Page:James Frederick Ferrier.djvu/62

58 more faithful. In other lines, it is true, he read much and deeply: literature in its widest sense attracted him as it would attract any educated man. Poetry, above all, he loved, in spite of the tale sometimes told against him, that he gravely proposed turning In Memoriam into prose in order to ascertain logically 'whether its merits were sustained by reason as well as by rhyme'—a proposition which is said greatly to have entertained its author, when related to him by a mutual friend. Works of imagination he delighted in—all spheres of literature appealed to him; he had the sense of form which is denied to many of his craft; he wrote in a style at once brilliant and clear, and carelessness on this score in some of the writings of his countrymen irritated him, as those sensitive to such things are irritated. He has often been spoken of as a living protest against the materialism of the age, working away in the quiet, regardless of the busy throng, without its ambitions and its cares. Sometimes, of course, he temporarily deserted the work he loved the best for regions less remote; sometimes he consented to lecture on purely literary topics, and often he wrote biographies for a dictionary, or articles or reviews for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. As it was to this serial that Ferrier made his most important contributions, both philosophic and literary, for the next fifteen years, and as it was in its pages that the development of his system may be traced, a few words about its history may not be out of place, although it is a history with which we have every reason to be familiar now.

About 1816 the Edinburgh Review reigned supreme in literature. What was most strange, however, was that the Conservative party, so strong in politics, had no