Spare Hours

John Brown

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• Publié par: jiboh
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 63
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Spare Hours, by John Brown This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Spare Hours Author: John Brown Release Date: November 4, 2008 [EBook #27153] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPARE HOURS *** Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net 1 HORÆ SUBSECIVÆ. “A lady, resident in Devonshire, going into one of her parlors, discovered a young ass, who had found his way into the room, and carefully closed the door upon himself. He had evidently not been long in this situation before he had nibbled a part of Cicero’s Orations, and eaten nearly all the index of a folio edition of Seneca in Latin, a large part of a volume of La Bruyère’s Maxims in French, and several pages of Cecilia. He had done no other mischief whatever, and not a vestige remained of the leaves that he had devoured.”—PIERCE EGAN. 2 “The treatment of the illustrious dead by the quick, often reminds me of the gravedigger in Hamlet, and the skull of poor defunct Yorick.”—W. H. B. “Multi ad sapientiam pervenire potuissent, nisi se jam pervenisse putassent.” “There’s nothing so amusing as human nature, but then you must have some one to laugh with.” 3 SPARE HOURS BY JOHN BROWN, M. D. If thou be a severe sour-complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge.—IZAAK WALTON BOSTON TICKNOR AND FIELDS 1864 4 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS , In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts R I V E R S I D E , C A STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON 5 NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. T HE author of “Rab and his Friends” scarcely needs an introduction to American readers. By this time many have learned to agree with a writer in the “North British Review” that “Rab” is, all things considered, the most perfect prose narrative since Lamb’s “Rosamond Gray.” A new world of doctors, clergymen, shepherds, and carriers is revealed in the writings of this cheerful Edinburgh scholar, who always brings genuine human feeling, strong sense, and fine genius to the composition of his papers. Dogs he loves with an enthusiasm to be found nowhere else in canine literature. He knows intimately all a cur means when he winks his eye or wags his tail, so that the whole barking race,—terrier, mastiff, spaniel, and the rest,—finds in him an affectionate and interested friend. His genial motto seems to run thus—“I cannot understand that morality which excludes animals from human sympathy, or releases man from the debt and obligation he owes to them.” With the author’s consent we have rejected from his two series of “Horæ Subsecivæ” the articles on strictly professional subjects, and have collected into this volume the rest of his admirable papers in that work. The title, “Spare Hours,” is also adopted with the author’s sanction. Dr. Brown is an eminent practising physician in Edinburgh, with small leisure for literary composition, but no one has stronger claims to be ranked among the purest and best writers of our day. BOSTON , December 1861. 7 CONTENTS. Rab and His Friends 21 “With Brains, Sir” The Mystery of Black and Tan Her Last Half-Crown Our Dogs Queen Mary’s Child-Garden Presence of Mind and Happy Guessing My Father’s Memoir Mystifications “Oh, I’m wat, wat!” Arthur H. Hallam Education Through the Senses Vaughan’s Poems Dr. Chalmers Dr. George Wilson St. Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh The Black Dwarf’s Bones Notes on Art 41 65 77 83 107 115 125 215 229 241 297 311 353 385 397 419 439 9 AUTHOR’S PREFACE. I N that delightful and provoking book, “THE D OCTOR , &c.,” Southey says: “‘Prefaces,’ said Charles Blount, Gent., ‘Prefaces,’ according to this flippant, ill-opinioned, and unhappy man, ‘ever were, and still are, but of two sorts, let the mode and fashions vary as they please,—let the long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff; presbytery, popery; and popery, presbytery again,—yet still the author keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the beginning of his book he enters, either with a halter round his neck, submitting himself to his readers’ mercy whether he shall be hanged or no, or else, in a huffing manner, he appears with the halter in his hand, and threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word. This, with the excitement of friends to his undertaking, and some few apologies for the want of time, books, and the like, are the constant and usual shams of all scribblers, ancient and modern.’ This was not true then,” says Southey, “nor is it now.” I differ from Southey, in thinking there is some truth in both ways of wearing the halter. For though it be neither manly nor honest 10 to affect a voluntary humility (which is after all, a sneaking vanity, and would soon show itself if taken at its word), any more than it is well-bred, or seemly to put on (for it generally is put on) the “huffing manner,” both such being truly “shams,”—there is general truth in Mr. Blount’s flippancies. Every man should know and lament (to himself) his own shortcomings —should mourn over and mend, as he best can, the “confusions of his wasted youth;” he should feel how ill he has put out to usury the talent given him by the Great Taskmaster—how far he is from being “a good and faithful servant;” and he should make this rather understood than expressed by his manner as a writer; while at the same time, every man should deny himself the luxury of taking his hat off to the public, unless he has something to say, and has done his best to say it aright; and every man should pay not less attention to the dress in which his thoughts present themselves, than he would to that of his person on going into company. Bishop Butler, in his “Preface to his Sermons,” in which there is perhaps more solid living sense than in the same number of words anywhere else after making the distinction between “obscurity” and “perplexity and confusion of thought,”—the first being in the subject, the others in its expression, says,—“confusion and perplexity are, in writing, indeed without excuse, because any one may, if he pleases, know whether he understands or sees through what he is about, and it is unpardonable in a man to lay his thoughts before others, when he is conscious that he himself does not know whereabouts he is, or how the matter before him stands. It is coming abroad in disorder, which he ought to be dissatisfied to find himself in at home.” 11 There should therefore be in his Preface, as in the writer himself, two elements. A writer should have some assurance that he has something to say, and this assurance should, in the true sense, not the Milesian, be modest. * I have to apologize for bringing in “Rab and his Friends.” I did so, remembering well the good I got then, as a man and as a doctor. It let me see down into the depths of our common nature, and feel the strong and gentle touch that we all need, and never forget, which makes the world kin; and it gave me an opportunity of introducing, in a way which he cannot dislike, for he knows it is simply true, my old master and friend, Professor Syme, whose indenture I am thankful I possess, and whose first wheels I delight in thinking my apprentice-fee purchased, thirty years ago. I remember as if it were yesterday, his giving me the first drive across the west shoulder of Corstorphine Hill. On starting, he said, “John, we’ll do one thing at a time, and there will be no talk.” I sat silent and rejoicing, and can remember the very complexion and clouds of that day and that matchless view: Damyat and Benledi resting couchant at the gate of the Highlands, with the huge Grampians, immane pecus, crowding down into the plain. This short and simple story shows, that here, as everywhere else, personally, professionally, and publicly, reality is his aim and his attainment. He is one of the men—they are all too few—who desire to be on the side of truth more than to have truth on their side; and whose personal and private 12 worth are always better understood than expressed. It has been happily said of him, that he never wastes a word, or a drop of ink, or a drop of blood; and his is the strongest, exactest, truest, immediatest, safest intellect, dedicated by its possessor to the surgical cure of mankind, I have ever yet met with. He will, I firmly believe, leave an inheritance of good done, and mischief destroyed, of truth in theory and in practice established, and of error in the same exposed and ended, such as no one since John Hunter has been gifted to bequeath to his fellow-men. As an instrument for discovering truth, I have never seen his perspicacity equalled; his mental eye is achromatic, and admits into the judging mind a pure white light, and records an undisturbed, uncolored image, undiminished and unenlarged in its passage; and he has the moral power, courage, and conscience, to use and devote such an inestimable instrument aright. I need hardly add, that the story of “Rab and his Friends” is in all essentials strictly matter of fact. There is an odd sort of point, if it can be called a point, on which I would fain say something—and that is an occasional outbreak of sudden, and it may be felt, untimely humorousness. I plead guilty to this, sensible of the tendency in me of the merely ludicrous to intrude, and to insist on being attended to, and expressed: it is perhaps too much the way with all of us now-a-days, to be forever joking. Mr. Punch, to whom we take off our hats, grateful for his innocent and honest fun, especially in his Leech, leads the way; and our two great novelists, Thackeray and Dickens, the