After his death, one who had known him long and intimately, on being asked what he considered to be the most distinguishing characteristic of his deceased friend, answered at once, ’Disinterestedness:  he seemed utterly incapable of regarding any subject except with a view to the interests of his country.  And next to that,’ he added, ’affectionateness; I never can forget the grief he showed at the death of his first wife; I thought he never would have held up his head again.’  How this tenderness deepened and mellowed in the husband and father of later years, some slight indications may be found in the letters that precede.

Disinterested devotion to public duty; tender and affectionate sympathies; a passionate love of justice, showing itself especially in a religious regard for the rights of the weak; all resting on the foundation of a firm and loving trust in God; these, far more than his ability or his eloquence, are the qualities that made him what he was:  the qualities, by the exercise and imitation of which, those who seek to do him honour may best perpetuate his memory.

There is one spot from which that memory is not likely soon to pass away:  the spot towards which, in his most distant wanderings, his thoughts turned with even more than the ordinary longing of a Scotsman for the place of his birth, and always with the fond hope that he might be permitted—­

                 life’s long vexation past,
  There to return, and die at home at last.

‘Wherever else he was honoured’ (to borrow again from the author already quoted), ’and however few were his visits to his native land, yet Scotland at least always delighted to claim him as her own.  Always his countrymen were proud to feel that he worthily bore the name most dear to Scottish hearts.  Always his unvarying integrity shone to them with the steady light of an unchanging beacon above the stormy discords of the Scottish church and nation.  Whenever he returned to his home in Fifeshire, he was welcomed by all, high and low, as their friend and chief.  Here at any rate were fully known the industry with which he devoted himself to the small details of local, often trying and troublesome business; the affectionate confidence with which he took counsel of the fidelity and experience of the aged friends and servants of his house; the cheerful contentment with which he was willing to work for their interests and for those of his family, with the same fairness and patience as he would have given to the most exciting events or the most critical moments of his public career.  There his children, young as they were, were made familiar with the union of wisdom and playfulness with which he guided them, and with the simple and self-denying habits of which he gave them so striking an example.  By that ancestral home, in the vaults of the Abbey Church of Dunfermline, would have been his natural resting-place.  Those vaults had but two years ago been opened to receive the remains of