describe to you the feeling of lonely and hopeless misery with which I have since been oppressed. I doated upon her, I believe, more than man ever did on a woman before; and, after four years of marriage, was more tenderly attached to her than on the day which made her mine. I took no interest in anything which had not some reference to her, and had no enjoyment away from her, except in thinking what I should have to tell or to show her on my return; and I have never returned to her, after half a day's absence, without feeling my heart throb and my eye brighten, with all the ardour and anxiety of a youthful passion. All the exertions I ever made in the world were for her sake entirely. You know how indolent I was by nature, and how regardless of reputation and fortune. But it was a delight to me to lay these things at the feet of my darling, and to invest her with some portion of the distinction she deserved, and to increase the pride and the vanity she felt for her husband, by accumulating these public tests of his merit. She had so lively a relish for life, too, and so unquenchable and unbroken a hope in the midst of protracted illness and languor, that the stroke which cut it off for ever appears equally cruel and unnatural. Though familiar with sickness she seemed to have nothing to do with death. . . . I have the consolation to think that the short time she passed with me was as happy as love and hope could make it. In spite of her precarious health, she has often assured me that she was the happiest of women, and would not change her condition with any human creature Indeed, we lived in a delightful progress of everything that could contribute to our felicity. Everything was opening and brightening before us. Our circumstances, our society, were rapidly improving, our understandings were expanding, and even our love and confidence in each other increasing from day to day. Now, I have no interest in anything, and no object or motive for being in the world. O, my dear John, my heart is very cold and heavy, and my prospect of life every way gloomy and deplorable. I had long been accustomed to place all my notions of happiness in domestic life; and I had found it there, so pure, perfect, and entire, that I can never look for it anywhere else, or hope for it in any other form. Heaven protect you from the agony it has imposed upon me! Write me soon to say that you are happy, and that you and your Susan will love me. My heart is shut at this time to everything but sorrow, but I think it must soon open to affection.'

We will add, for the sake of the many who may be feeling all this, though they cannot say it, that the shrinking heart did open to affection.' The strong man who thus moaned out his agony, found mercy from the Power whose protection he invoked without avail for his brother; called to the same suffering two or three years later. The hand of God raised up the stricken child of earth, led him back to wholesome labour, and rebuilt for the maturity and decline of his days, the tabernacle that was rent from above him in the proud flush of manhood. Jeffrey lived to write this:

To a Grandchild.

Craigcrook, 21st June, 1847. 'A high day! and a holiday! the longest and brightest of the year! the very middle day of the summer-and the very day when Maggie first opened her sweet eyes on the light! Bless you ever, my darling, and bonny bairn. You have now blossomed beside us for six pleasant years, and been all that time the light of our eyes, and the love of our hearts,-at first the cause of some tender fears from your weakness and delicacy-then of some little provocation, from your too great love, as we thought, of your own will and amusement-but now only of love and admiration for your gentle obedience to your parents, and your sweet yielding to the wishes of your younger sister and brother. God bless and keep you then for ever, my delightful and ever improving child, and make you, not only gay and happy, as an angel without sin and sorrow, but meek and mild, like that heavenly child, who was once sent down to earth for our example.'

Such, then, was the man Jeffrey-of the critic and the publicist we can but briefly speak. He has himself admirably distinguished between the literary and political vocations, in a letter to Mr. Empson, touching Macaulay's reasons for preferring the former. A great poet, or great original writer,' he says, 'is above all other glory. But who would give much for such a glory as Gibbon's? Besides, I believe it is in the inward glow and pride of consciously influencing the great destinies of mankind, much more than in the sense of personal reputation, that the delight of either poet or statesman chiefly consists.' And this double glory he might claim for himself. It is but a limited world that is ruled or affected by his canons of taste-and that world has almost unanimously confirmed his judgments, while it accepts his confessions of severity and petulance. But the great social and political worlds the immortal interests of freedom, industry, education-extend, as they enlarge their ever-widening circles, the glory of the man who helped to break up the immobility of ages and overcome the resistance of leagued obstructives. Jeffrey was among the chief of those who did this. He stood, at his start in life, so near the foot of the ladder of preferment, that it would have been easy to have risen upon the first round; and then, forgetting all he had seen and felt below, never looked back till he reached the top. Talent was eminently marketable in those days. A sign of adhesion to things as they were, would have secured him sinecures and promotions. He had many temptations to such a course, besides that pricking thorn of necessity that sometimes made him think, I could sell myself to the minister or to the devil.' A father's hopes and prejudices were shocked and disappointed at every indication of the son's adhesion to the hated revolutionaries-and only he who has been in such a case knows how strong is that temptation to silence or falsehood. He had seen Moir transported and Harry Erskine degraded for their reforming zeal. He had heard it declared, in so many words, from the bench before which he was training to plead, that the British constitution was a faultless one, and that he who touched it even with the profession of a desire to amend, must expect the penalties of a destroyer. The constitution thus eulogized and defended, consisted, so far as Scotland was concerned, in a constituency of about 2,000, returning forty-five members, absolutely and without exception in the hands of the ministry of the day; permitted Great Britain to be dragged into a war that had doubled the annual taxation within ten years, and was loading posterity with debt; while none could complain without danger of prison and death. Happily, Jeffrey's sense of the absurdity and wickedness of all this was stronger than his filial piety, or his ambition, or his wants. He gave himself to the people's-though not then the popular-cause. Rejecting, erroneously, as we think, the radical reform schemes of that day as unreasonable and extreme, he espoused the principles and policy of the then Whigs with all the wealth of his intellect and the ardour of his soul. His Review' was faithful to the original design of a political organ, when abstinence from politics would have con.

tinued to it undisputed literary eminence. Lord Cockburn is right in saying, Whoever exults in the dropping away of so many fetters, and in the improvement of so many parts of our economy, and in the general elevation of the public mind, must connect all these with the energy and intelligence of this journal. There is scarcely one abuse that has been overthrown which, supported as every one was, might not have still survived, nor a right principle that has been adopted which might not have been dangerously delayed, had it not been for the well-timed vigour and ability of this "Review." The originators and controllers of so mighty a power for good, have raised for themselves a monument more imposing and durable than any which admiration for genius and gratitude for public services can prompt or purchase; and on that monument must stand distinctly and permanently graven, the name of Francis Jeffrey.

We think we hear it asked-and the question is but the echo of our own heart-was there no religious aspect to the man thus eulogistically pictured? Has the biographer nothing to say of his friend's faith and hope towards the invisible and the eternal? Does the reviewer forget how this mighty 'power for good' railed at missions and other forms of Christian earnestness? Ah, no! the biographer is silent, or nearly so, on these great matters; and the reviewer does not forget. We must confess there is nothing in these volumes to indicate that Jeffrey was a religious man, in the higher acceptation of that term, or that he had what is called an Evangelical creed. But we have learned that a man can cast out devils only in the power of Christ, though he use not that adjuration; and that nothing is more unchristian than to refuse the Christian name to those who would wear it. In the old man of Craigcrook, we think we see some traces of likeness to that heavenly child' whom he commends as an example to his little Maggie; and when he breathes the prayer that he may yet know Arnold, whom he never saw in the flesh, we can but answer to the pious wish, Amen!'

For the Young.

WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF ME?'

'Now, Louisa dear, do decide; it will be much better to send an answer to Mrs. Hargrave at once, and to return those tickets, because they may be useful to some one elsc. Do sit down, now; you know it is not as if you had any doubt in your own mind about the matter.'

'But what shall I say, Mary? Oh dear! I wish we had but the shadow of an engagement for Friday week.'

'I am very glad we have not. We are only slightly acquainted with the Hargraves, and I think it so much better to let them know at once that these amusements are contrary to our principles.'

But how they will laugh at us! And that is not the worst, they will think it such a want of taste not to go and hear the finest singers in the kingdom, professing, as we do, to like music.'

6

Well, but Loui, that is nothing to do with the right and the wrong of the matter. We shall very often run into evil, if we are frightened at the first smile of derision we meet with in the right path.' 'I confess I am not so philosophical.'

'Or so consistent,' said the mother, for the first time lifting up eyes from her book.

her

'Oh, mamma! will you not help us? will you not write the note for us, and say that you do not approve of our going to an oratorio?'

'I do not think, Louisa, that this would be right. I am not the keeper of your conscience; and if, now that you are of an age to discriminate between right and wrong, you trust to my decision on every occasion, how will you ever walk safely alone? I may advise; but you are no longer a child, and you must decide.'

'Mary, then you write.' And Mary, after a few minutes' consideration, did write a very polite, grateful, but sincere letter, simply declining the offer of the oratorio-tickets, on the true ground of an objection to such performances. And having despatched this business, Mary seemed quite happy. Not so Louisa, who was restless and ill at ease for the remainder of the day.

I must,' said she, ingenuously, to her mother, as they were walking in the garden in the pleasant summer-evening light, I must have that which phrenologists call "love of approbation" rather fully developed, mother, for it does so distress me to be thought badly of.'

'And yet,' said Mary, this love of approbation, or whatever it is, seems to me an amiable quality. You really do wish to please your friends, Louisa dear.'

'We won't stay to analyze this organ, Mary; we are none of us phrenologists sufficiently profound for that, I fancy, but we are each of us capable of self-examination. Now tell me, Loui, if I may be admitted to your conference with self to-night, is it a simple desire to please your friends that makes you so miserable about this refusal to join the party to York?'

Louisa blushed, hesitated, and faintly answered 'No.'

'Louisa, I know more about that feeling of yours than you may think, dear girl; and I speak from experience, for I was at one time a greater slave to the fear of man (that is the name for your complaint) than I believe is the case with you. I do not often talk of my own history or experience, for it is dangerous ground; but at forty, one may talk of oneself at seventeen almost as of another person. Shall I give you a page of my life at that age?'

'Yes, oh yes; and they pressed their mother's arm with eager

ness.

When I was about seventeen, then, my father being anxious to give me the advantages of seeing a little of the world, was extremely careful to select for me such chaperones as he thought would advance me, intellectually and morally, but, alas! not religiously. Religion was scarcely as fashionable in those days as at present, and it required even more moral courage than you may suppose to dare to be singular.

'My mother was a truly pious woman, and I was early led, by the blessing of her example and influence, to consider the subject so near her heart. For a long time, however, the old motto might have been applicable to me, "Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor." The loss of that dear mother, when I was sixteen, made a very solemn impression on my mind. It was not alone her dying words, but the recollection of her living example, now for ever taken from my eyes, that convinced me of the value and truth of a religion which could teach her so to live and so to die.

'Perhaps I trusted too much to the lesson that her removal taught, and felt too sure that the world and its allurements would henceforward never more have an influence on my heart, nor tempt me to forsake the strait and narrow way. I was very like you, Louisa, in many respects. I sometimes fancy I discern in your conduct the same old motives which, in my earlier days, so continually actuated me. I mean the desire of human approval, or, in other words, the "fear of man." I was like you, buoyant and lively, and it was, therefore, a matter of great surprise and uneasiness to my father, that, after my mother's death, I shunned society, for which I had hitherto had a taste, gave up dancing and other amusements which, in my mother's life-time, I had been, contrary to her advice, so anxious to pursue, and altogether was so changed that my father seriously consulted with some of his friends as to the propriety of suffering me to continue the ascetic life"-such was his expression-that I had commenced.

'One family in our native town, whose acquaintance my father had sedulously cultivated for our sakes, took an especial and friendly interest in me at this time. Mr. and Mrs. Barrett were highly intellectual and refined persons, and I shall always acknowledge with gratitude the direction that Mrs. Barrett especially gave to the minds both of myself and a younger sister, in inspiring us with literary taste, and leading us from that which was merely frivolous and ornamental to the pursuit of solid and valuable knowledge. The mistake I made was not in the cultivation of their friendship, and in availing ourselves, as far as possible, of their superior and gifted conversation, but in following them blindly as infallible guides against better principle and judgment, simply from the dread of being thought singular.

The summer after my mother's death, our dear father, with his usual generous consideration for others, became anxious that our accustomed tour should not be given up; and after revolving in his mind many