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But Miss White had some engagement; she and her father left together; and the young men followed them almost directly-Mrs. Ross saying that she would be most pleased to see Sir Keith Macleod any Tuesday or Thursday afternoon he happened to be passing, as she was always at home on these days.

"I don't think we can do better than take her advice about the cigar," said young Ogilvie, as they crossed to Kensington Gardens. "What do you think of her?"

"Of Mrs. Ross?"

"Yes."

"Oh, I think she is a very pleasant woman." "Yes, but" said Mr. Ogilvie, "how did she strike you? Do you think she is as fascinating as some men think her?"

wants to be sent out to dig for Dido's funeral pyre at Carthage, and that he is only waiting to get the trinkets made at Birmingham."

They walked on a bit in silence.

"I think you made a good impression on Mrs. Ross," said Mr. Ogilvie, coolly. "You'll find her an uncommonly useful woman, if she takes a fancy to you; for she knows everybody and goes everywhere, though her own house is too small to let her entertain properly. By the way, Macleod, I don't think you could have hit on a worse fellow than I to take you about; for I am so little in "London that I have become a rank cutsider. But I'll tell you what I'll do for you if you will go with me to-night to Lord Beauregard's who is an old friend of mine. I will ask him to introduce you to some peopleand his wife gives very good dances-and if any Royal or Imperial swell comes to town you'll be sure to run against him there. I forget who it is they are receiving there tonight; but anyhow you'll meet two or three of the fat duchesses whom Dizzy adores; and I shouldn't wonder if that Irish girl were there-the new beauty: Lady Beauregard is very clever at picking people up."

"I don't know what men think about her," said Macleod. "It never occurred to me to ask whether a married woman was fascinating or not. I thought she was a friendly woman-talkative, amusing, clever enough."

They lit their cigars in the cool shadow of the great elms: who does not know how beautiful Kensington Gardens are in June? And yet Macleod did not seem disposed to be garrulous about these new experiences of his; he was absorbed, and mostly silent.

"That is an extraordinary fancy she has taken for Gertrude White," Mr. Ogilvie remarked.

"Why extraordinary ?" the other asked, with sudden interest.

Oh, well, it is unusual, you know; but she is a nice girl enough, and Mrs. Ross is fond of odd folks. You didn't speak to old White ?—his head is a sort of British Museum of antiquities; but he is of some use to these people-he is such a swell about old armour, and china, and such things. They say he

"Will Miss White be there?" Macleod asked, apparently deeply engaged in probing the end of his cigar.

His companion looked up in surprise: then a new fancy seemed to occur to him; and he smiled very slightly.

"Well, no," said he slowly, "I don't think she will. In fact, I am almost sure she will be at the Piccadilly Theatre. If you like, we will give up Lady Beauregard, and after dinner go to the Piccadilly Theatre instead. How will that do?”

"I think that will do very well," said Macleod.

ROBERT BUCHANAN, D.D.

DR. BUCHANAN died in March, 1875, after having been for more than forty years in the forefront of those ecclesiastical battles which have altered the face of Scotland. One cannot begin to write about such a man without remembering the warning Horace gave to his friend who was writing the history of the civil wars of Rome:

"Arma

Nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus

Tractas, et incedis per ignes
Suppositos cineri doloso."

If these wars are not raging so fiercely as once, Christian love has not yet laid the weapons away; and even in walking warily over these ashes there is risk of stirring fires by no means extinct. Our difficulty is the greater that the biography of Dr. Buchanan recently issued is confessedly a polemical work. Still, let us try to pick out from it, and to glean from other sources, some materials for a picture of the distinguished man who has passed away-a picture that should be rather painted with the warm colours of

the heart than etched with the steel, bright enough but cold and very sharp, of recent polemics.

Dr. Buchanan's figure, so long familiar in Glasgow and the Church courts of Scotland, was a striking one-tall, erect, handsome, elastic, with a face in which much dignity did not hide the ready smile of good-will. He was emphatically a Churchman, "a statesman among divines ;" and it may be said of him in that character, without offence to any one, that his great judgment and tact, his mastery of broad principles and minute details, the manifest honesty and depth of his convictions, giving uniform elevation to his public conduct, and his remarkable courtesy, set him high among the ecclesiastics even of Scotland, a country rich in such men. But he was something more than a Churchman, and better. There have been great ecclesiastics whom it is not very wholesome to get too near-the man being found to be something less than the 'ecclesiastic. Dr. Buchanan was not of these in his case the Churchman was great, but the man was greater.

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There is no autobiography or like material to give us insight into the first springs of his high character and public usefulness. He seems to leap on the arena about 1835, fullgrown and armed. But there were thirtytwo years of his life before that; and if too little is known of these years, still the little we are able to glean is suggestive. The home out of which he came was a model of order and comfort, bright with Christian cheerfulness, and distinguished for hospitality. The circumstances of his father, a farmer and brewer at St. Ninian's, near Stirling, were such that he was not pinched in his school and college course; and to both parents he owed what money cannot buy. The father is described to us by a survivor who knew him well as "a man of superior intelligence and Christian principle, a thorough gentleman, and possessed of extensive information." His mother was a person of very devoted piety, and had set her heart on it that one of her eight sons should study for the ministry; but to her great disappointment the four oldest chose mercantile pursuits. She prayed over the matter often and fervently; and at length her sixth son, Robert, early distinguished by his superior scholarship, was induced to go to the university. After a year or two of study, Robert began to shrink from the serious responsibility of the minister's office, and was disposed to become a lawyer. His mother,

however, reasoned with him and prayed for him, and the desire of her heart was granted at last. When his parents removed to Glasgow in 1837, their son was already a man of mark in the Church and in the city. It is good for us to discover this, and to think of that good old lady's prayers and counsels in the light of the Home in which so many mothers, since Monica and before her, have met their sons, where there are no differences causing pain, where the imperishable fruits of a good conscience and a pure heart multiply in the sun of the Saviour's face.

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In January, 1827, Mr. Buchanan entered on the charge of Gargunnock, a parish in Stirlingshire. Three years later he was removed to Salton, in Midlothian. In 1833 he became minister of the Tron parish in Glasgow, and remained a minister in that city for forty-two years. He was somewhat of an athlete, and there is a tradition of his once swimming the Forth at Gargunnock to bring over a boat from the farther side-a tradition which those can well believe who have read his "Clerical Furlough," or who have seen him, when over sixty-five years of age, erect and bright in his place as teller at the close of an Assembly debate long after midnight, when younger men were limp and yawning. This vigorous habit of body, preserved by temperance and plenty of exercise, was of no small account to the end of life. He was an early riser, too, getting through a large amount of work before breakfast. At Salton he enjoyed a special opportunity. One of his predecessors in that parish was no less a person than Bishop Burnet, who bequeathed his library for the use of the minister and five pounds a year to add to the stock; and to the eager use he made of this opportunity may be traced both the wide general scholarship and the thorough acquaintance with Church history which stood the Buchanan of later days in so good. stead. His remarkable faculty of storing all his information, however minute, in order ready for instant use on any occasion, began thus early to attract the notice of his friends. At the same time he was as busy outside his study as in it: he visited assiduously, organized parish machinery, and set up Sunday schools, taught by himself. So that the man who went to Glasgow in 1833, having then just entered on his thirty-second year, went with a head well furnished, with habits of hard working formed, and with a character fairly earned both for ability and earnestness.

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not fewer than 40,000 persons, of an age to attend public worship, who are living in entire estrangement from the Gospel, in a state of practical heathenism, painfully demonstrates the danger of leaving entirely to private benevolence to supply the poor and working classes with moral and religious instruction."

The ten years' conflict, of which he has written the history, was at this time beginning, and he was in the thick of it all through; but, notwithstanding all the demands made by it on brain and nerve, he did not allow himself to be diverted from his chief work-the spiritual care of his parish. His memory is kept fresh, as we

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happen to know, in the hearts of some now far away from Glasgow, by the fact that, after returning late from a fatiguing day's work in Edinburgh just before the disruption, he would not go home till he had visited one of his elders on his death-bed. An interesting example, too, of how his tact and his zeal went hand in hand, is still remembered by some who were then working with him. A meeting was held with a view to increasing Sunday schools in the Tron parish, at which it was proposed to enlist the aid of ladies. To this proposal noisy objection was beginning to be made, when Dr. Buchanan adroitly

got the discussion turned into another channel, and next Sabbath settled the question by a sermon on "Phoebe our sister."

The splendid enthusiasm with which, fifteen years later, he carried forward to success a large missionary work in the Wynds, had its origin in the hold taken on his heart thus early by the miserable condition of thousands of his parishioners; and it is simply true, as it is certainly instructive and pleasant, to say that all the stern and manly fighting before the disruption was but an episode subordinate to the cherished purpose of his life. Indeed, those things around which the

struggle afterwards gathered were originally things about which good men were heartily agreed. The fight seemed to be, and really was at first, against common enemiesignorance, vice, and irreligion-and Dr. Buchanan threw himself heart and soul into efforts to promote education and to relieve the alarming spiritual destitution of the masses The motto on the city arms, "Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word," was always on his lips. His own parish, a parallelogram clean cut out of the heart of Glasgow, having the Clyde on the south and the roaring tide of traffic on the north, contained in its centre the narrowest and vilest slums, called "wynds," through which a stranger would not care to walk without the company of a policeman, but in which the minister was always safe, as a known friend. Often have we seen his stately figure emerge from closes in the Saltmarket and Trongate, rarely entered by the respectable portion of the population. While doing fully the work needed for his large congregation and performing yeoman's service in behalf of the new church he had done so much to form, he was also making attempts to work in these "wynds"; his heart was in them, and whenever the conflict was over he turned eagerly to hard resolute labour there of a sort which those only undertake who have large hearts and supreme convictions. So early as November of 1843 he opened his first school in the Bridgegate; and there he worked steadily for seven years, until he had succeeded in gathering around the Lord's table more than a hundred persons, carefully examined by himself, to whom the very name of the Saviour had been lately unknown. Only then, when he had demonstrated the power of Christian influences to raise up the most degraded, did he blow the trumpet and call his fellow-citizens of all denominations to a levy en masse against the portentous spread of ignorance and vice; and in no other part of his career were his great wisdom and the single-eyed nobility of his character more conspicuous. If popular applause, if the large interests of churchmanship, if the delights of literature, if even a large measure of success in the ordinary work of a Christian minister, could have satisfied the ambition of his heart, Dr. Buchanan had all these; but he chose to toil on in patient and irksome attempts to solve the problem whether education and the Gospel could restore the lapsed masses of a great city, and could impart to the worst men and women that self-respect and that

hope of immortality which form the common heritage of every Christian. And his reward was in proportion to his self-denying toil. In 1850 he began to speak, trumpet-tongued, to his fellow-citizens about the great social problem. The man whose most prominent feature was calm dignity, took the public by surprise with bursts of passionate enthusiasm in speeches and printed appeals. Large funds were gathered; churches and schools were planted in the most needy districts; and a quarter of a century ago the young men of Glasgow University might find, as more than one did find, impulses of the best kind by going to the top of the High Street, where Norman Macleod was filling the Barony Church with audiences of working men in their every-day moleskins, or down into the heart of the "wynds," where a new church and an eager congregation of publicans and sinners proved the thoroughness of Robert Buchanan's philanthropy. The following words in his "Second Appeal" reveal to us the secret of what we have ventured to call his splendid enthusiasm :—

"I did my best to sustain the shock of cold water which, when I went forth to solicit subscriptions, was discharged in pailfuls upon me, and to remove the wet blankets which, one after another, were thrown upon the scheme. At one time, indeed, I did feel so chilled and disheartened that I would almost have been tempted to abandon the enterprise in despair, had it not been for a short sentence which I met with

in the Bible, and which struck on my ear with all the force and solemnity of a message from God. I had been thinking of that striking passage in the book of Proverbs-If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be doth not He that pondereth the heart consider it? slain; if thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; and He that keepeth thy soul, doth not He know it? and shall not He render to every man according to his works?' I had been thinking, say, on these pregnant words-words so terribly descriptive of the condition, spiritually considered, of the sunken and degraded masses of our city population, so suggestive of the worthless excuses which men make for their own selfish apathy in the midst of such evils, and so full these hollow excuses are pleaded. Wishing to see of warning and withering rebuke to those by whom the connection in which the passage stands, I turned up the place and found, immediately preceding it, this pungent saying, 'If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.' Why should Í, or any one, expect that a work so great is to be accomplished without a struggle? Nothing really important to mankind was ever achieved save at the expense both of trials and of toil. From that moment I became blind to difficulties, and deaf to opposition."

Going forward in this spirit, Dr. Buchanan lived to see four large churches, with about five thousand members in them, sprung from the handful of corn sown in the "wynds." The remorseless plough of the railway has been run over the site of the original church, and

the population of the district has been reduced to a fifth of what it was; but these sheaves remain, feeding many, and shedding multitudinous seed.

To show how this enthusiasm remained fresh and strong to the last, we may quote a sentence from a private letter, written in October of 1871:

"For myself, I have been ruminating over a movement which has been gradually taking shape in my mind, and in which I hope to break ground within a few weeks. I want to set agoing a fresh work of church extension in this rapidily growing city. A good many things have been done of late to arrest attention on the moral and social evils which are gathering ominously on the ground floor of society around us. The time, as it seems to me, is favour able for making an effort to reach and remove at least some of these. The French Commune, the International League, the incessant conflicts between capital and labour, are awakening anxieties in even secular minds, while, on the other hand, the revelations which are being daily made of the drunken and degraded condition in which thousands are living and dying, are filling Christian hearts with deeper longings for such a deliverance for those wretched victims of vice and ignorance as the Gospel alone can bring. For this work we shall want a great deal of money and a great deal of self-denying labour; and in order to do this we shall have special need of times of reviving from above."

Many who knew the stately churchman might think him the last person in the world to be found in what is called a "revival" meeting; yet no man took a more hearty and wise interest in those remarkable spiritual movements which from time to time sweep over the face of our larger populations. I have a lively recollection of an interview in 1860, for the purpose of giving him information about such a movement in a part of the country with which I happened to be connected, and of the mingling of dexterity and devoutness that appeared in his questions. And in March of 1874, just a year before his death, having occasion to write me about a matter not of public interest, he thus referred at the close of his letter to the religious excitement pervading Glasgow at that time: "I really have not time to write anything sufficiently detailed on the subject of the great work of grace going on in this city. It is very real, and is penetrating deep into society, and taking hold of many in all classes, high and low."

In other ways besides this highest way his zeal for the public good showed itself. It deserves to be known that the idea of Penny Savings Banks, as distinguished from those in which the lowest deposit was a shilling, originated with Dr. Buchanan in 1850. He was a member of the University

Council and of the School Board, his services in both being unusually full and acceptable to men of all classes. The following highly characteristic note from Norman Macleod, written in 1864, with reference to a presentation of four thousand guineas, which Dr. Buchanan had received, will indicate the esteem in which he was held by the best of those who differed from him on points of ecclesiastical polity:

ignorant of the noble and generous gift which had "When I met you in the street on Monday, I was been presented to you, or I would certainly have expressed my sympathy with you on such an occasion. No man deserves better of your Church than you. The old establishment made you, and others of a like stamp; and it will bother either Free or U. P. to produce anything better."

Both friends, alas! have gone from us. Their funerals were the most striking spectacles of the kind Glasgow has witnessed in the memory of the living, and thousands of the same persons, poor as well as rich, mourned at both.

Under Dr. Buchanan's stately manner, there beat a very true and warm heart. He took deep personal interest in young men, and put himself to much trouble to promote their welfare, doing all in a most quiet, unobtrusive, kindly way. Friends found in him a wise and trusty counsellor in every matter of difficulty; and he not only gave them the benefit of his sagacity and experience, but helped them to the utmost of his power with rare delicacy and genuine good will. It is too early yet for much to be known of what he was in the sacred circle of home; of how, without effort, he enlisted the full sympathy of all about him there in his public work; of how passionately he was loved and honoured in return for the strong love he gave.

Deep, genuine, growing piety was the mainspring of Dr. Buchanan's life; and, because it was genuine and grew, it brought with it, as the years went on, intenser zeal and widening sympathies. For ten out of the last twelve years of his life, his energies were bent towards promoting union among the non-established Presbyterian Churches of Scotland. We who heard him will not soon forget the profound sadness with which, when he had to announce that negotiations for that end must be indefinitely suspended, he said, "I have lived too long when I have lived to see this day."

Dr. Buchanan was fond of the sea, and enjoyed three or four yachting tours of considerable length. When men were talking of

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