Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/402

 386 CRITICAL STUDIES how thoroughly he did his proper work as a Professor of Moral Philosophy. This is not generally known now, and was not even at the time. There was a notion that he was there Christopher North, and nothing else; that you could get scraps of poetry, bits of sentiment, flights of fancy, flashes of genius, and anything but Moral Philosophy. Nothing was further from the truth in that year, 1850. In the very first lecture he cut into the core of the subject, raised the question that has always in this country been held to be the deepest and hardest in the science (the origin of the Moral Faculty), and hammered at it through the great part of the session. Even those who were fresh from Sir William Hamilton's class, and had a morbid appetite for swallowing hard and angular masses of logic, found that the work here was quite stiff enough for any of us. . . . His appearance in his classroom it is far easier to remember than to forget. He strode into it with the professor's gown hanging loosely on his arms, took a comprehensive look over the mob of young faces, laid down his watch so as to be out of the reach of his sledge- hammer fist, glanced at the notes of his lecture (generally written on the most wonderful scraps of paper), and then, to the bewilderment of those who had never heard him before, looked long and ear- nestly out of the north window, towards the spire of the old Tron Kirk; until, having at last got his idea, he faced round and uttered it with eye and hand, and voice, and soul, and spirit, and bore the class along with him." And, finally, Mr. John Skelton bears witness, in his Introduction to the volume which has occasioned the present article :