a sufficient explanation; the interesting story is undeniably told with high narrative skill. When we disregard minute errors of structure, and look to general effects, we find many excellences of style that help to explain his popularity. The historian possesses a flowing command of simple and striking language, always equal to the dignity and spirit of the events related, and enlivened by happy turns of antithesis and epigram. He had a feeling for dramatic contrasts, and introduces them with striking effect. He visited the scenes of all the important engagements, and his descriptions have the freshness and animation of pictures drawn from nature. Finally, what is of prime importance in such a work, though he deals with highly complicated affairs involving the interaction of several different powers, he keeps the concurring streams of events lucidly distinct, and brings the reader without perplexity to their joint conclusion. His explanatory episodes are peculiarly elaborate and luminous. In short, it has been well said that "if the art of engaging the reader's attention, and sustaining it by the vigour, spirit, and vivacity of the narrative be a high merit, many popular and many great historians must cede superiority of this kind to Sir Archibald Alison."

PHILOSOPHY.

Sir William Hamilton, Bart. (1788-1856), the greatest British supporter of a priori philosophy in this century, was the son of Dr W. Hamilton, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Glasgow. He was the lineal representative and was adjudged heir to the title of Sir Robert Hamilton, the leader of the Covenanting forces at Drumclog. His father died when he was two years old. He received his schooling partly at home, partly at the public schools of Glasgow, and partly at private schools in England. He passed through the curriculum of Arts in Glasgow, and spent a winter at Edinburgh in the study of medicine, which he was inclined to make his profession. In 1807 he went to Oxford as an exhibitioner on the Snell Foundation. There he became engrossed in the study of mental philosophy, and in the final examination professed a knowledge of an unusual (though currently very much exaggerated) list of books, and was passed with the highest distinction. About this time he abandoned his design of entering the profession of medicine, and ultimately settled at Edinburgh as a lawyer, being called to the bar in 1814, three years after his graduation as B.A. at Oxford. In 1820 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Chair of Moral Philosophy, vacated by the death of Brown, the appointment being given to John Wilson, In the following year he was appointed to the poorly-salaried Chair of Civil History. His appointment to the Chair of Logic did not take place till 1836.

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 reputation 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." 1 "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 cer tain enjoyment in conflict for its own sake." "His views on

1 Mr 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 Johnson. 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 attempt 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, appar ently, 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 Mr Veitch's Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, p. 386.

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 1850.1-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 discernment, 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, peared 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.

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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