Memories and Portraits E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 266

Beschreibung

Memoirs by the author of Treasure Island. He explains at the beginning: "This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle - taken together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be surprised at the occurrence."

Leseprobe

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

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NOTE

I.    THE FOREIGNER AT HOME

II.   SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES

III.  OLD MORALITY

IV.   A COLLEGE MAGAZINE

V.    AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER

VI.   PASTORAL

VII.  THE MANSE

VIII. MEMORIES OF AN ISLET

IX.   THOMAS STEVENSON

X.    TALK AND TALKERS: FIRST PAPER

XI.   TALK AND TALKERS: SECOND PAPER

XII.  THE CHARACTER OF DOGS

XIII. "A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED"

XIV.  A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S

XV.   A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE

XVI.  A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE

NOTE

THIS volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random.  A certain thread of meaning binds them.  Memories of childhood and youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle - taken together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself.  This has come by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of  the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be surprised at the occurrence.

My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed.  Of their descendant, the person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not because I love him better, but because, with him, I am still in a business partnership, and cannot divide interests.

Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in THE CORNHILL, LONGMAN'S, SCRIBNER, THE ENGLISH ILLUSTRATED, THE MAGAZINE OF ART, THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW; three are here in print for the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may he

regarded as a private circulation.

R. L S.

CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME

"This is no my ain house;

I ken by the biggin' o't."

Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on  France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set  people thinking on the divisions of races and nations.  Such  thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to  inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different  stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its  extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to  the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of  Rannoch.  It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad;  there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered  so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands  whence she sprang.  Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains  still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech.  It was but the  other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show  in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish- speaking woman.  English itself, which will now frank the traveller  through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea  Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the  ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home  country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition.  You may  go all over the States, and - setting aside the actual intrusion  and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese - you shall  scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty  miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the  hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.  Book English has  gone round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms  of our fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its  own quality of speech, vocal or verbal.  In like manner, local  custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law, linger on  into the latter end of the nineteenth century - IMPERIA IN IMPERIO,  foreign things at home.

In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his  neighbours is the character of the typical John Bull.  His is a  domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but  neither curious nor quick about the life of others.  In French  colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an  immediate and lively contact between the dominant and the dominated  race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least a  transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both.  But the  Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance.  He  figures among his vassal in the hour of peace with the same  disdainful air that led him on to victory.  A passing enthusiasm  for some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot  impose upon his intimates.  He may be amused by a foreigner as by a  monkey, but he will never condescend to study him with any  patience.  Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in  love, declares all the viands of Japan to be uneatable - a  staggering pretension.  So, when the Prince of Wales's marriage was  celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed  to give them solid English fare - roast beef and plum pudding, and  no tomfoolery.  Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly.   We will not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the  chance, will we eager him to eat of it himself.  The same spirit  inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands  of miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their  ignorance of the religions they were trying to supplant.

I quote an American in this connection without scruple.  Uncle Sam  is better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick.   For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and  nothing more.  He wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let  him try San Francisco.  He wittily reproves English ignorance as to  the status of women in America; but has he not himself forgotten  Wyoming?  The name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used  over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach.  The Yankee  States, of which he is so staunch a subject, are but a drop in the  bucket.  And we find in his book a vast virgin ignorance of the  life and prospects of America; every view partial, parochial, not  raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper, at the largest, to  a clique of states; and the whole scope and atmosphere not  American, but merely Yankee.  I will go far beyond him in  reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to  their cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the  silly rudeness of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where  to look when I find myself in company with an American and see my  countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog.  But in the  case of Mr. Grant White example were better than precept.  Wyoming  is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to  the English, and the New England self-sufficiency no better  justified than the Britannic.

It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most  ignorant of the foreigners at home.  John Bull is ignorant of the  States; he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his  opportunities, he is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own  door.  There is one country, for instance - its frontier not so far  from London, its people closely akin, its language the same in all  essentials with the English - of which I will go bail he knows  nothing.  His ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described;  it can only be illustrated by anecdote.  I once travelled with a  man of plausible manners and good intelligence - a University man,  as the phrase goes - a man, besides, who had taken his degree in  life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in.  We were  deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London; among other  things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had  recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things  were not so in Scotland.  "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a  matter of law."  He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he  choose to be informed.  The law was the same for the whole country,  he told me roundly; every child knew that.  At last, to settle  matters, I explained to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal  body, and had stood the brunt of an examination in the very law in  question.  Thereupon he looked me for a moment full in the face and  dropped the conversation.  This is a monstrous instance, if you  like, but it does not stand alone in the experience of Scots.

England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in  religion, in education, and in the very look of nature and men's  faces, not always widely, but always trenchantly.  Many particulars  that struck Mr. Grant White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less  forcibly; he and I felt ourselves foreigners on many common  provocations.  A Scotchman may tramp the better part of Europe and  the United States, and never again receive so vivid an impression  of foreign travel and strange lands and manners as on his first  excursion into England.  The change from a hilly to a level country  strikes him with delighted wonder.  Along the flat horizon there  arise the frequent venerable towers of churches.  He sees at the  end of airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails.  He may go  where he pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids, and  lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment.   There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many  windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody  country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant  business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their  air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit  of romance into the tamest landscape.  When the Scotch child sees  them first he falls immediately in love; and from that time forward  windmills keep turning in his dreams.  And so, in their degree,  with every feature of the life and landscape.  The warm, habitable  age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of the  country; the lush hedgerows, stiles, and privy path-ways in the  fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smock-frocks;  chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding English speech -  they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to English airs  in the child's story that he tells himself at night.  The sharp  edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt  whether it is ever killed.  Rather it keeps returning, ever the  more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have  been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to  enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye -  the domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the  quaint, venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm  colouring of all.  We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient  buildings, above all in country places; and those that we have are  all of hewn or harled masonry.  Wood has been sparingly used in  their construction; the window-frames are sunken in the wall, not  flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are steeper-pitched;  even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and permanent  appearance.  English houses, in comparison, have the look of  cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter.  And to this the  Scotchman never becomes used.  His eye can never rest consciously  on one of these brick houses - rickles of brick, as he might call  them - or on one of these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly  reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his  home.  "This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't."  And  yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his own money, the key of it  long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet, and never will be,  thoroughly adopted by his imagination; nor does he cease to  remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native  country, there was no building even distantly resembling it.

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count  England foreign.  The constitution of society, the very pillars of  the empire, surprise and even pain us.  The dull, neglected  peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a  startling contrast with our own long-legged, long-headed,  thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman.  A week or two in such a place  as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping.  It seems incredible that  within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been  thus forgotten.  Even the educated and intelligent, who hold our  own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with  a difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all things  with less interest and conviction.  The first shock of English  society is like a cold plunge.  It is possible that the Scot comes  looking for too much, and to be sure his first experiment will be  in the wrong direction.  Yet surely his complaint is grounded;  surely the speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous  ardour, the better part of the man too often withheld from the  social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with  terror.  A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of his own  experience.  He will not put you by with conversational counters  and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one  interested in life and man's chief end.  A Scotchman is vain,  interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth  his thoughts and experience in the best light.  The egoism of the  Englishman is self-contained.  He does not seek to proselytise.  He  takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the  unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference.   Give him the wages of going on and being an Englishman, that is all  he asks; and in the meantime, while you continue to associate, he  would rather not be reminded of your baser origin.  Compared with  the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity  and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest.  That  you should continually try to establish human and serious  relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull,  and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue  something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you  in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation.  Thus even the  lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the  head and shoulders.

Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English  youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and  gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of  future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct.   I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys  of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once  more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance  chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider  extremes of temperament and sensibility.  The boy of the South  seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to  games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily  transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in  mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser  and a less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more  immersed in present circumstances.  And certainly, for one thing,  English boys are younger for their age.  Sabbath observance makes a  series of grim, and perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of  Scotch boyhood - days of great stillness and solitude for the  rebellious mind, when in the dearth of books and play, and in the  intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect and  senses prey upon and test each other.  The typical English Sunday,  with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon, leads  perhaps to different results.  About the very cradle of the Scot  there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two  divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two  first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely  inquiring, "What is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very  roots of life with, "What is the chief end of man?" and answering  nobly, if obscurely, "To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever."  I  do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact  of such a question being asked opens to us Scotch a great field of  speculation; and the fact that it is asked of all of us, from the  peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly together.  No  Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would have had  patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight for  Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days  kept their influence to the end.  We have spoken of the material  conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying  everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of  the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone  cities, imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level  streets, the warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness  of the architecture, among which English children begin to grow up  and come to themselves in life.  As the stage of the University  approaches, the contrast becomes more express.  The English lad  goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens,  to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by  proctors.  Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of  education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that  separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots.  At an  earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different  experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell  hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the  public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he  has been wandering fancy-free.  His college life has little of  restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility.  He will find no  quiet clique of the exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten  borough of the arts.  All classes rub shoulders on the greasy  benches.  The raffish young gentleman in gloves must measure his  scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie from the parish school.   They separate, at the session's end, one to smoke cigars about a  watering-place, the other to resume the labours of the field beside  his peasant family.  The first muster of a college class in  Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads,  fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish  embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades,  and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices.  It was in  these early days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection  of his pupils, putting these uncouth, umbrageous students at their  ease with ready human geniality.  Thus, at least, we have a healthy  democratic atmosphere to breathe in while at work; even when there  is no cordiality there is always a juxtaposition of the different  classes, and in the competition of study the intellectual power of  each is plainly demonstrated to the other.  Our tasks ended, we of  the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city.  At  five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college  gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of  the winter sunset.  The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies  in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the  masters of the world; and some portion of our lives is always  Saturday, LA TREVE DE DIEU.

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his  country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story  and from observation.  A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck,  outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights;  much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters.   Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of  foraying hoofs.  He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the  iron girdle and the handful of oat-meal, who rode so swiftly and  lived so sparely on their raids.  Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise,  and constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of his  country's history.  The heroes and kings of Scotland have been  tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish history -  Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five were still either failures or  defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the  Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach  rather a moral than a material criterion for life.  Britain is  altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire:  Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his  imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold,  sterile and unpopulous.  It is not so for nothing.  I once seemed  to have perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of  sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his  own.  It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish  romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine.  But the error  serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that  the heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by  paucity of number and Spartan poverty of life.

So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained.  That  Shorter Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was  yet composed in the city of Westminster.  The division of races is  more sharply marked within the borders of Scotland itself than  between the countries.  Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber,  are like foreign parts; yet you may choose a man from any of them,  and, ten to one, he shall prove to have the headmark of a Scot.  A  century and a half ago the Highlander wore a different costume,  spoke a different language, worshipped in another church, held  different morals, and obeyed a different social constitution from  his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north.  Even the  English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the  Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the  Scotch.  Yet the Highlander felt himself a Scot.  He would  willingly raid into the Scotch lowlands; but his courage failed him  at the border, and he regarded England as a perilous, unhomely  land.  When the Black Watch, after years of foreign service,  returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out and kissed the earth at  Port Patrick.  They had been in Ireland, stationed among men of  their own race and language, where they were well liked and treated  with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that they kissed at  the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people who did not  understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and hanged  them since the dawn of history.  Last, and perhaps most curious,  the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of  Europe.  They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking,  not English, but the broad dialect of Scotland.  Now, what idea had  they in their minds when they thus, in thought, identified  themselves with their ancestral enemies?  What was the sense in  which they were Scotch and not English, or Scotch and not Irish?   Can a bare name be thus influential on the minds and affections of  men, and a political aggregation blind them to the nature of facts?   The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to answer, NO; the far  more galling business of Ireland clenches the negative from nearer  home.  Is it common education, common morals, a common language or  a common faith, that join men into nations?  There were practically  none of these in the case we are considering.

The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language,  the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the  Highlander.  When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's  necks in spirit; even at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy  in their talk.  But from his compatriot in the south the Lowlander  stands consciously apart.  He has had a different training; he  obeys different laws; he makes his will in other terms, is  otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home in an  English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to  remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the  Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scotch accent of the  mind.

CHAPTER II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES (2)

I AM asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what)  to the profit and glory of my ALMA MATER; and the fact is I seem to  be in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for  while I am willing enough to write something, I know not what to  write.  Only one point I see, that if I am to write at all, it  should be of the University itself and my own days under its  shadow; of the things that are still the same and of those that are  already changed: such talk, in short, as would pass naturally  between a student of to-day and one of yesterday, supposing them to  meet and grow confidential.

The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life;  more swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the  quadrangle; so that we see there, on a scale startlingly  diminished, the flight of time and the succession of men.  I looked  for my name the other day in last year's case-book of the  Speculative.  Naturally enough I looked for it near the end; it was  not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I began to think it  had been dropped at press; and when at last I found it, mounted on  the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that posture  like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the  dignity of years.  This kind of dignity of temporal precession is  likely, with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less  welcome; but I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and  I am the more emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of  a parent and a praiser of things past.

For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it  has doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline  by gradual stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming  embellishments, it does; and what is perhaps more singular, began  to do so when I ceased to be a student.  Thus, by an odd chance, I  had the very last of the very best of ALMA MATER; the same thing, I  hear (which makes it the more strange), had previously happened to  my father; and if they are good and do not die, something not at  all unsimilar will be found in time to have befallen my successors  of to-day.  Of the specific points of change, of advantage in the  past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that, on a near  examination, they look wondrous cloudy.  The chief and far the most  lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle,  unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of  the whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes  of good, flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east- windy, morning journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during  lecture and unquenchable gusto in the delights of truantry, made up  the sunshine and shadow of my college life.  You cannot fancy what  you missed in missing him; his virtues, I make sure, are  inconceivable to his successors, just as they were apparently  concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically alone in  the pleasure I had in his society.  Poor soul, I remember how much  he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun)  seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune  and dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went.   And it may be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in  their season, and that all clouds roll away at last, and the  troubles of youth in particular are things but of a moment.  So  this student, whom I have in my eye, took his full share of these  concerns, and that very largely by his own fault; but he still  clung to his fortune, and in the midst of much misconduct, kept on  in his own way learning how to work; and at last, to his wonder,  escaped out of the stage of studentship not openly shamed; leaving  behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good deal of its  interest for myself.