Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/164

408 loud and general interest, Who is this "Modern Pythagovean? " In 1827, while Macnish was employed in these fugitive but important literary avocations, he was introduced by Mr. Black wood to Dr. Moir, ever after his fast friend, who loved him like a brother, and lived to commemorate his worth.

It was not only in prose but in verse that Macnish excelled, and had he devoted himself to the Delilah of poetry, we doubt not that he would have been still more highly distinguished in this department of intellectual excel- lence, than he was as a prose writer of essays and tales. But already the field of the Muses had been so over-trodden and be-mired, that the best of our bards had escaped from it into the more ample and diversified regions of prose Scott, Coleridge, Southey, and Moore, who were a- weary of having their kibes trode upon and grazed by the eager ambitious toes of awkward followers and imitators. Macnish, however, had been wont to express his deeper feelings in verse; and an event in 1827 called from him more than one mournful lyric of domestic sorrow. This was the death of his youngest sister, Christian, a child only ten years old, who was drowned on the banks of the Clyde near Glasgow, while crossing a plank laid athwart a small arm of the river.

The life of a man who devotes himself to the settled profession of a physician, and the peaceful occupations of authorship, presents few materials for the biographer. As a physician, indeed, we have little to say of Macnish, except that his career in this capacity was of even tenor, and was attended with a fair proportion of profit and success in his native city of Glasgow. In his literary capacity, every moment of spare time seems to have been fully occupied; and the articles which he contributed, both in prose and verse, not only to "Blackwood's Magazine," but also to Frazer's, and other less distinguished periodicals, obtained a prominent place in that species of light literature, and made the good folks of Glasgow justly proud of their fellow-citizen. These productions it is the less necessary to particularize, as they have been published in a compact volume under the editorship of his biographer, Delta. It may be merely mentioned in passing, that they are all more or less distinguished by a lively creative fancy, and chaste subdued classical style, reminding us more of the best writers of the Addison and Goldsmith periods, than the slashing, outre, and abrupt, though sparkling tales and essays that form the staple of our modern periodical writing. Among the happiest of these attempts of Macnish, we may particularly specify the "Metempsychosis," an "Execution at Paris," a "Night near Montevideo," and "A Vision of Robert Bruce." Still, Macnish might soon have been forgot by the magazine reading public, had he not established his literary reputation upon a more secure basis ; and it is by his "Anatomy of Drunkenness" and "Philosophy of Sleep," two able and substantial treatises, and his "Book of Aphorisms," that he is now best known and estimated.

The first of these works, which Macnish commenced before he had reached the age of twenty, and during his toilsome sojourn in Caithness, was the fruit of much reading and research, aided, perhaps, occasionally by the practical illustrations which he witnessed among the inhabitants of that whisky smuggling county. Afterwards, he matured it into a thesis, which he read before the Medical Faculty in 1825, when he took out his degree, and published it in 1827 in a thin octavo of fifty-six pages. The subject was comparatively an untrodden field, as hitherto the vice of drunkenness had been rather analyzed by the divine and moralist, than anatomized by the surgeon. The novelty of