Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/286

234 coast clear. He had caught the porter, and saved his own bones. The fastidious object of his sketch forms a conspicuous figure in the group of the "Street Auctioneer."

The mirthful spirit of the artist, which drew him so powerfully to congenial subjects, was not confined to drawing; it found vent also in buoyant mimicry, in which he could act the droll characters of his daily search, as well as draw them. In this way, though deprived of the power of utterance, he could deliver jokes that set the company in a roar. It is gratifying also to add, that with all this mirthfulness there was a soundness of moral principle and depth of religious feeling within him that aimed at nobler ends than the harmless amusement of society. From infancy he had received a religious education, and it was all the more endeared to him, perhaps, from the difficulty which he must have found in acquiring those spiritual ideas of which he saw so few visible symbols. Sacred and sincere, indeed, must be the devotion of the deaf and dumb! He was also eager to impart what he had learned, and therefore, with two friends under the same bereavement as himself, he established a religious meeting of the deaf and dumb, to whom, on the Sabbaths, he preached and expounded by signs. After Geikie's death this interesting congregation was kept up by a worthy successor, who, we believe, still continues the good work which the artist so laudably commenced. After an uninterrupted course of good health, a short illness of a few days occurred, under which Geikie died, on the 1st of August, 1837. He was buried in the Greyfriars' church-yard. Of his productions it is unnecessary to enter into farther analysis, as these, ninety-four in number, illustrative of Scottish character and scenery, have been published in one volume, and are familiarly known to almost every class. They are also accompanied with explanations, and a biographical introduction by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, from which the foregoing facts have been chiefly derived.

.—This amiable poet of domestic life, and popular song-writer, was born in Dunfermline, Fifeshire, on the 7th of July, 1708, and was the second of three sons. His father was a man of respectable condition, according to the reckoning of the times in provincial towns, for he was a master weaver, and kept several looms in full employment. His mother, who died in 1844, was justly characterized as "a woman of high intellectual powers, and one who, belonging to the middle classes of society, was distinguished by high literary acquirements, united to a modesty that rather fostered the talents of others than exhibited her own." Can we easily imagine a poet of good, current, lasting songs, born in a loftier position, or independent of such a maternity? Like most bards, and especially of this particular class, Robert Gilfillan's natural tendency was called forth in early life, under the pressure of a stirring public impulse. While still a boy, he had joined a group of urchins like himself, to make merry during the Christmas holidays with the sport of guising, or guisarding—an old Saxon revel, scarcely yet disused in Scotland, but which is now generally supplanted by the drawing-room amusement of charades; and while employed in this merry street masquerade, instead of confining himself to the hundred-year-old hackneyed stanzas about Alexander the Great and Galatian, he chanted a song of his own composition on the death of Sir Ralph Abercromby, at that time a recent event, and by which the sympathies of every cottage in Scotland had been roused into full native vigour. Young Gilfillan on this occasion received more than the usual poet's meed of pence and praise from the goodwives of Dunfermline, who listened at their doors in silent admiration.