SCOTLAND.

HAVING gratified my curiosity by a sojourn of some weeks in London, I now wended my way to another old and much-cherished alma mater, Edinburgh, a metropolis which, in whatever aspect we may regard it, is perfectly unique in its character, and justly deserving of the feelings of pride inspired in the bosom of every trueborn Scotsman who rejoices in the enduring fame which the learned men of "Auld Reekie" have won for their country throughout the world.

Here I found, like the trunk of an old tree stripped of almost all its branches, the venerable John Thompson, the same professor of surgery whom I had followed when I was a pupil in that celebrated university. I received from him and his two sons, both eminent surgeons, kindnesses and attentions which I never can forget.

There appears to be something more tenacious of life in the texture and grain of the Scotch constitution than in that of the English. For here I found also moored in his laboratory the veteran chemist, Professor Hope, as distinguished now as he was when I followed his lectures near forty years before. He was anchored, it is true, in person to the same locality where I had left him, and where he had ever been; but, unlike those immovable and inanimate objects at whose feet the stream of time passes unnoticed and unfelt, he had been ever watchful of the progress of events, and closely sympathized with, and participated in, every scientific improvement that had taken place in the brilliant department which he teaches. Home and the younger Duncan

D

were also there, as in former days, but the eloquent voice of the accomplished Gregory was heard no more within those walls. His spirit, with that of the great and wise elder Duncan, and that of the immortal Cullen, had forever fled from that university, where admiring crowds had once gathered around them. They had gone to a better and a happier world; but they have left their virtues and their usefulness to be treasured and cherished as among the brightest pages in the annals of medicine.

Dugald Stewart, too, that monument of intellectual power, which, like some mighty pyramid or proud obelisk, peers on high over the sandy wastes of time, and whose brilliant and most profound and logical discourses I myself have so often listened to with delight, had also been gathered to his fathers, not to perish unknown among the unhonoured dead, but, in the language of our own beautiful poet, Halleck, to be registered among those

"Immortal names

That were not born to die."

Of Edinburgh it may truly be said,

"Salve Magna Parens, Frugum Saturnia Tellus

Magna virum."

VIRGIL, Georgics, lib. ii.

At Edinburgh I was not unthoughtful that I was breathing within the atmosphere that had been enchanted by her own Great Wizard of the North; that there his orb had risen to its highest splendour, and there had sunk forever to rest; leaving a rainbow arc in the wake of his renown that time itself cannot efface. I felt that, even for an American as humble as myself, it would not seem extra-professional to make a pilgrimage to the yet green turf of the grave of that inspired genius, who, like his great prototype Shakspeare, has portrayed with

such truth the alchemy of the mind and the anatomy of the passions. I accordingly repaired to Abbotsford within a year after his death, and visited his mansion, which, though it knew him no more - its armour-garnished walls and his favourite library were all there his very vestments hanging round-and that Gothic door, which he has immortalized in story, unchanged and undisturbed, yet did they everywhere seem to impart a balmy fragrance, redolent, in every relic and in every antique gem that stood out from the tracery, of the blameless life and consummate witchery of the great master who had here, from his own throne, wielded his magic wand with such stupendous power.

I visited also, near Abbotsford, that exquisite ruin, Melrose Abbey; and when one evening I was there, and beholding the moon shining through its windows, I was forcibly reminded of those well-known beautiful lines, where the author of Ivanhoe thus speaks:

"If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright,

Go visit it by the pale moonlight;

For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild but to flout the ruins gray. ??

From thence we proceeded a little farther on to Dryburg Abbey, where all that there is of mortal or earthly of the great bard and dramatist, reposes beside his father, and mother, and daughter beneath a plain and unadorned tomb, in one of the cloisters of that sacred ruin, that he so often visited and admired, and had himself selected for his last resting-place.

"That a poet and a novelist should have chosen the shades and ruins of Dryburg for his monument, I am not in the least surprised. They are extensive and romantic beyond my feeble powers of description. The peaceful solemnity of the Abbey forbids even the most idle and trifling to forget that its crumbling walls are to

the living a memento mori, and the ivy which clings so tenaciously to its time-worn arches, like the Christian's hope, outliving the vigour of youth, and cheering even death's portals with its bright expectation of a green eternity."*

Before I part with Scotland, I owe it to surgery to pay a passing tribute to the memory of one whom I well recollect while I was a pupil in Edinburgh, and whom, in after years, my more mature judgment has ranked as one of the most Herculean minds that has ever appeared in any country. I mean John Bell, whose name is still fondly and justly cherished, both by the preceptor and pupil, as a household treasure, throughout all the varied walks, the elementary paths, as well as the most intricate mazes of anatomy and surgery. The boldness and originality of his conceptions and execution in both those departments; his wonderful erudition and his peculiar felicity and terseness of style, his writings alone, in fact, surpassing in graphic power and elegant diction any other compositions in the whole range of medical literature; his rare genius, communicating a charm to everything he touched, not only through his pen, but .also his pencil, for he was an accomplished limner, combined traits of character that threw a halo and flood of light over the schools of Edinburgh, that was not limited by the Tweed or the Thames, but shed its effulgence through all distant lands where the healing art is known.

But though the source of that light, not the radiance that emanated from it, is now forever extinguished, his illustrious brother, Sir Charles Bell, still lives to hallow his memory and to perpetuate his fame. Consociated with him in all the great works on which they laboured together during life, he survives after the premature

* Extract from a MS. Journal of Mrs. V. Mott.

death of that brother, to whose grave in a foreign land [Italy]' he recently made a pilgrimage, and will prolong by his own individual achievements that lustre which

will forever adorn this revered name. It may be said truly of Sir Charles Bell, that his physiological and pathological inquiries into the anatomy of the brain and nerves have, like those of Sir John Herschel in the mechanism of the heavens, penetrated farther than those of any other savant, and opened an entire new world to our observation, that promises to revolutionize many of the received opinions in medicine, and overturn, or, rather, subjugate to the control of his newly-propounded theory of the hitherto mysterious functions of the sensific and motific powers, not only the humoral, but other reigning hypotheses.

Sir Charles, in the declining years of his life, felt that his happiness would be most consulted by leaving the great metropolis of England, which he had chosen for some years as his residence; and returning once more, and for the last time, to the land of his fathers, and to his favourite city, Edinburgh, he was there immediately chosen to the professorship of surgery in the University, which chair he continues to fill with distinguished honour and usefulness as one of the ablest teachers of the age.