No. 12.

LITERARY CRITICISM.

The Annual Biography and Obituary for the year 1829. Vol. xiii. London. Longman and Co. 1829.

BIOGRAPHY is the connecting link between the liI ving and the dead. When a great man dies, nearly all that the survivors can do for him is to write and read his Memoirs. If he has left behind him in his works the picture of a great and original mind, it is not unlikely that even posterity may take an interest in his sayings and doings, and feel anxious to acquire something like the personal acquaintance which was enjoyed by his contemporaries. Nor is this simply the gratification of an idle curiosity. The future must in all cases be guided by the past; and when the map of the lives of those who have preceded us is spread out before us for our examination, it is more than likely that it may teach us to avoid many of the dangers which surround ourselves, and enable us to arrive, by a directer road, at the great objects to which we tend. Few, perhaps, peruse the details of biography with this avowed purpose; but this is the effect which they are calculated, imperceptibly, to produce, and which gives them a moral importance as well as a temporary interest.

The work before us, which has now existed for thirteen years, is conducted on extremely proper principles, and with much respectability. Its design is to furnish Memoirs of all the most celebrated persons who have died within the past year, which Memoirs shall embrace a statement of the leading events of their lives; and, if their pursuits were literary, an account of their principal productions. To the longer biographies, a general alphabetical list is added of all persons of any note who have died within the specified time. The materials from which the Editors compile their information are either such private documents as may be transmitted to them, or such records and statements as the friends of the deceased may have previously given to the world, | whether in a separate form, or in the periodical publications of the day. Every attention is paid to the feelings of surviving relatives; and a benevolent wish to say as much good as possible of the dead seems to pervade the

work.

The present volume contains twenty-nine full Memoirs, besides a copious Biographical Index, supplying the principal incidents in the lives of several hundreds more. Among those of whom more detailed accounts are given, the most remarkable are the following: -1st, The Margravine of Anspach, who was the youngest daughter of the Earl of Berkeley. Her first husband Was Lord Craven, whom she divorced, and her second the Margrave of Anspach. This lady acquired a greater I share of notoriety than she appears to have been entitled to, by the publication of her own memoirs in 1826, which were praised because they were the production of a person of rank who moved in the first circles, and told

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anecdotes about them; but which are, in point of fact, little more than a tissue of silliness, egotism, and vanity. 2d, Dr Mason Good, of whose life so very full an account has been recently published by his friend, Dr Olinthus Gregory. Dr Good was an industrious and worthy man. His medical works are infinitely superior to his theological; the utility of the former is likely to give them a permanent value; the latter will, in all probability, perish. 3d, Lady Caroline Lamb, a lady of singular genius and eccentric character, whose fate acquires an additional interest from being, to a certain degree, connected with that of the greatest poet of the day, and who, in the course of her life, became intimately acquainted with all the most illustrious persons of England, France, and Italy. Yet it appears very doubtful whether any one of the three works she has left behind her" Glenarvon," " Graham Hamilton," and " Ada Rheis" is destined to be long remembered. 4th, Sir Henry Torrens, as brave a soldier during war, and as useful a one during peace, as this country ever possessed. 5th, Captain Clapperton, one of those numerous and undaunted travellers whom Scotland has sent forth to extend the boundaries of geographical knowledge, and to fall victims to their own enterprising spirit. He died at Sackatoo, in Africa, on the 13th of April 1827. 6th, Harry Stoe Van Dyk, an unfriended scholar, with genius enough to make him ambitious of winning for himself a name, but not enough to enable him to achieve his own fortune, and escape from the bitterness of disappointment. We are afraid he was but one of many who, in the present state of the literary world, may be met with every day, toiling on in an obscurity that is lightened only by the secret lamp burning within their own souls, and over whose untimely fate mankind are ever willing to drop the late and useless tribute of a tear. 7th, Archdeacon Coxe, whose numerous Biographical works will long continue to be referred to with no common interest, exhibiting, as they do, so much research, accuracy, and learning. 8th, The Rev. Legh Richmond, a useful and notable man in his day and generation. 9th, Henry Neele, to whom precisely the same remarks apply as have been made with regard to Van Dyk. 10th, Her Majesty the Queen Dowager of Wurtemberg, eldest daughter of George III., a very amiable personage, whose memoirs one reads because she was a queen; and as it is not every day that a queen dies, it is consequently only now and then that we have an opportunity of ascertaining how very dull a life most of them lead. 11th, General Sir Niel Campbell, who, at Sierra Leone, whither he had been sent as Governor, closed ingloriously a distinguished military career, and added another argument, if such were needed, in favour of the propriety of allowing that pestilential colony to be howled over by the beasts of the desert. 12th, The Earl of Liverpool, a statesman whose name will live on the page of history, and of whose character, moral and intellectual, posterity will be best able to judge. And 13th, Dugald Stewart, probably the most illustrious name of all, the memoir of whose life has been furnished expressly for the "Annual Obituary" from original and authentic sources, and which we shall now proceed, without farther preface, to lay before our readers, as at once the best specimen of the work, and a piece of writing, in itself, highly interesting and instructive :

DUGALD STEWART, Esq.

Author of "The Philosophy of the Human Mind;" and formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh.

"DUGALD STEWART was the only son who survived the age of infancy, of Dr Matthew Stewart, Professor of Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh, and of Marjory Stewart, daughter of Archibald Stewart, Esq., one of the Writers to the Signet of Scotland. His father, of whom a Biographical Memoir has been given to the public by his distinguished successor in office, the late Mr Playfair, is well known to the literary world as a geometrician of eminence and originality. His mother was a woman remarkable for her good sense, and for great sweetness and kindliness of disposition, and was always remembered by her son with the warmest sentiments of filial affection.

"The object of this brief notice was born in the College of Edinburgh, on the 22d of November, 1753, and his health, during the first period of his life, was so feeble and precarious, that it was with more than the ordinary anxiety and solicitude of parents that his infancy was reared. His early years were spent partly in the house at that time attached to the Mathematical Chair of the University, and partly at Catrine, his father's property in Ayrshire, to which the family regularly removed every summer, when the Academical Session was concluded. At the age of seven, he was sent to the High School, where he distinguished himself by the quickness and accuracy of his apprehension, and where the singular felicity and spirit with which he caught and transfused into his own language the ideas of the classical writers, attracted the particular remark of his instructors.

"Having completed the customary course of education at this seminary, he was entered as a student at the College of Edinburgh. Under the immediate instruction of such a mathematician and teacher as his father, it may readily be supposed that he made an early proficiency in the exact sciences; but the distinguishing bent of his philosophical genius recommended him in a still more particular manner to the notice of Dr Stevenson, then Professor of Logic, and of Dr Adam Ferguson, who filled the Moral Philosophy Chair. In October, 1771, he was deprived of his mother; and he, almost immediately after her death, removed to Glasgow, where Dr Reid was then teaching those principles of metaphysics which it was the great object of his pupil's life to inculcate and to expand.

"After attending one course of lectures at this seat of learning, the prosecution of his favourite studies was interrupted by the declining state of his father's health, which compelled him, in the autumn of the following year, before he had reached the age of nineteen, to undertake the task of teaching the mathematical classes. With what success he was able to fulfil this duty, was sufficiently evinced by the event; for, with all Dr Matthew Stewart's well-merited celebrity, the number of students considerably increased under his son. As soon as he had completed his twenty-first year, he was appointed assistant and successor to his father, and in this capacity he continued to conduct the mathematical studies in the University, till his father's death, in the year 1785, when he was nominated to the vacant chair.

"Although this continued, however, to be his ostensible situation in the University, his avocations were more varied. In the year 1778, during which Dr Adam Fer

guson accompanied the Commissioners to America, he undertook to supply his place in the Moral Philosophy Class; a labour that was the more overwhelming, as he had for the first time given notice, a short time before his assistance was requested, of his intention to add a course of lectures on Astronomy to the two classes which he taught as Professor of Mathematics. Such was the extraordinary fertility of his mind, and the facility with which it adapted its powers to such inquiries, that although the proposal was made to him and accepted on Thursday, he commenced the Course of Metaphysics the following Monday, and continued, during the whole of the season, to think out and arrange in his head in the morning (while walking backwards and forwards in a small garden attached to his father's house in the College), the matter of the lecture of the day. The ideas with which he had thus stored his mind, he poured forth extempore in the course of the forenoon, with an eloquence and a felicity of illustration surpassing in energy and vivacity (as those who have heard him have remarked) the more logical and better-digested expositions of his philosophical views, which he used to deliver in his maturer years. The difficulty of speaking for an hour extempore, every day on a new subject, for five or six months, is not small; but when superadded to the mental exertion of teaching also, daily, two classes of Mathematics, and of delivering, for the first time, a course of lectures on Astronomy, it may justly be considered as a very singular instance of intellectual vigour. To this season he always referred as the most laborious of his life; and such was the exhaustion of the body, from the intense and continued stretch of the mind, that, on his departure for London, at the close of the academical session, it was necessary to lift him into the carriage.

"In the year 1780, he began to receive some young noblemen and gentlemen into his house as pupils, under his immediate superintendence, among whom were to be numbered the late Lord Belhaven, the late Marquis of Lothian, Basil Lord Daer, the late Lord Powerscourt, Mr Muir Mackenzie of Delvin, and the late Mr Henry Glassford. In the summer of 1783, he visited the Continent for the first time, having accompanied the late Marquis of Lothian to Paris; on his return from whence, in the autumn of the same year, he married Helen Bannatine, a daughter of Neil Bannatine, Esq., a merchant in Glasgow.

"In the year 1785, during which Dr Matthew Stewart's death occurred, the health of Dr Ferguson rendered it expedient for him to discontinue his official labours in the University, and he accordingly effected an exchange of offices with Mr Stewart, who was transferred to the Class of Moral Philosophy, while Dr Ferguson retired on the salary of Mathematical Professor. In the year 1787, Mr Stewart was deprived of his wife by death; and, the following summer, he again visited the Continent, in company with the late Mr Ramsay of

Barnton.

"These slight indications of the progress of the ordinary occurrences of human life, must suffice to convey to the reader an idea of the connexion of events, up to the period when Mr Stewart entered on that sphere of action in which he laid the foundation of the great reputation which he acquired as a moralist and a metaphysician. His writings are before the world, and from them posterity may be safely left to form an estimate of the excellence of his style of composition_of the extent and variety of his learning and scientific attainments of the singular cultivation and refinement of his mind of the purity and elegance of his taste-of his warm relish for moral and for natural beauty of his enlightened benevolence to all mankind, and of the generous ardour with which he devoted himself to the improvement of the human species of all of which, while the English language endures, his works will continue to preserve the indelible evidence. But of one part of his fame no me

"In 1796, he was induced once more to open his house for the reception of pupils; and in this capacity, the late Lord Ashburton, the son of the celebrated Mr Dunning, the present Earl of Warwick, the present Earl of Dudley, Lord Palmerston, his brother the Honourable Mr Temple, and Mr Sullivan, the present Under-Secretary at War, were placed under his care. The Marquis of Lansdowne, though not an inmate in his family, was resident at this time in Edinburgh, and a frequent guest in his house, and for him he contracted the highest esteem; and he lived to see him, along with two of his own pupils, cabinet ministers at the same time. Justly conceiving that the formation of manners, and of taste in conversation, constituted a no less important part in the education of men destined to mix so largely in the world, than their graver pursuits, he rendered his house at this time the resort of all who were most distinguish ed for genius, acquirement, or elegance in Edinburgh, and of all the foreigners who were led to visit the capital of Scotland. So happily did he succeed in assorting his guests, so well did he combine the grave and the gay, the cheerfulness of youth with the wisdom of age, and amusement with the weightier topics that formed the subject of conversation to his more learned visitors, that his evening parties possessed a charm which many who frequented them have since confessed they have sought in vain in more splendid and insipid entertainments. In the year 1806, he acompanied his friend the Earl of Lauderdale on his mission to Paris; and he had thus an opportunity not only of renewing many of the literary intimacies which he had formed in France before the commencement of the Revolution, but of extending his acquaintance with the eminent men of that country, with many of whom he continued to maintain a correspondence during his life.

"The year after the death of his son, he relinquished his chair in the University, and removed to Kinneil House, a seat belonging to his Grace the Duke of Hamilton, on the banks of the Frith of Forth, about twenty miles from Edinburgh, where he spent the remainder of his days in philosophical retirement. From this place were dated, in succession, the Philosophical Essays in 1810; the second volume of the Philosophy of the Human mind in 1813; the Pr liminary Dissertation to the Encyclopædia; the continuation of the second part of the Philosophy in 1827; and finally, in 1828, the third volume, containing the Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man; a work which he completed only a few short weeks before his career was to close for ever. Here he continued to be visited by his friends, and by most foreigners who could procure an introduction to his acquaintance, till the month of January, 1822, when a stroke of palsy, which nearly deprived him of the power of utterance, in a great measure incapacitated him for the enjoyment of any other society than that of a few intimate friends, in whose company he felt no constraint. This great calamity, which bereaved him of the faculty of speech, of the power of exercise, of the use of his right hand, which reduced him to a state of almost infantile dependence on those around him, and subjected him ever after to a most abstemious regimen, he bore with the most dignified fortitude and tranquillity. The malady which broke his health and constitution for the rest of his existence, happily impaired neither any of the faculties of his mind, nor the characteristic vigour and activity of his understanding, which enabled him to rise superior to the misfortune. As soon as his strength was sufficiently re-established, he continued to pursue his studies with his wonted assiduity, to prepare his works for the press with the assistance of his daughter as an amanuensis, and to avail himself with cheerful and unabated relish of all the sources of gratification which it was still within his power to enjoy, exhibiting, among some of the heaviest infirmities incident to age, an admirable example of the

serene sunset of a well-spent life of classical elegance and refinement, so beautifully imagined by Cicero: 'Quiete, et pure, et eleganter actæ ætatis, placida ac lenis senectus.'

" In general company, his manner bordered on reserve; but it was the comitate condita gravitas, and belonged more to the general weight and authority of his character, than to any reluctance to take his share in the cheerful intercourse of social life. He was ever ready to acknowledge with a smile the happy sallies of wit, and no man had a keener sense of the ludicrous, or laughed more heartily at genuine humour. His deportment and expression were easy and unembarrassed, dignified, elegant, and graceful. His politeness was equally free from all affectation, and from all premeditation. It was the spontaneous result of the purity of his own taste, and of a heart warm with all the benevolent affections, and was characterized by a truth and readiness of tact that accommodated his conduct with undeviating propriety to the circumstances of the present moment, and to the relative situation of those to whom he addressed himself. From an early period of life, he had frequented the best society both in France and in this country, and he had in a peculiar degree the air of good company. In the society of ladies he appeared to great advantage, and to women of cultivated understanding, his conversation was particularly acceptable and pleasing. The immense range of his erudition, the attention he had bestowed to almost every branch of philosophy, his extensive acquaintance with every department of elegant literature, ancient or modern, and the fund of anecdote and information which he had collected in the course of his intercourse with the world, with respect to almost all the eminent men of the day, either in this country or in France, enabled him to find suitable subjects for the entertainment of the great variety of visitors of all descriptions, who at one period frequented his house. In his domestic circle, his character appeared in its most amiable light, and by his family he was beloved and venerated almost to adoration. So uniform and sustained wa the tone of his manners, and so completely was it the result of the habitual influence of the natural elegance and elevation of his mind on his external demeanour, that when alone with his wife and children, it hardly differed by a shade from that which he maintained in the company of strangers; for although his fondness, and familiarity, and playfulness, were alike engaging and unrestrained, he never lost any thing either of his grace or his dignity: 'Nec vero ille in luce modo, atque in oculis civium, magnus, sed intus domique præstantior.' As a writer of the English language, -as a public speaker, -as an original, a profound, and a cautious thinker, -as an expounder of truth, -as an instructor of youth, as an elegant scholar as an accomplished gentleman; -in the exemplary discharge of the social duties, in uncompromising consistency and rectitude of principle, in unbending independence, in the warmth and tenderness of his domestic affections, in sincere and unostentatious piety, in the purity and innocence of his life, few have excelled him: and, take him for all in all, it will be difficult to find a man, who, to so many of the perfections, has added so few of the imperfections, of human nature. 'Mihi quidem quanquam est subito ereptus, vivit tamen, semperque vivet; virtutem enim amavi illius viri, quæ extincta non est; nec mihi soli versatur ante oculos, qui illam semper in manibus habui, sed etiam posteris erit clara et insignis.'

"Mr Stewart's death occurred on the 11th of June, 1828, at No. 5, Ainslie Place, Edinburgh, where he had been for a few days on a visit.

"The remains of this distinguished philosopher were interred in the Canongate churchyard. The funeral proceeded as a private one till it reached the head of the North Bridge, when it was joined by the Professors of the University, in their gowns, two and two, preceded