Blackie chose him, and because his large sympathy refused all channels dug by sect, and flowed out into the broad stream whose waters God has designed for the refreshing of all mankind. The plaid, the thick stick, the low-crowned hat, the brown wig worn for some years, the finely cut profile, the devout attitude in prayer, the close attention, were all familiar to the congregation of Free St John's during the latter half of Dr Guthrie's ministry.

Connected also with these years was the "Blackie Brotherhood," instituted by the Professor to bring together, at least once in twelve months, a little group of friends belonging to the inner circle. We find twelve of these upon its first roll-call: Mr Hunter of Craigcrook and his son, Mr Kinnear, Dr Lindsay Alexander, Dr Hanna, Dr Walter C. Smith, Professor Campbell Fraser, Dr John Brown, Mr George Harvey, Mr Noël Paton, Mr D. O. Hill, and Dr Gairdner. Parts in some kind were important to brotherhood, but the essential qualification was moral nobility of character. Poets, painters, philosophers, and divines were only qualified if to their gifts they added the Christian graces of faith, hope, and charity. Atheists and scoffers were classed with bigots and dogmatists, and with the "damnatory orthodox," in disability. Such men

are

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THE BLACKIE BROTHERHOOD."

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never poets, nor sing the lyrics of love, nature, and good-fellowship, and they would have been out of place in that kindly company, which had a preference for "moral nobility" tempered by song. Their communion, bodily and prandially, was in one of the Princes Street hotels; spiritually, "in that genial region of fervid and flowery spontaneity in which, as in an earthly Paradise, it was the privilege of the Brotherhood to dwell." The "Blackie Brotherhood" lasted for a quarter of a century, and the gaps which death made in its ranks were filled by men with every worthy attribute. It is impossible now to recover its merry jests and sparkling humour. "snows of yester-year" endure a winter long; its laughter is but a waft of fragrance which no man can register.

The

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CHAPTER XIII.

LAYS, LECTURES, AND LYRICS.

1857-1860.

THE minstrel flame, which had nearly flickered out in Athens,-fanned by airs from the western seas at Arran, by pine-scented breezes at Braemar,-blazed up again, and at the end of 1856 he completed a volume of original verse, called Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece,' and published by Messrs Blackwood & Sons. Although mainly concerned with the mythical and heroic stories of Greece, there were appended to these the "Braemar Ballads," inspired by a summer sojourn there. Marching alone down the glens and up the mountains, his faculties quickened by movement in the fresh and heather-sweetened air, he covered much ground in his wanderings. As he walked he sang and shouted his lays into

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THE BRAEMAR BALLADS."

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shape, aided rather than diverted by the shifting scenes of nature in her solitudes, or of peasant life and industry. For the first time he was brought face to face with deserted homesteads, with ruined hamlets, with patches-once kindly and provident―merging into the surrounding waste, with the wilding bushes from which the vanished hands had gathered fruits in their season, with all those relics of humble life which touch us with a pathos far nearer tears than do the crumbling towers of feudalism. They filled him with sympathy, and sent him straight to the study of that struggle, age after age, between peasant and proprietor. With characteristic With characteristic energy he mastered its annals in the past, and made acquaintance with that old agrarian feud which separated into hostile camps the Plebeians and Patricians of Rome. His thoughts were soon articulate both in verse and prose. The "Braemar Ballads" were added to the Greek Lays, and a letter was sent to the Times,' which was not only inserted in the columns of that influential journal, but endorsed and made conspicuous by a sympathetic leading article. Professor Blackie awoke to find himself the centre of a storm of letters more or less hostile from all parts of the kingdom. He bore the onset blithely as was his wont, and settled himself all the more firmly into

his attitude of challenge. No war-horse ever welcomed the battle with a readier response.

As a poetic venture the 'Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece' were much criticised, and although they pleased the taste of those who liked their poetry fervid, it was not surprising that the finer critics of the time found fault with their torrent of troubled verbiage. For, in spite of their fervour, they are deficient in interest, rude in construction, and suggest the schoolboy in expression. Their poet was not wholly a poet. He solaced himself with rhyme, but did not possess the great poetic gift which transmutes the very words of common life into gems that gleam and glow, by some subtle setting, by some immersion into fire which releases the pure gold from the dross. His genius selected on ethical, not on æsthetical, grounds. Whatsoever things were noble, manly, heroic, patriotic, devout on these things he rhymed, and was a poet more by such selection than by rendering. When he told a straightforward story in simple words he approached poetic utterance, and the incident of the reveller Polemo convinced of righteousness by Xenocrates is almost on the plane of poetry. But a wayward use of language depreciates even this; for to apply in verse the same loose copiousness which makes unconsidered talk so worthless is to deform its structure and to paralyse its aim.