sounds" altogether independent of association, for the single individuals whose sense of the beauty of " simple colours" is sufficiently strong to convince them that it, like the other sense, has an underived existence, wholly its own. We have left ourselves but little space to speak of the distinguished man so recently lost to us, as a lawyer, a statesman, and a judge. He will be long remembered in Edinburgh as one of the most accomplished and effective pleaders that ever appeared at the Scottish bar. It has become common to allude to his appearances in the House of Commons as failures. We know not how his speeches may have sounded in the old chapel of St Stephen's; but this we know, that of all the speeches in both Houses of which the Reform Bill proved the fruitful occasion, we remember only his : we can ever recall some of its happy phrases, as when, for instance, he described the important measure which he advocated as a firmament which was to separate the purer waters above from the fouler and more turbulent waters below,-the solid worth of the country, zealous for reform, from its wild unprincipled licentiousness, bent on subversion; and, founding mainly on this selective instinct of our memory, we conclude that the speech which is said to have disappointed friends and gratified opponents must have been really one of the best delivered at the time,-perhaps the very best. As a judge, the character of Jeffrey may be summed up in the vigorous stanza of Dryden : "In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abethdin With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean, All accounts agree in representing him as in private life one of the kindest and gentlest of mortals, ever surrounded by the aroma of a delicate sense of honour and a transparent truthfulness, equable in temper, full in conversation of a playful ease, and, with even his ordinary talk, ever glittering in an unpremeditated wit, "that loved to play, not wound.” Never was there a man more thoroughly beloved by his friends. Though his term of life exceeded the allotted three score and ten years, his fine intellect, like that of the great Chalmers, whom he sincerely loved and respected, and by whom he was much loved and respected in turn, was to the last untouched by decay. Only four days previous to that of his death he sat upon the bench; only a few months ago he furnished an article for his old "Review," distinguished by all the nice discernment and acumen of his most vigorous days. It is further gratifying to know, that though infected in youth and middle age by the wide-spread infidelity of the first French Revolution, he was for at least the last few years of his life of a different spirit: he read much and often in his Bible; and he is said to have studied especially, and with much solicitude, the writings of St Paul.—January 30, 1850. FIRE AT THE TOWER OF LONDON. THREE of the most interesting ancient buildings of Britain destroyed by fire within less than ten years! "Are such calamities as these really unavoidable?" asks a writer in the Times, "and ought we to make up our minds to hear of the conflagration of some great national treasure every five or ten years as a thing that must be ?” value still survive to England,-Windsor, Hampton Court, Treasures of at least equal great University Libraries. Increased vigilance and care Fires smoulder for hours the British Museum, and the How are they to be protected? are recommended by this writer. ere they burst forth so as to be detected by the watchmen outside; and they have then, in most cases, become too formidable to be got under. But by stationing careful persons within our more valuable buildings, instructed to visit every apartment and passage once every hour, might not the mischief be detected at a stage when it could be easily overmastered? Statistical fact, however, comes in to show that the suggestion is less wise than obvious: buildings so watched are found more liable to destruction from fire than those for whose safety no such precautions are taken. The private watchman has to use a light in his rounds; in cold weather he requires a fire; though essential that he be of steady character, there is a liability to be deceived, on the part of the employer, considerable enough to tell in the statistical table as an element of accident. Even when there is no unsteadiness, inattention is apt to creep on men watching against an enemy that has just a chance of visiting what they guard, once in five hundred years. In short, the result of the matter is, that insurance offices, founding on their tables, demand a higher premium for houses guarded in this manner than for houses left altogether unprotected. To meet with the evil thus indicated, the writer in the Times suggests that the watchmen, in order to keep up their vigilance, should be changed once every two years; that each at the end of his term should have to look forward to some certain promotion as a reward of his diligence and care; and that none but active, prudent, trustworthy men, should be chosen for the office. The scheme, of course, lies open to the objection just hinted at;-the inevitable liability of employers to be deceived in character would in not a few cases render the precaution useless. We question, too, whether the attention of a watchman who visited every part of a large building some ten or twelve times each night for two years together, could be so continually kept up, that more than a balance would be struck between the dangers he introduced and those he pre vented. It is doubtful, we say, whether, even by a scheme thus improved, the statistician would find that the watchman did more than neutralize himself. One suggestion, however, may be made on the subject, which we are convinced the practical man will at once recognise as sound. The causes of the three great fires which within the last seven years have inflicted three great calamities on the country, seem, so far as they can be ascertained, to have been all pretty much alike. They all appear to have been connected with the overheating of flues: the buildings were all ancient ones,- -none of them at least less so than the times of William III.; and they have all been destroyed by accidents originating in the modern mode of heating houses by stoves and metal flues. Any one practically acquainted with the subject must see that in every such case the liability to accidents of this nature is inevitably great. In building a house, the workman can take the necessary precautions as he proceeds. He can take care, for instance, that no beam or joist, or other piece of wood, approach any flue nearer than a foot,—the distance specified by act of Parliament; but in altering a house, he can, in striking out his flues, take no such precautions. In cutting through the hard walls, there may be wood within an inch of him, of which he can know nothing,-wood covered up at times by a mere film of mortar; and no possible care can guarantee him against accidents. He is of necessity a worker in the dark; nor, in the circumstances, can it be otherwise. Still, however, one very effectual kind of precaution may be taken. A medium for heating such a flue may be employed through which fire cannot be communicated. A metal flue, heated in the ordinary manner, becomes not unfrequently red hot, and sets fire to whatever wood may be in contact with it; and hence, we doubt not, the destruction of both Houses of Parliament, the Royal Exchange, and the National Armoury. But steam, when employed as the heating medium, is restricted to a certain temperature, above which it cannot rise, and which cannot set fire to wood or any other substance employed in architecture. We would therefore suggest it should be laid down as a rule, that in all ancient buildings heated by metal flues, the heating medium should be steam, and that the furnace should always be in a fire-proof outhouse, disconnected from every other building. Simple as the precaution may seem, we are certain it would diminish the chances of accident from fire by full two-thirds of their present amount. It is melancholy enough that in so brief a period three of the most interesting public buildings of England or the world should have thus perished. Each of the three has been associated for centuries with the history of Britain, in all for which Britain is most famous. Her emporium of trade is still a heap of blackened ruins,-the noble and venerable pile that served to connect her commerce of the present day, spread over every land and every sea, with her commerce of three hundred years ago, when a few adventurous traders struck out in quest of yet undiscovered shores, into oceans still undefined by the geographer, and whose remoter skirts seemed as if bounded by lines of darkness! Her halls of legislation perished next,―erections, the history of which is that of civil liberty, not in Britain only, but over half the world, places suggestive of every great English name that mingles in the history of the lengthened contest between right and prerogative, from the days of Pryne and Hampden, down to those of Chatham and Fox. And now the national magazine of trophies and arms has fallen a prey to the devouring element. The building representative of the wars and victories of Britain has shared the same fate with her halls of commerce and legislation; and much has perished, as in the other cases, which cannot be estimated at a money |