sore against the traditions of his life.  You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by Miss Mather;[35] yet this rag of a Chelsea[36] veteran lived to his last year in the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness, and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities.  You could not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shakespeare and Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke[37] by the page together; but the parchment was filled up, there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and he was capable of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits.  His voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride in using it.  On his last voyage as Commissioner of Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and made himself clearly audible without a speaking trumpet, ruffing the while with a proper vanity in his achievement.  He had a habit of eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and a little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a survival from some former stage of bodily portliness.  Of yore, when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have pointed with these minute guns his allocutions to the bench.  His humour was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism, stone and gravel might have combined their forces against that frail tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor’s Life of Christ and greet me with the same open brow, the same kind formality of manner.  His opinions and sympathies dated the man almost to a decade.  He had begun life, under his mother’s influence, as an admirer of Junius,[38] but on maturer knowledge had transferred his admiration to Burke.  He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the colloquial, I should certainly be shamed:  the remark was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume.[39] Scott was too new for him; he had known the author—­known him, too, for a Tory; and to the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a trouble.  He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he was proud to tell, played a certain part in the history of Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare’s fairy pieces with great scenic display.[40] A moderate in religion, he was much struck in the last years of his life by a conversation with two young lads, revivalists.  “H’m,” he would say—­“new to me.  I have had—­h’m—­no such experience.”  It struck him, not with pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing, should hear these young fellows talking of his own subject, his own weapons that he had fought the battle of life with,—­“and—­h’m—­not understand.”  In this wise and grateful