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                           _HORAE SUBSECIVAE._


    "_A lady, resident in Devonshire, going into one of her parlors,
    discovered a young ass, who had found his way into the room, and
    carefully closed the door upon himself. He had evidently not
    been long in this situation before he had nibbled a part of
    Cicero's Orations, and eaten nearly all the index of a folio
    edition of Seneca in Latin, a large part of a volume of La
    Bruyere's Maxims in French, and several pages of Cecilia. He
    had done no other mischief whatever, and not a vestige remained
    of the leaves that he had devoured._"--PIERCE EGAN.

    "_The treatment of the illustrious dead by the quick, often
    reminds me of the gravedigger in Hamlet, and the skull of poor
    defunct Yorick._"--W. H. B.

    "_Multi ad sapientiam pervenire potuissent, nisi se jam
    pervenisse putassent._"

    "_There's nothing so amusing as human nature, but then you must
    have some one to laugh with._"




                              SPARE HOURS



                          BY JOHN BROWN, M. D.



    If thou be a severe sour-complexioned man, then I here disallow
    thee to be a competent judge.--IZAAK WALTON



                                 BOSTON
                           TICKNOR AND FIELDS
                                  1864



       Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by
                          TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
          In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the
                       District of Massachusetts



                         RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
               STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON




NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.


The author of "Rab and his Friends" scarcely needs an introduction to
American readers. By this time many have learned to agree with a writer
in the "North British Review" that "Rab" is, all things considered, the
most perfect prose narrative since Lamb's "Rosamond Gray."

A new world of doctors, clergymen, shepherds, and carriers is revealed
in the writings of this cheerful Edinburgh scholar, who always brings
genuine human feeling, strong sense, and fine genius to the composition
of his papers. Dogs he loves with an enthusiasm to be found nowhere else
in canine literature. He knows intimately all a cur means when he winks
his eye or wags his tail, so that the whole barking race,--terrier,
mastiff, spaniel, and the rest,--finds in him an affectionate and
interested friend. His genial motto seems to run thus--"I cannot
understand that morality which excludes animals from human sympathy, or
releases man from the debt and obligation he owes to them."

With the author's consent we have rejected from his two series of "Horae
Subsecivae" the articles on strictly professional subjects, and have
collected into this volume the rest of his admirable papers in that
work. The title, "Spare Hours," is also adopted with the author's
sanction.

Dr. Brown is an eminent practising physician in Edinburgh, with small
leisure for literary composition, but no one has stronger claims to be
ranked among the purest and best writers of our day.

_BOSTON, December 1861._




CONTENTS.


  RAB AND HIS FRIENDS
  "WITH BRAINS, SIR"
  THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN
  HER LAST HALF-CROWN
  OUR DOGS
  QUEEN MARY'S CHILD-GARDEN
  PRESENCE OF MIND AND HAPPY GUESSING
  MY FATHER'S MEMOIR
  MYSTIFICATIONS
  "OH, I'M WAT, WAT!"
  ARTHUR H. HALLAM
  EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES
  VAUGHAN'S POEMS
  DR. CHALMERS
  DR. GEORGE WILSON
  ST. PAUL'S THORN IN THE FLESH
  THE BLACK DWARF'S BONES
  NOTES ON ART




AUTHOR'S PREFACE.


In that delightful and provoking book, "THE DOCTOR, &c.," Southey says:
"'Prefaces,' said Charles Blount, Gent., 'Prefaces,' according to this
flippant, ill-opinioned, and unhappy man, 'ever were, and still are, but
of two sorts, let the mode and fashions vary as they please,--let the
long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff;
presbytery, popery; and popery, presbytery again,--yet still the author
keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the beginning
of his book he enters, either with a halter round his neck, submitting
himself to his readers' mercy whether he shall be hanged or no, or else,
in a huffing manner, he appears with the halter in his hand, and
threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word. This,
with the excitement of friends to his undertaking, and some few
apologies for the want of time, books, and the like, are the constant
and usual shams of all scribblers, ancient and modern.' This was not
true then," says Southey, "nor is it now." I differ from Southey, in
thinking there is some truth in both ways of wearing the halter. For
though it be neither manly nor honest to affect a voluntary humility
(which is after all, a sneaking vanity, and would soon show itself if
taken at its word), any more than it is well-bred, or seemly to put on
(for it generally is put on) the "huffing manner," both such being truly
"shams,"--there is general truth in Mr. Blount's flippancies.

Every man should know and lament (to himself) his own
shortcomings--should mourn over and mend, as he best can, the
"confusions of his wasted youth;" he should feel how ill he has put out
to usury the talent given him by the Great Taskmaster--how far he is
from being "a good and faithful servant;" and he should make this rather
understood than expressed by his manner as a writer; while at the same
time, every man should deny himself the luxury of taking his hat off to
the public, unless he has something to say, and has done his best to say
it aright; and every man should pay not less attention to the dress in
which his thoughts present themselves, than he would to that of his
person on going into company.

Bishop Butler, in his "Preface to his Sermons," in which there is
perhaps more solid living sense than in the same number of words
anywhere else after making the distinction between "obscurity" and
"perplexity and confusion of thought,"--the first being in the subject,
the others in its expression, says,--"confusion and perplexity are, in
writing, indeed without excuse, because any one may, if he pleases, know
whether he understands or sees through what he is about, and it is
unpardonable in a man to lay his thoughts before others, when he is
conscious that he himself does not know whereabouts he is, or how the
matter before him stands. _It is coming abroad in disorder, which he
ought to be dissatisfied to find himself in at home._"

There should therefore be in his Preface, as in the writer himself, two
elements. A writer should have some assurance that he has something to
say, and this assurance should, in the true sense, not the Milesian, be
modest.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have to apologize for bringing in "Rab and his Friends." I did so,
remembering well the good I got then, as a man and as a doctor. It let
me see down into the depths of our common nature, and feel the strong
and gentle touch that we all need, and never forget, which makes the
world kin; and it gave me an opportunity of introducing, in a way which
he cannot dislike, for he knows it is simply true, my old master and
friend, Professor Syme, whose indenture I am thankful I possess, and
whose first wheels I delight in thinking my apprentice-fee purchased,
thirty years ago. I remember as if it were yesterday, his giving me the
first drive across the west shoulder of Corstorphine Hill. On starting,
he said, "John, we'll do one thing at a time, and there will be no
talk." I sat silent and rejoicing, and can remember the very complexion
and clouds of that day and that matchless view: _Damyat_ and _Benledi_
resting couchant at the gate of the Highlands, with the huge Grampians,
_immane pecus_, crowding down into the plain.

This short and simple story shows, that here, as everywhere else,
personally, professionally, and publicly, reality is his aim and his
attainment. He is one of the men--they are all too few--who desire to be
on the side of truth more than to have truth on their side; and whose
personal and private worth are always better understood than expressed.
It has been happily said of him, that he never wastes a word, or a drop
of ink, or a drop of blood; and his is the strongest, exactest, truest,
immediatest, safest intellect, dedicated by its possessor to the
surgical cure of mankind, I have ever yet met with. He will, I firmly
believe, leave an inheritance of good done, and mischief destroyed, of
truth in theory and in practice established, and of error in the same
exposed and ended, such as no one since John Hunter has been gifted to
bequeath to his fellow-men. As an instrument for discovering truth, I
have never seen his perspicacity equalled; his mental eye is
_achromatic_, and admits into the judging mind a pure white light, and
records an undisturbed, uncolored image, undiminished and unenlarged in
its passage; and he has the moral power, courage, and conscience, to use
and devote such an inestimable instrument aright. I need hardly add,
that the story of "Rab and his Friends" is in all essentials strictly
matter of fact.

There is an odd sort of point, if it can be called a point, on which I
would fain say something--and that is an occasional outbreak of sudden,
and it may be felt, untimely humorousness. I plead guilty to this,
sensible of the tendency in me of the merely ludicrous to intrude, and
to insist on being attended to, and expressed: it is perhaps too much
the way with all of us now-a-days, to be forever joking. _Mr. Punch_, to
whom we take off our hats, grateful for his innocent and honest fun,
especially in his Leech, leads the way; and our two great novelists,
Thackeray and Dickens, the first especially, are, in the deepest and
highest sense, essentially humorists,--the best, nay, indeed the almost
only good thing in the latter, being his broad and wild fun; Swiveller,
and the Dodger, and Sam Weller, and Miggs, are more impressive far to my
taste than the melo-dramatic, utterly unreal Dombey, or his strumous and
hysterical son, or than all the later dreary trash of "Bleak House," &c.

My excuse is, that these papers are really what they profess to be, done
at bye-hours. _Dulce est desipere_, when in its fit place and time.
Moreover, let me tell my young doctor friends, that a cheerful face, and
step, and neckcloth, and button-hole, and an occasional hearty and
kindly joke, a power of executing and setting agoing a good laugh, are
stock in our trade not to be despised. The merry heart does good like a
medicine. Your pompous man, and your selfish man, don't laugh much, or
care for laughter; it discomposes the fixed grandeur of the one, and has
little room in the heart of the other, who is literally self-contained.
My Edinburgh readers will recall many excellent jokes of their
doctors--"Lang Sandie Wood," Dr. Henry Davidson our _Guy Patin_ and
better, &c.

I may give an instance, when a joke was more and better than itself. A
comely young wife, the "cynosure" of her circle, was in bed, apparently
dying from swelling and inflammation of the throat, an inaccessible
abscess stopping the way; she could swallow nothing; everything had been
tried. Her friends were standing round her bed in misery and
help