1 APRIL 1871, Page 19

THE RELICS OF MR. A. S. LOGIN.* THE notice of

the late Mr. Logan—a Scotch barrister and county- court judge, who died, at the age of fifty, in the year 1862,—by Dr. John Brown, which is prefixed to these very brief relics, would alone mark him as one of those many original men who have had ample faculty, though other conditions failed them, to make for themselves a great name and fame in this world, even without that striking poetical fragment of the origin of which the same graphic

• On Robert Burns; an Address. Judas the Betrayer, His Ending: a Poetical Frag- ment. By the late Alexander Stuart Logan, Advocate, Sheriff of Forfarshire. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas. 1871.

pen has given us so notable an account. Dr. John Brown's bio- graphical notice was printed immediately after his friend's death in the Scotsman, whence it is transferred to this tiny volume ; and certainly no more graphic picture of great but intermittent energy, and a bundle of heterogeneous powers mutually enhancing each other's effect by the very contrasts they presented, could easily be conceived. Mr. Logan died of angina pectoris, and had been suffering from some disease which his physicians did not understand for a long time before his death. Dr. John Brown believes that there were physical limits on his powers of labour from a much earlier period, which accounted for the irregular energy of his genius. "He was," says Dr. John Brown, "like a lion in his working,— a burst of energy, an interval of inertia. He would go through in ten hours what many ten men could hardly do in ten days ; but then he lapsed into a deeper inaction than any of the ten could have dared or attained, and thus he lost,—for by standing still we infallibly go back. Not that he did not achieve an honourable place in his profession. He did this early by the sheer force of his enormous mental power, but he never advanced continuously to the heights which his faculties, considered merely as mental, gave promise of,—indeed, had in them the power of, if seconded by a strenuous, clear-working, unencumbered physique. As a lawyer, he was distinguished leas by his learning, his in- genuity, his adroitness, his eloquence, or his legal solidity in the true sense, than by his great and immediate common-sense and judgment, his power of discharging a case of its accessories and taking it by the life, and this in the simplest forms of thought- and expression. He had all the ingredients for eloquence, except. the cumulative and explosive knack ; he was, therefore, more per- suasive, reasonable, and convincing, than surprising and striking. For eloquence is very much a series of explosions, of hits, of storms culminating, and of lulls gathering again to a paroxysm or- an ecstasy. As a judge in his own County Court we believe he was never excelled for judgments which were truly judicious ; indeed, they say he spoiled the Forfarshire litigators, and did his. duty too quickly and too well."

Dr. Brown's analysis of the secret of eloquence explains. its source in, at least, three-fourths of the eloquent men of any generation, though not in all, since there is a sort of political and religious eloquence which rather deserves to be called sus- tained passion,—like Mr. Bright's,—than argument propene& by a store of superabundant vitality. Brougham's eloquence was. entirely of this latter hind; and no doubt without that super- abundance of propelling force, which made it always easier for him to drive in his argument with a moral sledge-hammer than for almost any other man to give an ordinarily vigorous statement- of a case, Brougham's eloquence would hardly have been notable- at all. It is quite probable that the difference between mere good sense and the most wonderful eloquence, consists often enough its the mere difference between the condition of health which makes. a man not sorry to pause directly his case has been clearly stated, and that which disposes a man to make assurance doubly sure by capping every statement of reason with a display, and so to. say even ostentation, of the superfluous energy with which it is. held.

The qualities of mind hitherto described are perfectly re- flected in Mr. Logan's lecture on the poet Burns, which in.

sound, judicious, clear criticism, and nothing more. But- had this been all in Mr. Logan, there would not have been. anything very remarkable about him. What is remarkable is the combination of this shrewd, calm, not over-energetic good-sense

with the wealth of humour and remarkable dreaming faculty possessed by the same man. Of the former,—Mr. Logan's. humour,—Dr. John Brown gives us a vivid conception in the following sentences :—

"We have seen him with great wits and wage; distancing them all fp the long run, and fresh and beginning when they were ended. We are. only saying what all will say who have witnessed those rare occasions, when, we say that the intellectual wealth of the man—his amazing memory and its patness—his fun, and wild appropriation of all thoughts and things for his ends—made one of those mental delights we like to. remember. It is not easy to give his jokes, for they ware not shots— prepared and fired off—they were magnificent fees tie j e ose,lnfore wbiob you fell in helpless laughter. Some one was explaining . Carlyle's. savage—but not so far wrong—political creed as. to criminals, and, telling of his advising the good old German. fashion of carting. the. wretch out in a rough waggon into some wild place, than en stickFg s. stout sharp stick through him into the ground, and bidding him a. grim good-night.' Mr. Logan said, 'That was at least giving him a. stake in the country.' Now there is the true stuff in this impromtu. To some one advising him to read a bombastic book on a good subject,.,1 and saying, 'Don't you like to expatiate in that field?' He cannot get over the style.'" —And we are far from surprised to find, when we know that Mr. relation to the action of its tail,—a dog will soon distinguisht he interpretation put upon his name by his master,—has a tendency to educate him into that terrible monstrosity conceived by Lord Dundreary's powerful imagination, a dog whose tail grew

stronger than the dog, so that the tail wagged the dog. But assuming, as we do, and feel bound to do, in deference to the general merits of this tale, that the hero of this lively little story was named 'Wag' in the sense of humourist,' which we are quite sure he deserved, we complain a little that we don't hear more of Wag, and that we have (in proportion) too much of his master. Now, Tom is a very nice little boy, and we have no doubt that he will turn out a capital chemist and druggist (though we feel a little nervous as to the revenge which that dangerous thief Joshua Jenkins may take after his term of hard labour is out), but we can't profess to feel as much interest in him as we do in Wag, and yet we hear a great deal more about him. This is, we confess, a little disappointment to us. Miss Martineau evidently understands Wag. Her description of the meeting between Tom and his dog in the child's hospital is very faithful to life,—and it is hardly necessary to remark how much deeper Wag's feelings are than Tom's on the occasion,—yet she tells us nothing of the dog's feelings during the separation, although we hear a good deal of Tom's :—

"One day, soon after this, Tom had another visitor, very unexpectedly. He was lying down on his bed after his dinner, to rest his lame leg, as he was ordered to do every day at present, when he heard a little patter of feet, then one sharp bark, and in an instant Wag was on his bed, twirling round, rolling over upon him, licking his face and hands, shaking and quivering all over with excitement, and wagging his tail as if it could never stop ! Tom, overcome with joy and surprise, hugged and kissed his little friend, and laughed till he almost cried, and then showered on Wag all his most petting names, and endless questions as to where he had been all this time. The other boys in the room looked on amazed, and asked Tom many questions, but he did not answer—he hardly heard them, he was so taken up with Wag. But it was not many minutes before a young man came in and asked if his dog was there, and called, Wag, Wag !' Still Wag did not move, but sat trembling, nestled close to Tom, while Tom kept his arm round him, hugging him as if he could never let him go again. But when Tom looked up at the young man, he remembered him, and all his joy was gone ; he was the same young man who had bought Wag, so Tom had no right to keep Wag from him."

There is great pathos in that little scene, and when after his transports of joy and mirth, Wag does not move at his new master's voice, but sits on nestled close to Tom, trembling in every fibre, you feel how very close in Wag's, as in every humorist's heart, are the springs of laughter and tears. But then one does feel a little hurt at having no picture of Wag's feelings (which we are quite sure the authoress fully understands), when he was first sold into slavery and then again reclaimed by his kind but alien master. On the whole, we would entreat Miss Martineau in her next tale to take no a dog's inner life in a serious spirit, and give us more proportion between the canine and the human emotions of her story. She has all the qualities for telling such tales with spirit and humour. In our grandfathers' days it was far from uncommon to have the lives of "faithful Tray" or "honest Boxer" narrated for children, but then they were narrated from an old-fashioned point of view, the point of view which drew unreal lines between instinct and reason, which regarded a dog's sense of responsibility as a fictitious conception which it was need- ful to assume for the sake of the story, but which was of the nature of romance ; and it was generally a condescending point of view, that dealt rather in a stately fashion with the "lower animals." Miss Cobbe, in giving us the other day the biography of her own dog, took the modern and real tone, and though, if we remember rightly, we differed with her on one or two psychological inferences concerning her dog's feelings, we were not slow to recognize the great service she had done to the modern spirit in her lively little narra- tive. Miss Martineau betrays the power to sketch canine heroes and heroines, and mould them for purposes of fiction ; we only entreat her to have confidence in herself, and not subordinate them too much to her human characters.

Every one will perceive that "the coloured frontispiece" does not represent the Wag of this story, but possibly some other dog of the same name. The hero of this lively little tale is a "rough grey terrier," while the dog depicted is a cross between a Maltese poodle and a Skye terrier,—no doubt a very intelligent and feeling dog, for there is nothing like thoroughbred mongrels for intelli- gence and feeling, but quite foreign to the narrative of this history.