John Taylor Brown

“ As it is chiefly as a writer that Brown is likely to be permanently remembered, it is only necessary to say that in his medical capacity he was remarkable for his close and accurate observation of symptoms, skill and sagacity in the treatment of his cases, and conscientious attention to his patients. It may even be said that whatever position he may be thought to have taken in literature, he was first of all a physician thoroughly devoted to his profession, and, though not writing on strictly professional subjects, yet originally diverging into authorship on what may be called medical grounds. ”

“ The only explanations which can be given perhaps are that Leighton, living very much out of the world, and being somewhat deficient in what may be called the political sense, had no idea of the deadly hatred entertained toward Episcopacy by the great mass of the religious people of Scotland, and so of its utter unfitness to become the established church polity of the country, and that his soft and gentle nature rendered him too open to the persuasions which were used to induce him to enter a sphere for which he instinctively felt he was ill qualified. ”

“ At Dunblane tradition still preserves the memory of "the good bishop," silent and companionless, pacing up and down the sloping walk by the river's bank under the beautiful west window of his cathedral. And from a letter of the earl of Lothian to his countess it appears that, whatever other reasons Leighton might have had for resigning his charge at Newbattle, the main object which he had in view was to be left to his own thoughts. It is therefore on the whole not very wonderful that he was completely misjudged and even disliked both by the Presbyterian and the Episcopal party. ”

“ Few men have in life been more generally beloved, or in death more sincerely lamented. He had a singular power of attaching both men and animals to himself, and a stranger could scarcely meet with him even once without remembering him ever afterwards with interest and affection. ”

“ When the king wrote to the council that some of the most peaceable and moderate outed ministers might have liberty to preach, and Leighton pleaded that all might have the like liberty, it was "thought that he did this of purpose to oppose and crush it." Nothing that the good man could say or do brought upon him anything but suspicion and calumny. ”

“ No writer conveys a clearer or more elevated idea both of what Christian religion is and what it is capable of in the heart of man. It was a common reproach against Leighton, as we have seen, that he had leanings towards Roman Catholicism, and perhaps this is so far true that he had formed himself in some degree upon the model of some of those saintly persons of that faith, such as Pascal and Thomas a Kempis, who had carried the spiritual life to more ethereal heights than appear to be as yet attained within the lines of Protestantism. ”

“ No one can study Leighton's works without feeling that Burnet's judgment of the man must have been the true one. We know not if anywhere, except in Holy Scripture, there is to be found so much of what seems to breathe the very breath of heaven, or to be the expression of a life quite apart from the life of this world. ”

“ Naturally unambitious, it is doubtful if, with all his wide culture and enthusiastic love of literature, he would ever, but for his love of his profession, have been induced to appear before the world as an author at all. It is observable that the whole of the first volume of ‘Horæ Subsecivæ’—perhaps, though not the most popular, yet the most substantially valuable of the whole series—is almost exclusively devoted to subjects intimately bearing on the practice of medicine. The importance of wide general culture to a physician ”

“ If Leighton did not know before, he soon began to discover the sort of men with whom he was to be associated in the episcopate. He travelled with them in the same coach from London towards Scotland, but having become, as he told Burnet, very weary of their company (as he doubted not they were of his) , and having found that they intended to make a kind of triumphal entrance into Edinburgh, he left them at Morpeth and retired to the earl of Lothian's at Newbattle. ”

“ When disgusted with the proceedings of the other bishops in "outing so many honest ministers and filling their places with insufficient and for the most part scandalous men," and intimating his wish to demit his office in consequence, he was only "pretending to be displeased." ”