minds of Hall and Mackintosh were in many respects alike, and of this we hope to be able to furnish some curious illustrations, should we, as is our purpose, find time to call our readers' attention to the works of Hall; but at present we can only refer to the general character of both minds. There was the same love of truth, the same generosity of purpose and of conduct: both, we think, loved declamation for its own sake, and in this were deceived for declamation is not oratory; yet both undoubtedly possessed the power of influencing great bodies of men-let us say, when calling to their aid the prepared sympathies of those whom they addressed. The auditor was pleased, and could not but be pleased, when he found his own passions, his own prejudices echoed; thoughts which he could recognise as the children of his own fancy were presented to him in the dress given by the great man who was good enough to adopt them and allow them to be called by his name it mattered little whether the language of the orator was quite intelligible; the subject which was to be decorated was as familiar to the admiring crowds as poor Bloomfield's "Farmer's Boy" was to its author before Dr. Parr translated it into Greek, to the great amazement of all Birmingham-and of about as much value as Doctor Parr's translation of Bloomfield's Poems, is the kind of declamation which was then valued at Aberdeen. Hall and Mackintosh were at this time, from their studies, called by their class-fellows "Plato and Herodotus"-so strange was a little Greek at Aberdeen; but moral and metaphysical investigations were their chief subjects of study and dispute. They would repair, we are told by Doctor Gregory, in his memoirs of Hall, to the seashore, or to the picturesque scenery on the banks of the Don, above the old town of Aberdeen, to discuss the subjects of the morning's reading. In this way they examined together almost every important position in Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, in Butler's Analogy, or in Edwards on the Will. Night after night they

disputed for the length of two sessions; and as might be expected, though it surprises Hall's biographer, were for this the better friends. Sir James describes himself as learning more in these discussions than from all the books he had ever read; and Hall was fond of reiterating through life his conviction that "his friend possessed an intellect more analogous to that of Bacon than any person of modern times." To us all this sounds not like in-incerity, but like exaggeration. Hall, though he appears to have had a mind roaming naturally and joyously among its own range of subjects, had the unfortunate habit of seeking to express every thought of his in the strongest language he could invent. His strength of language did not, like that of our home imitators of the German sublime, arise from a blundering effort to render conceivable to other minds what must for ever remain unintelligible to their own. In Hall the very lowest notions of any subject are translated into such language as the goodhumoured satirist has given to the ghost of Johnson in the Rejected Addresses; and we are afraid that Sir James's admirers will not find it easy to persuade others that there is any great resemblance between him and Bacon, although such was the opinion of his distinguished Aberdeen classfellow. It is marvellous to us how, while these Scottish-bred chiefs are for ever disputing, they regard nothing as the subject of reasonable doubt. No, no! they translate everything into aphorism, and then it rests an article of faith—a proposition to be sustained by thesis and syllogism, against all gainsayers. O ye sons of Scotland! and ye, their children of Belfast-and ye who, in the parish of Templemore,* are recorded by the Ordnance Surveyors of Ireland as reading each month 500 numbers of the University Magazine, beware how you flatter yourselves into the belief that because ye are positive ye are therefore Aristotles; think not, because ye have fought at the Diamond, that ye are altogether such as the mighty men of our Magazine. You are not: neither

was Mackintosh any thing at all like Bacon; nor was Robert Hall--though his is no inglorious a name in our literature—such a man as Jeremy Taylor. Mackintosh's vacations were passed in making verses and love, and the circumstances of his family made him anxious for an early establishment in life. His utmost ambition, did not, he tells us, soar beyond a professorship at Aberdeen; and though some letters were written by influential persons to aid him in this object, it does not seem to have been pursued by him with any earnestness. We cannot but think that his life would, under such circumstances, have been a more happy and a more useful one than that to which his higher destinies called him. A person speculating on the fortunes of eminent men may reasonably regret that the humble offices which Mackintosh and Burke sought for themselves in early life were denied to them; for we can scarce bring ourselves to believe that the peaceful studies in which

their own tastes would have led them

to pass their lives would not have produced better fruit than can live in the climate to which they were removed. Burke giving up to party what belonged to mankind is scarcely an overstatement, and Mackintosh's name is destined to live in our literature by the fragments of works which his position in society interrupted and marred. When he gave up the plan of college life he had to look round him for the means of subsistence. His own inclination would have led him to the Scotch bar; but his means were unequal to the struggles of so expensive and uncertain a profession. To become a bookseller in London was his next hope; but capital was wanting for that; and so he lost the enjoyment of that paradise on earth, as he then thought "a life spent among books, and diversified by the society of men of genius." The deliberations ended in his going to Edinburgh to study medicine.

The names of the principal persons in the literary circles in Edinburgh in the year 1784 are mentioned. Mackintosh's age and circumstances were such as to give him little opportunity of often seeing them; and we gather that M'Kenzie and Dr. Gregory were at this time almost the only lions he was in the habit of seeing. "The elegant

genius of the former was too calm to make a due impression on the tumul tuary mind of a disputatious boy; and," adds Sir James, "I soon contracted prejudices against the latter of the same nature with those which made nie spurn the society and reject the almost paternal kindness of Doctor Cullen, to whom I had been very warmly recommended."

Mackintosh's residence at Edinburgh was in the dog-days of the Brunonian heresy in medicine. He had a fever--was recommended wine-drank it in large quantities-recovered-became, in consequence, a Brunonian-and, instead of studying medicine, joined a medical debating club; and was, of course, among Cullen's warmest assailants. We are not competent to form any opinion of the value of Brown's theories; but his own love of ardent spirits is said to have had no small influence in the formation of them. He delivered lectures on the anti-Cullenian system, which attracted great crowds. Each evening, previous to his lecture, he astonished his audience by taking fifty drops of the tincture of opium in a glass of whiskey, and repeated the dose four or five times in the course of the lecture. In this way he inflamed his imagination for a while, and declaimed with great animation, Brown mixed in all the worst dissipation of the students, and must have been the ruin of many of them. It is scarce worth while to delay our narrative by mentioning his fate. His habits of drunkenness became each day more confirmed; his theories, though deserv ing of more attention than the Cullenians would give them, were soon brought into disrepute by his intemperance, and by his presumptuous and confiding ignorance. Cullen struggled to make out means of support for him, but in vain. He migrated to London-ate opium-drank brandy-advertised lectures, and seemed to have secured an audience-but he came home one night drunk to his lodgings-took his customary dose of laudanum, and was found dead!

This was dangerous society for a clever boy, and Sir James felt it so. We transcribe another page from his memoirs :

guished bark from James's powder, or a pleurisy from a dropsy in the chamber of a sick patient, I discussed with the utmost fluency and confidence the most difficult questions in the science of medicine. We mimicked, or rather felt all the passions of an administration and opposition; and we debated the cure of a dyssentery with as much factious violence as if our subject had been the rights of a people, or the fate of an empire. Any subject of division is, indeed, sufficient food for the sectarian and factious propensities of human nature. These debates might, no doubt, be laughed at by a spectator; but if he could look through the ridiculous exterior, he might see that they led to serious and excellent consequences. The exercise of the understanding was the same, on whatever subjects, or in whatever manner it was employed. Such debates were the only public examinations in which favour could have no place, and which never could degenerate into mere formality; they must always be severe and always just.

I was soon admitted a member of the Speculative Society, which had general literature and science for its objects. It had been founded about twenty years before, and during that period, numbered among its members all the distinguished youth of Scotland, as well as many foreigners attracted to Edinburgh by the medical schools.

When I became a member, the leaders were Charles Hope, now Lord Justice Clerk, John Wilde, afterwards professor of civil law, and who has now, alas! survived his own fertile and richly endowed mind; Malcolm Laing the historian, "The scourge of impostors and terror of quacks;" Baron Constant de Rebecque, a Swiss of singular manners and powerful talents, and who made a transient appearance in the tempestuous atmosphere of the French Revolution;t Adam Gillies, a brother of the historian, and a lawyer in great practice at Edinburgh; Lewis Grant, eldest son of Sir James Grant, then a youth of great promise, afterwards member of parliament for the county of Elgin, now in the most hopeless state of mental derangement; and Thomas Addis Emmett, who soon after quitted physic for law, and became distinguished at the

Irish bar, He was a member of the secret directory of united Irishmen. In 1801, when I last visited Scotland, he was a state prisoner in Fort George. He is now a barrister at New York.

Hope had not much fancy, but he had sense and decision, and he was a speaker of weight and force.

• Emmett did not reason, but he was an eloquent declaimer, with the taste which may be called Irish, and which Grattan had then rendered so popular at Dublin. Wilde had no precision and no elegance: he copied too much the faults of Mr. Burke's manner. He was, however, full of imagination and knowledge, a most amusing speaker and delightful companion, and one of the most generous of men.

My first speech was in the Speculative Society; it was against the slave trade, which Dr. Skeete, a West Indian physician, attempted to defend. My first essay was on the religion of Ossian. I maintained, that a belief in the separate existence of heroes must always have prevailed for some time before hero-worship; that the greatest men must be long dead, believed to exist in another region, and considered as objects of reverence before they are raised to the rank of deities; that Ossian wrote at this stage in the progress of superstition; and that if Christianity had not been so soon introduced, his Trenmor and Fingal might have grown into the Saturn and Jupiter of the Caledonians. Constant complimented me for the ingenuity of the hypothesis, but said, that he believed Macpherson to have been afraid of inventing a religion for his Ossian.””—Vol. I. pp. 25-28.

We must make room for his observations many a long year after on these declaiming societies and their effects :

"I am not ignorant of what Edinburgh then was. I may truly say, that it is not easy to conceive a university where industry was more general, where reading was more fashionable, where indolence and ignorance were more disreputable. Every mind was in a state of fermentation. The direction of mental activity will not indeed be universally approved. It certainly was very much,

though not exclusively pointed towards metaphysical inquiries. Accurate and applicable knowledge were deserted for speculations not susceptible of certainty, nor of any immediate reference to the purposes of life. Strength was exhausted in vain leaps to catch what is too high for our reach. Youth, the season of humble diligence, was often wasted in vast and fruitless projects. Speculators Those who will learn, must for a time trust their teachers, and believe in their superiority. But they who too early think for themselves, must sometimes think themselves wiser than their master, from whom they can no longer gain any thing valuable. Docility is thus often extinguished, when education is scarcely begun. It is vain to deny the reality of these inconveniences, and of other most serious dangers to the individual and to the community, from a speculative tendency (above all) too early impressed on the minds of youth.""Vol. I. p. 29.

could not remain submissive learners.

We hurry over the rest of his Edinburgh life. He obtained his diploma at the usual time; and his thesis is said to have been better than was expected from a man so idle.

The excitement of debating clubs was, we think, injurious to him in every way. Notwithstanding the animation of such scenes, and although the mind exerts itself with increased activity under such influences; and the village Keans and Coates's of the political stage-those who are fitted by nature for the part, and their affected imitators are formed by the opportunity thus given; and although we freely admit that there are few circumstances in which intellect is awakened that are not really and for ever beneficial to society,-yet there is much to deplore in those stimulants which lead young men of the highest promise (such are always most easily misled) from the acquisition of real knowledge into courting opportunities of display; which, while not less time is employed in intellectual exertion than if the studies were of a more sober kind, yet make the student habitually neglect such pursuits as cannot well be the subject of popular harangues, and, what perhaps is worse, tempt him by the strongest impulses of our nature to think rather of what will satisfy the minds of others than his

own, and in this way make him, in the very recesses of his heart, and almost unknown to himself, the mere advocate of a party. Every thing that distinguishes original thinking is gradually lost-every higher quality that requires more than publicity and praise dies away-every sentiment is accom modated to the taste and understanding of the expected audience, and the strength of expression is almost inversely as the feeling of the speaker. Hence in part the strange inconsis tencies of men with "public lives;" hence, too, the otherwise inexplicable fact that those who at first dealt in the most violent declamation have almost always ended in losing all that was peculiar or striking in their style, and have become, as they advanced in life, the most commonplace of all men-knowing nothing-feeling nothing-loving nothing. But we are forgetting the limits within which our observations must be confined, and shall therefore say no more on this subject at present than just advert to the spirit of partizanship, thus almost unconsciously created, and its more direct injuries. The man may be an honest man, but is scarcely a fair reasoner, who does not present to his own mind the case of an adversary with as much strength as his mind dispassionately exercised upon the subjeet can give it. Now, at these meetings-call them debating clubs or what you will-does it ever occur that in any of the speeches on either side an attentive listener can point out anything like a fair statement of the case to which the speaker affects to reply?

In the spring of the following year (1788) he migrated to London. There is some inaccuracy of dates in this part of his son's narrative; for his marriage is represented as taking place on the 18th of February of the same year with a young lady whom he met at the house where he lodged. We think, both from the order in which some other incidents of Sir James's life are given, and from his son's account of the idleness and dissipation in which his first year in London was passed, that the editor of Sir James's History of the Revolution must be right in assigning the next year as the date of his marriage. The marriage surprised and offended the friends of

both parties; and yet so little is it possible for others to estimate what are the constituents of happiness there can scarce be a doubt that the short period of obscure struggle which followed this union was the happiest of Sir James's life. His support was obtained by contributions to the periodical press. A pamphlet on the regency question, occasioned by the malady which attacked George the Third, in which Mackintosh supported the analogy which Fox sought to establish between the existing circumstances and the natural demise of the crown, is the only work of his to which any distinct reference is given. He made some unsuccessful attempts to establish himself as a physician, first in Salisbury, then at Bath, and afterwards at Weymouth. In 1789 he visited the Netherlands in company with his wife, and for the greater part of the year resided in Brussels, where he made himself acquainted with foreign politics-informaation which, on his return to London, he turned to an immediate account. He returned to London early in 1790, without money or means of living. There must, we think, be some mistake in the statement given by a correspondent of the Law Magazine, on the authority of Parr, that "his wife being the sister of Peter and Daniel Stuart, the respective proprietors of the Oracle and Morning Post-the former a Pittite, the latter a Foxite paper-Mackintosh wrote leading articles for each of those journals, suited to their respective politics. The statement was probably one of Parr's monstrous exaggerations at a period of hostility with Sir James -for, though we are altogether ignorant of the author of the paper in the Law Magazine, it is impossible to read the article and not place the most entire reliance on the fidelity of his recollection. The notes to that article by the editor of the Law Magazine contain much interesting information.

In April, 1791, appeared his reply to Burke-a splendid work, aud which even at this day cannot be read without our feeling that it deserved all the praise which it obtained. The publication of the "Vindicia Gallica" at once brought its author into celebrity. His acquaintance was eagerly sought by

the leaders of the Whig party; "by Fox, Grey, Lauderdale, Erskine, Whitbread;" and soon after by one, whose praise not alone was of more value, but under the circumstances must have been felt of more value-by Burke himself. The period of his composing it," says the biographer who has drawn up the account prefixed to Sir James's Fragment of the History of the Revolution, a narrative which seems to us of considerable value, though spoken of with some impatience by Mackintosh's son-" the period of composing it was probably the happiest of his life. His life was now passed in the solitude of his house at Ealing, without seeking or desiring any other enjoyment than the composition of his work and the society of his wife, to whom, by way of recreation, in the evening, he read what he had written during the day. The Vindiciae Gallicæ, accordingly, though not the most profound or learned of his productions, was never after equalled by him in vigour and fervor of thought, style, and dialectics."

We, of course, must decline any discussion of the topics of Mackintosh's work; but there is something in the honest letter of Mr. Wilde's, which his son gives, that compels us to make room for it :

"With regard to your book, my dearest James, I had the first or second copy that was in Edinburgh. My opinion of it I need not tell you; as I prophesied luna minores;' but I prefer sunshine, it has happened. You are inter ignes even to the moon playing in autumnal azure on the waters of Loughness. You know I never could conceal any part of my mind from such friends as better for sottishness and prostitution you. I certainly did not like you the

66

on a throne.' Let us reason the matter. Suppose all the calumnies against the King and Queen of France to be true, you will not certainly say that the slavery of France was owing to them. Let the private vices of this man and woman be what they might, they had nothing in them savage or tyrannical. France was enslaved long before, and by other hands. You deny the benevolence of the king of France. Be it so: but you allow yourself, and who will not allow, (Paine does it,) that concessions to liberty,