Thought as Thought," and the like, made me prick up my ears. Even then there was no need for being greatly put out, or being in a hurry to confess ignorance. A little waiting till the phrases were heard again in new contexts, and a little application of ordinary nous, sufficed for their interpretation. But when, grown bolder, I began to converse on the subject of these Edinburgh-University phrases with those whom I found to be masters of them, and to ask them to fish up for me more abstruse phrases from the same pool by way of puzzles, then, as "the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," or "the Relativity of Human Knowledge," or "the Phenomenology of Cognition," came up successively on the hook, my natural history failed me, and whether the thing were eel, flounder, or turbot, I was in doubt. I was disposed to resent the troubling of the literary atmosphere with such uncouth terms and combinations, insisting, as I think the FleetStreet intellect still does, on the allsufficiency of what is called "plain English" for the expression of whatever can be of any interest to man or beast. But soon I perceived that in this I was taking the point of view rather of the beast than of the man, and that in the same spirit it might be allowed to a carter or coal-heaver, overhearing the words "hypotenuse," "parabola," "parameter," and "absciss" in the talk of mathematicians, to resent their occupation as humbug. For, the more I inquired, the more I found that it was because the notions were unfamiliar to me that the terms were perplexing, that there was not one of the terms of which a good account could not be given if once the notions were entertained, and that, when the notions were entertained, there was life in them, or at least exercise. came to perceive that, while it was chiefly in the talk and the discussions of the inferior students that the raw clots and gobbets of the new phraseology floated publicly, the real meaning of the phraseology, and of the system of thought to which it appertained, was in quiet possession of indubitably the ablest young minds native to the University.

I

Nor was there any difficulty in knowing whence the powerful influence came. Every day I heard more of Sir William Hamilton, and what a man he had been to the University since his appointment to the Professorship of Logic and Metaphysics in 1836. Far less was then known of this great thinker by the world out of Edinburgh than has come to be known since; nor within Edinburgh was he yet estimated at his true dimensions. Since 1813, indeed, when he had settled in Edinburgh, after his course at Oxford, nominally as a member of the Whig side of the Scottish bar, there had been a whispered repu tation of his prodigious erudition, and of the profound nature of his speculations and studies. But in 1820 he had contested the Moral Philosophy chair unsuccessfully with Wilson; and not till after 1828, when articles of his had begun to appear in the Edinburgh Review, denouncing and breaking in upon the stagnation of all the higher forms of speculative philosophy in Great Britain, had the attention of German and French thinkers been drawn to him, leading to a more definite opinion of him at home. On being appointed to the chair of Logic and Metaphysics at the mature age of forty-eight, he was at length, as all saw, in the right place, and it was certainly expected that from that place there would be some radiation or other of a speculative influence that would disturb the self-satisfaction of the Scotch in their last mixture, by way of a national philosophy, of Brown's Lectures and a dash of Phrenology with a residuum of Stewart and Reid, and that might also penetrate into England, and send a current through its mingling tides of Benthamism and Coleridgianism. But all that Hamilton was to be, and all the honour that was to come to the University of Edinburgh from its having possessed him, were not foreseen. It was not foreseen that to him, more than to any contemporary of his in Britain, would be traced a general deepening and strengthening of the speculative mood of the land, by a timely recall to those real and ultimate contemplations the forsaking of which

for any length of time together by the higher spirits of a nation always has been, and always will be, a cause of collective intellectual insolvency. It was not foreseen that by him more than by any other would there be a re-enthronement in the world of British speculation of the grand god, Difficulty, for whose worship alone need universities or great schools be kept up in a land, the constancy of whose worship there, in all the different departments of knowledge, is a land's glory, but the very look of whose visage in one or two departments had been forgotten even by professed thinkers like Whately. It was not foreseen that it would be by expositions and developments of Hamilton's Logic that English dignitaries of the Church would be earning themselves distinction, or that it would be on Hamilton's metaphysical doctrine of the Relativity of Human Knowledge that English theologians would be meeting avowedly as on a battle-ground, or that in the discussion of this same doctrine, with a view to affirm or confute it, would future English philosophers of the greatest nontheological celebrity be equally finding an inevitable part of their occupation. While so much was unforeseen, however, the little student-world round the University quadrangle had already ascertained its own good fortune in possessing Hamilton among its teachers. When he was named or thought of, it was as the Kant or Aristotle of the place. And certainly, whatever influences were at work, there was no influence so recognisable as his. His grasp, his very fingermarks, if I may so say, were visible on the young minds that had passed through his teaching. It was among young Hamiltonians to a great extent that I found myself, and that I formed the new acquaintanceships that interested me most, some of which have ripened since then into most valued friendships. Owing to circumstances which I have never ceased to regret, I was unable to take the benefit of regular attendance on Hamilton's lectures for myself, and had to postpone any acquaintance with the matter of his teaching, more intimate

than that which could not but be conveyed to me indirectly, until there should be sufficient opportunity for me and others through his published writings. But I cannot forget the appearance of his class when I casually did visit it to hear him lecture. As he went on distinctly and strongly with his Primo, Secundo, Tertio, advancing from division to division of his discourse, each sentence full of matter, and the matter unusual, and requiring, as it seemed, exertion to apprehend it, one could not but be struck with the fact that many of the auditors were far too young. But then, on looking at the names of distinguished students of previous years honourably blazoned on the wall behind the lecturer, and on remembering students who had been in the class and had certainly not listened in vain, one could not but be aware that a busy emulation was at work among the benches of the auditors, leaving few absolutely unaffected, and that, where there did chance to be a young mind of due capacity, there was probably no one of the logical lectures from which it would not come away exercised and suppled as it could hardly have been in any hour elsewhere, and no one of the metaphysical lectures from which it would not come away glowing with some new conception extending the bounds of its ideal world. Most evident of all was the power that lay, here as in other parts of the system of the University, in the fact of a personal leading exerted to the uttermost. It may hardly be known to those who never saw Hamilton, and whose knowledge of him is only by inference from his writings, what an impression of general massiveness and manliness of character was given by his very look, and what an equipment of passionate nature went to constitute the energy of his purely speculative reason. Calm as was his philosophic demeanour, clear and unclouded as he kept the sphere of abstract investigation or contemplation around him to the farthest range to which his reason could sweep, there was no man who carried in him a greater fund of rage or

more of the spirit of a wrestler. Stories, perfectly authentic, are and were told of him, which invest his character with an element almost of awe-as of the agony, relieving itself by paroxysms of prayer, into which he was thrown by the sense of his not being sufficiently prepared with lectures to meet his class in the first session after his appointment; or of the fright into which he once threw old David Irving, the Keeper of the Advocates' Library, when one of the rooms of the Library from which Sir William wanted a volume chanced to be locked by official orders, and David demurred about giving him the key; or of the vehement outbreaks of his temper occasionally even among his colleagues of the Senatus Academicus, when his language about individuals among them, or about the whole body if they stood in his way, would be very far from measured. More patent to the public was the violence of his combats every now and then, on some topic or other, with any man or any class of men with whom he had taken it into his head to have the refreshment of a paper controversy. There were phrases of his which he had flung out on such occasions with tongue or pen - one of them being this dreadful one, "the brutal ignorance of the clergy"-that were among the favourite quotations of his admirers in the College quadrangle. In the calm bold face and powerful though not tall frame of Sir William, as he was to be seen any time after we had been talking of these things, there was no difficulty in recognising the sort of man from whom such manifestations of passion might have come, and in whom there might be plenty more of the like, if more were called for. Alas! within a year or two I was to see him physically a very different Sir William from what he was when this impression might have been most easily received from his appearance. Ere I left Edinburgh he was going about crippled by the paralysis which had suddenly killed one side of his noble frame, though it had left his great intellect utterly untouched. Year after year I was to hear

of him, when I inquired, as still going about in this sadly crippled state, visibly ageing and ailing, and his hair grizzling and whitening from the brown which I remembered, but still carrying on his classes personally or by deputy, still reading or thinking night after night in his library, and now sending forth more actively than ever volumes in which, when he should be gone, some fragments of his soul should remain. It is not longer ago than May, 1856, since he died, leaving the fragments to tell their tale.

Of the Professors of the Medical Faculty in Edinburgh, worthily keeping up, in my time at the University, the high reputation of the Edinburgh Medical School, I do not remember that I dropped in upon the lectures of any except old Jameson, the Mineralogist. He was Professor of Natural History, and had been such since 1803. It was pleasant to look at the thin venerable man in whom the science of the last century was linked with that of the present, and to hear him proceeding in his dry and exact way from this to that, duly traversing every bit of the map of his subject, whether there was anything of interest in it or not, and formally winding up at the end of every topic with some such farewell phrase as "This, then, is the natural history of the Dolphin." One lecture of his has haunted me more than I should have expected. It was on the cause of the seeming blueness of space. enumerated the various hypotheses on the subject, and dwelt on that which he was disposed to make chiefly his own. But I do not think he concocted out of all the hypotheses together any satisfactory explanation; and, as I really do not know yet with any adequate distinctness the imperative cause of the blueness of the sky, it sometimes occurs to me as a horrible imagination that space might have been blood-coloured or copper-coloured, quite as comfortably for itself, without the least ability on our part to prevent it.

He

Nowhere in the University was the crossing of influences from the different

faculties and professors, and the importation at the same time of independent influences, more observable than in the Debating Societies. All the world over academic debating societies are, I suppose, very much the same; and to describe the debating societies of Edinburgh University would therefore be useless, unless it were to be done with very ample local illustration, and plenty of personal anecdote. The very great importance of the debating societies as a non-official part of the apparatus of this University deserves, however, to be noted. In addition to the famous "Speculative Society," of which all the world has heard from Lockhart, Lord Cockburn, and others, and which still existed, though in a more remote state of connexion with the actual life of the University than in its palmy days, there were I know not how many societies, either general or special, all flourishing, and all having their weekly or fortnightly evenings of meeting within the walls of the college. There was the "Theological Society," which had existed for nearly a century; there was "the Diagnostic Society," some thirty years old; there was "the Dialectic Society," also of considerable age; there was "the Metaphysical Society," recently founded by the more prominent of the young Hamiltonians; and there were other societies, medical and legal. You might be an active member of two or three of these societies, if you were so inclined; and, though the societies were not then associated in a federal body as they have been since, there were occasional meetings of several societies in common for great conjunct debates by their assembled champions. It would be easy to make fun of my recollections of these gatherings, and there was absurdity enough. in many of them. But to this day I have known nothing of the sort better on the whole, and it remains a question with me whether the excitement and mutual invigoration afforded by them were not that agency in the university-life of Edinburgh which gave zest and unity to all the rest. Oh, what essays, on all things human and divine, we read and

heard; what criticisms, complimentary or sarcastic, we pronounced on the essays; what traits of character, what comicalities, what revelations of unfledged power came forth in our debates; how we did go at the question whether Mahomet was an impostor; how some of us defended the execution of Charles I., but others did not see their way to regicide consistently with the Decalogue; how we did anticipate the Parliament in abolishing the Corn Laws! And then, when we turned out late at night, flushed with our oratory, to take our several ways homewards in groups, how the rhetorical mood and the nimbleness of invention would last, and what laughs and flashes of wit there would be along the lines of the lamp-posts! I remember, as if it were but last night, the going home of one such group. We had passed the South Bridge on our way from the University, and had entered Princes Street and turned westward. There was among us one whom we all respected in a singular degree. Tall, strong-boned, and granite-headed, he was the student whom Sir William Hamilton himself had signalized and honoured as already a sterling thinker, and the strength of whose logic, when you grappled with him in argument, seemed equalled only by the strength of his hand-grip when you met him or bade him good-bye, or by the manly integrity and nobleness of his character. He was also the gentlest and kindliest of human beings. But, suddenly, when we were in that part of Princes Street pavement which is nearly opposite to the site of the Scott monument, there appeared before us, in the dim light of approaching midnight, a spectacle which strangely moved him. It was one of those rotatory imps-the first of his order, I should think, in Edinburgh— who earn pennies by tumbling head over heels with rapidity five or six times continuously. To discern precisely what it was at that time of night, especially as the phenomenon was then a rare one, was exceedingly difficult. Maddened, as it appeared, by the sight of the revolving creature, our friend rushed at

him, hitting at him with his umbrella, and sternly interrogating-" What are you?" Calling up from the pavement, "I'm a wheel, I'm a wheel," the thing continued to revolve, fast as the Manx Arms set a-whirling, full half the distance between two lamp-posts. Unsatisfied by the information, and still pursuing the thing, and striking at it with the

hook of his umbrella, ran our friend, while we gazed on with amazement. A great awe fell upon us; and even now, when I think of debating societies, or of life itself, I seem to see the rotatory imp in the lamp-lit darkness of Princes Street pursued by the phrenzied metaphysician.

99.66

CHAPTER LVII.

THE BURNT HUT COMPANY.

THE following are some extracts from the leader of the Palmerston Sentinel a short time after the affair of the sale :

"Athenæus, in his Deipnosophists," tells us that the ancient Carians used, at the annual festivals of Venus, to crown with rosemary the luckiest man of his year in front of the principal temple. For public ceremonies of this kind we are not wholly unprovided. Rome had her Forum, Athens her Areopagus, Corinth her Sisipheum ; so Palmerston has her Government Block. Let Mr. James Burton, the Port Romilly blacksmith, be carried up there; let him be crowned with a wreath of Kennedya; for assuredly such fortunes as his, scarce ever befell one of the Audax Iapeti genus before. A discovery has transpired, in the fertile and salubrious district of Port Romilly, which promises to elevate Palmerston into one of the principal commercial emporiums of the civilized globe. The bullock'shide of Dido which first traced the walls of the future Carthage will in future go down to posterity with the theodolite of Captain Snig, the gallant and intelligent engineer officer who first traced the streets of Palmerston; and the venerable and vivacious statesman whose name it bears must be content to share

futurity with the city to which he stood in loco parentis. Oh, si angulus iste!' have we been exclaiming, ever since the foundation of the colony. We have been blessed with fertile lands, with full-fed rivers, with boundless forests, with numberless flocks and herds. We have made a material progress greater than that of any nation in ancient or modern times. One thing had been denied to us. One thing made us jealous of South Australia, to which colony we are in all other respects, physical and moral, so vastly superior. We wanted mineral wealth-and we have got it. Yes. It may be attempted to be denied, but it is true. A Cornish miner, named Trevittick, has discovered that the whole of the Cape Wilberforce mountain is in an eminent degree cupri ferous. In Burnt Hut Gully, purchased last week for twelve hundred and eighty pounds by Mr. James Burton, an enormous outcrop of pure metal itself takes place, similar to those on Lake Superior. On the next lot, Morepark Gully, bought at the same time, for the same price, by the Hon. Mr. Dawson, a small quarry, which has been opened, exhibits a mass of blue and green carbonates, eighteen feet thick. Negotiations are being attempted to be gone into for the purchase of Mr. Burton's claims, and his payment in shares, but without success hitherto. Mr. Trevittick considers that, as soon as he can get to work, he will raise a matter of four thousand tons