we do with the intellectual and moral growth of the soul, and to remember with the pious George Herbert, how "The man that looks on glass On it may stay his eye; Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, There are few more perfect systems of gymnastic for mind and body than the game of golf. This noble Bell's father was a barber in the city. profession has dwindled much since the time when Henry VIII. presented a charter to the barber-surgeons of his day. The schism which is the fate of human things, and which, on one side, is nowadays dignified with the title of "division of labour" (whereas it should be called monotony and restriction of labour), has overtaken the barber-surgeon. The surgeons have gone inside the head, have penetrated into the inner secrets of the human body; the barbers have been content to remain outside. Alexander Bell was, however, far more than an ordinary barber of the present day. His was an architectonic calling: he did not cut hair, he built hair. He was often to be met in South Street-the wide, tree-lined, and majestic street which stretches from the West Port to the Priory, and worthily the pride of St Andrews-carrying on each hand an elaborate and highly dressed wig, carefully apart, so that no collision might disarrange their form or dispel their powder. This was in the morning: and, after fitting one professor with his wig, he would sit down and breakfast with him, and then away to another professor with his wig, and he would sit down and breakfast with him," his appetite" says Southey, "like his mouth" (and his mind also) "being of remarkable and well-known capacity." This extensive appetite, which was moral as well as physical, his son Andrew seems to have inherited. Alexander Bell belonged to what is known as the higher classes. He and his wife were the first persons in the city to introduce the drinking of tea, they possessed a tea-service of china; he was himself bailie of the city (and in that capacity at one time put down a furious meal-mob by his own personal weight); and he was in the habit of assisting Dr Walker, the professor of natural philosophy, in the preparation of his experiments. Dr Bell was descended, on the mother's side, from a Captain Cavalie, of the Horse Grenadier Guards, who came over to England with William of Orange, and settled in St Andrews as a wine merchant. His mother had in her blood a strain of insanity, which in later years developed itself into mania and suicide. Andrew was the second son. At the age of four some friend gave the little boy a penny, upon receiving which he seized on one of his brother's books, set off to school, and offered his penny as his quarter's fee. Those were the days when a large part of school education consisted of flogging, and by far the greater majority of teachers believed and acted upon the dogma, "Nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu." They were as thorough enemies of the a priori as Locke himself: it was the contrary method they preferred and employed; it was the other end of a child's being to which they appealed. Dr Bell himself used to say, "I never went to school without trembling. I could not tell whether I should be flogged or not." And Mr Southey adds: "Schools were everywhere conducted in those days upon a system of brutal severity, which never ought to have existed except when the master happened to be a man of singular humanity"-a sentence of curious and extraordinary significance. Little Bell did not know much, but what he knew, he knew thoroughly, and never forgot. This he achieved by not trusting to his memory-I mean to the willmemory. His verbal memory was so weak that he never could get correctly by heart a single rule in his Latin syntax, but he could apply the rule with perfect judgment. His reasoning and inquiring powers were always active and at work; and, while still a child, he wrote a little book of arithmetic for himself. He left school with a fair knowledge of Latin, and no Greek. In the year 1769, Andrew Bell, then at the age of sixteen, was matriculated as a student of the United College of St Salvator and St Leonard's. Though the youngest pupil in the mathematical class, he rose to be the head of it; and he also distinguished himself in several other classes in his college. He eked out the bursary he held, and his other scanty resources, by private teaching. He was ready to teach anything at a few hours' notice, for he could always, as he said, prepare over-night for the lesson of the next day; and thus what he had to teach he acquired as he went along. So simple is the art of teaching, so near does it lie to every man who chooses to take it up. I remember meeting in Washington the head of a famous American college for ladies, who assured me she "could teach anything, if she had the books." Of all his studies, mathematics and natural philosophy were his favourites, and in the latter he even rose to the stage of original inquiry. To this he remained true through life; and his master, Dr Wilkie, the Professor of Natural Philosophy, told him that he never knew a man fail of success in the world, if he excelled in one thing." 66 This Dr Wilkie was a remarkable man. He was a clergyman, a professor, a poet, an agriculturist of deep insight, and a political economist. He came of a family so poor that, when his father died, he had to borrow money to bury him; and so hard, that when he asked his uncle for a loan of £10 for the funeral expenses, that gentleman declined. He was never able to rid himself of a perpetual feeling and gruesome consciousness of the horrors of poverty. He used to say, “I have shaken hands with poverty up to the elbow, and I don't want to see her face ever again." In agriculture his rule was deep ploughing and plenty of manure, clean ground, and rich feeding for it. He went about the back streets of the town picking up, says Southey, dead cats, dogs, and horses, for the purpose of giving them, not decent burial, but profitable interment." He studied the qualities of different soils, gave good wages to his servants, and raised better crops than any of his neighbours. But the thoughtful man, though rewarded by nature, was overreached by his fellow-men, and he was "always cheated in the market." 66 Constantly fighting with poverty, but determined to make his own way in the world, he came to the conclusion, after long and careful thought, that the best way of promoting his interests was to write an epic poem. This would be fame, and fame was then the road to wealth. Philosophy would find few readers; theology or a volume of sermons would either have roused bitter suspicion, or have met with total neglect; a tragedy from a minister of the Kirk would have been a scandal; a novel he would have liked to write, but he could hardly found upon a novel a just claim to preferment : an epic poem-and nothing else it must be. Even when this point had been settled, there came the miseries of choice he had to look out for a subject; and he was again burdened with "the weight of too much liberty." He at length chose the Second War of Thebes as his subject, and he called his poem "The Epigoniad." While engaged in the "composition" of his epic, he tilled the ground with his own hands, gave or found employment for the poor, took care of his sisters (who would have sunk into indigence but for him), preached for neighbouring ministers-but always extempore― and pursued his own physical studies. His adviser was an old woman. Like Molière, he employed her as the test of his verses; and if any line displeased or failed to strike her, he altered, retouched, and recast it, until at length it succeeded in conquering her approbation. This old woman, Margaret Paton, is probably the only person who ever read the whole poem. He had many other virtues and peculiarities. The potatoes he pro |