of the East. Short as his residence was destined to be, comprehensive as were his views, and great his attainments in science, in history, and European politics, it would have been an accomplishment procured at too costly a sacrifice of time and thought, and he did wisely to abstain from the seductions that to his imaginative mind such a new field of literature spread before him. In his first official charge he openly avowed his strong repugnance to Capital Punishments; he affirmed that he had no opinion of the efficacy of transportation for reformation or example; and he wished all places of punishment to be so constructed as to prevent the loss of liberty being aggravated by unnecessary severities. He conceived it to be the first duty of a criminal judge to exert and strain every faculty of his mind to discover, in every case, the smallest possible quantity of punishment that may be effectual for the ends of amendment and example. He considered every pang of the criminal, not necessary for those objects, as a crime in the judge. To these sentiments, which did honour to him as a citizen and as a man, and which were in full accordance with his belief as a Christian, he was through life consistent; and to him was given the high and enviable privilege of extending those principles by his influence as a legislator, which he had firmly enforced by his authority as a judge.*

It is said that while in India he commenced the History of England, beginning with the Revolution. He sketched some of the principal characters, and leading passages in the work; and though these sketches were stolen from him, and offered for sale in France, he subsequently recovered them. He wrote a very beautiful and masterly sketch of the character of Fox in the Bombay Courier; a sketch so just in its ideas, so elegant in its language, so honourable in its feeling, as at once to rise into an undisputed superiority over numerous competitors. He returned to Europe in 1812, and received a pension of 1,2001. a-year from the Company, and a Law Professorship in the College. In the same year he was returned to Parliament through the interest of Lord Camden, as the representative of the small county of Nairn. We cannot follow him through the details of his political life; the effect of his first speech was undermined by a manœuvre of Lord Castlereagh, and it is said that the failure was long felt by him. As a politician he appeared to stand on neutral ground. The Whigs did not desert nor disclaim him, and yet the Court offered him a seat through the medium of Lord Moira. He wrote many able articles for the Edinburgh Review, and unfolded his philosophical principles of criticism on works of taste and science; and in society he was distinguished for the brilliancy and amenity of his conversational powers.

The annexation of Genoa to Sardinia called forth in one splendid display the varied argumentative powers of his mind; his established maxims of civil jurisprudence; his knowledge of the great fundamental principles of the constitution-his acquaintance, deep and wide, with municipal and international law-and his warm interest in the independence of nations, and

To this praise of simplicity, one passage pointed out by the Biographer is certainly an extraordinary exception. "The moral and political system of Hobbes was a palace of ice, transparent, exactly proportioned, majestic, admired by the many as a delightful dwelling, but gradually undermined by the central warmth of human feeling, before it was thawed into muddy water by the sunshine of true philosophy."

There is a strangely worded sentence in this part of the narrative: "After his return to England he was requested to sit for a bust of him, to be placed in the Society's library, and was regarded with the reverence due to one who was its chief or nament."

:

the sacred liberty of mankind. The remaining literary works of Sir James Mackintosh were a general view of Ethical Philosophy, published in the Encyclopædia Britannica; a life of Sir Thomas More in Lardner's Cyclopædia, and a History of England from the Roman Conquest to the Reign of Elizabeth. The dissertation on Ethics is more occupied with the review of the different systems that have appeared, than in advancing original opinions. His views are comprehensive, acute, and impartial his style generally clear, and such as is suited to works of philosophy, but not equal to Dugald Stuart's in the grace and finish of the composition. His comprehensive examination extends from the remotest dawn of knowledge and civilization to the present day; from the schools of Plato and Epicurus, to those of Bentham and of Brown; and, as we move along the direction of his work, the brilliancy of every ingenious theory, and the grandeur of every elaborate system, the favourite paradox of every school, and the subtle speculation of every private moralist, rise and expand themselves before us. The character of Hume seems to be drawn with great precision of knowledge and taste, as well as impartiality of feeling. With what a mild and forbearing dignity are the sceptical opinions of the Philosopher approached in the following paragraph :

"To those who are strangers to the seductions of paradox, to the intoxication of fame, and to the bewitchment of prohibited opinions, it must be unaccountable, that he who revered benevolence should cease to see it on the throne of the universe. It is a matter of wonder, that his habitual esteem for every fragment and shadow of moral excellence, should not lead him to envy those who contemplated its perfection in that living and paternal character which gives it a power over the human heart."

Alas! what coarseness of invective, what brutality of insult, have been lavished against the very passages and declarations which are here viewed only with the serene eye of the philosopher, and treated with that compassionate tenderness which is best adapted to remark the infirmities of genius, and to lament the inconsistencies and absurdities of the human heart.

The Life of Sir T. More is a beautiful specimen of biography, and although the History of England may not always be precise in its dates, or accurate in its facts; though it may have added nothing from the hidden record, or the forgotten roll, to the mass of our historical materials; yet the judicious and skilful manner in which the narrative is conducted, and the refined graces with which it abounds, are deserving of high praise; and the inferences and reflections are such as we should have expected from a wise and benevolent mind.

Among the tributes of honour bestowed upon Mackintosh's high literary character, the degree of LL.D. was conferred on him by the University of Oxford; and he was twice elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. In 1830, on Lord Grey's taking office, he was appointed Commissioner for the Affairs in India. He took but little part in the proceedings of Parliament; but his speech on the 4th of July, 1831, on the Reform Bill, was among the ablest spoken. It was not a speech calculated to propitiate the people; it was not directed to attack the aristocracy; it was not constructed on party motives; it was not guided by personal antipathies; but it conveyed the deliberate conviction of the inan of years and of wisdom, of the philosophic statesman and the experienced politician, on one of the most important and awful propositions that could be considered in the councils of a nation.

During the winter of 1831 and 1832, his health was delicate and uncer

tain about the middle of March he experienced, while at dinner, a difficulty of respiration and deglutition; and after some fluctuations of his complaint, which arose from muscular debility, pains in the head and limbs came on, and were followed by brain fever and delirium; his case became hopeless, and he expired in a state of insensibility on the 30th of May, and was buried in the parish church of Hampstead, on the 4th of June, 1832.

We have already exhausted all the space we had to spare, and perhaps even too long wearied the attention of our readers; we must therefore decline any formal summary of the varied excellencies and characteristics of Sir James Mackintosh's mind, which may be sufficiently gathered from the preceding narration; though we must lament the absence of all that personal recollection, and social and domestic intercourse, could have added to enrich the pages of his biography. This is a defect that we trust the attachment and veneration of his friends will supply; in the mean time, we think that we cannot better conclude, than in applying the same language in which he recorded the merits of the great Leader of the Opposition, to himself: "He will most certainly command the unanimous reverence of future generations by his pure sentiments towards the Commonwealth; by his zeal for the civil and religious rights of all men; by his liberal principles, favourable to mild government, to the unfettered exercise of the human faculties, and the progressive civilization of mankind; by his love for a country of which the well-being and greatness were indeed inseparable from his own glory, and by his profound reverence for that free constitution which he was universally admitted to understand better than any other man of his age, both in an exactly legal, and in a comprehensively philosophical sense."

DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE.

BY THOMAS GREEN, ESQ.

(Continued from p. 253.)

1804.

Nov. 15. Kotzebue, in his Travels to Paris, mentions that Madame Talma, who was a fellow-prisoner with Madame Roland, relates that the latter spent two nights before her execution in playing on the harpsichord but that the airs she struck, and her manner of playing, was so strange, so striking, and so frightful, that the sounds will never escape her memory.

Dec. 1. In the review in the Literary Journal of Brougham's Colonial Policy, No. 9, they speak of him as a writer in the Edinburgh Review, and as a youth of great promise.

Dec. 16. Finished Wakefield's Life. His fancy was fine, his sensibility exquisite, his taste delicious, and his language combining an exuberant flow, with apposite felicity, beyond any I ever met with: but I have no opinion of his judgment; his distinguishing virtues were mischievous for want of discretion, and though artless, candid, and at the bottom highly amiable, I am not surprised that he appeared a malicious and dangerous incendiary in the Court of King's Bench. I cannot read his political works myself without a violent indignation. His epistolary effusions are very happy; though he sets out with broadly stating his incessant thirst of knowledge, he afterwards mentious periodical fits of indolence. He ac

knowledges too a peevishness of temper and frowardness of mind. The endeavour which he makes to found the authenticity of the Old Testament on the New, has always appeared to me a very injudicious and suspicious inversion. He more than once explicitly and emphatically states, that the only foundation of morality is Revelation; this is strange, and evinces how far a favourite notion may monopolize the mind. Parr, in his view of Wakefield's literary character, thinks less highly of his critical abilities (in the pedantic sense of the term) than I should have supposed. Of classical criticism, in that sense, I know nothing, but certainly nothing can be more weak or absurd than his favourite emendation in " As you like it."

Dec. 22. Dined at Doctor Williams's. Many interesting anecdotes from Mr. C. Williams. Dunning, whose debauched habits often made him late, came shuffling into Court at half past nine. Lord Mansfield was very vexed. "Do you know what hour it is, Mr. Dunning?" Mr. D. pulling out his watch, "Half past nine, my Lord." "I have been here an hour, Mr. Dunning." "Then, my Lord, we have been equally irregular, you half an hour too soon, and I half an hour too late."- -Dunning had been strongly contesting a point of law, and urging Lord Mansfield to revise his opinion. "Mr. Dunning, I apprehend, I sit here, by his Majesty's gracious permission, to decide what is the law-at this rate I had better go home and burn my books."-" You had better by half go home and read them," said Dunning aside, but pretty loud.Lord Mansfield, after having examined the two old Mr. Elms, respecting their modes of life, and having applied the answer of the first sarcastically to Dunning, but receiving a very different answer from the second, "Well, my Lord," said Dunning, "what do you collect?"-" That Elm, Mr. Dunning, wet or dry, is a very tough wood."Sir Pepper Arden had been ill, to the great vexation of Lord Thurlow. The messenger came again, with his Honour's respects, and was sorry he could not sit at the Rolls. "What the devil ails him?" thundered Thurlow. "Please your Lordship, he is so relaxed, every thing goes through him." "D-n his eyes," said Thurlow, "let him take* an Act of Parliament, there is nothing so binding."- -An anecdote of him, when young, was characteristic. He used to annoy the Master of Caius, by walking across the grass. Seeing him coming, the Master opens the window, and cries, "Mr. Thurlow! Mr. Thurlow! I never look out at this window, but I see you walking across that grass.' "And I," said Thurlow, never walk across this grass, but I see you looking out of that window."sell said, Charles Townshend gave at a party, as a sentiment, "The Minister of State." Lady Cowper asked him for an explanation. "Why, Madam, we get in with difficulty, we stay in as long as we can-and we go out whenever we can be of no further use."- -Was very drunk when he made his speech, in which he depicted the quiet succession of administrations-said he went with Erskine, in his uniform, to be admitted at Lincoln's Inn; Erskine had lately affirmed, that he meant to take orders, and hoped to die a Bishop. The Prince promised him the first that fell.

-Rus

Dec. 23. The third volume of Burney's History of Music closes with an interesting account of the great Henry Purcell, whom he justly considers as the father of English musical expression; having fortified,

The Editor has softened the expression of the Lord Chancellor, though much at the expense of the wit.

lengthened, and tuned, the true accents of our mother tongue, those notes of passion which an Englishman would naturally breathe, and enforced those indigenous tones, by a modulation bold, affecting, sublime in the accent, passion, and expression of English words, he considers his vocal music as far superior to Handel's as an original poem to a translation. "From rosie bowers," he thinks his masterpiece this way. T. Salmon proposes a scheme, which has often occurred to me, of abolishing the plague of cliffs, by marking all unisons alike, and distinguishing octaves! On Stradella's unintentionally causing two assassins, hired to murder him, to relent by the charms of his composition, Burney observes, that it is a miraculous power of modern music, superior perhaps to any that can be well authenticated of the ancients. He considers Handel's "He was despised and rejected of men," in the Messiah, as the first English air for pathetic expression. He observes of Handel's music, that it requires a more powerful agency in the orchestra to develope and display it, than that of any other composer. Nothing can express his conceptions, but an Omnipotent hand. His pauses, he remarks, often "catch loquacity in. the fact."

Dec. 30. Read the first part of Bentley's remarks on Collins. In the assumed and well-sustained part of a Leipsic scholar, he wields the weapons of controversy with matchless dexterity and vigour; and he particularly luxuriates, when he evinces how little the various lections in the New Testament affect the integrity of the text. He positively affirms what I cannot believe, "That no man in his senses ever fell from Christianity to Atheism, who did not, from ill conduct, look on Christianity with fear and terror."

1805.

June 12. Read several of Gay's Fables. The thoughts are often neatly and sweetly expressed, but the moral sometimes is by no means clear in itself, nor clearly deduced from the fiction, an essential failing: it ought to stand forth in the brightest evidence. The happiest of all seems to be the 42d of the first set, exhibiting the contention between Vice and a Juggler, in which there is infinite wit and playfulness.

Jan. 15. Read Hurd's Lectures, in which he contends, with much subtlety of discrimination and refinement of reasoning, but with too curious and too captious a show of both, that the evidence of prophecy cannot properly be examined either by believers or unbelievers, without considering it as being what it professes to be, of divine suggestion, and having its ultimate accomplishment in the history and dispensation of Christ. In other lights, we attack or defend a phantom. Hurd's subtle preparative discriminations are very ensnaring, and would require infinite exertion in his antagonist. The paltry, provoking vulgarisms with which his style is polluted, are relieved by sentences and by passages of excelling majesty and captivating grace.

Read H. Tooke's defence on the Lexington libel. Exquisite discernment and penetration, perversely and mischievously misapplied. His future biographer may glean much information from passages in these speeches.

Jan. 17. Finished Johnson's Letters to Mr. Thrale. They raise him, if possible, still higher than ever in my esteem and veneration. His wonderful insight into the real springs of human actions, is often apparent where he trifles most; and when he summons his powers, he pours new and unexpected lights even on the clearest and most obvious topics. See