been dying for months, but he and I hoped to have got and to have given into his hands a copy of these Hora, the correction of which had often whiled. away his long hours of languor and pain. God thought otherwise. I shall miss his great knowledge, his loving and keen eye-his ne quid nimis -his sympathy-himself. Let me be thankful that it was given to me assidere valetudini, fovere deficientem, satiari vultu, complexu. if it did, and he cut the string. Up it rushed, amid the shouts and upturned faces of the boys, and the quiet joy of their master; James regarding it with a glum curiosity. Young Adam Ferguson was there, and left at the end of the hour with the rest, but finding he had forgotten his stick, went back; in the empty room, he found James perched upon a lofty and shaky ladder, trying, amid much perspiration, and blasphemy, and want of breath, to hit down his enemy, who rose at each stroke-the old battling with the new. Sir Adam's reproduction of this scene, his voice and screams of rapture, I shall never forget. Let me give another pleasant story of Dr. Black and Sir Adam, which our Principal (Dr. Lee) delights to tell; it is merely its bones. The doctor sent him to the bank for £5-four in notes, and one in silver; then told him that he must be paid for his trouble with a shilling, and next proceeded to give him good advice about the management of money, particularly recommending a careful record of every penny spent, holding the shilling up before him all the time. During this address, Sir Adam was turning over in his mind all the trash he would be able to purchase with the shilling, and his feeling may be imagined when the doctor finally returned it to his pocket! Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore extinguuntur magnæ animæ ; placide quiescas! Or, in more sacred and hopeful words, which, put there at my father's request, may be found at the close of the paper on young Hallam : O man greatly beloved, go thou thy way till the end; for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days." It is not for a son to speak what he thinks of his father so soon after his death. I leave him now with a portrait of his spiritual lineaments, by Dr. Cairns, which is to them what a painting by Velasquez and Da Vinci combined would have been to his bodily presence : "As he was of the Pauline type of mind, his Christianity ran into the same mould. A strong, intense, and vehement nature, with masculine intellect and unyielding will, he accepted the Bible in its literal simplicity as an absolute revelation, and then showed the strength of his character in subjugating his whole being to this decisive influence, and in projecting the same convictions into other minds. He was a believer in the sense of the old Puritans, and, amid the doubt and scepticism of the nineteenth century, held as firmly as any of them by the doctrines of atonement and grace. He had most of the idiosyncrasy of Baxter, though not without the contemplation of Howe. The doctrines of Calvinism, mitigated but not renounced, and received simply as dictates of Heaven, without any effort or hope to bridge over their inscrutable depths by philosophical theories, he translated into a fervent, humble, and resolutely active life. "There was a fountain of tenderness in his nature as well as a sweep of impetuous indignation; and the one drawn out, and the other controlled by his Christian faith, made him at once a philanthropist and a reformer, and both in the highest departments of human interest. The union of these ardent elements, and of a highly devotional temperament, not untouched with melancholy, with the patience of the scholar, and the sobriety of the critic, formed the singularity and almost the anomaly of his personal character. These contrasts were tempered by the discipline of experience; and his life, both as a man and a Christian, seemed to become more rich, genial, and harmonious as it approached its close."-Scotsman, October zoth. 23, RUTLAND STREET, d J. B. POST-PREFACE. THE only new matter in this edition, beyond a shaft from the quiver of the snell and shrewd Patin, is made up of two hitherto unpublished letters of Locke and Sydenham, which I had the good fortune to find in the British Museum,-that among the best and chiefest of our national glories, and where, strange to say, I found myself for the first time the other day. Not to my sorrow, for I am not by any means sure that it is not an advantage to be not young before seeing and feeling some things. A man at all capable of ideal exquisiteness, has a keener because a deeper sense of the beauty of the Clytie -of the awfulness of those deep-bosomed Fates, resting in each other's laps, "careless diffused "_ after, than before he finds himself "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita." Time and suffering, and self-knowledge, the mystery and vanity and misery of life, quicken and exalt our sense and relish of that more ample greatness, that more exact goodness, that sense of God, which the contemplation of Nature and Art 1 In a certain and large sense Malebranche is right. We see everything in God, as well as God in everything; all beauty of thought, passion, affection, form, sound, colour, and touch, whatever stirs our mortal and immortal frame, not only comes from, but is centered in God, in at their utmost of power and beauty, ought always to awaken and fill. It is the clear shining after the rain. Pain of body or of mind, by a doubleedged, but in the main, merciful law of God and of our nature, quickens and exalts other senses besides that of itself. Well is it that it does. Sweetness is sweeter than before to him who knows what bitterness has been, and remembered sweetness too. The dislocation of the real and the ideal the harsh shock of which comes on most men before forty, and on most women sooner, when the two lines run on together-sometimes diverging frightfully, for the most part from their own fault-but never meet, makes him look out all the more keenly for the points where he can his unspeakable perfections. This we believe to be not only morally, but in its widest sense, philosophically true, as the white light rays itself out into the prismatic colours, making our world what it is—as if all that we behold were the spectrum of the unseen Eternal. In that thinnest but not least great of his works, Mr. Ruskin's second volume of Modern Painters, there may be found the best unfolding I know of the doctrine that all sublimity and all beauty is typical of the attributes of God. I give his divisions, which are themselves eloquent :- Typical Beauty first of Infinity, or the type of Divine Incomprehensibility; second, of Unity, or the type of Divine Comprehensiveness; third, of Repose, or the type of Divine Permanence; fourth, of Symmetry, or the type of Divine Justice; fifth, of Purity, or the type of Divine Energy; lastly, of Moderation, or the type of Government by Law. |