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250 250 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. loved task of composition ; the volume was printed in 1867, and is said to bear painful marks of the un- due strain from which his mind had suffered. The very last years of his life were spent at St. Andrews, where on March i/th, 1871, he died, saying, " Quite comfortable quite happy nothing more !" leaving a family of nine children, one of whom, Mr. Robert Chambers, has for some time been a partner in the firm. His second wife (his first had died in 1863) did not survive him. Few men have worked so hard as Robert Cham- bers ; his life, busy in its threefold capacity of author, editor, and publisher, can scarcely have known an unprofitable hour ; few men frave worked so well, for not a line that he has written, not a book that he has published, but has tended in some way to the educa- tion and social improvement of the people ; and few men have reaped such an honourable and profitable reward for their labours. Dr. Carruthers, his colleague in the " Cyclopaedia of English Literature," says, " His worldly prosperity kept pace with his acquirements and his labours ; he was enabled to practise a liberal hospitality and a generous citizenship ; strangers of any mark in litera- ture or science were cordially welcomed, and a fore- noon antiquarian ramble with Robert Chambers in the old town of Edinburgh, or a social evening with him in Doune Terrace, were luxuries highly prized and long remembered. Thus we have an instance of a life meritorious, harmonious in all its parts, happy, and benefiting society equally by its direct operation and its example." The news of Robert Chambers's death so affected his brother, Mr. David Chambers, who was at that