THE PROFESSOR AND HIS CLASS. 255 



Eudaimonism was in fact a sublimed Utilitarianism ; so refined and 

 sublimed that it might have appeared quite a fair course to have 

 avoided discussing those metaphysical and psychological questions 

 which lie at the roots of the general controversy. He did not follow 

 this course. On the contrary, he laid bare the whole question : 

 Whether conscience be a product of experience, or an original and 

 intuitive faculty, with a frankness and fairness which are exceedingly 

 rare, and which impressed most those who most differed from him ; 

 and at the same time with a perception of the status qucestionis, 

 how it bore on all that followed, and how the teaching of each 

 philosopher bore upon it, which makes me regard his lectures as 

 the most comprehensive, and indeed the most valuable thing in our 

 language on this particular question, with the single exception of 

 Sir James Mackintosh's Dissertation. 



" His appearance in his class-room it is far easier to remember 

 than to forget. He strode into it with the professor's gown hang- 

 ing loosely on his arms, took a comprehensive look over the mob 

 of young faces, laid down his watch so as to be out of the reach of 

 his sledge-hammer fist, glanced at the notes of his lecture (generally 

 written on the most wonderful scraps of paper), and then, to the 

 bewilderment of those who had never heard him before, looked 

 long and earnestly out of the north window, towards the spire of 

 the old Tron Kirk ; until, having at last got his idea, he faced round 

 and uttered it with eye and hand, and voice and soul and spirit, 

 and bore the class along with him. As he spoke, the bright blue 

 eye looked with a strange gaze into vacancy, sometimes sparkling 

 with a coming joke, sometimes darkening before a rush of indignant 

 eloquence; the tremulous upper lip curving with every wave of 

 thought or hint of passion, and the golden-gray hair floating on the 

 old man's mighty shoulders — if indeed that could be called age, 

 which seemed but the immortality of a more majestic youth.* And 

 occasionally, in the finer frenzy of his more imaginative passages — 



* Of the "discipline in his class" in 1880, alluded to by Mr. Burton, Mr. Nicholson says, twenty 

 years later: — "I shall never forget the foolish appearance presented one day in the class by an 

 unmannerly fellow, who rose from his seat about ten minutes from the close of the hour, and 

 proceeded to the door. He. found some difficulty in opening it, and was returning to his place, 

 when the Professor beckoned him to his desk, and stooping down, asked, in that deep tone of his, 

 kindly, but with a touch of irony in the question, ' Are you unwell, sir ?' ' Xo, sir. 1 was the an- 

 swer. 'Then you will have the kindness to wait till the close of the lecture. 1 The experiment 

 of leaving the class before the termination of the hour was not likely to be again attempted, after 

 such an exhibition." 



