it had all the imagination of Rousseau, without his folly and extravagance. "The doctrines of religion," said Beattie," I had wished to impress on his mind, as soon as it might be prepared to receive them; but I did not see the propriety of making him commit to memory theological sentences, or any sentences which it was not possible for him to understand. And I was desirous to make a trial how far his own reason could go in tracing out, with a little direction, the great and first principle of all religion, the being of God. The following fact is mentioned, not as a proof of superior sagacity in him (for I have no doubt that most children would, in like circumstances, think as he did), but merely as a moral or logical experiment. He had reached his fifth or sixth year, knew the alphabet, and could read a little; but had received no particular information with respect to the Author of his being: because I thought he could not yet understand such information; and because I had learned, from my own experience, that to be made to repeat words not understood, is extremely detrimental to the faculties of a young mind. In a corner of a little garden, without informing any person of the circumstance, I wrote in the mould, with my finger, the three initial letters of his name; and sowing garden cresses in the furTows, covered up the seed, and smoothed the ground. Ten days after, he came running to me, and with astonishment in his countenance told me, that his name was growing in the garden. I smiled at the report, and seemed inclined to disregard it; but he insisted on my going to see what had happened. Yes,' said I, carelessly, on coming to the place, I see it is so; but there is nothing in this worth notice; it is mere chance; and I went away. He followed me, and taking hold of my coat, said, with some earnestness, It could not be mere chance, for that somebody must have contrived matters so as to produce it.' I pretend not to give his words, or my own, for I have forgotten both; but I give the substance of what passed between us in such language as we both understood. So you think,' I said, that what appears so regular as the letters of your name cannot be by chance.' 'Yes,' said he, with firmness, I think so. Look at your self,' I replied, and consider your hands and fingers, your legs and feet, and other limbs; are they not regular in their ap, ? He said, pearance, and useful to you they were.' Came you then hither,' said I, by chance?' 'No,' he answered, that cannot be; something must have made me: And who is that something? I asked. He said, he did not know.' (I took particular notice, that he did not say, as Rousseau fancies a child in like circumstances would say, that his parents made him.) I had now gained the point I aimed at; and saw, that his reason' taught him (though he could not so express it) that what begins to be must have an intelligent cause. I therefore told him the name of the Great Being who made him and all the world; concerning whose adorable nature I gave him such information as I thought he could, in some measure, comprehend. The lesson affected him greatly, and he never forgot either it or the circumstance that introduced it." So great was the docility of this boy, that before he had reached his twentieth year, he had been thought capable of succeeding his father in his office of public professor. When death had extinguished these hopes, the comfort and expectation of the parent were directed to his only surviving child, who, with less appli cation and patience, had yet a quickness of perception that promised to supply the place of those qualities. But this prospect did not continue to cheer him long. In March 1796, the youth was attacked by a fever, which, in seven days, laid him by the side of his brother. He was in his eighteenth year. The sole consolation, with which this world could now supply Beattie, was, that if his sons had lived, he might have seen them a prey to that miserable distemper under which their mother, whose state had rendered a separation from her family unavoidable, was still la bouring. From this total bereavement he sometimes found a short relief in the estrangement of his own mind, which refused to support the recollection of such a load of sorrow. Forbes, "he could not recollect what Many times," says Sir William had become of his son; and after searching in every room of the house, he would say to his niece, Mrs. Glennie, you may think it strange, but I must ask you, if I have a son, and where he is.?" That man must be a stern moralist who would censure him very severely for having sought, as he sometimes did, a renewal of this oblivion in his cups. He was unable any longer to apply himself to study, and left most of the letters he received from his friends Music, in which he unanswered. had formerly delighted, he could not endure to hear from others, after the loss of his first son; though a few months before the death of the second, he had begun to accompany him when he sang, on his own favourite instrument, which was the violoncello. Afterwards, as may be supposed, the sound of it was painful to him. He still took some pleasure in books, and in the company of a very few amongst his oldest friends. This was his condition till the beginning of April 1799, when he was seized with a paralytic stroke, which rendered his speech imperfect for several days. During the rest of his life he had repeated attacks of the same malady: the last, which happened on the 5th of October, 1802, entirely deprived him of motion. He languished, however, till the 18th of August in the following year, when nature being exhausted, he expired without a struggle. He was interred, according to his own desire, by the side of his two sons, in the church-yard of St. Nicholas, at Aberdeen, with the following inscription from the pen of Dr. James Gregory, Professor of Physic, at Edinburgh. Memoriæ. Sacrum. · In. Academia. Marescallana. hujus. Urbis. Viri. Pietate. Probitate. Ingenio. atque. Doctrina. Scriptoris. Elegantissimi. Poetæ. Suavissimi. Natus. est. V. Nov. Anno. MDCCXXXV. Quorum. Natu. Maximus. JACOBUS. HAY. Vel. a Puerilibus. Annis. Novumque. Decus. Jam. Addens. Paterno. "In his person," says Sir William Forbes, "Doctor Beattie was of the middle size, though not elegantly, yet not awkwardly formed, but with something of a slouch in his gait. His eyes were black and piercing, with an expression of sensibility somewhat bordering on melancholy, except when engaged in cheerful and social intercourse with his friends, when they were exceedingly animated." In a portrait of him, taken in middle life by Reynolds, and given to him as a mark of his regard by the painter, he is represented with his Essay on Truth under his arm. the allegorical figure of Truth as an At a little distance is introduced angel, holding in one hand a balance, and with the other thrusting back the visages of Prejudice, Scepticism, and Folly. stance of a poet having received so He is, I believe, the solitary inmuch countenance at the court of George the Third; and this favour he owed less to any other cause than to the zeal and ability with which he had been thought to oppose the enemies of religion. The respect with which he was treated, both at home and abroad, was no more than a just tribute to those merits and the excellence of his private character. His probity and disinterestedness, the extreme tenderness with which he acquitted himself of all his domestic ment of his pupils, for whose welduties, his attention to the improvefare his solicitude did not cease with their removal from the college; his unassuming deportment, which had not been altered by prosperity or by the caresses of the learned and the powerful, his gratitude to those from whom he had received favours, his beneficence to the poor, the ardour of his devotion, are dwelt on by his biographer with an earnestness which leaves us no room to doubt the sincerity of the encomium. His chief defect was an irritability of temper in the latter part of his life, which showed itself principally towards those who differed from him on speculative questions. In his writings, he is to be considered as a philosopher, a critic, and a poet. His pretensions in philosophy are founded on his Essay on Truth. This book was of much use at its first appearance, as it contained fidel writers, who were then in better a popular answer to some of the inodour among the more educated classes of society than happily they now, are. the case) it has prevented men, whose If (as I suspect to have been rank and influence make it most desirable that their minds should be raised above the common pitch, from pursuing those studies by which they were most likely so to raise them, the good which it may have done has been balanced by no inconsiderable evil. One can scarcely examine it with much attention, and not perceive that the writer had not Take any shape but that, and his firm nerves fects. Human perceptions first open upon effects, and thence by slow degrees ascend to causes." + His own definition might have been enough to satisfy him that it was something very harmless about which he had so much alarmed himself. Still he proceeds to impute to it I know not what mischief; till at last, in a paroxysm of indignation, he exclaims, "Exult, O metaphysic, at the consummation of thy glories. More thou canst not hope, more thou canst not desire. Fall down, ye mortals, and acknowledge the stupendous blessing." About Aristotle himself, he is scarce in less perplexity. He sets out by defining truth according to Aristotle's description of it in these fourteen dreaded books of his metaphysics. Again he tells us, "he is most admired by those who best understand him ;" and once more refers us to these fourteen books. But afterwards it would seem as if he had not himself read them; for speaking of metaphysic, he calls it that which Aristotle is said to have called theology, and the first philosophy; whereas Aristotle has explicitly called it so in these fourteen books; and when he is recommending the study of the ancients, he adds: " Of Aristotle, I say nothing. We are assured by those who have read his works, that no one ever understood human nature better than he." What are we to infer from this, but that he had not himself read them? For his distinction between common sense and reason, on which all his theory depends, he sends the reader to the fourth book of Aris Once, indeed, (but it is not till he has reached the third and last division of the essay) he screws up his courage so high as to question it concerning its name; and the result of his inquiry is this: he finds that to fourteen of the books attributed to Aristotle, which it seems had no general title, Andronicus Rhodius, who edited them, prefixed the words, ta meta ta physica, that is, the books placed posterior to the physics; either because, in the order of the former arrangement they happened to be so placed, or because the editor meant that they should be studied, next after the physics. And this, he concludes, is said to be the origin of the word metaphysic. This is not very satisfactory; and if the reader thinks so, he will, perhaps, be glad to hear those who, having dealt longer in the black art, are more likely to be conjurors in it. Harris, who had given so many years of his life to the study of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and to the first totle, tells us, that "Metaphysics are properly conversant about primary and internal causes." "Those things which are first to nature, are not first to man. Nature begins from causes, and thence descends to ef of his latter Analytics; and yet somewhere else he speaks of these as the most worthless of Aristotle's writings. As for Plato, who on such a subject might have come in for some consideration, we are told that • Philosophical Arrangements, c. xvii. P. 409, 8vo. ed. + Hermes, p. 9, 8vo. ed. The same writer again thus defines the word. "By the most excellent science, is meant the science of causes, and, above all others, of causes efficient and final, as these necessarily imply pervading reason and superintending wis dom. This science, as men were naturally led to it from the contemplation of effects, which effects were the tribe of beings natural or physical, was, from being thus subsequent to those physical inquiries, called metaphysical; but with a view to itself, and the transcendent eminence of its object, was more properly called worn iλocopíx, the first Philosophy." Three treatises (in a note), p. 365. Ibid.—See also Mr. Coleridge's Friend, vol. i. p. 309. Metaph. 1. vi. c. 1. he was as much a rhetorician as a philosopher; and this, I think, is nearly all we hear of him. : Beattie is among the philosophers what the Quaker is among religious sectaries. The xowoc vove, or common sense, is the spirit whose illapses he sits down and waits for, and by whose whispers alone he expects to be made wise. It has sometimes prompted him well; for there are admirable passages in the Essay. The whole train of his argument, or rather his invective, in the second part, against the sceptics, is irresistible. Scalda ogni fredda lingua ardente voglia, Celio Magno. "What comes from the heart, that alone goes to the heart," says a great writer of our own day; and there are few instances of this more convincing than the vehemence with which Beattie dissipates the reveries of Berkeley, and refutes the absurdities of Hume. . In the second edition, (1771) speaking of those writers of genius, to whom he would send the student away from the metaphysicians, he confined himself to Shakspeare, Bacon, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Few will think that other names might not well have replaced the last of these. In the fourth edition, we find Johnson added to the list. This compliment met with a handsome requital; for Johnson, soon after having occasion to speak of Beattie, in his Life of Gray, called him a poet, a philosopher, and a good man. In his Essay, he comforts himself with the belief" that he had enabled every person of common sense to defeat the more important fallacies of the sceptical metaphysicians, even though he should not possess acuteness, or metaphysical knowledge, sufficient to qualify him for a logical refutation of them." It is lamentable to see at how great a cost to himself he had furnished every person of common sense with these weapons of proof. In a letter to Sir William Forbes, written not long after, he makes the following remarkable confession. "How much my mind has been injured by certain speculations, you will partly guess when I tell you a fact that is now unknown to all the world, that since the Essay on Truth was printed, in quarto, in the summer of 1776, I have never dared to read it over. I durst not even read the sheets, and see whether there were any errors in the print, and was obliged to get a friend to do that office for me." As he proceeded, he seems to have become more afraid of the faculty of reason. In the second edition, he had said, "Did not our moral feelings, in concert with what our reason discovers of the Deity, evidence the necessity of a future state, in vain should we pretend to judge rationally of that revelation by which life and immortality have been brought to light." In the edition of 1776, he softened down this assertion so much, as almost to deprive it of meaning. "Did not our moral feelings, in concert with what reason discovers of the Deity, evidence the probability of a future state, and that it is necessary to the full vindication of the divine government, we should be much less qualified than we now are to judge rationally of that revelation by which life and immortality have been brought to light." There was surely nothing, except perhaps the word necessity, that was objectionable in the proposition as it first stood. It may be remarked of his prose style in general, that it is not free from that constraint which he, with much candour, admitted was to be found in the writings of his countrymen. Of his critical works, I have seen only those appended to the edition of his Essay, in 1776. Though not deficient in acuteness, they have not learning or elegance enough to make one desirous of seeing more. His remarks on the characters in Homer are, I think, the best part of them. He sometimes talks of what he probably knew little about; as when he tells us that "he had never been able to discover any thing in Aristophanes that might not be consigned to eternal oblivion, without the least detriment to literature; that "his wit and humour are now Mr. Coleridge. become almost invisible, and seem never to have been very conspicuous ;' with more, that is equally absurd, to the same purpose. The few of his poems which he thought worthy of being selected from the rest, and of being delivered to posterity, have many readers, to whom perhaps one recommendation of them is that they are few. They have, however, and deservedly, some admirers of a better stamp. They soothe the mind with indistinct conceptions of something better than is met with in ordinary life. The first book of the Minstrel, the most considerable amongst them, describes with much fervour the enthusiasm of a boy "smit with the love of song," and wakened to a sense of rapture by all that is most grand or lovely in the external appearances of nature. It is evident that the poet had felt much of what he describes, and he therefore makes his hearers feel it. Yet at times, it must be owned, he seems as if he were lashing himself into a state of artificial emotion, as in the following lines: O! Nature, how in every charm supreme! We hear indeed, too often, of "na- Even here he cannot let the metaphysicians rest. They are, in his mind, the grievance that is most to be complained of in this "vale of tears." There was one other thing that Beattie detested nearly as much as "metaphysic lore." It was the crowing of a cock. This antipathy he contrived to express in the Minstrel, and the reader is startled by the expression of it, as by something out of its place. Of the stanza beginning, " O, how canst thou renounce," Gray told him that it was, of all others, his favourite; that it was true poetry; that it was inspiration; and, if I am not mistaken, it is related of Bishop Porteus, that when he was once with Beattie, looking down on a magnificent country that lay in prospect before them, he broke out with much delight into the repetition of it. Gray objected to one word, garniture, "as suggesting an idea of dress, and, what was worse, of French dress; and the author tried, but tried in vain, to substitute another. It would, perhaps, be impossible to find a better for the place in which it stands. There is no ground of censure which a writer should admit with more caution, than that a particular word or phrase happens to suggest a ludicrous or unsuitable image to the mind of another person. Few probably would have thought of French dress on this occasion; and to some, a passage in our translation of the Bible might have occurred, where it is said, that " the Lord garnished the heavens." Another of Gray's criticisms fell on the word "infuriate," as being a new one, although, as Sir William Forbes remarks, it is found not only in Thomson's Seasons, but in the Paradise Lost. The second book of the Minstrel is not so pleasant as it is good. The stripling wanders to the habitation of a hermit, who has a harp, not a very usual companion for a hermit, to amuse his solitude; and who directs him what studies to pursue. The youth is pleased with no historian except Plutarch. He reads Homer and Virgil, and learns to mend his song; and the poet would have told us how he learnt to sing still better, if sorrow for the death of a friend had not put a period to his own labours. The poem thus comes abruptly to an end; and we are not much concerned that there is no more of it. His first intention was to have engaged the Minstrel in some adventure of importance, through which it may be doubted whether he could well have conducted him; for he has not shown much skill in the narrative part of the poem. The other little piece, called the Hermit, begins with a sweet strain, which always dwells on the ear, and which makes us expect that something equally sweet is to follow. This hermit too has his "harp symphonious." He makes the same complaint, and finds the same comfort for it, as Edwin had done in the first book of the Minstrel. Both are the Christian's comment on a well-known passage in the Idyllium of Moschus, See his Essay on Poetry and Music, 431. Ed. 1776. |