will be much to be said of acts of kindness for which he has hitherto had little credit. One who knew him well has said: ‘A more kind and feeling nature never existed. He did not make many professions, but had the good of his fellow-creatures at heart. He always found time to give advice and help.’ Indeed, to his habit of helping others, and not to any particular ability, he himself modestly ascribed his success: at least he said so in a famous address delivered in 1859 to the Young Men's Christian Institute of Wolverhampton: ‘I am perfectly confident,’ he added, in very odd language, ‘that the principle of mutual benevolence, of a universal desire to do good, derived from Christianity, and which is the first lesson inculcated when you are taught to read the New Testament, is one of the best and most sure modes of securing even temporary success in life.’ He exaggerated his own intellect, no doubt, but in critical keenness and subtlety he certainly had no rival. Without being an orator he had a rare gift of fluent, graceful, and persuasive speech, and a power of luminous exposition which has perhaps never been surpassed. In irony he was once described as ‘a gentleman who possesses such a plain, straightforward, John-Bull-like character of mind: rusticus, abnormis, sapiens, crassaque Minerva;’ but, irony apart, he had a singular faculty, which he exercised when his cause was good, of going straight to the heart of a question, and of bringing out the truth in a single telling sentence. Less able men have had a more durable fame than his will prove to be, for he left few of those definite records of work accomplished which keep a man's memory green. The lawyer's is like the actor's fame. Lord Westbury deserves to be remembered as a zealous and wise reformer, and as the boldest judge who ever sat on the English bench; but he will probably be known rather as the author of audacious sayings, and as the mythical source of innumerable stories.
[Law Mag. and Rev. 1865 and 1873; Times, 21 July 1873; Law Journal and Solicitors Journal, 26 July 1873; Irving's Annals of our Time; Hansard from 1851 onwards; Campbell's Life; Wilberforce's Life; Burke's Peerage and Baronetage; see also Westbury and Wilberforce, in Traill's New Lucian; and Macmillan's Magazine, xlvii. 469.]
BETHUNE, ALEXANDER (1804–1843), poet, the son of an agricultural day-labourer, was born at Upper Rankeillor, in the parish of Monimail, Fifeshire, about the end of July 1804. Owing to the poverty of his parents he received an extremely scanty education. Up to his twenty-second year he had been at school only from four to five months in all. But his mother was a woman of superior intellect and force of character. Her name was Alison Christie, and her sons Alexander and John [q.v.] owed her much.
In his fourteenth year Alexander was hired as a labourer. He describes himself as having been set to dig the stiff clayey soil ‘at raw fourteen,’ and says that for more than a year afterwards his joints on first attempting to move in the morning creaked like machinery lacking oil. Previous to this his parents had moved to the village of Lochend, near the Loch of Lindores. Here, in his twenty-first year, he gladly embraced the opportunity of attending a night-school, or school-classes held in the evening, taught by the Rev. John Adamson, afterwards of Dundee. Encouraged by the progress he made under this teacher, Bethune put himself under the instruction of his brother John, in order to learn weaving. The two expended their hard-won and still harder-saved earnings as labourers, on looms, &c.; but 1825 proved a disastrous year for the poor weavers all over Scotland, and their all went. In 1826 the two brothers were once more employed as outdoor labourers, with one shilling a day for wage. In 1829, while working in a quarry, Alexander was thrown into the air by a sudden blast of gunpowder. He was so mangled that his death was expected. But he recovered, and in about four months was again at his day-labouring. About three years later he met with an exactly similar accident. He recovered, but was much mutilated and disfigured, and carried his hurts with him through life. It was about this time he commenced author. Having won a place in the ‘Poet's Corner’ of several local newspapers, he published his ‘Tales and Sketches of the Scottish Peasantry’ in 1838. They brought him fame at once. His printer—a Mr. Shortrede, of Edinburgh—gave the author the sale-price of the first fifty copies disposed of, as copyright payment. This yielded him far more money than he had ever dreamed of possessing.
His brother John having about this time been appointed overseer on the estate of Inchtyre, Alexander became his assistant. But within a year the estate passed to another proprietor, and their engagement ended. Their home at Lochend, which formed part of Inchtyre, had likewise to be vacated. The brothers therefore came to the resolution of farming a piece of ground near Newburgh, Fifeshire, and of erecting a home for themselves. To raise funds for this purpose they published ‘Lectures on Practical Economy’ in 1839; but this work
