Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/406

 390 CRITICAL STUDIES get through the session. Mr. Taylor Innes says : and toothless, prelecting with the old volubility and eloquence, and with occasionally the former flash of his bright blue eye, soon fading into dulness again. I still remember his tremulous ' God bless you ! ' as the door closed for the last time. How different from that fresh and vigorous old age in which he had moved among us so royally the year before ! " In 1 85 1 he was forced to resign his professorship, after thirty years' service ; and Lord John Russell, the old Whig, hastened to secure a pension of ;^3oo a year for the stout old Tory. In the summer of 1852, although very infirm, he had himself driven to Edin- burgh from Woodburn, near Dalkeith, where he was staying with his brother Robert : " His mysterious mission to Edinburgh was to give his vote for Thomas Babington Macaulay. When he entered the com- mittee-room in St. Vincent Street, supported by his servant, a loud and long cheer was given." Macaulay heartily responded to this magnanimity. As Wilson wrote on another occasion : " The animosities are mortal, but the humanities Uye for ever." In his later years, he and Patrick Robertson had many a pleasant evening with Jeffrey, Cockburn, and Ruther- furd. On the ist of April, 1854, he was stricken with paralysis of one side ; and as the clock sounded midnight on the 3rd he breathed his last. He was buried in the Dean Cemetery, " where now repose a goodly company of men whose names will not soon die — Jeffrey, Cockburn, Rutherfurd, Thomas Thom- son, Edward Forbes, David Scott, John Wilson, and his well-loved brother James." It was soon resolved
 * The old lion sat in his arm-chair, yellow-maned