Horae subsecivae. Rab and His Friends, and Other Papers

|Dr. Chalmers used to say that in the dynamics of human affairs, two qualities were essential to greatness--Power and Promptitude. One man might have both, another power without...

"My dear Sir,--David Ritchie, _alias_ Bowed Davie, was born at Easter Happrew, in the parish of Stobo, in the year 1741. He was brought to Woodhouse, in the parish of Manor, whe...

This is its true sphere, and here lies its true honour and glory. When it intermeddles with other things,--from your Religion, Education, and Art, down to the number, and size,...

For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed "by the first intention for as James said, "Oor Ailie's skin's ower clean to beil." The students came in quiet and anxious, and su...

One Sunday he had gone with him to church, and left him at the vestry door. The second psalm was given out, and my father was sitting back in the pulpit, when the door at its ba...

And we know that all this misery, and examination, and wasting are true. We know that when his friend Alexis was struck down dead by lightning at his side as they walked togethe...

"Squeeze out the whey," was the pithy and sharp advice of his crusty, acute, faithful, and ill-fated friend, William Taylor of Norwich, author of English Synonyms, to Southey, w...

I doubt not my father regarded this little worn old book, the sword of the Spirit which his ancestor so nobly won, and wore, and warred with, with not less honest veneration and...

Such a pause, such a breathing-time my father never got during that part of his life and labours when it would have availed most, and he was an old man in years, before he was a...

His fate has been a mournful and a strange one, but he knew it, and encountered it with a full knowledge of what it entailed. He perilled everything on his theory; and if this h...

We have been assured by those whose taste we know in other matters to be excellent, that Mr. Maclise is a great genius, a man of true imagination; and that his "Sleeping Beauty,...

I have already spoken; her oddities were endless. We had and still have a dear friend,--"Cousin Susan" she is called by many who are not her cousins--a perfect lady, and, though...

I believe that the unassisted efforts of man's reason have not established the existence and attributes of Deity on so sure a basis as the Deist imagines. However sublime may be...

Another life-long and ever-strengthening friendship was that with James Henderson, D.D., Galashiels, who survived my father only a few days. This remarkable man, and exquisite p...

'But this we may say, we know of nothing in all literature to compare with the volume from which these lines are taken, since David lamented with this lamentation: "The beauty o...

We would rather have written these lines than any amount of Aurora Leighs, Festuses, or such like, with all their mighty "somethingness," as Mr. Bailey would say. For they, are...

My father--tall, slim, agile, quick in his movements, graceful, neat to nicety in his dress, with much in his air of what is called style, with a face almost too beautiful for a...

There was, as I have said, a permanent chill given by my mother's death, to what may be called the outer surface of his nature, and we at home felt it much. The blood was thrown...

The fourth epoch of his personal life I would date from his second marriage. As I said before, no man was ever happier in his wives. They had much alike in nature,--only one cou...

As wre have before said, there is a perpetual wonder in this power of one man over his fellows, especially when we meet with it in a great man. You see its operations constantly...

"He who reads a book on logic, probably thinks no better when he rises up than when he sat down, but if any of the principles there unfolded cleave to his memory, and he afterwa...

Your mere genius, who has instincts, and is poetical and not scientific, who grows from within--he is like our mountain river, clear, wilful, odd; running round corners; disappe...

|Last year at this time we were all impressed, as we seldom are by anything of this sort, by Delaroche's picture of Napoleon at Fontainebleau. We are none of us likely to forget...

We were all three awakened by a cry of pain--sharp, insufferable, as if one were stung. Years after we two confided to each other, sitting by the burnside, that we thought that...

"He spoke French readily, though with less elegance than Italian, till from disuse he lost much of his fluency in the latter. In his last fatal tour in Germany, he was rapidly a...

With that fine instinct, compounded of curiosity, experience, and affection, he has made his observations on the state of things! All is not right, he sees,--something very far...

|One of the chief sins of our time is hurry: it is helter-skelter, and devil take the hindmost. Off we go all too swift at starting, and we neither run so fast nor so far as we...

Awful indeed are the thunders of his utterance and the clouds that surround his dwelling-place; very terrible is the vengeance he executes on the nations that forget him: but to...