vu.J MARRIED LIFE. 205 



Oil the 9th of April the remains of John Mackintosh, 



having been brought from Germany, were laid by his 



own last wish in the Grange, as near as might be to the 



grave of Chalmers. Forbes was one of the friends who 



tided that funeral. 



The letters contained in this chapter reveal a grent 

 change that had come over his feelings and character 

 during this last decade of his life. In the autobiographic." 

 letter with which the fourth chapter closes there ia 

 something too much of self-sufricingness, too great inde- 

 pendence of human sympathy, unless it came from the 

 t ones of science. That letter is no doubt a faithful 

 -cript of him as he then was, or at least as he ap- 

 (1 to himself to be. He was then in a great degree 

 self-contained, but perhaps he believed himself to be so 

 more than he was. We may give an exhaustive account 

 of all that we feel in ourselves, and it shall be true as far 

 But there is in every man much more, 

 whether of strength or weakness, of good or evil, than the 

 plumb-line of his consciousness can at any one moment 

 get down to : much that lies in him dormant, waiting 

 but the change of circumstances which shall awaken it 

 and bring it to the surface. So it was with Forbes. 

 1 l"\v strong the family affection was in him we have seen 

 by the way he felt his father's loss. Then came the 

 gradual breaking up of the old home, the scattering of 

 the family, the absorption in scientific discovery, till he, 

 finding himself almost alone, and yet with all his 

 powers in full and delightful exercise, fancied that he 

 could so live always, and that he and science were a 

 match for any two. 



But the change of circumstances that was needed to 

 alter all this came in 1843. The peaceful and happy 

 married life whi-h then began, the birth of his children, 

 and the new family ties that grew round him, called out 

 the deep family affection which, during the first active 

 years of manhood, had slept in him unsuspected. Married 

 life, and the home it gave him, unsealed anew those feel- 

 ings which since his father's death, and the breaking up 



