should not be conscious, and this made him too open to the praise of those who could not truly appreciate them, and who bestowed their hollow compliments with insincerity of heart. Endowed with an ardour of feeling and quickness of perception proportionate to his stupendous abilities, and forming, in fact, an inherent and essential part of their constitution, it was impossible that his likings and aversions should not be proportionably strong, and more plainly expressed than those of other men, and his habits in this and many other respects, were what the great founder of the Peripatetic school ascribes to the character of the magnanimous, and such indeed he was.

"If I have touched thus plainly and sincerely on the blemishes of his character, I may claim the "greater credit in what I have to say on its excellencies. You will readily believe that he who has not sought to conceal the former, will not wish to magnify the latter beyond their due bounds. Indeed it would hardly be necessary to say this, were it not probable that among those who are now assembled there may be some, who were either strangers to him personally, or who have had but slight opportunities of knowing him. But to you, his beloved flock, who have had the benefit of his instruction and converse for more than forty years to you, his longtried and long-known friends, whose affection for him has increased in proportion to the length of your intimacy - to those whose frequent and habitual intercourse has given you the best means of estimating his talents and his virtues, to you it is needless to make this appeal. I speak before many and competent, even the most competent witnesses, in whose presence it would be as absurd in me to praise him for virtues which he did not possess, as it would be base in an enemy to censure him for faults which cannot justly be laid to his charge. I am here in obedience to his command, and so far, I trust, in his own free and manly spirit, as to scorn offering to his memory, what I should despise to receive as a tribute to my own. I must ever speak of him with the warmth of affectionate friendship, with love for his virtues,

with admiration for his learning, and with gratitude for his regard; but I will say of him only that which I believe and know, and will never introduce the language of insincerity in a place and on an occasion, which, of all others, should admit only the voice of truth.

"He was gifted by nature with a most powerful and capacious intellect, which he cultivated by early and diligent application. His memory was almost miraculous, and the stores which he could pour forth from it, on every subject of literature, were perfectly inexhaustible. In abstruse and metaphysical enquiries he had no superior. The quickness of his perception led his mind to remote and occult causes and their consequences, and the soundness of his judgment enabled him to discriminate between truth and error, between hypothesis and fact. Deeply versed in the writings of the ancient philosophers, and especially in those of the Academic and Peripatetic schools, and intimately conversant also with all the eminent writers on moral and metaphysical subjects in modern times, he could pierce into the most secret recesses of the human mind, and trace its passions and its habits, its virtues and its vices, to the very source from which they spring. Yet this knowledge was but human. It had that mixture of infirmity which allays all our brightest ac quirements, and thus teaches us the vanity of all earthly attainments. He whose keen and rapid glance could thus develope the motions of the human heart, and scrutinize those causes of our actions and feelings which are often unknown to ourselves, was continually liable to misapprehension and error in his intercourse with mankind. He judged of the hearts of other men from the unbounded benevolence and simplicity of his own. And from being accustomed to metaphysical and abstract views of the constitution of our minds, he forgot how much their legitimate and natural operations are controuled by circumstances, and perverted by intercourse with each other how fraud, prejudice, and interest, warp many from their natural bent; how pride, passion, and imitation corrupt others. How ceremony, ostentation, and self-love

influence these; how those are depraved by envy, hatred, and long-cherished animosity. However correct, therefore, might be his philosophical knowledge of the human mind, it must be admitted that he too often wanted judgment, and not unfrequently erred himself, and was still more often misunderstood, in his intercourse with mankind. And I have thought it but right to state this, because it may serve to explain and to remove many of those offences which were taken against him, by those who did not know his simplicity and singleness of heart, and who may have imagined themselves slighted where he never intended to offend, or may have construed expressions of momentary feeling into the language of settled dislike.

"In serious argument he was keen, energetic, and irresistible; but the cheerfulness of his mind sometimes led him to paradox on lighter subjects, especially among those whom he loved; and in such cases he seemed to contend not only for the sake of amusement, but, perhaps also, for that of strengthening his powers, and awakening his faculties for more grave discussion. The causes already mentioned have sometimes operated on these occasions to produce an unfavourable result among strangers, especially when combined with that impatience which was inseparable from his acute understanding and vigorous imagination, and perhaps, that desire of victory which was natural to his great and ardent spirit. On such occasions, phrases heightened by the colours of his glowing eloquence, arguments wrested from his adversaries, and pointed against their original framers with the dexterity of a practised disputant; the sportive sallies of an exuberant wit, and the playful shafts of ridicule, which were meant only to graze, but which, when dealt by such a hand, inflicted a deeper wound than the most hostile weapons of less gifted men; all these, I say, contributed to mislead those who did not thoroughly know him, in their estimate of his feelings and his character. They formed their judgment of him as of ordinary men, and did not give him the benefit of those allowances which a nearer acquaintance, and a more

intimate knowledge of his exalted virtues, and his matchless attainments might have induced them to grant. They saw not the sterling worth, the innate benevolence of his heart; they knew not, what all who enjoyed his intimacy could testify, that if a hasty expression, uttered in the ardour of dispute, was couched in stronger terms than he would have used in a moment of less excitement, it was not meant to inflict a permanent wound, and that it was utterly out of his nature deliberately to do an ill turn to the worst enemy he had.

"In politics his ardent love of freedom, his hatred of oppression, and his invincible spirit, joined to the most disinterested and incorruptible integrity, and the most resolute independence, even in the days of poverty and privation, made him always a prominent and conspicuous character. Caution he despised; it was not a part of his noble and fearless nature. What he thought greatly he uttered manfully; and such a mighty master of language, when speaking or writing on civil or religious liberty, carried away his hearers with the same resistless torrent of eloquence by which himself was swept along. It may be said by his adversaries, that there was sometimes too much vehemence in his language on this subject, and I have neither time nor inclination to enter the list with them on that head; but they should remember, that he who never knew fear or self-interest, could not speak in tame or servile terms; that all public men (and we cannot class him under any other denomination) sometimes use stronger language during the warmth of debate, than they would adopt in their cooler and less hurried moments, and that men of ardent minds and vivid imaginations are peculiarly liable to this imperfection, in proportion to the strength of their feelings, and the vigour of their eloquence.But after all that his worst adversary can urge against him, he must be allowed to have been the most sincere and faithful lover of his country, zealously attached to her constitution, and only anxious that all ranks and parties should enjoy as much liberty of action and of conscience, as he conceived to

be compatible therewith. And in private life he was on terms of friendly and familiar intercourse with many whose opinions were removed as far as possible from his own. For myself, I may say, that differing from him on many political points, and particularly on one which a few years since was peculiarly near his heart, and on some theological questions, not one moment's interruption to our friendship was caused by that or any other diversity of opinion, during more than five-and-twenty years.

age.

"As to his learning, it was the most profound, and, I may add, the most varied and extensive, of any man of his He has left a chasm in the literature of his country which none of us, who are here assembled to do honour to his memory, shall ever see filled up. He combined in himself a rare and happy union of qualities that are seldom compatible with each other; quick perception and sound judgment, retentive memory and vivid imagination; to these he added unwearied assiduity and accurate research. As a classical scholar he was supreme deeply versed in history, especially that of his own country; in metaphysics and moral philosophy not to be excelled; in theology he had read more extensively, and thought more deeply, than most of those who claim the highest literary fame in that department. He was admirably versed in the history and constitution of our own church, in the origin of its liturgy, which no man admired more than himself, and in the writings both of its founders and of those great luminaries who flourished in the seventeenth century. He was well acquainted also with the constitution of those sects and churches which differ from our own. He was well read in controversy, though he loved not controversialists, for his benevolent and tolerating spirit was shocked by any thing like rancour among men who believe a gospel of love, and worship a God of love, and yet can let loose the malignant and vindictive passions, in their religious disputes, against each other.

"Thus pre-eminent himself in learning, he was, of all men whom I have ever known or read of, the most liberal in com