with opponents that he sometimes, quite unjustly, incurred the suspicion of being in sympathy, if not in league, with these opponents.  He is specially interesting to us in this place, because Cairns succeeded him first in his pulpit, and then, after a long interval, in his chair.  Dr. Brown, the grandson and namesake of the old commentator of Haddington, was a man of noble presence and noble character, whose personality “embedded in the translucent amber of his son’s famous sketch” is familiarly known to all lovers of English literature.  He was the pioneer of the scientific exposition of the Scriptures in the Scottish pulpit, and was one of the first exegetical theologians of his time.  His point of view may be seen in a frequent criticism of his on a student’s discourse:  “That is truth and very important truth, but it is not the truth that is taught in this passage.”  Being so, it was simply “matter in the wrong place,” dirt to be cleared away as speedily as possible.

Cairns had been first attracted to Dr. Brown by his speeches on the Annuity Tax, an Edinburgh ecclesiastical impost for which he had suffered the spoiling of his goods, and he had been for more than a year a member of his church in Broughton Place; but it was only now that he came to know him really well.  Henceforth his admiration for Dr. Brown, and the friendship to which Dr. Brown admitted him, were to be amongst the most powerful influences of his life.  Among his fellow-students at the Hall were several young men of brilliant promise, such as John Ker, who had been first prizeman in the Logic class in Hamilton’s first session, W.B.  Robertson, Alexander MacEwen, Joseph Leckie, and William Graham.  Of these, Graham, bright, witty, versatile, the most notorious of punsters and the most illegible of writers, was his chief intimate, and their friendship continued unbroken and close for half a century.

But meanwhile the shadow was deepening over the home at Dunglass.  All through the autumn and early winter his father was slowly sinking.  He was only fifty-one, but he was already worn out; and his disease, if disease it might be called, had many of the symptoms of extreme old age.  His son saw him for the last time near the close of the year.  “I cannot say,” he wrote to Miss Darling, “that depression of spirits was the only, or even the chief, emotion with which I bade farewell to my father.  There was something so touching in his patience and resignation, so calm and inwrought in his meek submission to the Divine will, that it affected me more strongly than raptures of religious joy could have done.  He displays the same evenness of temper in the sight of death as has marked his equable and consistent life.”

He died in the early morning of 3rd January 1841.  His son William thus describes the scene:  “It was the first time any of us except our mother had looked on the face of the dying in the act of departing, and that leaves an impression that can never be effaced.  When the end came, and each had truly realised what had happened, our mother in a broken voice asked that ‘the Books’ might be laid on the table; then she gave out that verse in the 107th Psalm—­