THE LATE JOHN HILL BURTON.

THE preceding article is the last which our old and dear friend Mr. Burton wrote. It had not been revised by him when he died; and it is in consequence more or less patchy and unfinished. Yet to us it is not without a distinct interest and charm of its own, for it proves that the "old tramp," as he delighted to call himself, retained to the end much of the sprightly sense and vigour and unwearied interest in men and books and outdoor life which made him the delightful companion that he was. He may be said, indeed, with almost literal exactness, to have died pen in hand. in hand. His death took place on the Wednesday afternoon, and this is the record of his last days. "Both on Tuesday morning and Wednesday morning he insisted on having writing things given him

in bed, and on Tuesday morning he wrote half a page of large paper on the connection between the Greek war and the revival of the culture of Greek literature; he meant it as a hook on which to hang a dissertation in the Ellice-book.'* On Wednesday morning he wrote but half a line, when he grew too tired' to write. The few words might either belong to the Ellice-book' or to prison matters. Six hours later he was gone.

John Hill Burton was born at Aberdeen on 22d August 1809. He died at Edinburgh on 10th August 1881. He came of gentlefolk ;—his father was an officer in the 94th Regiment, his mother one of the Patons of Grandhome-a good Aberdeenshire stock. He was educated at Marischal College-the famous college of the Keiths, to which Dugald Dalgetty was proud to belong. He was called to the Scottish bar in 1831. From 1831 to 1881-a period of half a century-he worked probably as hard as any man of his time. Even when "on the tramp" his pen was never idle for a day. Politics, law, theology, history, geology, biography, botany, bibliography, he tried them all, and achieved something noticeable in each. His Manual of the Law of Scotland' was for long an authority in the schools. His treatise on political economy is about as good as anything of the kind can be-transparently lucid and logical. The Book-Hunter' is one of the books-quaint, original, racy, idiomatic, unique-which takes its place on the shelf where the 'Anatomie of Melancholy' and the Religio Medici' are found. But from all this "fine confused feeding" (as the Scotchman said of his sheep's-head) he turned habitually and instinctively to his own country and its history. Saving David Laing only, no man knew so much of the devious and obscure by ways of early Scottish life as disclosed in the old sermons and the old chap-books and the old records which are preserved in the Advocates' Library and the Register House of the northern capital. His first public essays in this direction were more or less tentative and experimental-brief biographical sketches of distinguished or notorious Scotchmen. His 'Life of David Hume,' indeed, has been the storehouse to which all subsequent biographers have turned. "A most competent authority," says Professor Huxley, in his monograph of the great philosopher, Mr. John Hill Burton, on whose valuable Life of Hume,' I need not say, I have drawn freely for the materials of the present sketch." But it was not until he had settled himself seriously to the great work of his life-the History of the Northern Kingdom from the earliest times to the last Jacobite rising-that his really admirable qualities as a writer manifested themselves. With all its defects and shortcomings, his History is undoubtedly one of the most considerable works of a half century which has been fertile in famous histories. It may be said without exaggeration that in this work, for the first time, an exact and scientific method of investigation was brought to bear systematically on the myths of our earlier annals, and that with a shrewdness of insight, a variety of interest, and a liveliness of style, that are as rare as they are attractive.

Mr. Burton was for nearly forty years a valued contributor to 'Maga.' The Cairngorm Mountains,' the 'Scot Abroad,' the 'Book-Hunter,'

*At the time of his death Mr. Burton was engaged in editing the correspondence of the late Edward Ellice.

originally appeared in our pages. The late Editor of this Magazine (Mr. John Blackwood) was one of his closest friends, and quite recently Mr. Burton informed the writer that the History of Scotland' itself had been undertaken on Mr. Blackwood's urgent persuasion. It has been remarked that Mr. Blackwood's fine discrimination of a man's capacity and peculiar gifts was seldom at fault; and this is another case in point.

In 1854 Mr. Burton was appointed Secretary to the Scottish Prison Board; and, as a diligent and painstaking administrator, his services. were highly esteemed at the Home Office and the Treasury. He continued to hold office as a Commissioner until the time of his death; and in proof of the anxious and intelligent interest which he took in what might be regarded as a somewhat uncongenial occupation, we may refer our readers to the article on Prison-life which appeared in the July number of the Magazine, and which was written by him.

The degree of LL.D. was conferred upon Mr. Burton by the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and that of D.C.L. by the University of Oxford. He was appointed Historiographer Royal of Scotland. through the good offices of his friend Edward Gordon, the Lord Advocate, by the Tory Administration of 1867. Though a Whig by conviction and training, he was essentially a moderate man, and for many years he had ceased to take any very active interest in the political fortunes of a party which had grown strange to him.

It would be out of place, writing within a week of Mr. Burton's death, to attempt to put on record any elaborate or deliberate estimate of his life and work; but there are one or two characteristic traits of our friend which may be briefly noted before the freshness of recollection is lost. The figures even of those we knew best quickly grow shadowy when they leave us to go over to the majority-a majority which, as we get up in life, seems to grow every day so much bigger than it used to be!

There was a good deal of the Bohemian in Burton. He was ill at ease when in full dress; he liked space and air; he was an inveterate wanderer-never happier than when tramping across the country-side, or camping among the heather. He did not care to become the slave of any clique or coterie. He valued his independence and his right to think for himself. And he was a most intrepid thinker. So long as he felt he was in the right, it did not matter to him what weight of authority might be arrayed against him. He brushed it aside-without scorn or contempt, indeed, but with a quiet indifference that was even more effective in the long-run. There was indeed a singular incapacity for resentment or anger or rancour in Burton's nature; he was absolutely free from jealousy, as well as from the other vices which a literary life is sometimes supposed to breed. One never heard him utter a harsh or unkindly word of a brother writer; and his appreciation of excellence was generous and unstinted. He was in every respect one of the most tolerant and catholic-hearted of men. Yet his tolerance did not proceed from coldness or indifference; for meanness, or baseness, or deliberate malice could sting him on occasion into sharp protest.

The alacrity and alertness of Burton's gait were characteristic of his mind. To the last he retained an almost boyish buoyancy both of body and mind. His spare and weather-beaten frame was sustained by an amazing vitality. The gaunt and attenuated figure, with the habitual

stoop, which passed you at express speed, turning neither to right nor to left the hat, which possibly had seen better days, thrown far back upon the head; the black surtout, which had been cut without any very close acquaintance on the part of the tailor with the angularities of the form it was to cover, streaming behind-might excite a passing smile; but we all knew that it was a fine, manly, independent, sincere, honourable soul that was lodged in this somewhat shabby tabernacle; and the incongruities were quickly forgotten.

Burton's vagrant and erratic tastes may have been partly due to the unsettled life he led as a child, he had twice, as he used to say, crossed the Bay of Biscay before he was weaned. (He was born in the stirring times of the Peninsular War, and his mother accompanied her husband and his regiment to Spain.) His literary bent was also decided at an early period he had begun to print and publish with Joseph Robertson and others before he left the University. That band of Aberdeen students had a distinct individuality, and idiosyncrasies of their own-shrewd, diligent, thrifty, strenuous, they cultivated literature on a little oatmeal. They did not sacrifice to the graces, but their rough-and-ready mode of making acquaintance with life seems to have succeeded fairly well. All these early experiences are very visible in the great work by which Burton will be remembered. It is the work of a man of immense industry and immense common-sense. He has little or no imagination; but his strong tenacious grasp of the past has seldom been surpassed. His realistic method, his power of intense and patient observation (though it wants the central fire of Carlyle), is always persuasive and often impressive. We do not think that he was fair to Mary Stuart; but it is difficult to find the flaw in that close, unimpassioned argument. There is a want of directness, no doubt, in his method of presentation: in many places the book is commentary rather than narrative,-there being only an oblique reference to the incidents on which the comment is made, and the commentary itself being apt to meander discursively, like De Quincey's, into those unfrequented byways of history which he delighted to explore. In one respect he never fails-his brief descriptions of the scenes where battles were fought or intrigues hatched are always admirable. He knew every inch of Scottish ground; and before he began his 'Queen Anne' he had followed Marlborough step by step from his earliest to his latest battle-field. He wrote with remarkable facility, if not with eminent precision. Yet his style, though often loose and inexact, has an idiomatic vigour, a rough-and-ready directness, a simple and colloquial ease, which to the jaded appetite is often as good as a tonic.

Altogether he was a man whose memory will be cherished most by those who knew him best-a man without guile, generous, sweet-tempered, honourable, incapable of meanness, who hated shams and pretences of every sort, and lived with singular simplicity (in an age from which simplicity has been banished), a pure, honest, laborious, useful life.