Was born a minister’s son, at Campbeltown, Argyllshire, June 3, 1812. He attended Glasgow University, and was minister of London 1838–43, Dalkeith 1843–45, and the Barony Church, Glasgow, from 1851 till his death, June 16, 1872. He was made a Queen’s Chaplain in 1857, and D.D. in 1858. An utterance of his on the Sabbath question in 1865 created much controversy. In 1869 he was moderator of the General Assembly. He visited Canada in 1845, Palestine in 1864–65, and India in 1867. From 1860 till 1872 he edited Good Words, contributing tales, essays, verses, sermons. In book-form he published “The Earnest Student” (1854), “Daily Meditations” (1861), “The Old Lieutenant” (1862), “Parish Papers” (1862), “Wee Davie” (1864), “Eastward” (1866), “Reminiscences of a Highland Parish” (his grandfather’s parish of Morven, 1867), “The Starling” (1867), and “Peeps at the Far East” (1871). See “Memoir” by the Rev. Donald Macleod (1876).

  The Queen hardly knows how to begin a letter to Mr. Donald Macleod, so deep and strong are her feelings on this most sad and most painful occasion—for words are all too weak to say what she feels, and what all must feel who ever knew his beloved, excellent, and highly gifted brother, Dr. Norman Macleod! First of all, to his family—his venerable, loved, and honoured mother, his wife and large family of children—the loss of this good man is irreparable and overwhelming! But it is an irreparable public loss, and the Queen feels this deeply. To herself personally, the loss of dear Dr. Macleod is a very great one; he was so kind, and on all occasions showed her such warm sympathy, and in the early days of her great sorrow, gave the Queen so much comfort whenever she saw him, that she always looked forward eagerly to those occasions when she saw him here; and she cannot realise the idea that in this world she is never to see his kind face, and listen to those admirable discourses which did every one good, and to his charming conversation again!

  The most manly man I ever knew, the most genial, the most many-sided, and yet the least angular…. Norman Macleod was no mere paper and pulpit and platform good man, putting all his goodness into books and sermons and speeches. Where he was best known—known as standing the crucial test of the “dreary intercourse of daily life”—there he was most respected and beloved.

  In every circle of society in which he had ever moved—in every congregation which had crowded round his pulpit—in every public auditory which had hung on his spoken utterances or his written words—the same broad, vast, heart-stirring impression was produced, as of one who not only had within him an inexhaustible fund of pathos, of wit, of laughter, and of tears, but who feared not, nay, who loved to pour it forth for the benefit, for the enjoyment, for the instruction of his fellow-creatures. And this tender overflowing “compassion,” to use the word in its largest sense, was tinged with no weak effeminacy, no unruly fanaticism. There was a force as of his own Highland clan, there was a shrewdness as of his own Scottish nation, which no one could mistake for feebleness or folly.

  In 1851, then, being called to the Barony Church of Glasgow, he finally took up his abode there, and substantially began the real work of his life. It was about this time I first saw him, and heard him address a public meeting. In the prime of life, tall, handsome, with a singularly winning expression, he was about as splendid a human creature as one could wish to look upon. Latterly, and especially when his health began to fail, he inclined to be too portly; but in those days his robust form showed immense power of work, and the Barony was the very sphere to put it to the proof.

  His active nature did not survive its usefulness; and instead of being kept under what, to his vivid imagination, might have been the appalling consciousness of life slowly ebbing away, his spirit passed, without a struggle, into that Presence in which his thoughts and affections had long made themselves a beloved abode. The news of his death passed with extraordinary speed through the kingdom, and everywhere produced a profound impression. No man, since Chalmers, was so much mourned in Scotland. People who had never exchanged a word with him felt and spoke as if a personal friend had been taken away, and those who had deemed it their duty sometimes to oppose him even with bitterness, were the foremost to pay honour to the rich humanity and religious nobleness, which had raised him above the influence of all party strife.

  He was a wonderfully eloquent and impressive preacher: “the greatest and most convincing preacher I ever heard,” was the estimate of Sir Arthur Helps, whose opinion was worth something. The solitary one among Scotch divines who was commonly placed before him was Dr. Caird, Principal of the University of Glasgow, who for thirty years has stood without question first among Scotch preachers. Guthrie and Macleod you would bracket as equal. Still more remarkable was his power as a platform speaker. When a great meeting of people was getting very tired, through many long-winded and remarkably sensible orations, he had but to rise, and instantly attention was keen, and there was life everywhere. Norman Macleod was never dull.

  The name of Norman Macleod was a household word throughout Scotland for at least the last twenty years of his life…. His heart at sixty, while ripened by experience and grace, still retained all the natural characteristics of its boyhood…. There was no element of emotion lacking or defective in his nature; no hard, harsh, unsusceptible parts; and hence nothing was foreign to him which man could feel. A large and free joyousness was congenial to his whole constitution; yet there were fibres of feminine tenderness in his heart; and for so manly a man the tear was easily drawn to his eye. His ready sympathy with sorrow and suffering gave an immense value to his intercourse with the afflicted. It made him in many a house of mourning the “Dr. M’Gavin” of his own “Wee Davie.”

  He was a great, full-rounded, whole-souled man, and his thorough humanness was the substratum of his power. Add to that his joyous love of nature, his Celtic temperament, with its poetic susceptibility and its occasional weird out-flashings of mystic might, his devotional fervor, which, to the surprise of so many—though Dr. Flint says it was no surprise to him—came out so fully in his diary, his deep well of tender sympathy with suffering, of which his “Wee Davie” may be taken as a specimen, and his intense desire to do good to all with whom he came into contact, and you have the qualities which were most distinctive in his character.

  Macleod was one of the most notable ecclesiastics that Scotland has produced, an eloquent preacher, an earnest philanthropist, a high-minded patriot, a man of broad and catholic spirit, a writer of no mean order, and a genial friend. Several monuments were raised to his memory. His Mission Church in Glasgow was made the “Macleod Parish Church.” The Barony congregation built a “Macleod Memorial Missionary Institute” in a destitute part of the parish. A statue of him was set up in Glasgow, and the queen placed two beautiful memorial windows in Crathie Church, where he had often preached before her.

General

  He felt that he never could give to what he wrote the finish which was needed. They must be taken for what they are, the mere coruscations of a mind preoccupied and pre-engaged. It was not that he did not appreciate—no one has read a page of his writings, but must perceive this—the grandeur, and relish the enjoyment of literary labour,—but like Mahomet, gazing down, according to the legend, on the world-famous view of Damascus, he felt, “Man has but one Paradise”—each man has but one great end in life—“and mine is fixed elsewhere.” Yet, regarding his works as thus the secondary and accidental utterances of a full heart and full mind, they take no mean place in the Scottish literature of our day. The high glee of the “Song of the Curlers,” the lofty strain of “Courage, Brother!” the delightful mixture of humour and pathos in the tales of the “Starling” and “Wee Davie,” are not unworthy of the countryman of Scott and of Burns, of the Ettrick Shepherd and of Christopher North.

  In Good Words his chief contributions to literature appeared, all except his life of John Mackintosh, “The Earnest Student,” which is perhaps the most artistically finished of them all. Our readers, therefore, must be familiar with those bright sketches of nature and human nature which were among the first things the paper-cutter hurried to on the monthly appearance of the welcome brown cover. “Wee Davie,” it has been said, was his own favourite, and its exquisite pathos has, perhaps, made this the general verdict, though the humour of “Billy Buttons” shows a still finer touch, and is a fit rival to Bret Harte’s “Luck of Roaring Camp.” But I know that he reckoned “The Starling,” of all his books, the one most likely to perpetuate his name, having cost him far more labour of thought than the others. Whether he was right in this estimate the future will tell. None of his other tales are so finished…. On the whole, my favourite is “The Recollections of a Highland Parish.” It is fragmentary, but fresh, natural, and true; just the kind of work which could be best done under such conditions as were imposed upon him. But none of his books give anything like a full idea of the man’s real greatness.

  “Wee Davie” was his own favourite among his works. It was rattled off at a sitting. But he thought very little of his writings, and full of shrewd observation, lively description, and good humour, in two scenes, as they are, there can be no doubt that Norman Macleod was infinitely greater in his life than in his books.

  His writings, though lively and clever, give no idea of Norman Macleod. What he produced must be vivified by his personality. And he was so pushed and over-driven by excessive work, that he never had time to do his best with his pen.

  “Eastward” and “Peeps at the Far East” are among the most enjoyable of books of travel. But probably Dr. Macleod’s works of fiction are those of his writings which will live longest, and which even best deserve to do so. For he had in a rare degree every quality necessary to a great novelist, and in this line of literature there was no distinction which he might not have gained. The works of fiction which we have from him were rapidly composed, and were all written with a view to produce a moral and religious impression, because he thought himself entitled to write stories only if he could make them subservient and conducive to the same end as his ministry of the Gospel; and yet “Wee Davie” is an exquisite gem, “The Gold Thread,” one of the most charming of children’s books, and “The Starling” and “The Old Lieutenant and His Son” are in every way worthy of permanent fame. It is only in his works of fiction that we see fully displayed Norman Macleod’s power of representing human characters and of touching the springs alike of laughter and of tears.

  These are what to the best of my ability I can recall as the most salient of the formative forces that acted on the important period of my youth and early manhood; but I cannot close this paper without expressing my obligations, though coming somewhat later, to two evangelists of this generation with whom it was my good fortune to be on terms of intimacy—Thomas Guthrie and Norman Macleod, two men the large human breadth, the sunny cheerfulness, the strong good sense, and the dignified grace of whose preaching will remain deeply graven in every Scottish heart so long as Scotland is Scotland. To this hour I remember the strong impression made on me by the Glasgow Doctor’s “Annals of a Highland Parish,” a book replete with more of the fresh breath, vivid colouring, and stirring action of a thoroughly manly style of life than any that I know outside of Homer.

  Norman Macleod wrote little verse, and except for one stirring song would have had no title to recognition here. This song, “Trust in God,” first appeared in the Edinburgh Christian Magazine for January 1857 (a magazine edited by its author), and has since found its way into countless collections of verse.

  As a writer of fiction it is remarkable that Macleod should be forgotten, when work similar to his, only duller, is boomed over all the earth. His stories, it is true, have a set religious aim, but that should be no offence in days when the most belauded fiction is nothing if not didactic, nay, when the novel is made a pulpit for the promulgation of moral heresy. If art in fiction is to be strangled, religion may as well be the executioner as the last indecency…. Macleod purposed to write stories which should be religious, and yet do no violence to reality. And his characters are plainly genuine, except, perhaps, the hero of his first attempt—“The Old Lieutenant and his Son.”… The most prevailing quality of Macleod’s fiction is the pathos, and though one must be a Christian to feel it all, there is much that no humane reader will be able to resist. To be sure the occasion is always simple and ordinary, never such, for instance, as the elaborate decline of a consumptive scholar in his garden-chair; and the cause of these tears may be only a remark or a gesture. Under the restrictions of Good Words he could not do his best as a humorist, yet he permitted himself to be thoroughly Scottish and provoke hearty laughter. Within a modest range he displays real genius in the portrayal of character and the rendering of Scottish conversation.