are the germs of a philosopher, with which the great and successful effort he made, some years later, to prove his right to the honor of a baronetcy, does not very well accord; while his childish fancy for the Pilgrim's Progress and the Apocalypse was the early evidence of a liking for the marvellous which we should hardly have expected, but which, in after years, often afforded pleasant refreshment to a mind wearied with abstract speculation.

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Here, too, is the first spark of the mixed Italian and Irish fire that edged his controversies in riper life; for, as Mill says, "though a strictly honorable he was a most unsparing controversialist, and whoever assailed even the most unimportant of his opinions might look for hard blows in return." But the quick temper, which had as noble a servant in the body that encased it in youth as it had afterward in the brain, was backed by a warm affection that always healed the wounds it had made, and retained for Hamilton as prominent a place in the hearts of his fellows as his dexterity gave him in their sports. In him the massive mind and great heart did keep company. For his only brother, Captain Cyril Thornton," and Ensign O'Doherty," of Blackwood's Magazine-his affection was great. For his university friend, Scott, he had such love as induced him to copy a journal which Scott's mother had kept of his last illness, and, years afterward, to name a son after the friend of his youth. Of the severance of a long friendship with Lockhart-after Scott, the most intimate of his schoolday friends-he was so unwilling to speak that it is impossible to determine the cause that led to it; while, of the effect upon him of the bereavement that he suffered in his thirty-ninth year, in the prime of his great manhood, we read that "so greatly was he prostrated by his mother's death that for some time he appears to have been without energy or spirit to make any exertion. Contrary to his usual methodical habits, he even neglected to return his books to their shelves, or to keep them in any sort of order. The result was the necessity of a somewhat ludicrous emigration from room to

room of the house; for an accumulation of confusion ensued in one apartment from which he could free himself only by taking refuge in another. This, in like manner, was abandoned when it had reached a similar state of disorder. At length he established himself in a large room in the upper story of the house, which commanded a view of the opposite coast and of the Fifeshire hills. He thought it less dismal than any of the usual sitting-rooms, associated as they were in his mind with more cheerful days. In the following year (1828) he removed to a smaller house in Manor Place, in which he continued to reside until 1839. Mr. De Quincey, who was in Edinburgh at this period, used kindly to break in on Sir William's evening solitude, accompanied generally by his eldest son and daughter, children of about eight or ten years of age. "While the two philosophers discoursed till the small hours of the morning, the two children would be lying asleep on a chair.”

Such facts as these-and his affection for his children would furnish further evidence of the same thing-prove that Hamilton was not the emotionless creature (or creator?) that some would have him to have been. For, as if adhering to their youthful impression that great men are as unlike others in the narrow bounds as in the wider reaches of their thought, many affect surprise at discovering evidences of their humanity in their private lives, and have, in particular, regarded Hamilton as one in whom the mental was not coupled with an ethical discipline and development. Were we to seek to determine that which rendered his character less complete than it might have been, we should discover it in a defect of will rather than in an inability, sometimes, to compel his mind to labor contentedly and with its whole strength in a given direction. We should suppose that the mind of Sir William Hamilton was at the time of his death burdened with as great a number of plans unaccomplished as that of any man of recent times, with the exception, perhaps, of Coleridge. In this is the suggestion of an ordinary infirmity of weaker minds.

Or was his conception of the work before him always

so grand a one that he forgot for the moment the wear and tear of body, and that he could not live forever? Whoever will study the preparation he made for, to him, so secondary a scheme as a proposed life of Martin Luther, will feel that an iron frame and a lease of eternity were needed to accomplish the much he hoped to perform. And how many minds death seized when it took his away! The whole world was then plundered without hope of recovery. All that rendered his Oxford career, if not the brightest, certainly the grandest that has been-all the rich results of such study as virtually restored Aristotle again to earth-the last recollection of obscure ones long ago dead-a high and perfect love of knowledge, unwilling to discriminate between that which the world approves and that which it condemns-doctor, lawyer, and great teacher-all these disappeared at once from the world.

The works he has left are the dimmest reflection of the man. They give no hint of that which was felt by those who saw him and listened to him, and knew his words to be no second-hand oracular responses, but the utterance of the god himself. In him that ancient possibility, universal scholarship, was as nearly realized as may be in this richer age. What had the poetry of George Buchanan, of Balde, of the triumvirate that Sannazarius headed in the sixteenth centurywhat had the writings of Baptista Mantuanus, or of Audoenus, to do with philosophy? What had medicine, or law, or a discussion of the Greek verb which should cite the opinions of Apollonius, Dyscolius, and Heradian, and a dozen more of whom the Royal Society had scarcely heard? Or the knowledge that could, follow Dr. Parr, into realms that he had thought solely his own, so closely as to compel him to turn upon his young pursuer with a Why, who are you, sir?" Yet these were a part of Hamilton. And, if such an acquaintance with the facts that make human history as can view them without and within, and marshal them according to the natural order they disclose-if, in a word, the widest range of knowledge with the profoundest erudition, is the proper equipment for a philosopher, then was Hamilton prepared for the great work of his life.

From 1812 to 1820 he was professionally a lawyer, yet one who never gave his heart wholly to his work; and for whom, if his disposition to pursue the recondite rather than the practical part of his profession did not stand in the way of rapid advancement, his political opinions certainly did. Those were honorable years for Edinburgh. Dugald Stewart, Playfair, and Henry Mackenzie, old men, were still alive. Those were Sir Walter Scott's most creative years. Francis Jeffrey, too, was making the best of them, Campbell, Southey, Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, furnishing the material upon which he worked. Thomas Brown, having relieved Stewart, was ornately declaiming his dogmatic criticism; while De Quincey, Wilson, and Lockhart were the promise of a time near at hand. To De Quincey we owe a racy picture of the Hamilton of 1814:

"In those days Wilson sometimes spoke to me of his friend Hamilton as one especially distinguished by manliness and elevation of character, and occasionally gazed at as a monster of erudition. Indeed, the extent of his reading was said to be portentous--in fact, frightful, and to some extent even suspicious; so that certain ladies thought him 'no canny.' If arithmetic could demonstrate that all the days of his life, ground down and pulverized into 'wee wee' globules of five or eight minutes each, and strung upon threads, would not furnish a rosary any thing like corresponding, in its separate beads or counters, to the books he was known to have studied and familiarly used, then it became clear that he must have had extra aid in some way or other-must have read by proxy. Now, in that case, we all know in what direction a man turns for help, and who it is that he applies to when he wishes, like Dr. Faustus, to read more books than belong to his allowance in this life. . . I was sitting alone, after breakfast, when Wilson suddenly walked in with his friend Hamilton. So exquisitely free was Sir William from all ostentation of learning that, unless the accidents of conversation made a natural opening for display, such as it would have been affectation to evade, you might have failed altogether to suspect that an extraordinary scholar was present. On this first interview with him I saw nothing to challenge any special attention beyond an unusual expression of kindness and cordiality in his abord. There was also an air of dignity and massy self-dependence diffused over his deportment, too calm and unaffected to leave a doubt that it exhaled spontaneously from his nature, yet too unassuming to mortify the pretensions of others. Men of genius I had seen before, and men distinguished for their attain

ments, who shocked everybody, and upon me in particular, nervously susceptible, inflicted horror as well as distress, by striving restlessly, and almost angrily, for the chief share in conversation. . . . . In Sir William, on the other hand, was an apparent carelessness whether he took any conspicuous share or none at all in the conversation. . . . . In general, my conclusion was, that I had rarely seen a person who manifested less of self-esteem under any of the forms by which, ordinarily, it reveals itself--whether of pride or vanity, or full-blown arrogance, or heartchilling reserve."

It was in 1820 that the two friends, Wilson and Hamilton, became the rival candidates for the chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, vacated by the resignation of Stewart, and the death of Brown. Before this, Sir William had made two short visits to Germany, both in the interest of literature. These appear to have been the only occasions on which he was absent from Scotland after his final establishment in Edinburgh. Like his fellow Scotsman, Carlyle (whose liking for Hamilton seems of a piece with his admiration of Edward Irving), he would appear to have reckoned much travelling among "shams." And, certainly, this was wisdom in one who had a world at his command, and who best loved to study with his family about him.

Though sixteen years of professional service would have been gained by Hamilton's appointment to the Chair of Moral Philosophy, yet, considering his greater fitness for the more exacting duties of the position he afterward filled, and, still more, the value of the work he meanwhile accomplished, it may be doubted whether it had been better for the world. Of this we may be sure that, when political propriety was weighed against mental fitness for the position, the former triumphed, and John Wilson was elected to the chair. But, as Lord Corehouse remarked, it was better to fail with such credentials as Hamilton offered than to succeed with any others; and, early in the following year, his recognized qualifications compelled even those who were hostile to his politics to concur in his appointment to the professorship of Civil History in the same university. To fill its duties was no great task, and Hamilton had leisure to pursue his investigations in his favorite fields.