PART SECOND.-CHARACTER AND
CRITICISM.

moment.

THE NEW YEAR.

Ere our sheet shall have passed from the press into the hands of our readers, we shall have entered on a new year. It is barely ninety degrees distant from us at the present It landed on the eastern extremity of Asia at the 1st of January 1845, just as we were rising from our breakfasts in Edinburgh on the 31st of December 1844; and it has been gliding westwards towards us, in the character of one o'clock in the morning, ever since. In a few hours more it will be sliding across the backwoods of America, in its seven-league boots, and careering over the Pacific in its canoe. And then, at some indefinable point, not yet fixed by the philosopher, it will find itself transformed from the first into the second day of the year; and thus it will continue to roll on, round and round like an Archimedes screw, picking up at every gyration an additional unit, until the three hundred and sixty-five shall be complete. The past year has witnessed many curious changes, as a dweller in time; the coming year has already looked down on many a curious scene, as a journeyer over space. It has seen Cochin-China, with all its unmapped islands, and the ancient empire of Japan, with its cities and provinces unknown to Europe. It has heard the roar of a busy population amid the thousand streets of Pekin, and the wild dash of the midnight tides as they fret the rocks of the Indian Archipelago. It has been already with our friends in Hindustan; it has been greeted, we doubt not, with the voice of prayer, as the slow iron hand of the city clock indicated its arrival to the missionaries at Madras; it has swept over the fever jungles of the Ganges, where the scaled crocodile startles the thirsty

tiger as he stoops to drink, and the exposed corpse of the benighted Hindu floats drearily past. It has travelled over the land of pagodas, and is now entering on the land of mosques. Anon it will see the moon in her wane, casting the dark shadows of columned Palmyra over the sands of the desert; and the dim walls of Jerusalem looking out on a silent and solitary land, that has cast forth its interim tenants, and waits unappropriated for the old predestined race, its proper inhabitants. In two short hours it will be voyaging along the cheerful Mediterranean, greeting the rower in his galley among the isles of Greece, and the seaman in his barque embayed in the Adriatic. And then, after marking the red glare of Etna reflected in the waves that slumber around the moles of Syracuse-after glancing on the towers of the Sevenhilled City, and the hoary snows of the Alps-after speeding over France, over Flanders, over the waves of the German Sea-it will be with ourselves; and the tall ghostly tenements of Dun-Edin will re-echo the shouts of the High Street. Away, and away, it will cross the broad Atlantic, and visit watchers in their beacon-towers on the deep, and the immigrant in his log-hut, among the brown woods of the West; it will see the fire of the red man umbering with its gleam tall trunks and giant branches in some deep glade of the forest; and then mark, on the far shores of the Pacific, the rugged bear stalking sullenly over the snow. Away, and away, and the vast globe shall be girdled by the zone of the new-born year. Many a broad plain shall it have traversed that is still unbroken from the waste-many a moral wilderness, on which the Sun of Righteousness has not yet arisen. Nearly eighteen and a half centuries shall have elapsed since the shepherds first heard the midnight song in Bethlehem : "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth; goodwill to the children of men ;" and yet the coming year shall pass, in its first visit, over prisons, and gibbets, and penal settlements, and battle-fields on which the festering dead moulder unburied. It will see the shotted gun, and the spear, and the crease, and the murdering tomahawk-slaves in their huts, and captives in their dungeons. It will look down on uncouth idols in their temples-worshippers of the false prophet in their mosques-the Papist in his confessional-the Puseyite in his stone allegory-and on much idle and bitter controversy among those holders of the true faith whose proper work is the conversion of the world. But the years shall

pass, and a change shall come; the Sacrifice on Calvary was not offered up in vain, nor in vain hath the adorable Saviour conquered and ascended to reign as King and Lord over the nations. The kingdoms shall become His kingdoms, the people His people. The morning rises slowly and in clouds, but the dawn has broken; and it shall shine forth more and more, until the twilight shadows shall have dispersed, and the sulphureous fogs shall have dissipated, and all shall be peace and gladness amid the blaze of the perfect day.-HUGH MILLER.

ESTIMATE OF DR CHALMERS.

Dr Chalmers was one of those who come to take their place in the company of historic persons. He was a man whose mind and soul, whose energies and opinions, and whose public conduct, so impressed his personal image upon the religious and moral aspects of his country, as that his likeness can never be thence effaced, nor himself forgotten? A century or two hence it will not be that the name of Chalmers has gone to his final resting-place in forgotten books. The youth of Scotland, some hundred years on, will not be putting any such question as this to their sires-" Thomas Chalmers who was he?" The religious cottager of Scotland's remotest glens, after a generation or two has passed away, will not need to be told that he owes an endless debt of love and reverence to the memory of Thomas Chalmers. None of these things will happen, or not unless social catrastrophes shall in the interval sweep Scotland clean of its true heart, its fervent mind, and its retentive memory! Scotland, we think, will forget Chalmers when it has forgotten Knox, and when it forgets the worthies of its age of martyrs; or to say what we mean in a word, when Scotland shall be Scotland no more.

In thus speaking, we are not borne aloft above the level of sobriety by the prejudices of national feeling-for we are not of North Britain; nor again do we lose sight of cold realities, blinded by exaggerated notions of Dr Chalmers's merits, powers, or accomplishments, as a philosopher, or as a writer, or as a statesman. We shall use no disguise in showing our entire freedom from any such tumid suppositions, as to the precise place which should be assigned him

in some of the above-named characters. There may be room here for differences of opinion, and our own opinion may differ a little, in certain respects, from that of his most ardent admirers, or of his countrymen generally; but among those at least among any whose happiness it may have been to pass an entire day in his company, there will be no difference of opinion when we say-Thomas Chalmers was a great man. All the characteristics of genuine greatness marked him as he stood among others. It was not that he surpassed all men around him in pure intelligence, or in any single element of moral excellence; but, taking altogether, mind and heart, and visible bearing, you gave him involuntarily, and he naturally took, the foremost position in almost any assemblage of notable persons with whom he had to do. The unassumingness of a child did not avail to screen him from that homage of which he was the object. The admitted merits and talents of others, on the right hand or the left, did not render that homage ambiguous-did not abate it. There might often be men near him who surpassed him in talent, but they did not dislodge him, in the view of others, from his place.

All was harmony in Chalmers's conformation. His figure and attitude very nearly accorded with the ideal of such a man, after Michael Angelo; and if it showed a rusticity to which that great artist would have applied his chisel, there was beneath the rugged surface a refinement, an intellectuality, to which only the hand of Raphaelle could have given expression. On an occasion, dating not many days before his death, he stood in the midst of a company-urging an argument with hands uplifted, just as a Michael Angelo or a Raphaelle might have wished to catch him, when in search of a study. With his broad build, and square mas. sive contour, shoulders, cranium, he seemed to take immovable possession of the ground that sustained his weight -not in elegant antithesis of limb to limb-not in easy mobile equipoise of the person, as if floating in air; but solidly, and as if really he had a muscular consciousness of the round world beneath him, and stood, statue-like, surmounting its great curvatures. Yet this man of mass and weight was flexible toward every human sympathy. He remembered you, even as to the items of your individual and domestic weal; he felt with you; and in a moment he was on your level; he was courteous as the most polished; ge

nuine and sincere as the most home-bred. He was firm as man should be, loving as woman, transparent as a child.

We have said, that whatever abatements there might be room to make on certain grounds, Thomas Chalmers was a great man. And what does this greatness which we claim for him imply? It has these elements: first, it implies amplitude of soul in the three dimensions of height, depth, and breadth; and what we mean is this. He who is great, intellectually and morally, has a stature loftier than that of other men, so that he commands a clearer view of the high heavens above him; and so that his thoughts tend thither, as if by a spontaneous upward gravitation. Leave him alone at any time, distract him not with the things of earth, let his soul go whither it would go, whither it is wont to go, and you will be sure to find that he is conversing with the upper world that he has soared-not, indeed, as if to spurn the earth, but as if to bespeak his entrance upon heaven. That we may show that we do not thus speak of Chalmers at the impulse of a mindless inflation, we say his mind had this altitude more by moral instinct, or tendency, than absolutely by intellectual stature. And thus also depth was his. John Foster's depth was that which makes a man tranquilly at home while treading or exploring the lowest profound of sombre meditation. Chalmers's depth was not of this sort: he was far too buoyant in temper to follow easily where Foster went; but he could approach the brink of the abyss, and gaze into that chaos, long enough to bring thence a settled solemnity of spirit, an awe, a seriousness, that gave force to his every energy while labouring for the good of his fellow-men.

Breadth, that other characteristic of greatness, most conspicuously belonged to Chalmers, both in mind and heart. Whether or not we go with him in his doctrines, as a political economist, or as an ecclesiastical theorist, the view he took of social interests was always wide, comprehensive, statesmanlike. Right or wrong in his principles, it was never a narrow ground that he occupied: never was it a pinched-in aspect of things that held his attention. He thought of institutions with approval or with disapproval, according to their bearing, in his view, upon the social system at large. In heart, and as to his sympathies, his benign affections, his hopeful temperament, his laborious benevolence, his scorning of selfish cavils, and over-caution, when