THE OLD TOWN. 29
and motive with the clear vision and minute anatomy of a Fielding or a
Shakespeare j and thence again to the 'large upper room' where Chalmers
was discoursing with all the vehemence of the pulpit on theism and antitheism,
Clarke, Hobbes, and Butler, and sometimes snatching up his AstrommfcaZ
Discourses and reading a passage from them with the fire and freshness
with which he had given it originally, fifteen years before, in the Tron Church
of Glasgow j and thence once more to the hall where Sir William Hamilton
was spreading out his enormous treasures of knowledge to an audience, few
if fit. It seemed almost as if Plato and Aristotle, and Chrysostom and
Copemicus, had come down from the higher spheres and alighted beside each
other !
' Such spells are past, and fled with these
The wine of life is on the lees.'
But still the College can boast of ingenious, learned, and celebrated Professors,
among whom we name, because they are best known to us, the
elastic, eloquent, eccentric, endless Blackie ; the strong, plodding, invincible
Masson ; the profound and clear-headed Tait ; the massive and erudite Flint j
not to speak of Sir Robert Christison, Sir Wyville Thomson, Hodgson,
Bdfour, Calderwood, Lister, Spence, Sellar, Geikie, and others. Let us be
permitted to step back out of the circle of the present Professors to others of
the past-to one ' clearer than the rest,' the great-souled John Goodsir, and
to the eminent Professor Sir James Y, Simpson, Bart., and also to drop a
word of sorrow as we recall the untimely fate of the late accomplished and
gifted Secretary to the University, our speciak friend the poet Alexander
Smith; and among the many in Edinburgh who do not but might grace
Professors' Chairs, let us not be accused of too much personal partiality if
we single out Dr. Hutchison Stirling, the learned and ingenious author of
The Secret of Hegeef.
Pursuing our way southward, passing the Surgeons' Hall, we reach
Nicolson Square, in the Methodist Chapel (hired for years for the use of
his' congregation) at the south-west corner of which we remember ofte-n
hearing in our early days the Rev. John Bruce, since of Free St. Andrew's
Church, holding forth with all that weird power, that fervour and originality,
*which rendered him, till the advent of Dr. Candlish, the most
attractive preacher to the intellectual classes in Edinburgh, and where
such youths as then were the late Patrick MacDougall, Professor of
Moral Philosophy, Edinburgh College, the late Dr. Eadie of Glasgow,
