"I just missed being by his side all the four years, for we entered together; but after a week or so I left to go abroad with the Barbours, to whom I was tutor. I have no recollection of him that session, for I had not gone in for the bursary examination, where any one competing with him was pretty certain to be made aware of Elmslie to his cost. Next session, when I returned, I was of course separated from him by a year, which makes a great difference in college life. But for three sessions we must have met nearly every day, and I was thrown into the closest contact with him in the committees and societies where students of the different years come together. "The Theological Society was at that time the centre of the life of the College. Under Robertson Smith, Lindsay and Black, whose last year was Elmslie's first, it had entered on a career of the most brilliant activity, in which, I suppose, it has never faltered since. We used to say, in our exaggerative way, that we got more good from it than from all the classes put together. And indeed it would be difficult to over-estimate the gain to be obtained from debates for which the leading men prepared carefully, being stimulated by audiences of fifty or a hundred to do their very utmost. Questions of Biblical Criticism were at that time the staple of the most important discussions; and then were fought out in secret the very battles which are now about to be fought out in the Church under the eyes of the world, with very much the same division of parties and amid the play of the same passions. "It was here that Elmslie first unfolded his marvellous powers as a speaker. At the University I had been a member of the Dialectic, where there were one or two fine speakers. One of them was more fluent and agreeable to listen to than any one I have ever heard since; another—long ago, alas! gone over to the majority—spoke with a freer play of mere intellectual force than even Elmslie possessed. But I had never before, and have never since, heard speaking which, taken all in all, quite came up to that to which Elmslie treated us Friday after Friday. The combination of powers was the marvel of it—the knowledge, the clearness of exposition, the fecundity of ideas, the telling force with which he put his points, the play of fancy, the exuberant wit and humour, the tenderness and pathos into which he could glide for a moment if it invited him; there was no resource which he had not at perfect command. Yet it was entirely without display; he was always perfectly natural and familiar. He never won a triumph which humiliated any one; and, whilst others by expounding the same free views excited bitter feelings of opposition, he had the gift of saying the most revolutionary things in such a way that no one was hurt; his weapon, though it cut deep, having the marvellous property of diffusing an anæsthetic on the wound it made.