ABSTRACT
The death of the late Professor John Stuart Blackie may not have struck many people, at least in the southern part of this island, as making a very great hole in English literature. In himself, and absolutely as an individual, he could not have reasonably challenged the first class, or even a high place in the second. Professor Blackie belonged to the first, and was somewhat unduly unconscious that in reviling the second he was demonstrating the fact that he did not belong to it. Men like Blackie, like Edmondstoune Aytoun, like Mr. Christopher Saintsbury North occupied a place and exerted an influence in Universities, to begin with, and in literature, secondly, which has rather disastrously disappeared. They made undoubtedly for inaccuracy; they made for occasional solecisms in taste and form; they sometimes made for folly. But they never made for priggishness, for pedantry, for mere dullness, or for absolute vulgarity.
