Robertson Smith

“ Even the happy few who know something of the facts of the Bible will learn much from the felicitousness or the present exposition. For Mr. Robertson Smith is not only a 'full man,' but has a singular gift of making a hard subject intelligible.... He loves to blow away the mists of controversy and show the truth in all its attractive simplicity."—The Academy. ”

“ The following presentation of the theory, on the general lines of Ewald, gives that form of it which Robertson Smith was able to accept in 1876.
The centre of attraction is throughout a female figure, and the unity of this figure is the chief test of the unity of the book. In the long canto, i. 1-ii .7, the heroine appears in a royal palace (i. 4) among the daughters of Jerusalem, who are thus presumably ladies of the court of Zion. At i. 9, an additional interlocutor is introduced, who is plainly a king, and apparently Solomon (i. 9, 12) . ”

“ They gripped the spokes meekly, Smith to starboard, Jones to port, and with the aid of the shivered mizzentopsail got the ship before it, and steered—beautifully, with no sign or word from one to assist the other. Neither took charge, as is usual with two men at the wheel. Their movements were simultaneous and harmonious, with no conflicting judgments of pressure or release. They steered as one man with the strength of two; and Captain Brown glared at them awhile, then, unable to criticise, went forward among his men to secure his wabbly upper topsailyards. He tautened the braces ”

“ Smith drank deeper from the news of Jones, and went to sea further committed to the blind worship of force. Jones insanely struck the man in irons, and in a week had ironed three others whom he had goaded into mutinous resentment of his abuse. Two strong, positive souls at the opposite ends of the earth, united by the first and lowest of primordial emotions—hatred and fear—were reinforcing each other to their mutual undoing. Had the kindergarten teacher done her duty and brought them together in childhood, or had they fought it out as boys, this might have been averted. ”

“ Once 'Gene Frady tripped on a root and fell headlong, pitching his torch into the dry duff a man's length before him. There was a rush to stamp out the incipient fire, the autumn terror of the forests, before any one lent a hand to help the fallen. Robertson went half-way up his leggings in a spring, and stood swearing fiercely, while the rest jeered at him and ordered him to move on before he muddied up a good drinking-place. ”

“ Robertson the historian and Home the dramatist were now among his neighbors, and no doubt used their influence in getting the young clergyman a living. He finally settled at Inveresk, where his life was a very pleasant round of cares and duties. Hume, Adam Smith, Blair, Smollett, and Robertson now figure largely in his personal record, so that he had no lack of genial companions. Adam Smith he describes as "a very absent man in society, moving his lips, talking to himself, and smiling, in the midst of large companies." ”

“ Not satisfied with this, Mr. Robertson followed him out into the street and being joined by a Baptist minister, began to abuse "Joe Smith," calling him an impostor, etc.
"Whom do you speak of," said Elder Taylor, "I was personally acquainted with Mr. Joseph Smith; he was a gentleman, and would not treat a stranger as you do me." They still followed him, but he paid no more attention to them.
A few days after this occurrence, he received a challenge to a public discussion from the Revs. C. W. Cleeve, James Robertson and Philip Cater. ”

“ An Irishman, damned at the wheel by Jones for bad steering, was set to work in his watch below by Smith for the small matter of eating his breakfast on deck. Other resemblances of thought and action occurred, more or less unfortunate, such as both showing kindness to the sick steward until they met at his bedside, then ignoring and neglecting him; and Mr. Jones's untactful appearance with his sextant when Mr. Smith was taking the sun at midday—an uncalled-for and regrettable piece of assumption on his part; for a second mate is not shipped to navigate, no matter what his proficiency. ”

“ In the latter we possess a more historical account of the anointing of Jehu, and Robertson Smith observes: "When the history in 1 Kings represents Elijah as personally commissioned to inaugurate [the revolution] by anointing Jehu and Hazael as well as Elisha, we see that the author's design is to gather up the whole contest between Yahweh and Baal in an ideal picture of Elijah and his work" (Ency. Brit. (9) art. Kings, vol. xiv. p. 85) . ↑ Understood in Eccles. xlviii. 12 (Heb.) to mean that Elisha was twice as great as Elijah. ”

“ When Smith relieved him at midnight he, too, felt the inhibition until Jones fell asleep, when his powers revived and his watch learned his caliber. Neither man knew the cause of the change of mood. As far as they could analyze their emotions they were nervous, broody, hateful, revengeful, and cowardly, until some reluctancy or misdoing of the men roused them to righteous rage. ”

“ Each in time became a competent second mate with a growing sense of his importance; then a first mate, with a fixed and accepted reputation for "buckoism" that reached across the thousand miles of sea to the other. Smith, drinking in a saloon at Callao, heard of Black Jones's feat in quelling the Eldorado mutiny with a belaying pin and cursed him mentally in furious envy. Jones, blackguarding a man he had just ironed in the 'tween deck at sea, heard from the victim of a man who could take him down—Bully Smith, who sailed out of New York. ”

“ The Conference that had closed so recently had appointed a young man, J. T. Robertson, to be my assistant in the Rangoon English Church, so that I could give more time to the affairs of the district. He was only a probationer in the Conference, having been admitted to Conference at its recent session, and he had had no experience as a pastor. More, he had come to a strange city; but, as the case often is in our mission work, we had to take all the risks to the work and to the man, and appoint him to the untried responsibility of the pastorate of the English Church. ”

“ In 1783 Smith joined Robertson and others in founding the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Robertson had long entertained the idea of establishing a society on the model of the foreign academies for the cultivation of every branch of science, learning, and taste, and he was at length moved into action by the steps taken in 1782 by the Earl of Buchan and others to obtain a royal charter for the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, founded two years before. ”

“ If such a one says ‘I am an Athravan’ he lies, call him not Athravan, noble Zarathustra, said Ahura Mazda, but thou shouldst call him priest, noble Zarathustra, who sits awake the whole night through and yearns for holy wisdom that enables man to stand on death's bridge fearless and with happy heart, the wisdom whereby he attains the holy and glorious world of paradise. ”

“ As swift as sight, 'Gene Frady dashed close to the bole and caught the falling creature in his hands. High above the leaping dogs he held it, while they snarled, defrauded of their prey.
"Quick, that crocus sack," he called. "Ah promised the kids to bring one home. Give him a switch, Mitchell."
The 'possum, rousing from the semi-stupor into which the smoke and the shock of his fall had thrown him, was beginning to struggle violently. Robertson broke a finger-thick stick and thrust it between the snapping jaws, that clamped upon it fiercely. ”

“ It only increased the general strain, and each mate mentally cursed himself and the other for the contretemps. Next, the men observed that the pet antipathies of Mr. Smith among them received more or less of the unkind attention of Mr. Jones, and vice versa. A Dutchman, kicked by the first mate in the morning washing down the deck, for working his broom athwartwise instead of fore and aft, was knocked down by the second mate in the dog-watch for passing to windward of him. ”

“ Smith; and he went forward among the men. Mr. Jones found other ropes to coil.
But the ship must be got ready for sea; and after a wearing day of work, with tentative orders from the two mates, with sarcastic comment from the captain, and insolent protest from the bewildered "rope-haulers," this was finally accomplished; and at eight bells in the evening, with the tug cast off and the towline coiled down to dry, with canvas set and the course given to the helmsman, Smith and Jones mustered the men into the waist to choose watches. ”

“ The qualities of courage, endurance, and masculine virility seemed of more importance than the intellectual and moral attributes. Jones declined a clerical position in the office of the skyscraper; and Smith, who could have been educated at college by the father of the bully, chose to ship in the navy as seaman apprentice. Shortly after, young Jones, unaware of Smith's step, yet influenced by the fate that was guiding their paths in parallel lines, joined the schoolship St. Mary, and on graduation entered the merchant marine as able seaman, with a scholar's knowledge of navigation. ”

“ The High Priest at such a moment seemed to embody all the glory of the nation, as the kings had done of old, and when the time came to strike a successful blow for freedom it was a priestly house that led the nation to the victory which united in one person the functions of High Priest and prince. ”

“ Mr. Smith bowed to his superior, found the numbers of these commands in the code book, and with a string of small flags at the signal-yard, and every man aboard viewing the world darkly through a [215] smoky film, the torpedo-boat approached the stranger at thirty knots. But there was no blinding glare of light in their eyes, and when they were within a hundred yards of the submersible, Metcalf removed his glasses for a moment's distinct vision. Head and shoulders out of a hatch near the tube was a man waving a white handkerchief. ”

“ A passing tug rescued them, the bully unconscious and Smith at his last gasp. The newspapers made him a hero, and the grateful bully, knowing Smith's enemy, offered to thrash him; but the same paralyzing inhibition prevented Smith from sanctioning this.
Jones, employed as elevator boy in a high building, emulated the feat a little later. Cool, and steady of nerve, he ran his car up and down through the smoke of a fire that gutted the building, and brought down to safety a half-hundred people, being rescued himself on the last trip, suffocating on the floor of his car. ”

“ Next Sunday Smith took an airing in his sedan chair, while his young friend went to hear Robertson and Blair preach. At nine o’clock, Blair having concluded, Rogers supped at Panmure House, and found the Oyster Club minus Bogle and plus a gentleman 231 from Göttingen. The conversation was personal, and perhaps the only item now worth recalling is Smith’s reason for identifying Junius with “Single Speech Hamilton.” Hamilton once told the Duke of Richmond at Goodwood—the story came to Smith from Gibbon—of “a devilish keen letter” from Junius in that day’s Public Advertiser. ”

“ Smith had probably known Windham already, but at any rate, as soon as Burke and he arrived in Edinburgh on the 24th of August and took their quarters in Dun's Hotel, they paid a visit to Smith, and next day they dined with him at his house. Among the guests mentioned by Windham as being present were Robertson; Henry Erskine, who had recently been Burke's colleague in the Coalition Ministry as Lord Advocate; and Mr. Cullen, probably the doctor, though it may have been his son (afterwards a judge) , who lives in fame chiefly for his feats as a mimic. ”

“ Smith and Douglas themselves are indeed the only two of them who seem to have made any mark in the world at all.
An allusion has been made to the Scottish dialect of the Snell exhibitioners; it may be mentioned that Smith seems to have lost the broad Scotch at Oxford without, like Jeffrey, contracting the narrow English; at any rate Englishmen, who visited Smith after visiting Robertson or Blair, were struck with the pure and correct English he spoke in private conversation, and he appears to have done so without giving any impression of constraint. ”

“ Sir James Steuart, the economist, played the king in Henry the Fourth when he was a boy at the school of North Berwick in 1735. The pupils of Dalkeith School, where the historian Robertson was educated, played Julius Cæsar in 1734. In the same year the boys of Perth Grammar School played Cato in the teeth of an explicit presbyterial anathema, and again [Pg 6] in the same year—in the month of August—the boys of the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy, which Smith was at the time attending, enacted the piece their master had written. ”

“ Robertson was very anxious to have only one learned society in Edinburgh, of which antiquities might be made a branch subject, and he even induced the University authorities to petition Parliament against granting a charter of incorporation to the Antiquarian Society. ”

“ The society was divided into two branches,—a physical branch or class devoted to science; and a literary branch or class devoted to history and polite letters,—and Smith was one of the [Pg 376] four presidents of the literary class. The Duke of Buccleugh was President of the whole society; and Smith's colleagues in the presidency of the literary class were Robertson, Blair, and Baron Gordon (Cosmo Gordon of Cluny, a Baron of Exchequer and most accomplished man) . ”

“ Carlyle that during this visit Franklin met Smith one evening at supper at [Pg 151] Robertson's in Edinburgh, but it seems from this letter highly probable that he had gone through to Glasgow, and possibly stayed with Smith at the College. Why otherwise should the younger, or, as Smith says, youngest, Franklin have thought of making a presentation to Glasgow College, or Smith of thanking him not merely in the name of the College, but in his own? Strahan was one of Franklin's most intimate private friends. They took a pride in one another as old compositors who had risen in the world ”