Gideon Grays,”—the hard-working and often poorly paid medical practitioners of our Scottish country villages and parishes,—and for the justice he has done to such a scholarly representative of that class as the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, and to such recent medical reformers as Dr. Andrew Combe and Dr. Henry Marshall. Especially interesting to us here ought to be the obituary sketches of Syme and Christison, so recently the ornaments of the Medical School of Edinburgh University. He threw his whole heart into his sketch of Syme, his admiration of whom, dating from the days when he had been Syme’s pupil and apprentice in surgery, had been increased by life-long intimacy. I may therefore dwell a little on this sketch, the rather because it reminds me of perhaps the only occasion on which I was for some hours in the society of Syme and Dr. John Brown together. In the autumn of 1868, Carlyle, then Lord Rector of our University, and in the seventy-third year of his age, was persuaded, on account of some little ailment of his, to come to Edinburgh and put himself under the care of Professor Syme for surgical treatment. Syme, proud of such a patient, and resolved that he should have his best skill, would hear of no other arrangement than that Carlyle should be his guest for the necessary time. For a fortnight or more, accordingly, Carlyle resided with Syme in his beautiful house of Millbank in the southern suburb of our city. Pains were taken to prevent the fact from becoming known, that Carlyle might not be troubled by visitors. But one day, when Carlyle was convalescent, there was a quiet little dinner party at Millbank to meet him. Besides Syme and Carlyle, and one or two of the members of Syme’s family, there were present only Dr. John Carlyle, Dr. John Brown, and myself. It was very pleasant, at the dinner table, to observe the attention paid by the manly, energetic, and generally peremptory and pugnacious, little surgeon to his important guest, his satisfaction in having him there, and his half-amused, half-wondering glances at him as a being of another _genus_ than his own, but whom he had found as lovable in private as he was publicly tremendous. There was no “tossing and goring of several persons” by Carlyle, in that dining-room at all events, but only genial and cheerful talk about this and that. After dinner, we five went upstairs to a smaller room, where the talk was continued, still more miscellaneously, Syme and Carlyle having most of it. That very day there had been sent to Carlyle, by his old friend David Laing, a copy of the new edition which Laing had just privately printed of the rare _Gude and Godly Ballates_ by the brothers Wedderburn, originally published in 1578; and Carlyle, taking up the volume from the table, would dip into it here and there, and read some passages aloud for his own amusement and ours. One piece of fourteen stanzas he read entire, with much gusto, and with excellent chaunt and pronunciation of the old Scotch.