him frequently," says Mr. Grennel, "at Fairlie, in his most happy moods, but I never saw him happier. Christian benevolence beamed from his countenance, sparkled in his eye, and played upon his lips. Immediately after prayers he withdrew, and, bidding his family remember that they must be early to-morrow, he waved his hand, saying, A general good night.""

About eight o'clock next morning a neighbour, who had expected to receive from him a packet of papers, sent to inquire whether they were ready. The housekeeper, who had been long in the family, knocked at his door, without, as it seemed, making herself heard. She opened it, spoke, received no answer; threw wide the window-shutters, and approached the bed. He sat in a half-recumbent position, with his head reclining upon the pillow, quite dead.

Such was the sudden but calm termination of a career as brilliant, as varied, certainly as eccentric-perhaps as useful—as has ever been run by one placed in the comparatively humble station of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. That popular enthusiasm made at the time a great deal too much of Chalmers his warmest admirers will now, we suppose, acknowledge. His style is generally turgid, often confused, unnecessarily disfigured by uncouth phrases and words coined for the nonce, and remarkable for nothing more than the perpetual repetition of some favourite idea in terms which seem intended to create in the unobservant reader a persuasion that new truths are brought before him. But there is a potency in it, notwithstanding, which carries us along -often indeed against the better pleadings of our judgment. In truth, we consider him one of the poorest reasoners, both as a moralist and a divine, that ever strove to convey his own views of things to the minds of others; and of his political economy experience has long since shown that it is both based and built up upon a delusion. Of his gigantic powers as a pulpit orator there can, indeed, be no doubt; there was a fervour in his manner, a persuasiveness in his tones, a charm even in the coarse Fife accent, of which he never got rid, that arrested the attention and kept it fixed on the preacher all the time that he was speaking; and if at the close of the discourse the auditors sometimes failed of determining the exact point which it was designed to establish, they never separated without having received a strong general impulse to good. Nor was his influence less effective in private conference than in public appeals. Whatever he took up, he took up in earnest, and there is a magic in earnestness which rarely fails of going much further with such as observe it than any extent of argument-be it ever so logical.

Of the posthumous works which his son-in-law has been induced

induced to publish, we cannot on the present occasion say much. The general impression made upon our minds by a laborious perusal of them, is that as far as the literary reputation of the author is concerned, they had better have been suppressed. Except two volumes entitled Institutes of Theology—a third made up of notes on Butler's Analogy, Paley's Evidences, and Professor Hill's Divinity Lectures-and a volume of Sermons, there is little or nothing to reward a second perusal. His Daily Scripture Readings, in three volumes, show that during the last ten or twelve years of his life he never permitted twenty-four hours to pass without making annotations on some portion of the Bible; while his Sabbath Scripture Readings, in two volumes, are made up of reflections and prayers all arising out of an exercise substantially the same. We doubt whether the writer of these very pious, though sometimes not very profound lucubrations, ever intended them to meet other eyes than his own. The Prelections,' though doubtless very useful for the purposes of Class instruction, which they were intended to serve, put in no claims whatever upon public attention, either for originality of idea or grace of illustration. Moreover, whatever in them was of any real value had already been embodied word for word by the author in the Second Book of his Christian Institutes. But the error of redundancy, which always blemished the style of Chalmers, appears to have fallen in regard to more than style upon his biographer.

The Institutes of Theology are set forth in four books-of which the first is introductory, dealing with Ethics and Metaphysics in the abstract; the second, a treatise on Natural Theology; the third, an enlargement of the old Essay on the Evidences; and the fourth, a sort of Dissertation on the Subject Matter of Christianity. In the treatment of these topics Chalmers seldom pretends to introduce what is absolutely new; but whenever he does venture out of the beaten track, he loses himself. For example, in considering the existence of moral right, he denounces at once the theory of Expediency, and that conclusion which resolves virtue into an observance of the law of God. Of course, there remains for him no alternative except to fall back upon the moral sense'-though he endeavours to conceal his object in a multiplicity of words which, if they do not mean this, mean nothing. What can the reader make of such a statement as the following? In the Divinity alone it is that virtue has its fountain-head and its being-not, however, in the fountain-head of the Divine Will; but higher than this, and superior to this, in the fountain-head of the Divine Nature.' In the Divine Nature there can be neither virtue nor vice. There is absolute perfection—a state quite apart from any in which either virtue or vice

6

can

460

can prevail. For the very term virtue means a successful effort to conform a fallible nature to some standard higher than its instinct to good, can spring only from a knowledge, more or less own; and this, if it be not produced by a 'moral sense, or perfect, of the will of the Supreme rewarder of virtue and

punisher of vice.

As for

Chalmers was a man of genius. His faculties were large, though ill-regulated. His impulses were stronger at all times than his judgment, and his language more fluent than his ideas. As a scholar he was very defective. Even in the Daily Scripture Readings' this fact is continually forced upon us. example, in the wonderment which he expresses at page 98 of vol. i., in regard to the causes from which the antipathy of the Egyptians to shepherds, in the days of Joseph, could have arisen! and his method of handling the character and proceedings of Balaam, especially with reference to the sacrifice by that imof seven bullocks and seven rams!! But to counterbalance postor these defects, Chalmers possessed energy, patience of labour, and an enthusiastic love of truth, which he might fail to overtake, at times, both in theory and in practice, but which he never ceased to follow throughout the whole of his career. He was a great man, and has left a stamp upon the character of the will not be easily effaced.

age which

We are happy to conclude in the words of a highly esteemed dignitary of the Episcopalian Church in Scotland-the Dean of Edinburgh. His 'Biographical Notice,' read soon after Chalmers's death to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, well deserved to be published in a separate form. The main objects and honours of the doctor's career are thus elegantly stated in its last page:

'His greatest delight was to contrive plans and schemes for raising degraded human nature in the scale of moral being. The favourite object of his contemplation was human nature attaining the highest perfection of which it is capable-and, as that perfection was manifested in saintly individuals, in characters of great acquirement adorned with the graces of Christian piety. His greatest sorrow was to contemplate masses of mankind hopelessly bound to vice and misery by chains of passion, ignorance, and prejudice. As no one more firmly believed in the power of Christianity to regenerate a fallen race,-as faith and experience both conspired to assure him that the only effectual deliverance for the sinful and the degraded was to be wrought by Christian education, and by the active agency of Christian instruction penetrating into the haunts of vice and the abodes of misery; these acquisitions he strove to gain for all his beloved countrymen; for these he laboured, and for these he was willing to spend and be spent. From the fields of earthly toil and trial he has

been

been removed, and he has entered into his rest. The great business of Christian benevolence, and the contest with ignorance and crime, are left in other hands. But his memory will not die, nor his good example in these things be forgotten. His countrymen will do his memory justice. Of the thousands who were assembled to witness the funeral procession which conveyed his earthly remains to the tomb, all felt conviction that a Great Man had fallen in Israel,-that a Scotchman had gone of whom Scotland might be proud,-a Scotchman who had earned a name in his country's annals, and a place in his country's literature, which will not pass away.'

ART. VI. Memoirs of the Right Honourable Henry Lord Langdale. By Thomas Duffus Hardy. 2 vols. 8vo. 1852.

THEN Curll, the piratical bookseller, gave the first ex

ample of publishing the Lives and Letters of persons recently deceased, Dr. Arbuthnot pleasantly called him a new terror of death; but such works as that now before us are worse than Curll's inflictions. Curll had but one victim at a time. Mr. Hardy kills many birds with one stone. The first and greatest sufferer is, of course, poor Lord Langdale himself. Mr. Hardy's blind and bungling partiality for 'his lamented master's memory has contrived to render him often ridiculous, and occasionally something worse, and he has raised or revived some questions of a personal character which will not, we think, insure from the public the encomiastic solution at which Mr. Hardy has himself arrived.

We have in the next place to complain that, by publishing the private letters of third persons which he happened to find in Lord Langdale's papers, he has, as we think, wantonly and unwarrantably invaded the confidence of private life. For instance, he discovers amidst the rubbish of Lord Langdale's closet a dozen letters or notes written by Sir Francis Burdett, one of Mr. Bickersteth's earlier friends and benefactors, in those turbulent days in which he was so hot and so rash in that line of radical politics which he afterwards as signally repudiated. These letters are (except one to be hereafter specially noticed) for the most part mere familiar gossip and of no curiosity or importance; but Sir Francis's party-zeal sometimes bursts forth with a violence which, if he had remembered it in after days, his good sense would have regretted, while the idea-could it have occurred to him-of its being published for history, would have revolted equally his good nature and his good taste. Mr. Hardy may probably have meant no harm, and he may possibly not appreciate exactly

exactly the indelicacy of such a publication; but it may not be amiss to remind him for his future guidance, that in point of law neither Lord Langdale himself, nor his representatives, had any right to publish Sir Francis Burdett's letters. The law on this point is clear and settled. The material substance of a letter belongs to the person to whom it is addressed, but the property of the mental production, especially as regards publication, and, above all, publication for profit, remains in the original writer. If, therefore, Mr. Hardy had not asked and obtained the consent of Sir Francis Burdett's representatives to the publication of these letters, we are sorry to acquaint him that he is just as much a pirate as the aforesaid Curll.

A third complaint is that there are many individuals still living -some of them of high rank and eminent stations-some of our own, but more of opposite politics-whom, because they happened to fall in with Lord Langdale in their passage through life, Mr. Hardy assumes a right to drag into his volumes, and to handle them with as little ceremony, as little delicacy, and often as little knowledge of their personal history, as if they had been dead a hundred years. But of living men we suspect that Mr. Hardy will be himself the greatest sufferer, and will find that he has exchanged a respectable though humble and somewhat dusty reputation as an antiquarian, for the ridicule of having in this work left behind him a record of more presumption and ignoranceleavened, we fear, by a little personal spite and bad faith-than we remember to have seen in a work that affected to be historical.

Lastly, and by us most seriously regretted, is the pain which Mr. Hardy's indiscretion is likely to inflict on Lord Langdale's family and friends. It might be doubted whether Lord Langdale's uneventful and comparatively undistinguished life required or even justified a professed biography; but there can be no doubt that all that can be fairly called biographical in the work might have been more distinctly told in half-nay a quarter-of its bulk; and the process by which it has been inflated to its present size is a combination of bad taste and bad workmanship on the part of Mr. Hardy-the ill effects of which must necessarily, though undeservedly, fall on Lord Langdale himself. But there is something still more serious. The dogmatic tone assumed by Mr. Hardy-the arrogance with which he challenges for Lord Langdale an indisputable superiority in talents, integrity, independence, and public services above all his legal contemporaries and judicial colleagues-and the utter, and indeed ridiculous inadequacy of the evidence of any such pre-eminence, must necessarily awaken a reacting spirit of inquiry and criticism, which, however temperately pursued, cannot but give pain to those whose

natural