'He lectured, standing, from notes which, with their successive additions, must, I suppose, at last have been nearly as full as his spoken words. His lecturing manner was professorial, but gentlemanlike; calm and expository, but rising into greatness, or softening into tenderness, whenever his subject required it. A slight asthmatic tendency made him often clear his throat; and such was my admiration of the whole exhibition, that Macvey Napier told him, not long ago, that I had said there was eloquence in his very spitting. "Then," said he, "I am glad there was at least one thing in which I had no competitor...." To me his lectures were like the opening of the heavens. I felt that I had a soul. His noble views, unfolded in glorious sentences, elevated me into a higher world. I was as much excited and charmed as any man of cultivated senses would be, who, after being ignorant of their existence, was admitted to all the glories of Milton, Cicero, and Shakespeare. They changed my whole nature. In short, Dugald Stewart was one of the greatest of didactic orators. Had he lived in ancient time, his memory would have descended to us as that of one of the finest of the old eloquent sages. But his lot was better cast. Flourishing in an age which requires all the dignity of morals to counteract the tendencies of physical pursuits and political convulsion, he has exalted the character of his country and his generation. No intelligent pupil of his ever ceased to respect philosophy or was ever false to his principles, without feeling the crime aggravated by the recollection of the morality that Stewart had taught him.'
This last tribute to Stewart is a very fine idea. It recalls Persius' noble line:
'Virtutem videant, intabescantque relicta.'
Stewart had the great honour and felicity of meeting Burns on his first visit to Edinburgh in 1786. A more singularly contrasted pair could hardly have been brought together from any corners of the earth. Burns looked up to the celebrated professor with genuine admiration, for rhetoric was the great poet's besetting weakness. He speaks of Stewart personally always with respect and esteem, but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh almost disgusted him with life. He was obliged to buy a pocket Milton, so that he might be able, whenever he recalled it, to study the sentiments of courage, independence, and noble defiance, 'in that great personage, SATAN,' as an antidote to the poisoned feeling of disgust.