sprinkled with a little ketchup.' Too poor to command books, his only resource was the squire; and his only relaxation, not being able to keep a horse, long walks over those interminable plains, on one of which he narrowly escaped being buried alive in a snow drift. This dreary existence lasted two years, when the squire, Mr. Beech, took a fancy to him, and engaged him as tutor to his eldest son. 'It was arranged that I and his son should proceed to the University of Weimar, in Saxony. We set out, but before reaching our destination Germany was disturbed by war, and in stress of politics we put into Edinburgh, where I remained five years.'

In 1797, the year of his arrival, this city was in a kind of transition state between two ages or generations, either of which might be excused for designating itself as Augustan. David Hume, Adam Smith, and Robertson were the central figures of the earlier period: Walter Scott, Playfair, Chalmers, and Jeffrey of the later; whilst Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart may be described as connecting links between the two. Or (to apply the beautiful imagery of Burke) before one splendid orb was entirely set, and whilst the horizon was still in a blaze with its descending glory, in an opposite quarter of the heavens arose another luminary, and for its hour became lord of the ascendant. Yet little did the survivors of the Robertsonian circle think of the ample compensation that was in store for them, and scornful, probably, or mistrustful was the passing glance which they cast on the newly discovered stars just beginning to twinkle through the haze.

Besides the indigenous celebrities which, about the end of the last century, the modern Athens was breeding up for her own local attraction and illustration, she had become the chosen resort of several young Englishmen who have since done honour to their training, and proved a source of becoming pride to their nursing mother. Lord Lansdowne, Lord Webb Seymour, Francis Horner, and Lord Brougham belonged to this category, and formed no unimportant addition to the list of new acquaintance, speedily to become valued and lifelong friends, amongst whom Sydney Smith received a ready welcome during his expatriation in the North. On the whole, therefore, the stress of politics' which compelled him to put into Edinburgh, instead of repairing to Weimar and falling under the influence of Goethe or quizzing him, may have been a fortunate occurrence; and we are by no means sure that even the solitary confinement of the curacy was time wasted in the long run. Clever and lively companions would have afforded useful instruction for the critic and capital practice for the controversialist; but, as regards the development of his thinking powers, commend us to the lonely meditations of Salisbury Plain.

The Memoir is singularly meagre of information during his five years' sojourn in Edinburgh; and the earliest letter in the selection bears the date of 1801, the fourth year after his arrival there. He was in the thirty-first year of his age when this Review was projected. Are we to infer that so active-minded a man, with his laudable aspirations for distinction and his fertility of resource, was content to let his faculties lie

fallow during so protracted an interval, or that he found a satisfactory occupation for them in reading with his pupils, or in metaphysical discussions with his friends? An incident told in connection with his marriage, which took place some time in 1799, rather adds to the mystery, as proving that the spur of straitened means was amongst his other stimulants to extraordinary exertion. Lady Holland tells us that it was lucky her mother, whose maiden name was Pybus, had some fortune, since her father's only tangible and appreciable contribution towards their future ménage were six small silver teaspoons, which, from much wear, had become the ghosts of their former selves. One day, in the madness of his joy, he came running into the room and flung these into her lap, saying, 'There, Kate, you lucky girl, I give you all my fortune.'

In a letter written long after he had left Edinburgh, he exclaims, "When shall I see Scotland again? Never shall I forget the happy days passed there, amidst odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and most enlightened and cultivated understandings.' He did not take the less kindly to the Scotch on account of their alleged insensibility to humour. It requires,' he used to say, 'a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding.' Charles Lamb stoutly maintained the same doctrine, and we fear that an attempt on our part to dispute it will meet with no better success than the essay of the Edgeworths on Irish Bulls, written to prove that the Irish make no more bulls than other nations, and proving incontestably that they make more than

all the other nations of Europe put together. Yet the imputation of insensibility to humour is a curious one to be fixed indelibly on the countrymen of Burns, Walter Scott, Galt, Lockhart, John Wilson, and Peter Robertson.

One of their raws' he was especially fond of rubbing. Their temper,' he writes, 'stands anything but an attack on their climate; even the enlightened mind of Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish on Craig Crook. In vain I have represented to him that they are of the genus Carduus, and pointed out their prickly peculiarities. He sticks to his myrtle illusions, and treats my attacks with as much. contempt as if I had been a wild visionary, who had never breathed his caller air, nor lived and suffered under the rigour of his climate, nor spent five years in discussing metaphysics and medicine in that garret of the earth-that handle-end of England-that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur.'

His account of the origin of this Journal can hardly be accepted as literally exact. One day we happened to meet in the eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleugh Place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey. I proposed that we should set up a Review : this was acceded to with acclamation. I was appointed Editor, and remained long enough in Edinburgh to edit the first number of the " Edinburgh Review." The motto I proposed for the Review was

"Tenui musam meditamur avenâ."

"We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal."

But this was too near the truth to be admitted, and so we took our present grave motto from Publius Syrus, of

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whom none of us had, I am sure, ever read a single line.' He had the principal voice in the selection and arrangement of the articles; but according to the detailed account of the transaction supplied by Lord Jeffrey to Mr. Robert Chambers in 1846, there was no editor, in the modern acceptation of the office, for the first three Numbers. As many of us as could be got to attend used to meet in a dingy room of Willison's printing-office, in Craig's Court, where the proofs of our own articles were read over and remarked upon, and attempts were made to sit in judgment on the few manuscripts which were then afforded by strangers. But we had seldom patience to go through with these; it was found necessary to have a responsible editor, and the office was pressed upon me. Smith

was by far the most timid of the confederacy, and believed that unless our incognito was strictly maintained we could not go on a day; and this was his object for making us hold our dark divans at Willison's office, to which he insisted on our repairing singly, and by back approaches, or by different lanes !'

Now that the fame of the band, at least of its leading members, rests upon an imperishable basis, such precautions may well seem superfluous; but, without embarking into the wide question of anonymous writing, we may suggest that Sydney Smith had reason on his side. Omne ignotum pro magnifico. The only mode of insuring a fair trial was to remain shrouded in mystery at starting; and if anything could have checked the success of the enterprise, it would have been a notification to the public that a set of