BOOKS.

JOHN STUART BLACKIE.*

PROFESSOR BLACKIE says of Mr. Ruskin that he possesses every virtue of a good writer except sense and self-control. If this criticism will not apply to Blackie as an author, it describes with sufficient accuracy his character as a man. "Boyhood in him," observes Mrs. Stoddart, "survived its proper term, and its incalculable influences, noisy, impish, laughter-loving, inconsiderate, checkered his character as a. professor and as a lecturer." Neither person nor place had the least restraint on Blackie's jocularities. He poked his, fun at the dons of Oxford, drove Jowett on one occasion from the room, and is even said—but the story "lacks written confirmation "—to have clapped the Princess Louise on the back and called her "a bonnie lassie." An Edinburgh professor dancing jigs, singing songs, and convulsing his class with humorous personalities, was a shock to propriety not readily to be tolerated ; and he nearly lost his appoint- ment to the Greek Chair by the reckless way in which he visited the Town Councillors and touted for their votes. "Do not come up to Edinburgh," one of his friends wrote, "till the election is over ; it is a pity you came up last time; some of the tailor electors were quite scandalised at your costume. If you do come just now, for my sake bring decent clothes with you ; but your best policy is to stay at Aberdeen."

At Aberdeen Blackie had spent his boyhood, his father being manager of a bank there. The youth was designed for the law, but he elected to study for the ministry, and in his sixteenth year became a student at the Edinburgh Univer- sity, applying himself to Greek, logic, and moral philosophy,. Then we read of him as a student of theology in the Univer- sity at Aberdeen. At this time Blackie was deeply troubled with religions difficulties, and the burden of Scotch Calvinism weighed him down. He consulted a friendly minister as to

his theological reading, and especially with regard to Boston's Body of Divinity. "What have you to do," was the reply, "with books of divinity by Boston or any other ? Are you a Christian? what should a Christian read before his Bible?

• JAn Stuart Mackie : a Biography. By Anna M. StAdart. 2. vols. L,ndont 1 W Blackwood and Sono. Do you know Greek 15 Where should a student of theology

fetch his divinity in preference to the Greek Testament P" Blackie took the advice, and was able to say in his old age that few men were more familiar with the Greek of the New Testament than he. The wise divine who gave John this good advice had also a sound piece of counsel for his father.

"Send your son to Germany," he said, "his jacket wants widening." With two friends and a fellow student, Blackie started therefore for Gottingen, whence after six months he migrated to Berlin, where he attended the lectures of Schleiermacher, Neander, and Raumer.

There his jacket so far widened that he gave up all thoughts of entering a Church which demanded subscription to the Westminster Confession. From Berlin, where he found him- self "perfectly master of the German language," Blackie flitted to Rome and studied hard with a view to a Professor- ship of Humanity in some Scotch University. There he gained the warm friendship of Bunsen, and that he should have done so, speaks well for the sterling qualities of the youthful student. His passion for Greek dates from this period, and having found a young Greek student in Rome, he studied modern Greek with him, and was soon able to converse in the language. After two years and a half of absence, years spent in vigorous study, Blackie returned to Scotland, and by his father's wish began reading for the Bar in Edinburgh. The law was uncongenial, and Blackie refreshed himself with

literature. His translation of Faust won an appreciative letter from Carlyle, and later on from Lewes, who quotes it in

his Life of Goethe. Five years passed, during which he held only two briefs, but managed to live in a thrifty way by writing for the magazines, the vacations being spent in walk- ing-tours. One of his friends in those days was Mr. (now Sir) Theodore Martin, "who records of John Blackie that his life of strenuous industry, of genial and grateful temper, and of stainless purity, made him a model and example to his com- rades in the struggle."

The appointment to a Latin Chair in Marischal College under the title of Regius Professor of Humanity was a happy exchange for the legal studies which he detested, and that post Blackie held until his ambition was rewarded ten years later by the Greek Professorship in Edinburgh. About this time the briefless barrister, who, like all Scotchmen, had heaps of cousins, fell in love with one of them, and was dismissed by the young lady's parents in consequence. He appears to have accepted his lot with resignation; but after vainly making an offer to another lady, returned for consolation to his first love. "I feel so much for you," she said ; and the result may be anticipated. The courtship was, however, not renewed without the strenuous opposition of the lady's family :—

"It was not altogether wonderful that Mr. Wyld should have misgivings about the engagement ; John Blackie had chiefly im- pressed the outer circle of his cousinhood with his volatility and want of the virtues most held in esteem by respectability. He had changed his mind so often with regard to a profession; he made a precarious living by the pen, which the well-to-do deemed then a paltry trade ; he dressed badly; his manners were abrupt —they called them harum-scarum, the Blackie manners ; ' they did not believe that he would hold his professorship for six months,—they gave him just that time 'to go to the devil.' One member of the family called on him at Dublin Street to expos- tulate about his manners. We may almost suppose they were at the botton of the family opposition."

From this time it is unnecessary to follow closely Blackie's varied and eccentric career. For forty years or more he figured as a professor, and was probably as widely known as any man in Scotland. He made a vow, and kept it, to do nothing by halves, and his labours of mind and body, with tongue and pen, were inexhaustible. Everybody knows who cares to know, Professor Blackie's efforts in the cause of the Highland Crofters, his work as an educational reformer, and his success in founding a Celtic Chair in Edinburgh. Of these and similar achievements, a sufficient account is given by Mrs. Stoddart. We must be content to gather from her pages a few suggestive passages or traits of character which will

serve to draw our readers' attention to this entertaining biography.

When Blackie was a young man, Carlyle, whom he found "rather terrible in a small parlour," treated him with the civility due to a brilliant countryman. He breakfasted with Lord Brougham, dined with Lockhart, and visited Coleridge, who "told the young enthusiast for German philo- sophy, that he had thrown such speculations overboard, and found perfect satisfaction for every inquiry in the first chapter of the Gospel of St. John." From his student days Blackie pursued the art of rhyming with amazing facility, but Mrs. Stoddart admits that he was not a good judge of poetry, and with the sole exception of Burns, whose songs he sang on the top of one of the pyramids and talked of in his dying hours, he does not seem to have felt the power of any of our great poets. For Wordsworth, indeed, he had at one time a fit of fervour, but he was not long subject to an influ- ence which his biographer, strange to say, considers more "isolating than enlarging." Of Tennyson, however, he spoke "with a reverence very unusual to him in allusion to his con- temporaries," and he enjoyed his friendship with Browning, who loved him "as a brother." "I wish," he writes, "his manner was as easy and natural in his books as at his luncheon-table." For imaginative prose literature Blackie seems to have eared little, and the only novels which he

praises are _Emote and Lot hair, the latter of which he calls

"a wise, and a true, and a noble book." His eccentricities were manifold, and by sober citizens he must have been regarded as an eminently unsafe man. He was a, notable- Unionist with regard to Irish Home-rule while advocating with all his zeal Home-rule for Scotland. When Mr. and Mrs.

S. C. Hall celebrated their golden wedding, the chair was- taken by the late Earl of Shaftesbury, who wondered why he had been asked to fill it. Blackie expressed the same wonder,. as well he might, on presiding at a meeting of teetotalers-

" I cannot understand," he said, "why I am asked to be here. I am not a teetotaler, far from it. If a man asks me to dine

with him, and does not give me a good glass of wine, I say he is neither a Christian nor a gentleman. Germans drink beer, Englishmen wine, ladies tea, fools water."

On another occasion, when lecturing at Dunfermline, his- indignation was roused by an attempt to stump the country

against the introduction of organs into churches. "I hear," he said, "you've got a man in this town called Jacob Primmer, who says that worship can't be true unless it is ugly. Let him come to me ; I'll prove him an ass in five minutes. At

the close, up stepped the Rev. Jacob Primmer, and demanded to be proved an ass. The Professor was taken aback for a

moment, but recovered with copious quotations from the Psalms, and wound up with a plea for dancing as a religious rite. Mr. Primmer took it in excellent part, and the next day the two were seen arm in arm, making a round of the sights

of Dunfermline." As a diner-out, Blackie was a welcome- guest, but those who sat next to him were liable to thumps on

the back or to a public embrace. "Called upon for a, song, and sometimes anrequested, the Professor would give 'Jenny Geddes,"Woo'd and married and a',' or Get up and bar the the door,' with vigour Sometimes he would rise and make a, tour of the table to reach his antagonist and tackle him more effectually. He took everything in good part, and expected the like treatment from others." Blackie's speeches,

says an ardent Scotchman, "were inimitable, but they were surpassed by his songs." As a lecturer he is said to have been

the despair of reporters, who revenged themselves by report- ing more of his nonsense than of his sense. At the close of one speech, having eat down, he suddenly started to his feet again and said, "I have only to add that though my language is strong, my opinions are moderate. Take that down, you blackguards." It is said that, despite his gay humour, Blackie never lost sight of the great seriousness of life. His religious feelings were strong, his reverence for Christ profound, yet "he could not be got to admit that he was a sinner ; he pro- tested that he was nothing of the sort."

Mrs. Stoddart's biography is written with sympathy and skill. She does not make a hero of Blackie, but she leads her readers to love him, and to forget his foibles in the noble sincerity and genuine goodness which made him dear to his countrymen all the world over. If a defect must be observed, it is to be seen in the elaborate account of the Professor's travels, which she acknowledges to be tedious, but declares to be "inseparable," which we beg to doubt, from the story of his life.