Every author is to be estimated by specimens of him at his very best. Dr. John Brown had a favourite phrase for such specimens of what he thought the very best in the authors he liked. Of a passage, or of a whole paper, that seemed to him perfect in its kind, perfect in workmanship as well as in conception, he would say that it was “done to the quick.” The phrase indicates, in the first place, Dr. John Brown’s notions of what constitutes true literature of any kind, or at least true literature of a popular kind, as distinct from miscellaneous printed matter. It must be something that will reach the feelings. This being presupposed, then that is best in any author which reaches the feelings most swiftly and directly,—cuts at once, as it were, with knife-like acuteness, to the most sensitive depths. That there are not a few individual passages scattered through Dr. John’s own writings, and also some entire papers of his, that answer this description, will have appeared by our review of his writings so far as they have been yet enumerated. In such papers and passages, as every reader will observe, even the workmanship is at its best. The author gathers himself up, as it were; his artistic craft becomes more decisive and subtle with the heightened glow of his feelings; and his style, apt to be a little diffuse and slipshod at other times, becomes nervous and firm. Of whatever other productions of Dr. John Brown’s pen this may be asserted, of whatever other things of his it may be said that they are thus masterly at all points and “done to the quick,” that supreme praise must be accorded, at all events, to the two papers I have reserved to the last,—_Rab and his Friends_ and _Our Dogs_. Among the many fine and humane qualities of our late fellow-citizen it so happened that love of the lower animals, and especially of the most faithful and most companionable of them, was one of the chief. Since Sir Walter Scott limped along Princes Street, and the passing dogs used to fawn upon him, recognising him as the friend of their kind, there has been no such lover of dogs, no such expert in dog-nature, in this city at least, as was Dr. John Brown. It was impossible that he should leave this part of himself, one of the ruling affections of his life, unrepresented in his literary effusions. Hence, while there are dogs incidentally elsewhere in his writings, these two papers are all but dedicated to dogs. What need to quote from them? What need to describe them? They have been read, one of them at least, by perhaps two millions of the English-reading population of the earth: the very children of our Board Schools know the story of _Rab and his Friends_. How laughingly it opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two boys in their scamper through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago after the hullabaloo of the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a sensation on our first introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South Bridge, to the great Rab,