wait long for his services. In 1830 he became Adjunct Professor of Ancient Languages and Literature, an office for which his previous studies had thoroughly qualified him. About the same time he formed the resolution to prepare himself for the work of the ministry. This resolution he was enabled to carry out even while discharging the duties of his position in the college; and accordingly we find him devoting himself to studies in Systematic Theology, Biblical Criticism, and History -giving the time which he had at command during four days in every week to the first-mentioned branch, and during the remaining two days to the other two branches. It was, at this time, that he may be said to have commenced that work which afterwards became the chief employment of his life. He had, indeed, pursued the study of Greek and of Hebrew at an earlier period. But now he undertook to master these languages much more perfectly, and with the definite object of making himself a thorough Biblical scholar. No doubt his first design in doing this was to gain that knowledge of the Word of God in the original languages, which he felt that every cultivated minister ought to possess. His peculiar linguistic tastes and capabilities, however, soon led him to a point beyond this. The work, which was begun only as a means to a further end, became an end in itself-and he was in a course of preparation, which resulted in the ministerial office being secondary to that of the scholar and teacher. There is very little of incident connected with his life in this professorship, and very little which may afford us any adequate idea of what his success as an instructor was. But, in regard to his method of study, a single extract from his diary, which is quoted with exclamations of wonder by his biographer, will present the young scholar quite distinctly before us:

"This," he says, "is my Hebrew day. My object, at present, is to obtain as accurate a knowledge as I can of the lexicography and grammar of the language. I choose a passage, therefore, merely to serve as a text, and go over it twice. In Hebrew I do this first in Kennicott, without the points, looking for every word in Gesenius's lexicon, and reading the whole article upon it carefully. This is my way of studying the passage lexicographically. I then take the pointed text, and analyze it most minutely, reading at large every article in Gesenius's Elementarbuch which has a bearing upon the subject. By pursuing this plan I shall soon have read a large proportion of the lexicon, and grounded

myself pretty completely in the grammar. In this sort of study, the grammar and lexicon are the real objects of attention; the Hebrew passage only serving as an index to the parts to be consulted. In another branch I shall make the exegesis of the passage my chief aim. Even in the former mode, however, I shall be slowly, but surely, gaining a thorough knowledge of some parts of the Bible."

When we consider the fact that he was but twenty-one years of age, at this time, it must be admitted that his earnestness and thoroughness were quite remarkable. It would certainly have been a great mistake, if such a man had turned aside to any work outside of the scholastic life. It seems, indeed, as if there could have been but one future opening before him.

After two years and a half, in April, 1833, he resigned his professorship and sailed for Europe, where he passed the following year. We get little idea of what he accomplished as a student abroad. Indeed he appears to have been resident in Germany only four or five months; too short a time for any considerable results, though his biographer speaks of him, in fond phrase, as returning "laden with the honeyed spoils of European learning." His European experience in general, if we may judge from his diary or letters, was not any more interesting than that of most cultivated young men whom it has been our fortune to know. His affectionate nephew, however, seems ready, almost everywhere throughout the volumes, to supply us with comments suggesting what Dr. Alexander would no doubt have said, had he known that his life was to be written. And if such vivifying suggestions are made to inspire all the words which the great man has left behind himas perhaps they ought to be—he was as far beyond most other men in respect to this matter, as in respect to many others.

Immediately on his return he became an instructor in the Theological Seminary at Princeton. Here he remained, in one capacity or another, during all the rest of his life. At first he declined the office of Adjunct Professor of Oriental Literature, if we understand his biographer correctly, but he substantially performed its duties from the beginning-being associated with Dr. Charles Hodge as his assistant. Whether this course was taken by reason of a modest and self distrustful view of his qualifications, or for the sake of making a trial as to his

success in this department of instruction before committing himself to it, is a point which is not quite clear to us. But, from whatever cause, he deferred his acceptance for three years, until, in 1838, he was inaugurated Professor, with a reputation already established, and with no further doubts in his own mind, or in the minds of others, that he was in the right place. The concluding portion of the first volume of the biography, and the whole of the second volume, are taken up with the narrative of the quiet and uneventful years, which followed this time, and reached to the hour of his death, nearly a quarter of a century afterward. It is a noticeable fact, that his ordination to the ministry was in 1839-nearly nine years after he had first resolved to devote himself to that profession, and four years after he had entered upon his Seminary duties. He had, indeed, preached to a considerable degree, and with very great acceptance. But, as in the case of his professorship, he was slow and cautious in taking upon himself the sacred office. The world had determined his reputation already, before he consented to present himself before it as claiming or holding the stations to which he was invited. From the time of his ordination, however, his two great works were carried on, side by side, and he was hardly less eminent in the branch of the Presbyterian Church to which he belonged as a preacher, than he was as a scholar.

At this point we leave the narrative, because there is nothing further to be referred to, beyond what may readily come before us as we consider his work and his character. Dr. Alexander was, undoubtedly, a scholar quite superior to most of those whom the department of Biblical Literature has called to itself in this country. He had extraordinary powers of acquiring foreign languages; an extraordinary love of learning; an extraordinary memory which enabled him to retain what he had once learned; an extraordinary patience which shrank from no labor necessary to attain the end he had in view; an extraordinary physical constitution which seemed to require no exercise to keep it in health and vigorous action; and an extraordinary freedom from all craving for social intercourse, so that his whole time could be uninterruptedly devoted to books. This wonderful combination of

powers and peculiarities gave him a vast advantage, as compared with other men, in the one thing to which his life was devoted. A man who cares nothing for society, for example, and can live alone, with no desires or calls from the outward world, escapes an incalculable amount of interruption, and saves for study an immense amount of time. So, too, with a man whose bodily organs take care of themselves, no matter how much he neglects them, or a man whose memory never loses what it has had entrusted to its keeping. No wonder that such a man leaves behind him many of his companions, learning ten languages while they are learning two or three. We do not say that he leads a better, or more useful, or happier life; but, if he has such powers, he will surely know more in his own line of study than they will, or than they canThe volumes before us abound in evidences of all these things. to which we have alluded. Beyond the immediate and narrow circle of his nearest friends, Dr. Alexander had little to do with the world. He buried himself in the privacy of his own room, where he was able to concentrate his mind upon books from morning till night. Persons who attempted to see him were not, indeed, always rejected. They were sometimes kindly received. But his reputation as a lover of solitude, and as a person of not very uniform graciousness of manner, was such that comparatively few ventured to disturb him. He seems to have been so free from all bodily weakness as to have almost despised any special attention to the care of his health. Except for a certain depression arising from peculiar states of the weather, he was never in any other than full working condition. As for his memory, it is sufficient to call attention to the fact, that, after having read the works of various authors and commentators in preparation for his own. commentaries, he was able to lay them all aside, and, keeping their various views fully in mind, to write his volumes in a place removed from his library and his home. His acquiring so largely the knowledge of Arabic in his early years, having commenced the study of it at the age of nine, will show his love of learning; while his patience is indicated by extracts. like that quoted above on page 76th, or like the following, with which the biography abounds:

May 14. Read Acts xxviii., in the Peshito, Vulgate, Luther, Meyer, DeWette, Erasmus, Calvin, Wolf, Bengel, Wetstein, Lightfoot, Lardner, Winer, Bloomfield, Olshausen, Von Gerlach, Humphrey, Hackett, Trollope, and Lyttleton."

Or this, when he was but nineteen years old:

"Sept. 30. 1. In Hebrew I have read since the 30th day of June, the last thirty chapters of Jeremiah-the prophecies of Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obed, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, aud thirty-six Psalms—in all, a hundred and sixty-nine chapters.

"2. Italian. The last twenty-eight cantos of Orlando Furioso.

"4. French. The funeral orations on the death of Maréchal Turenne, by Fléchier and Mascaron; the last two acts of the Menteur' of Corneille; other plays of the same author, and four comedies of Molière.

"5. Arabic.

Sundries in the Koran and Lockmân's Fables.

"6. Persia. Sundries in the Gulistan and the Tooti Namah.

"7. Greek. Homer; Iliad, I., II. XVIII; Odyssey, I., II. Sophocles, the Antigone, several hundred lines.

"8. Latin. The first book of Cicero, de Inventione Rhetorica.

"9. English. Vattel's Law of Nations; the Federalist; the first two volumes of Stewart's Philosophy of the Human Mind; the first two volumes of Kent's Commentaries on American Law; the third volume of Blackstone's Commentaries (for the third time); and sundries."

What we feel impelled to ask-might not such a man accomplish should he turn his energies to Biblical learning for more than twenty years? What wide cultivation might he not obtain, in regions which are rarely penetrated by ordinary minds? He soon became a kind of wonder to the view not only of the students who resorted to the Theological Seminary at Princeton, but to all that large circle of clergymen and others who found the center of their intellectual life in that University town. Before the end of his life, we are told by his nephew, that he understood, so thoroughly as to be "perfect master" of them, eight or ten languages; and, to some extent, about twenty-five. "Had he devoted himself wholly to strange tongues-as he did not, in later life, with the same absorbing assiduity as in former years "-the biographer thinks, "he could have mastered as many as any of the famous linguists, with the solitary exception of Mezzofanti.” We confess that we are a little sceptical in regard to the "twenty-five" languages-not that we doubt, that he may have looked into them to some slight degree, but that, on