desires filling themselves continually from "all the fulness of God," through living faith and love-that he the less felt the need of giving and receiving human affection. I never knew any man who lived more truly under the power, and sometimes under the shadow of the world to come. This world had to him little reality except as leading to the next; little interest, except as the time of probation and sentence. A child brought to him to be baptized was in his mind, and in his words, “a young immortal to be educated for eternity;" a birth was the beginning of what was never to end; sin his own and that of the race was to him, as it must be to all men who can think, the great mystery, as it is the main curse of time. The idea of it of its exceeding sinfulness - haunted and oppressed him. He used to say of John Foster, that this deep and intense, but sometimes narrow and grim thinker, had, in his study of the disease of the race, been, as it were, fascinated by its awful spell, so as almost to forget the remedy. This was not the case with himself. As you know, no man held more firmly to the objective reality of his religion - that it was founded upon fact. It was not the polestar he lost sight of, or the compass he mistrusted; it was the sea-worthiness of the vessel. His constitutional deficiency of hope, his sensibility to sin, made him not unfrequently stand in doubt of himself, of his sincerity and safety before God, and sometimes made the being obliged to continue to be a doubtful

existence privilege.

When oppressed with this feeling, - "the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world," the hurry of mankind out of this brief world into the unchangeable and endless next, I have heard him, with deep feeling, repeat Andrew Marvel's strong lines:

"But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariots hurrying near;

And yonder all before me lie
Deserts of vast eternity."

His living so much on books, and his strong personal attachment to men, as distinct from his adhesion to their principles and views, made him, as it were, live and commune with the dead-made him intimate, not merely with their thoughts, and the public events of their lives, but with themselves Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melanchthon, George Herbert, Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray, Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume,* Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander, etc., not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom he looked on as the greatest of men, with all these he had personal relations as men, he cordialized with them. He had thought much more about them would have had more to say to them had they met, than about or to any but a very few living men.** He delighted to possess books which any of them

* David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature he knew thoroughly, and read it carefully during his last illness. He used to say it not only was a miracle of intellectual and literary power for a man of twenty-eight, but contained the essence of all that was best on the philosophy of mind; "It's all there, if you will think it out."

** This tendency was curiously seen in his love of portraits, especially of men whose works he had and liked. He often put portraits into his books, and he seemed to enjoy this way of realizing their authors; and in exhibitions of pictures he was more taken up with what is usually and justly the most tiresome department, the portraits, than with all else. He was not learned in engravings, and made no attempt at collecting them, so that the following list of portraits in his rooms shows his liking for the men much more than for the art which delineated them. Of course they by no means include all his friends, ancient and modern, but they all were his friends:

might have held in their hands, on which they had written their names. He had a number of these, some very curious; among others, that wild soldier, man of fashion and wit among the reformers, Ulric von Hutten's autograph on Erasmus' beautiful folio Greek Testament, and John Howe's (spelt How) on the first edition of Milton's Speech on Unlicensed Printing. He began collecting books when he was twelve,

Shakspere (a small oil painting which he had since ever I remember)
Dugald Stewart - Dr. Innes - Dr. Smith, Biggar the two Erskines and
Mr. Fisher-Dr. John Taylor of Toronto Dr. Chalmers - Mr. William
Ellis, Rev. James Elles J. B. Patterson- Vinet-
- Dr. John Erskine
Finlayson

Tholuck

John Pym
Richard Baxter Dr. Lawson

Archibald M'Lean Gesenius Professor Dr. Peddie (two, and a

copy of Joseph's noble bust); and they were thus all about him for no other reason than that he liked to look at and think of them through their countenances.

* In a copy of Baxter's Life and Times, which he picked up at Maurice Ogle's shop in Glasgow, which had belonged to Anna, Countess of Argyll, besides her autograph, there is a most affecting and interesting note in that venerable lady's handwriting. It occurs on the page where Baxter brings a charge of want of veracity against her eldest and name-daughter who was perverted to Popery. They are in a hand tremulous with age and feeling: "I can say wt ruth I neuer in all my lyff did hear hir ly, and what she said, if it was not trew, it was by others sugested to hir, as yt she wold embak on Wedensday. She belived she wold, bot thy took hir, alles! from me who never did sie her mor. The minester of Cuper, Mr. John Magill, did sie hir at Paris in the convent. Said she was a knowing and vertuous person, and hed retined the living principels of our relidgon, which made him say it was good to grund young persons weel in ther relidgion, as she was one it appired weel grunded."

The following is Lord Lindsay's letter, on seeing this remarkable marginal note:

EDINBURGH, DOUGLAS' HOTEL, 26th December 1856.

MY DEAR SIR, I owe you my sincerest thanks for your kindness in favouring me with a sight of the volume of Baxter's Life, which formerly belonged to my ancestrix, Anna, Countess of Argyll. The Ms. note inserted by her in it respecting her daughter is extremely interesting. I had always been under the impression that the daughter had died very shortly after her removal to France, but the contrary appears from Lady Argyll's memorandum. That memorandum throws also a pleasing light on the later life of Lady Anna, and forcibly illustrates the undying love and tenderness

and he was collecting up to his last hours. He cared least for merely fine books, though he enjoyed, no one more so, fine type, good binding, and all the niceties of the book-fancier. What he liked were such books as were directly useful in his work, and such as he liked to live in the midst of; such, also, as illustrated any great philosophical, historical, or ecclesiastical epoch. His collection of Greek Testaments was, considering his means, of great extent and value, and he had a quite singular series of books, pamphlets, and documents, referring not merely to his own body the Secession, with all its subdivisions and reunions but to Nonconformity and Dissent everywhere, and, indeed, to human liberty, civil and religious, in every form, for this, after the great truths, duties, and expectations of his faith, was the one master passion of his life liberty in its greatest sense, the largest extent of individual and public spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all risk of obscuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688 the right and power of the English people to be their own lawgivers, and to appoint their own magistrates, of whom the sovereign is the chief.

His conviction of the sole right of God to be Lord of the conscience, and his sense of his own absolute religious inde

of the aged mother, who must have been very old when she penned it, the book having been printed as late as 1696.

I am extremely obliged to you for communicating to me this new and very interesting information. Believe me, my dear Sir, your much

obliged and faithful servant,

LINDSAY.

JOHN BROWN, Esq., M.D.

pendence of every one but his Maker, were the two elements in building up his beliefs on all church matters; they were twin beliefs. Hence the simplicity and thoroughness of his principles. Sitting in the centre, he commanded the circumfer

ence.

But I am straying out of my parish into yours. I only add to what you have said, that the longer he lived, the more did he insist upon it being not less true and not less important, that the Church must not intermeddle with the State, than that the State must not intermeddle with the Church. He used to say, "Go down into the world, with all its complications and confusions, with this double-edged weapon, and you can cut all the composite knots of Church and State." The element of God and of eternity predominates in the religious more than in the civil affairs of men, and thus far transcends them; but the principle of mutual independence is equally applicable to each. All that statesmen, as such, have to do with religion, is to be themselves under its power; all that Christians, as such, have to do with the State, is to be good citizens.

The fourth epoch of his personal life I would date from his second marriage. As I said before, no man was ever happier in his wives. They had much alike in nature, only one could see the Divine wisdom of his first wife being his first, and his second his second; each did best in her own place and time. His marriage with Miss Crum was a source of great happiness and good not only to himself, but to us his first children. She had been intimately known to us for many years, and was endeared to us long before we saw her, by her having been, as a child and girl, a great favourite of our own mother. The families of my grandfather Nimmo, and of the Crums, Ewings, and Maclaes, were very intimate. I have heard my father tell, that being out at Thornliebank with my mother, he asked her to take a walk with him to the Rouken,