Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/150

98 until about a third of the work was finished, when the breaking up of his constitution obliged him to lay aside his well-worn pen. His last years were years of suffering, arising chiefly from diseases incident to such a sedentary life, until he sank under an attack of bronchial inflammation. His death occurred in Throgmorton Street, London, on the 10th of December, 1834, in his seventy-sixth year. His wife had died eighteen years previous, and his remains were interred in the same vault with hers, in the church of St. Bartholomew, near the Royal Exchange.

In the foregoing summary we have omitted the mention of not a few of Chalmers' less essential literary performances, conceiving the list to be already long enough to give an idea of his character and well-spent life. We can only add, that his character was such as to endear him to the literary society with whom he largely mingled, and by whom his acquaintance was eagerly sought. He was what Dr. Johnson would have termed "a good clubbable man," and was a member of many learned societies during half a century, as well as the affectionate biographer of many of his companions who had been wont to assemble there. He was charitable almost to a fault—a rare excess with those in whom a continued life of toil is too often accompanied with an undue love of money, and unwillingness to part with it. He was also in his private life an illustration of that Christian faith and those Christian virtues which his literary exertions had never failed to recommend.

—This eminent orator, philosopher, and divine, by whom the highest interests of his country during the present century have been so materially influenced, was born in the once important, but now unnoticed town of Anstruther, on the south-east coast of Fife, on the 17th March, 1780. He was the son of Mr. John Chalmers, a prosperous dyer, ship-owner, and general merchant in Easter Anstruther, and Elizabeth Hall, the daughter of a wine-merchant of Crail, who, in the course of twenty-two years, were the parents of nine sons and five daughters, of which numerous family, Thomas, the subject of this memoir, was the sixth. After enduring the tyranny of a severe nurse, he passed in his third year into the hands of an equally severe schoolmaster, a worn-out parish teacher, whose only remaining capacity for the instruction of the young consisted in an incessant application of the rod. Thus early was Thomas Chalmers taught the evils of injustice and oppression; but who can tell the number of young minds that may have been crushed under a process by which his was only invigorated! After having learned to read, and acquired as much Latin as he could glean under such unpromising tuition, he was sent, at the age of twelve, to the United College of St. Andrews. Even long before this period he had studied with keen relish "Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress," and resolved to be a minister. It appears that, like too many youths at their entrance into our Scottish universities, he had scarcely any classical learning, and was unable to write even his own language according to the rules of orthography and grammar. All these obstacles, however, only called forth that indomitable perseverance by which his whole career in life was distinguished; and in his third year's course at college, when he had reached the age of fifteen, he devoted himself with such ardour to the study of mathematics, that he soon became distinguished by his proficiency in the science, even among such class-fellows as Leslie, Ivory, and Duncan. These abstract studies required some relief, and in the case of Chalmers, they were alternated with ethics, politics, and political economy. After the usual curriculum of four years he enrolled as a student of