personality are found in this position, there society has the benefit of a didactic use of these men incalculably more energetic and intimate than if they had been confined to authorship, or to that comparatively cooler exercise of personal influence for which conversation in short flights with a few at a time affords opportunity. Now, if we were to look for the university whose history has afforded the most striking illustrations of this matchless advantage of the professorial system, what university would suggest itself sooner than that of Edinburgh? There may have been other universities where till lately the drill in Latin and Greek, and the general habits of class-work, were more exact, sound, and business-like. But there has been no university more conspicuously fortunate in the possession always of, say two, or three, or four men simultaneously, of the highest power, shedding lustre over the whole body of their colleagues, and exercising an influence incalculably beyond that of ordinary scholastic reckoning.

Two or three and twenty years ago one of the great attractions in Edinburgh University was the class-room of Dr. Chalmers, called the Divinity Hall. It was on the right of the quadrangle, immediately after entering through the portico from the street, and the access to it was by a narrow flight of stone stairs leading to a kind of stone-gallery looking upon the quadrangle. In this stonegallery, or about the portico and quadrangle, would be lounging at an early hour in the forenoon, waiting the doctor's arrival, the members of his audience. They were mostly young Scotsmen of from eighteen to five-and-twenty, destined for the Scottish Kirk; but there was a considerable sprinkling of young Irish Presbyterians, together with a group of oldish military officers, who, after their service in India or elsewhere, had settled for the quiet evenings of their lives in Edinburgh, and, partly to while away the time, partly from a creditable interest in theological matters awakened at last in their grizzled noddles, had taken to attending Dr. Chalmers's lectures. Occa

sionally there would be a stranger or two of distinction. Punctually a few minutes before the hour the Doctor would arrive among the gathered groups expecting him. His manner on arriving was generally hurried and absent, and he disappeared at once into his vestry or ante-room, there to put on his gown, and his little white Geneva bands, a pair of which he usually kept in an odd brown-covered old volume of Leibnitz that lay handy for the purpose on a side-table. Sometimes one or two of the strangers would follow the Doctor into the vestry to bid him good morning before lecture, but he did not like the intrusion. Meanwhile, the doors of the Hall having been opened, the audience had entered and filled it. It was more like a dingy ill-contrived little chapel than a classroom, having a gallery raised on iron pillars over the back rows of seats so as to darken them, and a pulpit opposite this gallery rising to a level, with it. The students, properly so called, the number of whom was from 100 to 130, occupied the seats below, clear of and under the gallery; and in the comparatively empty gallery, not much minded of the Doctor, who generally looked downwards to his students, sat the strangers of distinction and the military veterans. Emerging from the vestry by its private entrance into the Hall, the Doctor, now in his gown and bands, still rather hurried and absentlooking, mounted the pulpit, a sight for any physiognomist to see. Then generally, after a very brief prayer, which he read from a slip of paper, but in such a way that you could hardly detect he was reading, the business of the hour began. Not unfrequently, however, it would turn out that he had forgotten something, and, muttering some hasty intimation to that effect instead of the expected first words of his prayeronce, I am told, it was this surprising communication, delivered with both his thumbs up to his mouth, "My artificial teeth have gone wrong"-he would descend again from the pulpit and go back to his vestry. On such occasions

it was a chance if he did not come upon one or two late comers availing themselves of that quiet means of entrance, engaged while they did so in the interesting process of measuring their heads with his by furtively examining and trying on his vast hat.

Suppose

all right, however, and the lecture begun. It was a perfectly unique performance every lecture a revelation, though within so small and dingy a chapel, of all that the world at large had come to wonder at in Chalmers. For the most part he sat and read, either from his manuscript or from some of his printed books, from which he had a most dexterous art of helping himself to relevant passages-sat and read, however, with such a growing excitement of voice and manner that whether he was reading or not reading was never thought of. But every now and then he would interrupt his reading, and, standing up, and catching off his spectacles so that they hung from his little finger, he would interject, with much gesticulation, and sometimes with a flushing of the face, and an audible stamping of the foot, some little passage of extempore exposition or outburst. No one lecture passed in which the class was not again and again agitated by one of those nervous shocks which came from Chalmers's oratory whenever and about whatsoever he spoke in other public places. Clamours of applause had, indeed, become habitual in the classroom; and, as, in spite of their apparent indecorousness in such a place, they were justifiable by the audience on the plain principle, "If you lecture like that, then we must listen like this," he had been obliged to let them occur. Only at the natural moments, however, would he tolerate such interruptions. He was sensitive to even a whisper at other times, and kept all imperiously hushed by an authority that did not need to assert itself. To describe the matter of his lectures would be more difficult than to give an idea of their form. It was called Theology, and there certainly was a due attempt to go over the topics of a theological course,

with frequent references to Butler, Paley, Jonathan Edwards, the Theologia Elenetica of Turretin, and, by way of general text-book, to Dr. George Hill's Lectures in Divinity. But really it was a course of Chalmers himself, and of Chalmers in all his characters. Within two or three consecutive sessions, if not in one, every listener was sure to be led so completely and with so much commotion through the whole round of Chalmers's favourite ideas, that, if he remained ignorant of any one of them or unsaturated with some tincture of them all, it could only be because he was a miracle of impassiveness. But through all and over all was the influence of a nature morally so great that by no array and exposition of its ideas, repeated never so often, could it be exhausted, and by no inventory of them represented. Merely to look at him day after day was a liberal education.

One of Chalmers's colleagues in the Theological Faculty of the University (in which faculty there were then but three professors in all) was a certain clerical old gentleman, with a great squab bald head, fat pinkish-white cheeks, portly and punctiliously clean general appearance, and very fat calves neatly encased in black stockings, who professed to teach the Oriental languages. Considering the little I have to say of him, I need not name him; but we used to call him sometimes "The Rabbi," in compliment to his Orientalism generally, and sometimes "Waw," from a certain occult idea of the fitness of the name of one of the Hebrew letters, as pronounced by himself, to represent the total worth of his existence. How so fat-faced and placid a man, in such specklessly-clean linen and apparel, should have been so near an approach to Inutility personified, I do not know; but, to this day, when I think of the matter, it is one of the most baffling problems that have come across me personally, what reason there was, I will not say for the Rabbi's existence on earth, but for his existence in the position of Professor of Oriental Languages in the University of Edinburgh. He

had been appointed to the post as long ago as 1813, and I suppose there were then some authorities whose business it was to make such appointments. It was within our knowledge also that he was the widower of a lady who had been of some distinction as a novelist at a time when lady-novelists were rarer than they are now, that he cherished her memory in his old age with a fond and faithful affection, and that, in his own house, he was a kindly, innocent old gentleman, who had one or two pet cats and fed them at his breakfast-table. Moreover he had been a parish-clergyman-in which capacity, for aught I know, he may have been most exemplary and worthy of all respect. I speak of him only as Professor of Oriental Languages; and, in the conjoint names of Gesenius, Renan, and Max Müller, I will have my say about the Rabbi, dead though he is, in this capacity. For thirtyfive years he was the man upon whom the Kirk of Scotland depended, so far as the metropolitan university was concerned, for the teaching of Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, and Persic. I forget whether Arabic was included in his course, but it is all the same whether it was or was not. As for the Syriac, the Chaldee, and the Persic, if the Syriac, Chaldee, and Persic alphabets had been written out on pieces of paper, and these pieces of paper had been steeped in a bucket of water, and each student of the Rabbi's had drunk a tumblerful of the water, that would have been about the metaphorical measure of the Syriac, the Chaldee, and the Persic that the Rabbi contrived to impart. But take the Hebrew, on which naturally would be laid the stress. We were, I can answer for it, a docile set of students, willing, and even eager, to learn anything that offered itself with a touch of human interest; and we were bound by rule to attend the Rabbi two years. Yet I undertake to say, with the most literal exactness, that, so far as it depended on attendance on the Rabbi during these two years, all that was acquired, or that it was possible to acquire, of Hebrew scholarship might

have been acquired by six evenings of sleepy inspection of the Hebrew grammar and the Hebrew Bible at home. What do I remember of the class? I remember the Rabbi in his chair, looking listless and placidly-peevish, as if he thought the whole thing a discomfort, and wanted to be home to his cats. I remember the insipidity of the Hebrew according to his wretched system of pronunciation, which neglected the points, stuck in an indefinite sound of the vowel e between every two consecutive consonants, and made the great unutterable name sound as a series of the feeblest human vowels, IEUE. I remember that, with one or two exceptions, easy to be accounted for apart from the Rabbi's influence, none of us, when called up to read to the Rabbi, could construe or translate three lines of Hebrew, unless he had a torn leaf of the English Bible clandestinely inserted in the Hebrew volume by way of help. I remember, in short, that it was a disgust and weariness to us all, and that from no fault of our own, but from a perfectly just estimate of the possibilities here afforded us by a great university, for fees which we had paid down, of learning what we were compelled at least to profess to learn within its walls. Perhaps my own most vivid recollections of the Rabbi's class-room are of letters to friends which I wrote in it, by way of an economy of time that would otherwise have been useless, and of a large course of reading, on the same principle, in books of witchcraft, which I took with me for the purpose, beginning with Defoe's "History of the Devil." In justice to myself, I must beg the reader to believe that, from mere respect for routine, I would have given the work of the class the preference, had I been able to see there was any. Now there would be no need for such behaviour. The opportunities of instruction in Hebrew and its cognates now furnished by the Scottish Universities are as good, I believe, as any in the kingdom; and in Edinburgh University there has been recently founded, in addition to the gene

ral chair for the Oriental languages, a special chair for Sanscrit.

The remaining colleague of Dr. Chalmers, using the same class-room as the Rabbi, but at a different hour, and for a class much more numerous and a thousand times more radiant, was Dr. David Welsh, Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Of this man there remains a fine and high, if not a wide, memory among his countrymen, and most justly so. He was considerably the youngest of the three colleagues, being, at the time of which I speak, forty-six or fortyseven years of age. He was a thin, spare, weak-chested man, of middle height, or less, with a delicately blond complexion and scanty light hair, a finely-shaped head of the erect type, a grave expression of countenance, and a peculiar habit of knitting his brows and corrugating his eye-lids as he spoke, but very capable of a kindly laugh, which ran over his face like a gleam, and was accompanied by a flash of his upper teeth. His appearance, and especially his narrow chest, indicated precarious health, and indeed it was known that from his youth he had given signs of pulmonary weakness, and that more recently he had been warned of heart-disease. Although on these grounds he had to take precautions which made him more of a recluse than was natural for one in his position, and, although in particular the exercise of speaking was difficult for him, the result as regarded his class was no impairing of his efficiency, but only some peculiarities in his manner as a lecturer. He hardly trusted at all to extempore discourse, and in any attempt of the kind hesitated and stammered, and kept up a dry clearing of his throat, and prolonging of syllable after syllable, that would have been painful but for his always hitting on something right and emphatic at last. In reading there was not of course this painful hesitation, and the labour which the act of sufficiently loud speaking then cost him only imparted a sense of his conscientious earnestness, and sometimes an effect as of eloquence. He had been He had been appointed to the Church-History chair in the year 1831, having been before that No. 62.-VOL. XI.

minister for several years of one of the parishes of Glasgow, and before that again minister of the retired country. parish of Crossmichael in Kirkcud brightshire.

The most notable portion of Welsh's life, and that on account of which many who might have cared little for his clerical quality would have looked at him with interest, had been the ten years of his youth, from 1810 to 1820, before he had been appointed to Crossmichael parish. During these ten years he had been on terms of the most familiar friendship with Dr. Thomas Brown, the metaphysician. He had first seen Brown in the winter of 1809-10, when Brown for the second time did temporary duty for Dugald Stewart in the Moral Philosophy class in Edinburgh University. Welsh was then a lad of sixteen, up in Edinburgh from his native Dumfriesshire to attend the classes, and with a particularly keen taste for logical and philosophical studies. Brown at once captivated him. He was one of those, of whom there were many, that so much relished Brown's new, brilliant, and analytical style of metaphysics as to be almost sorry when Stewart resumed duty, and proportionately glad when, in the following session, Brown was formally appointed colleague to Stewart, thenceforward to do the whole work, while Stewart lived on as a sleeping partner. Would not the day of Stewart and his sober metaphysics of the old school be over, and was not the era of a new and more daringly Whig metaphysics about to begin? Such were the expectations of many ardent young men about Edinburgh, in what happened, at any rate, to be the great comet year, 1811. An eminent surviving friend of Welsh remembers how, going then as a boy in the evenings to see young Welsh in his lodgings and receive lessons from him, he used, in passing through George Square, to look up with never-ceasing wonder at the great shining meteor taking up such a space in the heavens. By that time Welsh had attained the desire of his heart in becoming privately acquainted with Brown; and, during

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the remainder of Brown's life, Welsh, gradually advancing from the stage of a student of Divinity to that of a licensed preacher or probationer of the Scottish Kirk, was continually in the company of the brilliant metaphysician. Every other evening, when in Edinburgh, he would be one of the family-party around Brown's tea-table, hearing his cheerful talk with his mother and sisters, and so much one of them as to be consulted even about those poems of Brown which he published in succession about this time, and which he read before publication to none out of his own household. "Penitus domi inspexi" is Welsh's description of the degree of his intimacy with his celebrated friend and senior, in words quoted from Pliny the younger where he speaks of a like friendship of his, "Penitus "domi inspexi, amarique ab eo laboravi, "etsi non erat laborandum. Erat enim "obvius et expositus, plenusque huma"nitate quam præcepit. Atque utinam "sic ipse spem quam de me concepit im"pleverim ut," &c. What may have been the nature of the hope which Brown had formed of Welsh's future career can only be guessed. When Brown died of consumption at Brompton, in April, 1820, at the age of forty-two, his surviving friend-who had been the last to bid him farewell in Edinburgh, and who always remembered the sad leave-taking as one of the greatest griefs of his life—was but a youth of six-and-twenty, a probationer of the Scottish Kirk, whose sole appearances in any character of his own had been in a few stray writings for periodicals. His real outfit for the future was his enthusiasm for Brown, and the reputation which descended to him of having been Brown's friend. These he carried with him, in 1821, to the country parish of Crossmichael, but, at the same time, a strong interest in phrenology, as then taken up and expounded in Edinburgh by Messrs. George and Andrew Combe. In phrenology he had begun to discern the promise of a science that should corroborate some of Brown's psychological speculations, and even lend a new method for the study of the human mind.

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Of a family in which the strong Scottish form of piety was hereditary, and being also sincerely "Evangelical" in his views of Christian theology, Welsh was able, in his parish of Crossmichael, to combine, to an extent that might have been thought difficult beforehand, the character of a zealous and devout pastor of "Evangelical" sentiments with that of a worshipping disciple of Brown's philosophy and a seeker after light even in the new cerebral physiology of Gall and the Combes. He was known also, generally, as a young clergyman of scholarly tastes, and more fastidious than usual in his efforts after a classical English style. Of his intellectual and literary qualities the public had the means of judging when he published, in 1825, that biography of Brown which had for some time been expected from him. It was an octavo volume, entitled, Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Brown, M.D., late Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. shorter memoir of Brown, prefixed to all the late editions of his Lectures, is an abridgment of this volume, made for the purpose by Welsh himself. The book is really a very good specimen of philosophical or literary biography, not in any way rich or striking, but careful, dignified, affectionate, and conveying a sufficiently distinct image of Brown personally. The phrenological leanings. of the work appearing only casually in the notes, the credit which Welsh derived from it was of a general kind. He had thoughts of following it up with a Treatise on Logic, but before that intention could take effect he was removed from Crossmichael to Glasgow. He had been but three or four years in Glasgow when the Church-History chair in Edinburgh fell vacant. Melbourne ministry, on the strong recommendation of Chalmers, appointed Welsh to the chair. Jeffrey, in announcing the appointment to Chalmers, stated that it had been made expressly in deference to his wishes; but on other grounds it was such an appointment as a Whig ministry might have been expected to make. Welsh was, and re

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