With the author’s consent we have rejected from his two series of “Horæ Subsecivæ” the articles on strictly professional subjects, and have collected into this volume the rest of his admirable papers in that work. The title, “Spare Hours,” is also adopted with the author’s sanction. Dr. Brown is an eminent practising physician in Edinburgh, with small leisure for literary composition, but no one has stronger claims to be ranked among the purest and best writers of our day. _BOSTON, December 1861._ CONTENTS. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS “WITH BRAINS, SIR” THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN HER LAST HALF-CROWN OUR DOGS QUEEN MARY’S CHILD-GARDEN PRESENCE OF MIND AND HAPPY GUESSING MY FATHER’S MEMOIR MYSTIFICATIONS “OH, I’M WAT, WAT!” ARTHUR H. HALLAM EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES VAUGHAN’S POEMS DR. CHALMERS DR. GEORGE WILSON ST. PAUL’S THORN IN THE FLESH THE BLACK DWARF’S BONES NOTES ON ART AUTHOR’S PREFACE. In that delightful and provoking book, “THE DOCTOR, &c.,” Southey says: “‘Prefaces,’ said Charles Blount, Gent., ‘Prefaces,’ according to this flippant, ill-opinioned, and unhappy man, ‘ever were, and still are, but of two sorts, let the mode and fashions vary as they please,—let the long peruke succeed the godly cropt hair; the cravat, the ruff; presbytery, popery; and popery, presbytery again,—yet still the author keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing; when at the beginning of his book he enters, either with a halter round his neck, submitting himself to his readers’ mercy whether he shall be hanged or no, or else, in a huffing manner, he appears with the halter in his hand, and threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word. This, with the excitement of friends to his undertaking, and some few apologies for the want of time, books, and the like, are the constant and usual shams of all scribblers, ancient and modern.’ This was not true then,” says Southey, “nor is it now.” I differ from Southey, in thinking there is some truth in both ways of wearing the halter. For though it be neither manly nor honest to affect a voluntary humility (which is after all, a sneaking vanity, and would soon show itself if taken at its word), any more than it is well-bred, or seemly to put on (for it generally is put on) the “huffing manner,” both such being truly “shams,”—there is general truth in Mr. Blount’s flippancies.