Colloquia Peripatetica - 1879 Author:William Angus Knight Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF DR. JOHN DUNCAN. DURING the quarter of a century which ended in 1870, there might have been seen almost daily in the streets of E... more »dinburgh, during the winter months, an old man of singular appearance and mien; short of stature, and spare in figure, with head usually bent, and eye that either drooped or gazed wistfully abroad, as if recognising a reality behind the illusions of sense ; the expression of his face one of lonely abstraction, with lines indicative of many a struggle with the darker side of things; more like an apparition from a mediaeval cloister, than a man of the nineteenth century. His pathetic look and generally uncouth appearance were sure to attract the notice of the passer-by. That man was not only a characteristic figure among the celebrities of Edinburgh, but really one of the most noticeable men of his time. He was the late professor of Hebrew in the College of the Free Church; the learned, original, eccentric, profound, yet child-like Rabbi Duncan. To estimate the character and genius of oneso many-sided, yet so unlike his contemporaries, critically to measure him as a man and a theologian, and to assign him his place in the long roll of religious men in Scotland, " who being dead yet speak," is a task from which any pupil of his may reasonably shrink. The ordinary difficulties of criticism are enhanced in the case of one who has left scarcely a fragment of writing behind him ; and whose conversations, prelections, and occasional discourses, as they survive in the memory of friends and pupils, are virtually the only data which afford materials for judgment. Besides, his saintly character, his quaint and curious erudition, his polyglot wisdom, and that deep guileless heart of his (so humble and tremblingly conscientious), wit...« less