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.

The three friends sought the bield of the low wall old Edinburgh boys remember well, and sometimes miss now, as they struggle with the stout west wind....

The third we all know.  What has he not done for every one of us?  Who else ever, except Shakespeare, so diverted mankind, entertained and entertains a world so liberally, so wholesomely?  We are fain to say not even Shakespeare, for his is something deeper than diversion, something higher than pleasure; and yet who would care to split this hair?