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Rh He had early selected this pursuit as the most attractive and congenial to his powers; and as far as his devotion to it may have needed for its full growth sympathy and encouragement from another mind, such nourishment was amply supplied by his intimacy with Sir William Hamilton. This intimacy, commencing in 1831, ripened into a warm friendship, and continued thoroughly cordial and affectionate, both in agreement and in difference on philosophical questions. In one of his early essays Ferrier expresses his ardent admiration of this great teacher (see vol. ii. p. 300), and in a later treatise, principally directed against some of Sir William Hamilton's positions, he speaks thus of him: "He has taught those who study him to think, and he must stand the consequence, whether they think in unison with himself or not. We conceive, however, that even those who differ from him most would readily own that to his instructive disquisitions they were indebted for at least half of all they know of philosophy." A tribute of loving reverence to Hamilton's memory, written soon after his death, will be found in vol. i. pp. 488-90.

The silent workings of home influences had tended not the less surely to arouse and widen his intellectual sympathies. Having relations on both sides so highly gifted with literary ability, it is not surprising that Mr Ferrier should have combined with his metaphysical predilections a powerful and at the same time discriminating interest in all varieties of mental culture. Letters still preserved show how frank and