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354 vived for a single hour. Thus his course went on till the close of 1849; but though still exhibiting much of his former activity, as well as enjoying every source of happiness, he knew that this must soon terminate. "I have made," he thus writes to his son-in-law and daughter, "a last lustration of all my walks and haunts, and taken a long farewell of garden, and terrace, and flowers, seas and shores, spiry towers, and autumnal fields. I always bethink me that I may never see them again." He had, indeed, seen the last of his autumns; for on the 22nd of January following, after a brisk afternoon walk round the Calton Hill, he was attacked by bronchitis, a complaint to which he had for several years been more or less subject; but so little did he apprehend the consequences, that he thought that, at the worst, they would only compel him to resign his place on the bench. But death was advancing with a swift though silent step, and after four days of illness, in which he suffered little, and anticipated a speedy recovery, he breathed his last. This was on the 26th of January, 1850. He, too, felt his ruling passion strong in death; for in his dreams during the three nights previous to his dissolution, the. spirit of the Edinburgh reviewer predominated, so that he was examining proof-sheets, reading newspapers, and passing judgment upon arguments or events as they rose before his mind's eye in the most fantastical variety. During the last year of his life, his walks had carried him to the Dean Cemetery, where, amidst its solemn vistas, enlivened with the song of the blackbird, he had selected the spot which he wished to be his final resting-place; and there, accordingly, his remains were deposited on the 31st of January.

Mrs. Jeffrey outlived her husband only a few months. She died at Haileybury, on the 18th of May, and her remains were interred beside his, in the Dean Cemetery.

KEITH, SIR ROBERT MURRAY, K.B. In this distinguished personage we have presented before us the rare character of a high-minded, honourable, upright diplomatist. But, what is perhaps equally rare, he was a Scottish diplomatist. That our country, which has produced so many distinguished men, should have left such a profitable walk almost unoccupied, and that a people so accustomed to veil their feelings, so habituated to self-command, and so shrewd and penetrating, should yet be able to produce so few names illustrious for diplomatic talent, is one of those inexplicable anomalies that stand out so strongly in the national character, to the great perplexity of ethnical psychologists. It classes with the fact that the Scot, who at any moment is ready to die for his country, is equally prompt to quit it, and in no great hurry to return to it.

That branch of the Keiths to which the subject of this memoir belonged, was descended from the Keiths of Craig, in Kincardineshire. He was the eldest son of General Sir Robert Keith, who for some time was ambassador at the courts of Vienna and St. Petersburg; his mother was a daughter of Sir William Cunningham, of Caprington; his sister, Mrs. Anne Murray Keith, the intimate and esteemed friend of Sir Walter Scott, was beautifully delineated by the great novelist, under the name of Mrs. Bethune Baliol, in the "Chronicles of the Canongate." Robert was born on the 20th of September, 1730. His father being