My father took the one at the head, and also
another much smaller, springing from the same point as his, which he
had caused to be placed there, and unrolling it, put it into my hand.
I twisted it firmly round my fingers, and awaited the result; the
burial men with their real ropes lowered the coffin, and when it
rested at the bottom it was too far down for me to see it. The grave
was made very deep, as he used afterwards to tell us, that it might
hold us all. My father first and abruptly let his cord drop, followed
by the rest. This was too much. I now saw what was meant, and held
on and fixed my fist and feet, and I believe my father had some
difficulty in forcing open my small fingers; he let the little black
cord drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its open end
disappearing in the gloom." {4}
The man who wrote this, and many another passage as true and tender,
might surely have been famous in fiction, if he had turned his powers
that way. He had imagination, humour, pathos; he was always studying and
observing life; his last volume, especially, is like a collection of
fragments that might have gone toward making a work, in some ways not
inferior to the romances of Scott. When the third volume of Essays was
published, in the spring of his last year, a reviewer, who apparently had
no personal knowledge of Dr. Brown, asked why he did not write a novel.
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