Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 7.djvu/183

Rh in the senate and at the bar, there were not a few who could bear testimony to his extraordinary eloquence. The ease, the grace, and the dignity of his action; the compass and harmony of his voice, its flexibility and variety of intonation; the truth with which its modulation responded to the impulse of his feelings, and the sympathetic emotions of his audience; the clear and perspicuous arrangement of his matter; the swelling and uninterrupted flow of his periods, and the rich stores of ornament which he used to borrow from the literature of Greece and of Rome, of France and of England, and to interweave with his spoken thoughts with the most apposite application, were perfections not possessed in a superior degree by any of the most celebrated orators of the age. His own opinions were maintained without any overweening partiality; his eloquence came so warm from the heart, was rendered so impressive by the evidence which it bore of the love of truth, and was so free from all controversial acrimony, that what has been remarked of the purity of purpose which inspired the speeches of Brutus, might justly be applied to all that he spoke and wrote; for he seemed only to wish, without further reference to others than a candid discrimination of their errors rendered necessary, simply and ingenuously to disclose to the world the conclusions to which his reason had led him: "Non malignitate aut invidia, sed simpliciter et ingenue, judicium animi sui detexisse."

In 1790, after being three years a widower, he married Helen D'Arcy Cranstoun, a daughter of the honourable Mr George Cranstoun, a union to which he owed much of the subsequent happiness of his life. About this time it would appear to have been that he first began to arrange some of his metaphysical papers with a view to publication. At what period he deliberately set himself to think systematically on these subjects is uncertain. That his mind had been habituated to such reflections from a very early period is sulfiuiently known. He frequently alluded to the speculations that occupied his toyish, and even his infant thoughts, and the success of his logical and metaphysical studies at Edinburgh, and the Essay on Dreaming, which forms the fifth section of the first part of the fifth chapter of the first volume of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, composed while a student at the college of Glasgow in 1772, at the age of eighteen, are proofs of the strong natural bias which he possessed for such pursuits. It is probable, however, that he did not follow out the inquiry as a train of thought, or commit many of his ideas to writing before his appointment in 1785, to the professorship of moral philosophy, gave a necessary and steady direction to his investigation of metaphysical truth. In the year 1792, tie first appeared before the public as an author, at which time the first volume of the Philosophy of the Human Mind was given to the world. While engaged in this work he had contracted the obligation of writing the life of Adam Smith, the author of the Wealth of Nations, and very soon after he had disembarrassed himself of his own labours, he fulfilled the task which he had undertaken; the biographical memoir of this eminent man having been read at two several meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in the months of January and March, 1793. In the course of this year also, he published the Outlines of Moral Philosophy; a work which he used as a text hook, and which contained brief notices, for the use of his students, of the subjects which formed the matter of his academical projections. In March, 1796, he read before the Royal Society his account of the Life and Writings of Dr Robertson, and in 1802, that of the Life and Writings of Dr Reid.

By these publications alone, which were subsequently combined in one volume, quarto, he continued to be known as an author till the appearance of his volume of Philosophical Essays in 1810; a work to which a