During the first year of his work in Aberdeen, Professor Blackie's public and private engagements interrupted the flow of his contributions to magazine literature. But after marriage he returned to this field of labour, and during his leisure hours in the following winter he prepared a review of Klopstock's collected works, which appeared in the ‘Foreign Quarterly Review’ for January 1843; and an article on Professor Steffens's personal memoirs of the German movement against Napoleon, for the April number of the same Review.

Before the session began he made a second effort to secure his full professorial fees, and gained a partial victory over the grudging Senate. He secured a fee of two guineas from each student of the second class for three hours’ teaching. This raised his full salary to about, £350, a sum which—when mulcted of the interest due to Miss Stodart, of the payments expected from Scotch Professors to public and ceremonious demands, of the money spent on essential books—left a mere sufficiency for current needs and private charities. But Mrs Blackie brought to the management of this small income a singular gift for wise economy; and wholesome food, books, and warmth were always forthcoming, although these excluded every amenity of home embellishment for some years. It was a trial to her fine taste to endure the horse-hair chairs and sofas which meagrely furnished their little parlours; but her hand had the magic touch which gives grace, and these stiff essentials, anew distributed, grew pliant and comfortable at her desire.

So wrote the Professor when his hair was white, and, to some extent, his retrospective estimate of the ten-years'-old schoolboy may have weight with us.

‘Æschylus,’ begun in 1838, had taken twelve years to transmute into English, but only the first three and the last three of those years were specially devoted to the work. It was dedicated to Chevalier Bunsen and Professor Gerhard. The translator likened his labour to that of Medea with her “renovating kettle,” “who, having cut a live body to pieces, engaged to produce it again reinvigorated in all its completeness.”

In translating ‘Faust,’ he had aimed at a “recasting” rather than at a “transposing” of the original. So his aim in translating ‘Æschylus’ was, in Southey's words, “faithfully to represent the matter, manner, and spirit of the original,” rather than to offer “in the guise of the English language an image of Æschylus in every minute verbal feature.” He desired that his version of the great dramas should do Æschylus justice in so far that the reader should be satisfied that their author was a man of genius, essentially Greek, imbued with lofty conceptions of the divine sovereignty of Zeus, of the immortal influence of human action, of the impossibility of escape from the barriers within which man's lot is cast,—those barriers of human relationship and divine limitation which are imposed on all. And he sought to do this through the medium of a language unsuited to express all that Greek meant when wielded by Æschylus,—unsuited to reproduce his tremendous phrases, his marvellous combinations, but sufficiently worthy to deprive the translator of all apology for failure.

It was early in November 1866 that, presiding at a meeting of the Working Men's Club, at its Institute in the High Street of Edinburgh, Professor Blackie launched forth into an invective against the Reform Bill, which at that time was in process of incubation, and, charging somewhat unadvisedly down the vistas of “manhood suffrage” and “the ballot,” flung a challenge in the faces of their champions. This was reported in the ‘Scotsman’ of November 12 as follows:—

There is little doubt that the gauntlet was a mere rhetorical flourish, and that he expected no knight of reform to pick it up. He did not account himself a politician, and was seldom acquainted with the pros and cons of party questions. His opinions on these were evolved in the manner which he indicated himself—from classic precedent and his own consciousness. But reckless rhetoric in print is apt to rouse a Nemesis. The Scottish National Reform League played the part of the goddess, and inspired Mr Ernest Jones, then known as an able advocate of Manhood Suffrage, to respond to the challenge.

John Blackie and a young German called Thilemas started on September 2, knapsacks on back, dressed in white Italian summer suits, which could be washed when occasion offered, and without a care in the world other than heavy hearts at leaving Rome. Some of this heaviness can be traced to a romantic sentiment which had grown upon our hero for a certain clever and amiable Clotilda, to whom he had given lessons in English during the spring and summer, and whom he celebrated in abounding verse as the pattern of female dignity and charm. He had presented his verses on the subject to his family, however, and not to the lady herself, so that but for the sorrow that he must leave his gentle friend with little hope of seeing her again, he was free from fetters.

The two pedestrians made their way by Perugia and Chiusi to Florence, taking nine days to walk the two hundred and fifty miles, at the rate of from twenty-five to thirty miles a-day. They stopped at the wayside inns for food and rest, and made the towns their stages for the night. The peasants whom they met could not understand the portent of two persons who scoured the country on foot, and sometimes they were refused admittance on the ground that only brigands and escaped malefactors pursued such courses. But they had much enjoyment of the tramp, and turned aside to view the antiquities which bordered their route. On September 11 they reached Florence, and made a halt of ten days to visit its galleries and buildings.

A touch of vertigo bewilders us as we try to follow the Professor through the maze of interwoven activities which he so nimbly threaded during these years. We enter upon a period of cession to the interest of the moment, of suspense from concentrated effort, of varied study, of enjoyment, acquisition, expansion. The pressure of life had relaxed for a time; Commissions and Parliaments relieved him from the strain of lifting up his voice in the unredeemed wilderness of education; he scarcely cared to swell the chorus, the burden of whose song he had manfully raised. For some years, therefore, we are concerned with a multitude of matters, important and purposely useful, but demanding no longer the strenuous heroism of earlier tasks. Something of abandonment to personal enjoyment may be discovered in this period, involving work, social life, travel, and study in temperate proportions.

The level is broken by one stirring enterprise, to which he was impelled partly by circumstances, partly by the influence of his summer studies, ungoaded by professional demands. These had necessarily supplied much of the stimulus to his Æschylean and Homeric labours, but their claims were satisfied, and he was free—in his own words—“to let things take their natural course.”

The Franco-German war of 1870–71 engaged his interest to a degree seldom effected by political occurrences, which he generally disregarded. Two impulses accounted for this, both personal to himself. These were the fighting instinct, which in his case was rather mental than physical, and the part which German influence had played in his education. War was always attractive to him, whether past or present.

The writer wishes to acknowledge her great indebtedness to Mrs Blackie, who not only intrusted her with the letters, MSS., and papers from which the biography has been compiled, but has shown the most constant and helpful interest in the work; to Dr Stodart Walker, who supplied her with notes on the Professor's relations with the students of Edinburgh University, and on the incidents of his last illness; to Professor Mackinnon, for many facts connected with the founding of the Celtic Chair; to Professor Cowan, for his reminiscences of the Greek Class, and for information referring to the Travelling Greek Scholarship; to Dr Donaldson, Principal of the University of St Andrews, for information with regard to University Reform; to Dr Forbes White, Mr Burness, Dr Gardiner, Mr George Seton, Sir Arthur Mitchell, and other friends of Professor Blackie's, for reminiscences and anecdotes of importance to the presentation of his individuality; to Sir Theodore Martin, K.C.B., for greatly esteemed interest and suggestions; to the executors of the late Mr J. A. Froude, and to many others, for their kind permission to quote from letters written to Professor Blackie; to the executors of the late Sheriff Nicolson, for their kind permission to make quotations from his poems; to Mr David Douglas, for furnishing statistics of publications; and, finally, to Mr Blackwood, for his unwearied interest and encouragement during the progress of the biography.

The writer has taken advantage of the present edition to revise the whole very carefully; to make use of the many valuable suggestions to which the circulation of its earlier editions gave rise; and to correct slips in the original work.

Concerning the ‘Life of Burns,’ Dr Stodart Walker, the Professor's nephew, writes:—

How he succeeded can best be understood by reading the book. It has been accounted “a tender and yet masterly review of the greatest lyric poet of his native land.” He neither suppresses nor extenuates the wrong done by Burns, but he teaches us to understand the man's temperament,—with its glow of genius, its self-respect, its temptations, its deep remorse, its unassailable dignity in presence of his dull accusers.

The author lectured on the subject of Burns in Kilmarnock at the time of its publication, and records how he was treated with great hospitality of a teetotal character, out of keeping with the place and the occasion.

The record of this movement from start to finish forms the main source for Professor Blackie's biography during the ensuing four years.

The matter had been relegated to the University Council as soon as he seriously undertook its promotion. A committee was formed, which included representatives of the Edinburgh University, of the Highlands, of Celtic scholarship, and of the Free Church. Sir Alexander Grant, Professor Masson, Cluny Macpherson, Mr Alexander Nicolson, Lord Neaves, and Professor Macgregor were its members. Professor Blackie was member and convener, as well as executor of its behests. Papers indicating the circumstances which made the preservation of Celtic dialects urgent, and fitted with blank pages for subscription-lists, were prepared and forwarded to all parts of the kingdom, as well as to all provinces and colonies of the empire where Highlanders were resident. These were accompanied by the Professor's personal appeal,—on behalf of the maintenance of Gaelic in the Highlands for the people; of the Celtic dialects in the University for the needs of philological study.

The schools consequent upon the new educational policy were—in all parts of the Highlands—sapping the very foundations of their language. Manned by Englishspeaking teachers, they condemned the children who did not understand English to sit side by side with those who did, to read the same lessons, and to profit by them as best they could. To little girls and boys who painfully learned to utter sounds which conveyed no meaning to them, the hours at school were an unredeemed penance. The teacher had no means of relieving their futility, for a knowledge of Gaelic was not a necessary qualification for his post.

Professor Blackie was the champion of the “forward movement” on the whole campaign of education, and particularly from the old camping – ground of University teaching, and it was in this position that men in advance of their day hailed him with hopeful welcome. His very freedom from sectarian exclusiveness, which had threatened to bar the way, helped to pacify the sectarians after the race was won. Just at first there were sinister murmurs that the Westminster Confession would brandish its flaming sword — with a dying menace — at the gates of Edinburgh University; but these subsided, and his earlier signature was accepted without demur. As he offered a friendly front alike to the Dissenting and to the Established Churches, no denomination could resist his genial unconsciousness of any lingering objection entertained by its own variety of Presbyterianism.

Aberdeen had long outlived its earlier prejudices against his opinions. The man himself was sound, in charity with all men, devout, diligent, a Christian. In Aberdeen there was a widespread regret mingled with the civic pride and congratulation. Divines and scholars alike acknowledged the distinction which he had conferred upon Marischal College, and which shone more conspicuously in the light of his promotion, — for the Aberdonians were not backward to admit merits which Edinburgh claimed from their midst.

His students at Marischal College had signed one of his most influential testimonials, and now offered him a valedictory gift of books. Those of his old students who were attending the Divinity classes in the Edinburgh Free Church College eagerly watched the contest for the Greek Chair, and were found tossing up their caps with enthusiasm at the result.

The commentary contained in this edition of the Ajax is not an enlargement of that which I contributed in 1868 to the Catena Classicorum, but a new one throughout.

In sending forth this volume, which finishes, so far as the extant plays of Sophocles are concerned, the task which I began in 1883, I desire to repeat my acknowledgments to the Syndics and to the staff of the Cambridge University Press, who have enabled the work to be carried on under the most favourable conditions which publishers or printers could provide.

A volume containing the Fragments of Sophocles is in preparation.

In the spring of 1832 John Blackie established himself in Edinburgh, and began to read for the Scottish Bar. His lodgings were in Lauriston during the first year of his legal studies, but later he removed to more convenient quarters in Dublin Street. His wooing of the legal muse was both distasteful and unsuccessful in the preliminary stages. He found Bell and Erskine the driest and least intelligible of reading. Gifted and brilliant, his head a very beehive of ambitious fancies, theories, and reforms in active competition with sentiment, and all clamorous for articulate expression, he felt stupefied in the presence of the stereotyped and ancient Themis. To persevere at all needed a courage stimulated by intervals of dalliance with the more attractive Muses. But he made manful efforts, and sought admission into a lawyer's office, that he might the better conquer the dull terminology of the law.

The gentleman who helped him through the perplexities of bonds and bills was a Mr Alexander, a Writer to the Signet, well versed in their dreary details. His first valuable lesson was to reduce his pupil to a salutary sense of his own ignorance. This incident is told in the “Notes”:—

A correspondence in the ‘Scotsman,’ roused by Professor Blackie's poem called “Canaries and Creeds,” indicates the troubled waters of theological controversy in Scotland during that year and those following. The epoch had its loud pretensions to infallibility, its response in the acclaim of the ignorant, its inquisitors, its traitors, its martyrs, its outcome of the triumph of a wider revelation for which its martyrs suffered, and for which they now are crowned.

Occupied with his College duties and with lectures at Galashiels, Linlithgow, and Govan, he was able to grant Mrs Blackie a very unwonted leave of absence in London, where a new but already greatly valued friend had claimed her presence. This was Miss Pipe of Laleham, who became acquainted with Altnacraig in the summer of 1876, and whose school in Clapham Park had for many years heralded and achieved the larger, stronger, and more radical education for girls, now become a commonplace of our time.

During his wife's absence many letters on the subject of his book on Gaelic reached him, and on her return he went north to Inverness for a couple of days on Celtic Chair business. On this subject Mr Froude wrote to him early in February:—

It seems to have been in August 1861 that Professor Blackie, on his way from Sudbrooke to Southsea, stopped at Winchfield and tramped over the brown heath to Eversley, to visit Kingsley.

Lectures on “Education,” on “Ancient and Modern Poetry,” articles for ‘Macmillan's’ and other magazines, a paper on “Athens” for the ‘Daily Review,’ supplemented his work on Homer and his academical duties that year and the next. He spent May 1862 in London, and the summer months were divided between Methven, Dollar and Lowland rambles.

The foregoing chapters have been written in vain if the reader, personally unacquainted with Professor Blackie, has not by this time realised what manner of man he was. But there are aspects of his public life and conversation to which justice can only be done by giving them the necessary emphasis with a multitude of small touches. An attempt to vivify his portrait in this way may therefore be made in a chapter set apart for the purpose.

Blackie at home and Blackie abroad differed considerably. He was a compound of two individualities both wholesome and good, but not the same in manifestation. At home he was gentle, considerate, methodical, serious; only at table relaxing into discursive talk and occasional explosiveness. His domestic pleasantries were tranquil, and took the form of genial banter and of equally genial irony. To the latter kind belonged the continued narration of the married life and adventures of Mr Bob Melliss. He was a mythical schoolfellow, gifted and amiable. In an evil hour, allured by her rank and pretensions, he had married the Lady Letitia Lambert. This stately personage belonged to the school of “white-satin-shoe philosophers.” Her dainty nerves endured no breath from the plebeian world, but required an environment of patrician and ceremonious elegance. The easy-going Bob had to surrender every friend and every habit of his bachelor days, and became a model husband for this lofty and sensitive dame. He forgot the very meaning of liberty, ate and drank as her stern glance directed, spoke and kept silence at her command. He was not unhappy,—far from it,—but he was a slave, a well-dressed appendage to the Lady Letitia's train.