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periences, afterwards to be noted, when the wind began to veer with regard to his engagement. A faint favouring breeze arose; several members of the Wyld family criticised unfavourably the attitude at Gilston, and spoke on behalf of the Professor, openly taking his part. Events were conspiring for him. It could no longer be gainsaid that he held the Chair of Humanity in Aberdeen and filled it with honour. Mr Wyld's heart was softening towards his daughter, whose presence he missed, and whose strength of purpose he began to realise. Friends on all sides upheld her conduct, and censured the opposition to so fitting a marriage. It was evident that no unreasonable wrath would frighten Eliza Wyld into a cowardly renunciation. She meant to stand by the man who loved her, whose intellect and aspiring career she esteemed far above the comforts of Gilston.

Had it been possible, John Blackie would have come to marry her in Edinburgh; but his salary was not to fall due till January, and the fees were in arrears, many of the students not paying till the session was near its close. Not till April could the little house be fully arrayed to greet his bride, and he had settled to marry her in that month,-in Edinburgh, if there was no relenting; at her home, if Mr Wyld permitted.

In the meantime he was occupied with making every kind of experiment in teaching which should rouse the interest of his "boys." He was translating Horace's Odes into blank verse-a version which he never published, but the interest of which animated his work at the College. "Man is a singing animal," he said, and to rouse up every available faculty in his class he took to poring, till long past midnight, over "unintelligible erudition about old Greek music." revive the classic union of verse with melody, he spent hours in wedding Horace's Odes to musical measure, and in Spohr's 'Faust' and

Το

Maggie Lauder" found airs that consorted with their rhythm. Appealing to both ear and eye, he covered the class-room walls with diagrams, drawn by himself. He wrote: "I seek to put modern blood and life into these dry old formulas." The task was hard, and many of those dull young Aberdonians must have remained stony ground, in spite of all his vigorous delving and harrowing; but a few gave way, and he recorded:

I have some half-a-dozen very fine lads, with whom, I think, I have succeeded in setting their souls astir. We have eight of them to breakfast every Saturday morning.

It was no easy matter to keep order in a class

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of boys fresh from the grammar-school, where they had submitted to the harsh discipline of the tawse, and were too rough and unmannerly to understand the kindly humour of the new Professor. He began by taking them for students and treating them as intelligently anxious to work, and was sore put to it to reduce the noisy crew to submission when, mistaking his gentleness for weakness, they asserted their natural savagery in daily disturbances. He had recourse to his only defensive weapon, fines sternly imposed, and so kept moderate whip-hold of the team. Dr Forbes White tells us in Alma Mater' :

By his good nature and by his cutting wit he soon mastered the turbulent element, and by my year '43-'44, an easy, natural good behaviour was the rule. He was loved, and this love got him respect. He was of course fond of jokes and of extreme statements which caused a laugh, but the class went on sweetly and merrily, busily at work, perfectly under control,-a class entirely different from any other in the ease of its manner.

He found his rooms in Dee Street very small; they cramped the march to which he beat his thoughts into language. His maid-servant, too, neglected her duties; he needed a wise manager

at home.

The Professors were bending from their first

formality, and called upon him. They were not interesting, and it is to be feared that he did not sun himself in their condescension. He excepted Professor Lizars from the "catalogue of nobodies," and Mr Brown, the Professor of Greek, who was "jovial and liked a joke, and was by no means at fault in his particular line."

He managed to visit Edinburgh for three days of the Christmas week, and spent them with his friends, seeing much of his promised wife, and growing more aware of her delight in all things lovely and of good report. He found her brave and cheerful, speaking tenderly of her father, but resolved to abide by her lover. He wrote to her after his return more frequently, and if possible more devotedly, than ever. She was reading Wordsworth and Coleridge with full sympathy, and her pleasure in their poetry drew from him a characteristic acknowledgment:

Poetry is my religion, my all. I love the Gospel of the blessed Jesus, because it is instinct in every line with the poetry of emotion and of conduct. It is the beautiful, the devoted in conduct, to which I cling.

It was on the 25th of January 1842 that he gave his first public and popular lecture. The movement for popular lectures had just begun, and John Blackie threw himself into it with vigour, the first Professor in Scotland who did

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SO. His audience was large, and the subject"The Principles of Poetry and the Fine Arts" -had the advantage of being new to the Aberdonians. He wrote to Eliza Wyld on the following day :

My lecture last night, so far as I could read its reception myself, and was informed by others, was a decided hit. There's for you! Platonism preached to the hard granite ears of Aberdeen, and with applause! I am a little proud of the achievement. And such an audience, overflowing! Three cheers for the little Professor! Hurrah! The ladies are now most mathematically convinced that the difference between the estimation in which they are held here, and that which is enjoyed by the Hottentot Venus, depends not on association and capricious taste, but on eternal, immutable, and divine laws.

In this lecture he sounded a Leitmotif, on which he dwelt with varying emphasis all his life. Indeed by this time he had chosen and proclaimed the texts on which utterance was given to him, and what other texts were left for later years were but contexts or revised readings of those.

He read this lecture, but was sensible of the "bondage of the paper," and it set him thinking upon the whole subject of public oratory.

I have been set upon a new scent this week [he wrote], and my ambition has got a new push. It was the lecture,