AS a professional scholar of the highest attainments whom no amount of learning could make a pedant, John Stuart Blackie is one of the choicest products of nineteenth-century education. For him the Republic of Letters was a democracy. He got at the simplicities of things. The great scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who studied Homer wrote treatises for the aristocracy of learning—treatises of which they themselves were intolerably proud. As a result of their ignorance of the simple harmonies heaven uses to wake the soul of such a singer as Homer, they and their works are condemned to the limbo of the second-hand dealer’s backrooms,—a limbo from which those who do not fear learned dust may rescue them at a shilling a pound. “Take the other edition, won’t you?” begged a bookseller of a possible customer; “I can sell that one in parchment boards for $1.50, because it will look well on a library table.”

  It was to this that a masterpiece of the great Vossius had come at last! But the back shelves will never hold Blackie. He learned from Homer that the Scotch fiddle which instructed Burns in melody had in it the soul of Greek poetic art. From the studies of the great masterpieces of Greece, he learned to know and to reverence as sublime the simplicity of native art which shaped the expression of “When the Kye Comes Hame” or of “Annie Laurie.” “The man who strives must dare to err” is almost what Goethe says to decide the dispute which professional scholars have each with the theories of all the rest. Nothing need be said of Blackie’s theories as professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh, except, indeed, as they led him to write essays on the love songs of Scotland. Intrenched as he is in the affections of those who love him for his love of music, the entire Sanhedrin of great critics will not prevail against him.

  Born in Glasgow in July, 1809, he was educated at the universities of Edinburgh, Göttingen, Berlin, and Rome. From 1852 until 1882 he was professor of Greek in Edinburgh University. Among his publications of this period were metrical translations of Æschylus and of the “Iliad,” “Horæ Hellenicæ,” and “Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece.” He was by nature a poet and musician, and his best work as an essayist was inspired by his study of Scotch melody. His own lyrical poems were collected and published during his lifetime. He died in Edinburgh, March 2d, 1895.