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mained to the last, an advanced Whig in politics. When he accepted the chair he was thirty-eight years of age. During the eight or nine years of Welsh's professorship which had elapsed before I knew him, he had devoted himself most conscientiously to the duties of the post, laying aside preaching and all other work for the proper study of ecclesiastical history, and going to reside for a season in Bonn that he might acquire the mastery of German necessary for the easy use of the materials in that language. He had, in fact, completed a course of lectures, presenting, in three. parts, a consecutive view of Church History as far as the Reformation. first part extended to the period of Constantine, the second thence to the end of the thirteenth century, and the third thence to the Reformation inclusive. It had become his plan to repeat these parts of his course in cycle, so that students attending him for three years in succession would hear the whole. When I had first the pleasure of listening to him, he was in the last or Reformation portion of his course. It was a very painstaking, and, in the main, very delightful and even stirring narrative-not certainly from the most Catholic point of view, but from the point of view of a liberal and warmhearted Evangelical Presbyterian — of the European religious movement of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. After Wycliffe, Huss and the Bohemians, and others, we came upon the great German group with Luther in the midst, and we finished off, if I remember rightly, with a touch of Zwingli and the Swiss and French prolongation as far as Calvin. He was best on the Germans, or the Germans suited us best, and he brought out Luther, as we all thought, in beautiful relief. In the other two portions of his general cycle I do not think that he was nearly so interesting. My recollection at least of his Church History of the first three centuries is singularly hazy and featureless. The early heresies and the Gnostics came into this part of the course, and I remember being bold enough at the time to pass this criticism on his account of

the Gnostics, that it was as if he had gone to the top of a tower, we looking up to him, and, there ripping open a pillow, had shaken out all the feathers, and let them descend upon us, calling down to us to observe them, for these were the Gnostics.

In connexion with none of the courses of lectures delivered in the University could the pros and cons of the Scottish professorial system be better discussed than in connexion with Welsh's course on Church History. So far as it was a narrative or survey (and it was mainly of this character) there can be no doubt that it only performed for the students the kind of service which they might more naturally, and with better effects of self-discipline, have performed for themselves by suitable reading under directions. Perhaps even there was a danger that, as recipients through the ear, in such easy circumstances, of a complete tale of Church History prepared for them by their Professor, the majority of the students might go away with a permanently too meagre conception of the real dimensions of the study. But, on the other hand, there was a fitness in the method pursued to the requirements of the place and occasion. Here at least was the presentation to the audience of a medley or panorama of impressions, anecdotes, figures of men and generalized visions of events, well worth having at the time, and sure to function usefully in the mind afterwards. There must be many a man living now whose knowledge of Church History consists in little more than a recollection of the names of Wycliffe, and Huss, and Jerome of Prague, and Zisca, and Reuchlin, and Erasmus, and Luther, and Melanchthon, and Ecolampadius, and Zuinglius, and Calvin, and Bullinger, and Bucer, as they used to be pronounced so fondly in often repeated series by Welsh's labouring voice, and who is yet better and larger-horizoned by reason of that recollection. And only conceive practically the consequences of an attempt to work, with seventy or a hundred young men together, the method. of learning Church History by right

reading for themselves. Conceive so many young men turned loose simultaneously among the libraries of Edinburgh in a competitive hunt after the folios and quartos in which the precious lore is treasured. The library-system of the place or of any place would breakdown under the pressure. There would be a famine among the copies of Origen, and Fleury, and Fabricius, and a fight ing for odd volumes of the "Acta Sanctorum." In connexion with which fancy I may interpolate the remark that one of the deficiencies of Edinburgh in my day was in the matter of the easy accessibility of books to any young fellow in quest of them, and that, whatever may have been done since then in rendering both the College library and the great libraries of the Faculty of Advocates and the Writers to the Signet more generally and frankly available, I conceive that it may still be by an advance in this direction, as well as by the institution of tutorships and fellowships, that the cause of erudition may be promoted, to the extent now desired, in and around the chief University seat of Scotland. With perfect accessibility of books, professorial courses of lectures might more and more tend to assume one or other of those ideal forms in which they are best of all, and never can be superseded the form of stimulants and directories, or that of supplements of the latest matter, or, in some cases, that of orbs of principles. Of course, however, such a raid as has been supposed among the original sources. of information is purely imaginary, and the process would resolve itself into an importation into the town at particular seasons of a sufficient number of textbooks. But, while Welsh's course did not exclude the use of text-books, and rather led to the use of them, it was, in itself, at least a larger text-book, and, by means of examination, it was made to answer as such. Add to all this the effect upon some of first knowing of such a study as Church History, and forming some notion of what it might be, not through a dead text-book, but through the daily sight of one who, after his type, was a living Church-historian. In

many ways there came from Welsh a fine interfusion of personal characteristics with the substance of his readings. Not unfrequently we saw him stirred with the full emotion of his subject, and were stirred contagiously. Methinks I hear him yet as, with excited breath, and with something of the old spirit of a Dumfriesshire Covenanter trembling through his weak frame, he quoted, or rather ground out through his teeth, after one narrative of bloody religious tyranny, the prayer of Milton's sonnet

Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold, Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones."

More habitually, however, he sat before us in the aspect of an inquirer of liberal and philosophical temperament, trying always to be accurate, candid, and just. A certain classic taste in style, also, with a liking for an apt Latin quotation now and then, helped us to a sense of literary finish, while in his half-stuttered advices to us individually we had experience not only of his kindliness and shrewdness, but of a sort of clear Attic wit rare among the Scotch.

In the last years of his life, which were the years immediately following those of my first acquaintance with him, Welsh was brought out, by the compulsion of events, from his previously rather recluse and valetudinarian habits. When the Non-Intrusion controversy in the Scottish Kirk was approaching the foreseen catastrophe, who so fit to be brought forward into a chief place in the drama that was to be acted as this much-respected professor of Church History, whose Whig sympathies had all along gone heartily with the movement, and who had indeed always had a share in its private counsels? Accordingly in 1842, and in the view of what was coming, they made him Moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk. As Moderator of that year's Assembly it fell to him still to occupy

the chair at the opening of the next or Disruption Assembly in May, 1843; and on him, therefore, it devolved to act the leading part in what may be called the ceremonial of the Disruption. It was Welsh that, immediately after the gathering of the members of the Assembly and before the first business had begun, read the protest by which be and those who might adhere to him declared their reasons for quitting it and the establishment which it represented. It was Welsh who, then turning round to the Royal Commissioner on the throne behind him, bowed his solemn leave, and, taking up his hat, walked out of the Assembly, followed close by Chalmers, and leading that procession of ministers and elders which, forming itself in George Street, made its way through the gazing and acclaiming multitudes of Edinburgh to the hall, some half a mile distant, where it had been agreed to constitute the Free Church of Scotland. In this public ceremonial, and in the subsequent proceedings in opening the new Assembly, Welsh, roused by the emotion of the occasion far above his usual hesitation of manner and unreadiness in speech, acquitted himself with much dignity, so that those who have an interest in recollecting those Edinburgh events of May, 1843, as in a Scottish historical picture, can think of his spare figure and grave light-haired look as fittingly and gracefully in the midst. He did not long survive this, the most conspicuous public appearance of his life. To fall back completely, after it, into his former recluse habits was impossible. In addition to the Professorship of Church History in the New or Free Church College, for which he had necessarily exchanged his chair in the University, he had a good deal of public work to do in connexion with the schemes and arrangements of the newly-founded institution. There came also, to occupy a part of his time very suitably, the editorship of the North British Review, then started, with the co-operation of Chalmers, as an organ of liberal literature in which Scottish

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theology should not be unrepresented It must have been on some visit of his to London, in 1844, on the business of this periodical that, chancing then to be in town, I had my last interview with him but one, and dined with him at his hotel in Cockspur Street. was then in fair health and good spirits, and full of hopes of the new Review. The next time I saw him was in his house in Edinburgh, to which he was confined by medical orders. The heartdisease of which he had received previous warnings had declared itself fatally, leaving him but a residue of days to be counted one by one before the last spasm. One of the last, out of

his own family, to see him was his old friend Dr. Andrew Combe, himself an invalid who had been kept alive almost miraculously for many years by care and regimen through an equally fatal disease, and whom all that knew him remember as one of the most serene, upright, and naturally pious of men, rendered only more thoughtful of others by the long patience of his own nearness to death. This interview must, I think, have been at Helensburgh on the Clyde, whither Welsh had been removed, and where he died, April 24, 1845.

Seldom or never, as I have said, did all the students of all the faculties diffused among the class-rooms of the quadrangle of Edinburgh University have an opportunity of intermingling socially. Once or twice, however, in the course of a session, there was an approach to a universal meeting for some general university purpose or other, when a concourse of as many of the different faculties as chose to come assembled in the chemistry theatre, with the cheering and ruffing inseparable from such occasions, to behold the Principal and the whole Senatus Academicus, or body of professors, seated on the platform or daïs beneath. sight of the assembled Senatus Academicus I remember as a striking one. My interest in the medical and legal faculties not being such as to lead me to single out then the most eminent

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professors in those faculties with the same curiosity that I applied to the others, I remember that there were three heads out of the twenty or thirty on the daïs that always seemed to me, even physically, to divide the supremacy. They were those of Chalmers, Wilson, and Hamilton. As pieces of Nature's sculpture they were, each, head and bust together, splendid. But what made the sight of the three beside each other so interesting was that the colouring was so different. Chalmers's head, the oldest of the three, and also the largest, though all looked large, was white, the hair close and crisply silver from crown to neck and temples, with no sign of baldness-the large forehead and face also white as marble, and with all the repose of marble. Yellow was Wilson's colour-the hair yellow and mane-like, the face blond, the look wildly-noble, the bust magnificent even as he sat, but more magnificent when he rose and the height was seen. Hamilton was brown-the hair a dark brown, the complexion a clear or sanguine dark, the expression very calm, the eyes full, bold, and, as it seemed, of a clear hazel. He was not so tall as Wilson, but had the neck and chest of a man of great natural strength, who had known gymnastic exercise. He and Wilson were each in their first fifties. Although it was not my lot to see more of either of these two than was to be seen casually at such general college-meetings, or by dropping in as an occasional hearer at their lectures, and although it sums up the whole of my personal knowledge of them to say that I have shaken hands with both, they made so great an impression upon me that a passing word or two about each will be no violation of my rule in these papers.

Wilson in his class-room, as Professor of Moral Philosophy, was one of the shows of Edinburgh. Though he was called by the Arts' Students "the Professor," par excellence, there was gathered round him, for them and others about the college, the accumulated interest of all that he had been and done nonprofessorially. Those early and almost

legendary days of his were remembered when, as an extraordinary gipsy-genius from the Lakes and Oxford, of whom men had begun to talk, he threw himself so furiously into Blackwood and Scottish Toryism; and there was the fresher remembrance of his continued outflashings and savageries in the "Noctes Ambrosianæ," and of his many other feats, some of them unprofessorial enough, during his actual tenure of the Professorship since he had succeeded Brown in 1820. It was "Christopher North" that the students saw and adored, though they called him the "Professor." How they did cheer and adore him! In his class there was constant cheering of him on the least opportunity, especially by the juveniles of his audience, and yet with a kind of wondering respect for his reputation, voice, and magnificent appearance, which kept the acclamation always distinct from disorder, and left the full sway really in his hands. As far as ever I could ascertain, it was nothing that could in any conventional sense be called a systematic course of Moral Philosophy that he administered to them, but a rich poeticophilosophic medley in all the styles of Christopher North, with the speculative made to predominate as much as possible. His way was to come in from his anteroom with a large bundle of ragged papers of all sorts and sizes (many of them old folio letters, with the postage marks and torn marks of the seals visible on them, and others, scraps of about the size of a visiting card), and, throwing these down on the desk before him, either to begin reading from them, or, sometimes, having apparently failed to find what he wanted uppermost, and having also felt in vain in his waistcoat pockets for something likely to answer the purpose, to gaze wildly for a moment or two out at a side-window, and then, having caught some thread or hint from the Tron Church steeple, to begin evolving what seemed an extempore discourse. The first time that I heard him, the effect of these preliminaries, and of his generally wild and yellowhaired appearance, so much stranger

than anything I had been prepared for, almost overcame my gravity, and I had to conceal my face for some time behind a hat to recover sufficient composure to look at him steadily. The voice and mode of delivery were also singular. It was not so much reading or speaking as a kind of continuous musical chaunt, beginning in a low hollow tone, and swelling out wonderfully in passages of eloquence, but still always with a certain sepulchral quality in it-a moaning sough, as of a wind from the tombs, partly blowing along and partly mufiling the purely intellectual meaning. From my recollections of him, both on the first and on subsequent occasions, I should say that the chief peculiarities of his elocution, in addition to this main one, were, in the first place, a predominance of u among his vowel-sounds, or a tendency of most of his other vowels, and especially the o, to pass, more or less, into one of the sounds of u, and, in the second place, the breaking up of his sentences, in the act of uttering them, by short pants or breathings, like ugh! interjected at intervals. Thus, in making the quotation from Ariosto: "O the great goodness of the knights of old!" he uttered it, or rather moaned it, nearly like this, "Oo-the great-goodness-uf-the-knoights-uf-oold!" with a pause or breathing after almost every word; and, in speaking in one of his lectures of the endurance of remorse, and in illustrating this by the fancy of the state of mind of a criminal between his condemnation and his execution, he wound up, I remember distinctly, with a phrase uttered, as regards the longer interjected breathings, exactly thus: "Ay! and there may be a throb of remorse (ugh!) even at that last moment -when the head-tumbles-into the basket-of the executioner (ugh!)” – the last ugh! being much the most emphatic. Habitually eloquent, after a manner which these and other peculiarities rendered unlike the eloquence of any one else, Wilson was sometimes so deeply and suddenly moved by the feeling of what he was saying or deseribing that he rose to unusual heights

of impassioned and poetical oratory. In particular, there were certain lectures, the time of the coming round of which was always duly known, when his class-room was crowded by professors and strangers in addition to his students, in expectation of one of his great outbursts, and when amid those clapping their hands most enthusiastically along with the young ones, as the outburst came, would be seen Sir William Hamilton. This admiring appreciation by Sir William of the power of a colleague so different from himself ought to be cited in correction of a notion which the frequent descriptions and laudations of Wilson's physique, and the recollections of the sheer undisciplined tumultuousness of much of his writing, have naturally generated among those who have no personal reason to care for his memory. It is quite certain that Sir William thought his colleague a better Professor of Moral Philosophy for all essential purposes than a man of more regular powers could have been without Wilson's genius. And I have invariably heard, from even the most logical and hardheaded of any of Wilson's students whom I have questioned on the subject, the same assertion of their belief in the extraordinary efficiency of his class, and of their ceaseless thankfulness for having belonged to it.

Much more striking, however, than any traces of Christopher North's influence, recognisable among the modes. of thought and speech current among the students of Edinburgh University, were the traces of another influence which it took some time to identify. Nothing surprised me more, at first, than the recurrence, in the talk of the students, whenever two or three were conversing or arguing seriously, of certain clots and gobbets of a phraseology, and apparently of a philosophy, which seemed to belong. to the place, but to which I was a stranger. "Induction," "Deduction," and "Syllogism," of course I knew, and, I think, also "Subjective" and "Objective;" but "thinkable in space and time," "the Absolute," "the Laws of