The last time I ever saw Dr. Brown, a year before his death, he was kind enough to lend me one of the rarest of his treasures, “Poems,” by Mr. Ruskin.  Probably Mr. Ruskin had presented the book to his old friend; in no other way were it easy to procure writings which the author withdrew from publication, if, indeed, they ever were, properly speaking, published.  Thus Dr. Brown was all things to all men, and to all boys.  He “had a word for every one,” as poor people say, and a word to the point, for he was as much at home with the shepherd on the hills, or with the angler between Hollylea and Clovenfords, as with the dusty book-hunter, or the doggy young Border yeoman, or the child who asked him to “draw her a picture,” or the friend of genius famous through all the world, Thackeray, when he “spoke, as he seldom did, of divine things.”

Three volumes of essays are all that Dr. Brown has left in the way of compositions:  a light, but imperishable literary baggage.  His studies are usually derived from personal experience, which he reproduced with singular geniality and simplicity, or they are drawn from the tradition of the elders, the reminiscences of long-lived Scotch people, who, themselves, had listened attentively to those who went before them.  Since Scott, these ancient ladies with wonderful memories have had no such attentive listener or appreciative reporter as Dr. Brown.  His paper called “Mystifications,” a narrative of the pranks of Miss Stirling Graham, is a brief, vivid record of the clever and quaint society of Scotland sixty years ago.  Scotland, or at least Scottish society, is now only English society—­a little narrower, a little prouder, sometimes even a little duller.  But old people of position spoke the old Scotch tongue sixty years ago, and were full of wonderful genealogies, full of reminiscences of the “’45,” and the adventures of the Jacobites.  The very last echoes of that ancient world are dying now from memory, like the wide reverberations of that gun which Miss Nelly MacWilliam heard on the day when Prince Charles landed, and which resounded strangely all through Scotland.

The children of this generation, one fears, will hardly hear of these old raids and duels, risings and rebellions, by oral tradition handed down, unbroken, through aunts and grandmothers.  Scott reaped a full, late harvest of the memories of clannish and feudal Scotland; Dr. Brown came as a later gleaner, and gathered these stirring tales of “A Jacobite Family” which are published in the last volume of his essays.  When he was an observer, not a hearer only, Dr. Brown chiefly studied and best wrote of the following topics:  passages and characters of humour and pathos which he encountered in his life and profession; children, dogs, Border scenery, and fellow-workers in life and science.  Under one or other of these categories all his best compositions might be arranged.  The most famous and most exquisite of all his works