when he himself was all the family; the old Aberdeen Jacobite people; Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune, who in her day bewitched Edinburgh; Rab, Ailie, and Bob Ainslie. His characters are oddities, but are drawn without a touch of cynicism. What an amount of playful, wayward nonsense lies between these pages, and what depths of melancholy under the fun! Like Sir Walter, he had a great love for dogs, and never went out unaccompanied by one or two of them. They are the heroes of several of his sketches.
Throughout the English-speaking world, he was affectionately known as Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh. He stood aloof from political and ecclesiastical controversies, and was fond of telling a story to illustrate how little reasoning went to forming partisans. A minister catechizing a raw plowboy, after asking the first question, "Who made you?" and getting the answer "God," asked him, "How do you know that God made you?" After some pause and head-scratching, the reply came, "Weel, sir, it's the clash [common talk] o' the kintry." "Ay," Brown added, "I'm afraid that a deal of our belief is founded on just 'the clash o' the kintry.'"
MARJORIE FLEMING
From 'Spare Hours'
One November afternoon in 1810--the year in which 'Waverley' was resumed and laid aside again, to be finished off, its last two volumes in three weeks, and made immortal in 1814; and when its author, by the death of Lord Melville, narrowly escaped getting a civil appointment in India--three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like schoolboys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm-in-arm down Bank Street and the Mound in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet.