viii Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. 
enthusiasm. At any rate, the Professor’s Theology was never 
taken so seriously as his admiration for all that was heroic in the 
Fathers of the Scottish Church from John Knox to Richard 
Cameron. Blackie had it in him to he a considerable Lyric Poet, 
for some of his songs contain lines, and even verses, with the true 
ring of a man’s heart in them. But he had not patience to point 
and polish them : the gem was there, but it was not cut so as to 
bring forth its perfect lustre. Probably he himself would have 
rested his claims to be remembered rather on his philosophy than 
on his poetry ; for though he had none of the Scottish love of 
metaphysics, and had never mastered the systems of Hume, or 
Hamilton, or Kant, yet he spoke many a wise and true word to 
his countrymen, not merely in his book on Self Culture and his 
Four Phases of Morals , but in almost every one of the many 
lectures he delivered on all kinds of subjects. These, indeed, were 
often marred to those who had not heard them by the almost 
boyish freaks which, down to the last, he indulged in when 
addressing an audience, and which were always carefully reported 
so as to make him often look liker a mountebank than a philosopher. 
He used to complain of this occasionally, and I had to tell him he 
had only himself to blame, for he spoke more sense and also more 
nonsense than any other man I knew. But away from the excite- 
ment of public meetings, in the quiet hour, e.g., of a Sabbath 
evening, such as I often spent with him in his latter days, it was 
good to listen to his subdued and chastened thought, lit up by 
many an apt quotation from Aristotle, or Goethe, or the Bible, and 
one could easily understand, at such times, his claim to be reckoned 
a philosopher. In those quiet hours his natural eloquence was 
very impressive, for he was a born orator ; and if he could have 
been kept from skipping and romping away from his theme, at 
other times, he could not have failed to win the brilliant, if 
evanescent, honours of a great public speaker. Take him for all 
in all, he was a man of fine gifts and versatile powers, genuine and 
right-hearted, who but that he yielded to that versatility of mind 
might have been a notable poet, orator, or philosopher, but was only 
Blackie, whom all his countrymen loved. His language was often 
egotistic, and yet he was not vain, for at bottom his character was 
simple and humble. The source of not a little fun and light- 
