By this time, through articles contributed to the Edinburgh Review,' and subsequently reprinted under the title of Dissertations and Discussions in Philosophy,' he had obtained European reputa tion as a philosopher. In 1844 his health was much shattered by an attack of paralysis of the right side, which, while it left his mind uninjured, permanently disabled the side affected, impairing his eyesight and his speech, and leaving him with an imperfect use of his right arm and right leg. "He had so far recovered from his illness in the winter of 1844-45 as to be able to resume his studies, and he continued the work of reading and thinking with but slight interruptions till a few days before his death in May 1856. The editing of Reid, which had suffered so much from interruptions, was resumed. The work was finally published-though without being completed-in November 1846. The supplementary dissertations D** and D* * * had been written before his illness." His class lectures on Logic and Metaphysics were published after his death, under the editorial charge of the late Dean Mansel and Professor Veitch, his pupils.-In his youth Hamilton was a very handsome, athletic man. He is described by Carlyle as having "a fine firm figure of middle height; one of the finest cheerfullyserious human faces, of square, solid, and yet rather aquiline type; and a pair of the beautifullest kindly-beaming hazel eyes, well open, and, every now and then with a lambency of smiling fire in them, which I always remember as if with trust and gratitude." "He was finely social and human in these walks or interviews. His talk was forcible, copious, discursive, careless rather than otherwise; and on abstruse topics, I observed, was apt to become embroiled and revelly, much less perspicuous and elucidative than with a little deliberation he could have made it. By lucid questioning you could get lucidity from him on any topic." In company he had no pretensions to shine as a talker, and listened quietly without showing any disposition to strike in, unless he had a special interest in the subject, when he became animated and fluent. "He did not accommodate himself to the prevailing opinions of the company; but rather took delight in running atilt against them in a good-humoured way. He had great pleasure in stating and defending some paradox or startling opinion (of which he would perhaps afterwards make a joke), not because it exactly represented his own opinion, but sometimes merely for the sake of argument, and more frequently with the wish to uphold the unpopular side of a question under discussion." "The prevailing opinion on a subject, when strongly put, had a tendency to arouse in him a feeling of opposition.' "As in intellect he was critical, so in temperament he was strongly polemical, even finding a certain enjoyment in conflict for its own sake" "His views on

1 Professor Veitch's Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, p. 142.

University matters brought him pretty frequently into sharp collision with some of his colleagues. For with all his lovableness, even tenderness of nature, Hamilton was yet a man of resolute will, and high and somewhat uncompromising temper." From the time of his extraordinary examination at Oxford, his erudition and encyclopedic reading became a subject of wonder and exaggerated rumour. He seems to have had something of the same bookdevouring turn as Johuson. Johnson is described as "tearing out the heart" of a book, and Sir William, in a coarser modification of the phrase, as "tearing out the entrails "-expressions that point to the same habit of glancing at the table of contents, the index, or the marginal annotations, and reading only what one happens to be interested in. The two men agreed further in combining with this literary epicureanism (or rather gluttony) a reluctance to compose; but Hamilton, who had a decided mechanical turn, preserved the results of his reading in an elaborately ingenious commonplace-book,' whereas Johnson left what he read to the chances of resuscitation by his powerful memory. Of late years both the extent and the accuracy of Hamilton's scholarship have been questioned, but with all deductions he still remains what he was represented to De Quincey as being "a monster of erudition."We do not here a tempt any outline of his philosophy; and his philosophical abilities are still matter of dispute.— As regards style, he had, with his prodigious memory, a fine command of language; his command of the language of controversy, especially for the purpose of summarily "putting down" an antagonist, is at least as good as his command of the language of philosophical exposition. In both operations he is masterly. He had a taste for antithesis and pithy compression. He was also notably studious of method, of good arrangement; more, apparently, from a love of mechanical symmetry, than from any lively sympathy with the difficulties of the reader.

MISCELLANEOUS.

Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850), the chief of the originators of the 'Edinburgh Review,' was the son of a depute-clerk of the Court of Session, and received his early education at the Edinburgh High School. He pursued university studies partly at Glasgow, partly at Oxford, and partly at Edinburgh, exercising himself all the while voluminously in English composition. At Oxford he remained only nine months, and left with a sense of relief, finding the routine subjects of study very uncongenial. He was called to the Edinburgh bar in 1794. Entertaining the then unpopular principles of the Whig party, his career was for several years the re1 Professor Veitch's Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, p. 388.

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verse of prosperous, and more than once he had serious thoughts of abandoning the profession. The establishment of the Edinburgh Review' in 1802 was the making of his fame and fortune. "Without patronage, without name, under the tutelage of no great man; propounding heresies of all sorts against the ruling fancies of the day, whether political, poetical, or social; by sheer vigour of mind, resolution of purpose, and an unexampled combination of mental qualities-five or six young men in our somewhat provincial metropolis laid the foundation of an empire to which, in the course of a few years, the intellect of Europe did homage." The sociable and clear-sighted Jeffrey was admirably fitted to keep together and direct the energies of this fortuitous concourse of unemployed talent. His fame grew with the fame of the work. He rose rapidly to a first-rate position at the bar. His election to the Rectorship of Glasgow University in 1820 was a proof of the general admiration of his powers. His election as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1829 was a proof that he enjoyed the highest popularity among his brother lawyers. From 1830, for about three years and a half, he held office in the Whig Ministry as Lord Advocate. In 1833 he was appointed one of the Judges of the Court of Session, and lived in the quiet discharge of his judicial duties and the pleasant society of "Modern Athens" until his seventy-seventh year, when he died, after a brief illness, on the 26th of January 1850.-Jeffrey was a dark, wiry, little creature, with small mobile features, black sparkling eyes, and a remarkably long, narrow head. His voice was high-pitched, his speech somewhat mincing, and his movements exceedingly animated. "Jeffrey's manner," wrote his friend Horner, "almost irresistibly impresses upon strangers the idea of levity and superficial talents." His appearance, however, did not do him justice. "He has indeed a very sportive and playful fancy, but it is accompanied with an extensive and varied information, with a readiness

1 The following is his own account of his connection with the 'Edinburgh Review: "I wrote the first article in the first number of the Review in October 1802, and sent my last contribution to it in October 1840! It is a long period to have persevered in well--or in ill doing! But I was by no means equally alert in the service during all the intermediate time. I was sole editor from 1803 till late in 1829; and during that period was no doubt a large and regular contributor. In that last year, however, I received the great honour of being elected, by my brethren of the bar, to the office of Dean of the Faculty of Advocates; when it immediately occurred to me that it was not quite fitting that the official head of a great Law Corporation should continue to be the conductor of what might be fairly enough represented as, in many respects, a party journal; and I consequently withdrew at once and altogether from the management. I wrote nothing for it for a considerable time subsequent to 1829; and during the whole fourteen years that have since elapsed, have sent in all but four papers to that work, none of them on political subjects. I ceased in reality to be a contributor in 1829."-Preface to the collected edition of his contributions to the Edinburgh Review,' 1843.

of apprehension almost intuitive, with judicious and calm discern. ment, with a profound and penetrating understanding." To this it must be added, that the range of his apprehension, discernment, or penetration was not of the widest order: a man of great activity and decision, with much knowledge of the world, and skill in the management of men, he yet did not display, at least in literature, the highest power of entering into the feelings of others, of understanding the position of men very different in character from himself. In his criticisms of Wordsworth we see vividly at once his own character and his failure to appreciate a character very different from his own. He was an affectionate man, intensely attached to his friends, and uncontrollably fond of their society; and the passages that he admires in Wordsworth are chiefly passages of tenderness. He loved natural scenery, too, in a way, and does justice to Wordsworth's more striking word-pictures; but he was too much attached to "the busy haunts of men" to follow the raptures of a genuine nature-worshipper, and he found Wordsworth's minute descriptions intolerably tedious. But what he chiefly failed to understand, and what chiefly offended him, were the meditations natural to a recluse, and the glorification of children and of country personages to a degree altogether out of keeping with their conventional place in the social scale. He was constantly accusing Wordsworth of clothing the commonest commonplaces with unintelligible verbiage, and of debasing tenderness with vulgarity. A similar narrowness, the same tendency to lay down the law without a suspicion that other people were differently constituted from himself, appears in his essay on 'Beauty.' Himself defective in the feeling for colour, he denies that colour possesses any intrinsic beauty, and is utterly sceptical regarding the statements of artists and connoisseurs, suspecting them of pedantry and jargon. His style is forcible and copious, without any pretence to finished or elegant structure. His diction is perhaps too overflowing; his powers of amplification and illustration sometimes ran away with him; "his memory," says Lockhart, "appeared to range the dictionary from A to Z, and he had not the self-denial to spare his readers the redundance which delighted himself." His collected works give but a feeble idea of the cleverness of his ridicule; he refused to republish the most striking specimens of his satirical skill.

Conjoined with Jeffrey in the origination of the Edinburgh Review' was the Rev. Sydney Smith (1771-1845), the most brilliant wit of his generation. The son of an eccentric English gentleman, he was educated at Winchester and at Oxford, and then set adrift to push his own fortunes. He wished to study for the bar, but was under the necessity of entering the Church. For three years he acted as curate in a small village in the midst of

Salisbury Plain. In 1797, being appointed travelling tutor to the son of the parish squire, he set out with his pupil for the University of Weimar, but was forced by the political storm then raging on the Continent to put into Edinburgh. Here he found a congenial group of aspiring young men, most of them fortuneless like himself, and linked together by agreement in unpopular political views: among these, some four or five years after his arrival, he suggested the idea of a quarterly periodical as a vent for their opinions and their ambition, and himself took a leading part in writing and in choosing articles for the first number of the Edinburgh Review.' He contributed to this periodical for a quarter of a century, until he became a dignitary of the Church; and his strong sense and wit are justly credited with a large share of its popularity. In 1804-5-6 he lectured at the Royal Institution on Moral Philosophy. Very slender recognition was given to his powers and his connection with the rising Whig Review: a'though his political friends were then in office, he had to accept the small living of Foston-le-Clay in Yorkshire; and even it was obtained with some difficulty. There he remained for twenty-two years. In 1828 he was presented by Lord Lyndhurst, a Conservative, to the cauonry of Bristol Cathedral, and from that time ceased to write for the 'Edinburgh Review.' Through the influence of the same nobleman he was enabled to exchange Foston for the living of Combe Florey, near Taunton. All that his Whig friends did for him was to make him a prebendary of St Paul's: this piece of promotion he received in 1831. His case is sometimes mentioned along with Swift's as an example of political ingratitude; the excuse for not making him a bishop was that his writings were generally regarded as being inconsistent with clerical decorum. He died on the 22d of February 1845. Like De Quincey, Jeffrey, Wilson, and many other less distinguished contributors to periodical literature, he has left no great work as a pre-eminent monument of his genius; his Peter Plymley's "Letters on the subject of the Catholics," which appeared in 1808, are his most elaborate efforts on any one subject, and they do not extend beyond fifty closely-printed octavo pages. It is perhaps a vain regret to wish that his powers had been spent upon sustained compositions of greater length; he wrote briefly upon questions of passing interest with extraordinary immediate effect; he influenced as well as gratified his contemporaries; and now that his objects have been attained and the interest of his themes has been succeeded by other interests, the lovers of wit are as much entertained by his short effusions as they would have been by more ambitious performances.-Both physically and mentally Sydney Smith belonged to the race of giants. He was a man of a large build, and of a constitution that retained to his latest years a hearty enjoyment of life. His wit and great convivial powers