mathematics defied him.  Scott was ‘the Greek dunce,’ at Edinburgh.  Thackeray, Shelley, Gibbon, did not cover themselves with college laurels; they read what pleased them, they did not read ‘for the schools.’  In short, this behaviour at college is the rule among men who are to be distinguished in literature, not the exception.  The honours attained at Oxford by Mr. Swinburne, whose Greek verses are no less poetical than his English poetry, were inconspicuous.  At St. Andrews, Murray read only ‘for human pleasure,’ like Scott, Thackeray, Shelley, and the rest, at Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge.  In this matter, I think, he made an error, and one which affected his whole career.  He was not a man of private fortune, like some of those whom we have mentioned.  He had not a business ready for him to step into.  He had to force his own way in life, had to make himself ‘self-supporting.’  This was all the more essential to a man of his honourable independence of character, a man who not only would not ask a favour, but who actually shrunk back from such chances as were offered to him, if these chances seemed to be connected with the least discernible shadow of an obligation.  At St. Andrews, had he chosen to work hard in certain branches of study, he might probably have gained an exhibition, gone to Oxford or elsewhere, and, by winning a fellowship, secured the leisure which was necessary for the development of his powers.  I confess to believing in strenuous work at the classics, as offering, apart from all material reward, the best and most solid basis, especially where there is no exuberant original genius, for the career of a man of letters.  The mental discipline is invaluable, the training in accuracy is invaluable, and invaluable is the life led in the society of the greatest minds, the noblest poets, the most faultless artists of the world.  To descend to ordinary truths, scholarship is, at lowest, an honourable gagne-pain.  But Murray, like the majority of students endowed with literary originality, did not share these rather old-fashioned ideas.  The clever Scottish student is apt to work only too hard, and, perhaps, is frequently in danger of exhausting his powers before they are mature, and of injuring his health before it is confirmed.  His ambitions, to lookers-on, may seem narrow and school-boyish, as if he were merely emulous, and eager for a high place in his ‘class,’ as lectures are called in Scotland.  This was Murray’s own view, and he certainly avoided the dangers of academic over-work.  He read abundantly, but, as Fitzgerald says, he read ‘for human pleasure.’  He never was a Greek scholar, he disliked Philosophy, as presented to him in class-work; the gods had made him poetical, not metaphysical.

There was one other cause of his lack of even such slender commercial success in letters as was really necessary to a man who liked ‘plain living and high thinking.’  He fell early in love with a city, with a place—he lost his heart to St. Andrews.  Here, at all events, his critic can sympathise with him.  His ‘dear St. Andrews Bay,’ beautiful alike in winter mists and in the crystal days of still winter sunshine; the quiet brown streets brightened by the scarlet gowns; the long limitless sands; the dark blue distant hills, and far-off snowy peaks of the Grampians; the majestic melancholy towers, monuments of old religion overthrown; the deep dusky porch of the college chapel, with Kennedy’s arms in wrought iron on the oaken door; the solid houses with their crow steps and gables, all the forlorn memories of civil and religious feud, of inhabitants saintly, royal, heroic, endeared St. Andrews to Murray.  He could not say, like our other poet to Oxford, ‘Farewell, dear city of youth and dream!’  His whole nature needed the air, ‘like wine.’  He found, as he remarks, ‘health and happiness in the German Ocean,’ swimming out beyond the ‘lake’ where the witches were dipped; walking to the grey little coast-towns, with their wealth of historic documents, their ancient kirks and graves; dreaming in the vernal woods of Mount Melville or Strathtyrum; rambling (without a fishing-rod) in the charmed ‘dens’ of the Kenley burn, a place like Tempe in miniature: these things were Murray’s usual enjoyments, and they became his indispensable needs.  His peculiarly shy and, as it were, silvan nature, made it physically impossible for him to live in crowded streets and push his way through throngs of indifferent men.  He could not live even in Edinburgh; he made the effort, and his health, at no time strong, seems never to have recovered from the effects of a few months spent under a roof in a large town.  He hurried back to St. Andrews: her fascination was too powerful.  Hence it is that, dying with his work scarcely begun, he will always be best remembered as the poet of The Scarlet Gown, the Calverley or J. K. S. of Kilrymont; endowed with their humour, their skill in parody, their love of youth, but (if I am not prejudiced) with more than the tenderness and natural magic of these regretted writers.  Not to be able to endure crowds and towns, (a matter of physical health and constitution, as well as of temperament) was, of course, fatal to an ordinary success in journalism.  On the other hand, Murray’s name is inseparably connected with the life of youth in the little old college, in the University of the Admirable Crichton and Claverhouse, of the great Montrose and of Ferguson,—the harmless Villon of Scotland,—the University of almost all the famous Covenanters, and of all the valiant poet-Cavaliers.  Murray has sung of the life and pleasures of its students, of examinations and Gaudeamuses—supper parties—he has sung of the sands, the links, the sea, the towers, and his name and fame are for ever blended with the air of his city of youth and dream.  It is not a wide name or a great fame, but it is what he would have desired, and we trust that it may be long-lived and enduring.  We are not to wax elegiac, and adopt a tearful tone over one so gallant and so uncomplaining.  He failed, but he was undefeated.

In the following sketch of Murray’s life and work use is made of his letters, chiefly of letters to his mother.  They always illustrate his own ideas and attempts; frequently they throw the light of an impartial and critical mind on the distinguished people whom Murray observed from without.  It is worth remarking that among many remarks on persons, I have found not one of a censorious, cynical, envious, or unfriendly nature.  Youth is often captious and keenly critical; partly because youth generally has an ideal, partly, perhaps chiefly, from mere intellectual high spirits and sense of the incongruous; occasionally the motive is jealousy or spite.  Murray’s sense of fun was keen, his ideal was lofty; of envy, of an injured sense of being neglected, he does not show one trace.  To make fun of their masters and pastors, tutors, professors, is the general and not necessarily unkind tendency of pupils.  Murray rarely mentions any of the professors in St. Andrews except in terms of praise, which is often enthusiastic.  Now, as he was by no means a prize student, or pattern young man for a story-book, this generosity is a high proof of an admirable nature.  If he chances to speak to his mother about a bore, and he did not suffer bores gladly, he not only does not name the person, but gives no hint by which he might be identified.  He had much to embitter him, for he had a keen consciousness of ‘the something within him,’ of the powers which never found full expression; and he saw others advancing and prospering while he seemed to be standing still, or losing ground in all ways.  But no word of bitterness ever escapes him in the correspondence which I have seen.  In one case he has to speak of a disagreeable and disappointing interview with a man from whom he had been led to expect sympathy and encouragement.  He told me about this affair in conversation; ‘There were tears in my eyes