tice, the most powerful advocate upon earth for the interests of truth A time was it was a passing cloud-that some of us were tinged with levelling principles; but the good sense of the national mind and spirit soon recovered its tone; and, with prophetic sagacity, escaped in time from those vipers of the bosom. What is it that we now live to see in the wisdom of that awful instructor, Time? Engrafted upon the savage phrenzy of popular clamour against all government, whether of God or of man, is a despotism the most unbridled, and the most insolent, that ever degraded the liberty it overcame. Every nominal stake, for which innocent blood was the order of the day, and the policy of the guillotine, has been more than superseded, it has been thrown into wanton ridicule by the parade of that supercession. Kings were to be dethroned and murdered ;—regicide was an attribute of honour;—the very name of king was to be a curse. An imperial king has not only taken the sceptre of his own French territory,' as he calls it, into his personal hand; but, as if to laugh at the fools he has enslaved, has littered, if I may use that phrase, half the continent with petty sovereigns, at the mercy of his breath.

tar.

What seem their heads,

The likeness of a regal crown have on.'

The pillars of the church were to be subverted; the pope of the day was banished, was degraded, was imprisoned, was a rambling fugitive under a guard, and shown to the multitude as an object of derision; it was a murder; it took his heart. The successor of that pope, terrified or corrupted, is received into the very heart of Paris, and consecrates the imperial diadem, with all the imposing fopperies of the Catholic alThe nobles were to sink into the dust;-all were to be citizens. One of the noblesse, who was descended from the Bourbon race, took the name of D'Egalité, and paid for it with his head. What has become of that vulgar and brutal spirit now? Ask the dukes and princes, elevated into the peerage for being janizaries to the usurper, who animates their energies by terror, not by love! All badges of honour were to be torn off, trampled under foot, and abjured as humiliating memorials of slavery to kings. They are now spread over a court as full of parade as that of Louis XIV., and are wantonly exchanged in the coquetting intercourse of a regal confederacy against the obstinate, though solitary embers of spirit, independence, and freedom, left on earth! We thank him for this note which he has given to history, for the living proof, upon a record which he who runs may read,'that rebellion against the legitimate principles of government and of religion, is the unequivocal parent of tyranny in the church and state.' Returning home with a generous abhorrence from the awful picture of experiments like these, upon a foreign shore, our national spirit feels pride of heart in the scene before us. The dignity of independence receives every one of us into its open arms, animated by a social union of all the links in our political chain from the palace to the cottage; each of them sacred and revered in its turn, but not one of them intrusted with a power to injure the rest. You, gentlemen of this county in particular, if you are asked, what you have done as contributors to the bank and stock of your country's welfare?' can tell us, without one feather of arrogance, that you have promoted with success, tranquillity,

and justice, the most valuable blessings of human life;-that your judges, who visit you at stated periods, find their office anticipated or disarmed by your public spirit as magistrates, and by your example as

men."

A fall from his horse hastened his death, which took place in April, 1816. He died at Presteigne, "leaving behind him," says the writer of the biographical notice appended to his Miscellaneous works," "the character of possessing, rather than profiting by, great talents. From his father he enjoyed a very good hereditary estate; and with his wife, who still survives him, he obtained a very handsome dower. Either or both of these circumstances, united with a strong love for independence, might have rendered him less anxious for advancement. Mr Hardinge seems to have had some forebodings of the melancholy

event which took him from his friends and the world. In one of his latest letters to Lady Knowles, he says, I despair of taking leave of Davies until the undertaker is waiting for me.' He had proposed to visit at Kingsland the shrine of Dr Davies. His remains passed through Kingsland to be interred with those of his family at Kingston-uponThames. A melancholy association with the recollection of the intended visit to the tomb of his last favoured hero of taste and virtue is formed in the mind; and painful moral feelings of regret arise, which teach us more forcibly to remember that man proposes, but God disposes. Mr Hardinge was rather short of stature, but very handsome, with a countenance expressive of the good qualities he possessed. His temper was admirable, and his perseverance in the cause of those he protected most extraordinary and exemplary. When we consider that few live to the advanced age Mr Hardinge attained without sustaining a loss in some material faculty, we shall more highly prize the rare gifts he enjoyed, both mentally and bodily; for, excepting the wrinkles and grey hairs, which hoary time by its iron grasp will leave on the strongest, his life may be said to have been mental youth, and his death a short interruption and passage to that blessed state of perfection which goodness and philanthropy sought after while on earth. As a Christian, Mr Hardinge, in all circumstances, and in every part of his life, appears to have been a steady believer, and at times pious and devout in the extreme. In the character of a judge he was irreproachable; and his various charges for many years, at the different assizes in Wales, are admirable. In that respectable function, one of the latest acts of his life was the sifting to the bottom the grounds upon which all judges before his time had charged juries in cases of child-murder. cellent notes for a charge were prepared by the benevolent judge in April, 1816, not many days before his decease; but he did not live to deliver it. Mr Hardinge's ideas on this subject were fully confirmed by the unquestionable concurrent opinions of several professional gentlenien of first-rate eminence; and that this important subject had long before excited his attention, will appear from a letter addressed in 1805 to Dr Horsley, then bishop of St Asaph. Mr Hardinge had brilliant talents, and a power of showing them so as to afford to his companions and correspondents the greatest gratification. The talent of society he possessed in an eminent degree; and the rank which he held among the

his

'Londor, 3 vols., 8vo.

Some ex

wits of his day, and the illustrious personages by whom he was admitted into familiarity, sufficiently evince how much, in conversation at least, he must have displayed the gentleman and the scholar. In conversation indeed he had few equals; as he had an astonishing flow and choice of words, and an animated delivery of them, such as few persons possess. He delighted in pleasantries, and always afforded to his auditors an abundance of mirth and entertainment, as well as information. His passion for the muses commenced in infancy, and continued to the close of life. The correspondence of Mr Hardinge was most extensive. His letters were extraordinary from their wit, fancy, and gaiety. They seemed to be the productions of a youth of twenty, rather than a man upwards of sixty years of age. Of his various compositions his letters were pre-eminent. Notwithstanding his talents and acquirements, he had a rare humility for an author, being ready at all times to adopt the suggestions of his friends, in preference to his own expressions. Of this he gave a striking proof, in permitting me to expunge some unpleasant reflections on a deceased commentator on Shakspeare, for whom I had a great respect, and whom he had treated somewhat too cavalierly. On the suggestion of a gentleman on whose judgment he had great reliance, he destroyed one of his early productions, on which he had bestowed much labour. Mr Hardinge, like the generality of mankind, was not without his failings. Men of genius are often negligent in concerns they deem trivial. Anxious as he was that his own literary productions should be preserved, his inattention to their preservation is much to be lamented. Those who were in habits of intimacy with him must have experienced the frequency with which he requested the loan of books, and sometimes the difficulty of recovering them from what he called the chaos of his library.' But whatever were his merits or his defects, they were greatly overbalanced by his active benevolence. By ardent zeal and perseverance he obtained immense sums by subscription for such persons as he thought worthy of his protection. This activity of friendship, almost always successful, was the principal feature in his character. It was wholly disinterested; it was noble, and ought to be held forth to general example."

Henry Erskine.

BORN A. D. 1746.-DIED A. D. 1816.

THE honourable Henry Erskine, third son of Henry David, earl of Buchan, by Agnes, daughter of Sir James Stewart of Coltness, was born in Edinburgh on the 1st of November, 1746. His patrimony being small, he early selected the profession of the law, and was admitted a member of the faculty of advocates at the age of 22. The eloquence of the Scottish bar was by no means proverbial at this period; and the existing forms of court seemed ingeniously contrived to repress any thing like eloquence on the part of the pleaders. Our young advocate, however, broke through many of the trammels that had hitherto been imposed by universal habit, at least on his brethren at the bar, and introduced a style of pleading, animated and graceful beyond any thing that had yet been witnessed in the court of session. It took well both

with the court and clients, and he rapidly rose into the leading prac tice at the bar.

The Erskines espoused whig politics in very early life, and on the accession of the Rockingham administration, Henry Erskine was appointed lord-advocate of Scotland,—a diguity which of course proved as ephemeral as the ministry which conferred it. On the return of Fox to power in 1806, Henry Erskine once more became lord-advocate, while his brother, Thomas, was nominated lord-chancellor. He enjoyed his honours a little longer this time, but was again stripped of them when Pitt resumed the ascendant.

In 1812 Mr Erskine withdrew from the bar, finding his health giving way. He died on the 8th of October, 1817. "The character of Mr Erskine's eloquence," says one who knew him long and intimately, "bore a strong resemblance to that of his noble brother, Lord Erskine, but being much less diffusive, it was better calculated to leave a forcible impression: he had the art of concentrating his ideas, and presenting them at once in so luminous and irresistible a form, as to render his hearers masters of the view he took of his subject; which, however dry or complex in its nature, never failed to become entertaining and instructive in his hands; for, to professional knowledge of the highest order, he united a most extensive acquaintance with history, literature, and science, and a thorough conversancy with human life and moral and political philosophy. The writer of this article has witnessed, with pleasure and astonishment, the widely different emotions excited by the amazing powers of his oratory; fervid and affecting in the extremest degree when the occasion called for it; and no less powerful, in opposite circumstances, by the potency of wit and the brilliancy of comic humour, which constantly excited shouts of laughter throughout the precincts of the court,—the mirthful glee even extending itself to the ermined sages, who found too much amusement in the scene to check the fascinating actor of it. He assisted the great powers of his understanding by an indefatigable industry, not commonly annexed to extraordinary genius; and he kept his mind open for the admission of knowledge, by the most unaffected modesty of deportment. The harmony of his periods, and the accuracy of his expressions, in his most unpremeditated speeches, were not among the least of his oratorical accomplishments.

"In the most rapid of his flights, when his tongue could scarce keep pace with his thoughts, he never failed to seize the choicest words in the treasury of our language. The apt, beautiful, and varied images which constantly decorated his judicial addresses, suggested themselves instantaneously, and appeared, like the soldiers of Cadmus, in complete armour and array to support the cause of their creator, the most remarkable feature of whose eloquence was, that it never made him swerve by one hair-breadth from the minuter details most befitting his purpose; for, with matchless skill, he rendered the most dazzling oratory subservient to the uses of consummate special pleading, so that his prudence and sagacity as an advocate were as decisive as his speeches were splendid.

"Mr Erskines attainments, as we have before observed, were not confined to a mere acquaintance with his professional duties; he was an elegant classical scholar, and an able mathematician; and he also pos

sessed many minor accomplishments in great perfection. His knowledge of music was correct, and his execution on the violoncello most pleasing. In all the various relations of private live, Mr Erskine's character was truly estimable, and the just appreciation of his virtues extended far beyond the circle of his own family and friends; and it is a well-authenticated fact, that a writer, or as we should say, attorney, in a distant part of Scotland, representing to an oppressed and needy tacksman, who had applied to him for advice, the futility of entering into a lawsuit with a wealthy neighbour, having himself no means of defending his cause, received for answer, Ye dinna ken what ye say, Maister, there's nae a puir man in Scotland need to want a friend or fear an enemy while Harry Erskine lives! How much honour does that simple sentence convey to the generous and benevolent object of it! He had, indeed, a claim to the affection and respect of all who were within the knowledge of his extraordinary talents, and more uncommon virtues.

"With a mind that was superior to fear, and incapable of corruption, regulated by undeviating principles of integrity and uniformity,-elevated in adversity as in prosperity, neither subdued by pleasure into effeminacy, nor sunk into dejection by distress. In no situation of his life was he ashamed or afraid of discharging his duty, but constant to the God whom he worshipped, he evinced his confidence in the faith he professed by his actions; to his friends he was faithful, to his enemies generous, ever ready to sacrifice his little private interests and pleasures to what he conceived to be the public welfare, or to the domestic felicity of those around him. In the words of an eloquent writer he was a man to choose for a superior, to trust as a friend, and to love as a brother: the ardency of his efforts to promote the happiness of his fellow-creatures, was a prominent feature in his character; his very faults had their origin in the excessive confidence of too liberal a spirit, the uncircumscribed beneficence of too warm a heart. It has been remarked of a distinguished actor, that he was less to be envied whilst receiving the meed of universal applause, than at the head of his own table: the observation may justly be applied to Mr Erskine. In no sphere was the lustre of his talents more conspicuous, while the unaffected grace and suavity of his manners, the benevolent smile that illumined his intelligent countenance in the exercise of the hospitalities of the social board, rendered indeed a meeting at his house' a feast of reason, and a flow of soul.' In person Mr Erskine was above the middle size, well-proportioned, but slender; his features were all character and most strikingly expressive of the rare qualities of his mind. In early life his carriage was remarkably graceful,-dignified and impressive as occasion required it; in manner he was gentle, playful, and unassuming; and so persuasive was his address, that he never failed to attract attention, and by the spell of irresistible fascination to fix and enchain it. His voice was powerful and melodious, his enunciation uncommonly accurate and distinct, and there was a peculiar grace in his utterance which enhanced the value of all he said, and engraved the remembrance of it indelibly on the minds of his hearers. For many years of his life, Mr Erskine had been the victim of ill health, but the native sweetness of his temper remained unclouded, and during the painfully protracted sufferings of his last illness, the language of com