VII.

LORD KA MES.

Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Hon. Henry Home, of Kame; containing Sketches of the Progress of Literature and general Improvement in Scotland, during the greater part of the Eighteenth Century.

THE principal facts relative to the individual who forms the leading subject of this work, may be given in a few words. Henry Home was the son of a country gentleman of small fortune, and was born in the year 1696. About the age of sixteen, he was bound by indenture to attend the office of a writer to the signet in Edinburgh, with a view to prepare himself for the profession of a solicitor. Being sent one evening by his master with some papers to the President of the Court of Session, he was so handsomely treated by the venerable judge and his daughter, and so enchanted with the character of dignity and elegance in their manners and situation, that he was instantly fired with the ambition of attaining eminence in the public profession of the law, and resolved to qualify himself for an advocate. He commenced a most laborious course of study, as well in the departments of literature and science, as in the knowledge more peculiarly appropriate to his intended profession, and made a rapid progress in them all. He was called to the bar at the age of twenty-seven, published various writings on legal subjects, obtained at length the first eminence as a pleader, and was appointed at the age of fifty-six one of the judges of the Court of Session, by the title of Lord Kames. His moral and metaphysical studies were prosecuted with as much ardour as those of the law; he was personally acquainted with most of the philosophers of the time; and by means of his writings became celebrated as a philosopher himself. When he was near the age of seventy, his fortune received the addition of a very large estate, left to his wife, to whom he had

been married at the age of forty-five: this estate he was almost enthusiastically fond of cultivating and adorning. About the same period that he obtained this wealth, his legal rank was raised to that of a Lord of Justiciary, a judge of the supreme criminal tribunal in Scotland, of which office he continued to discharge the duties till his death, in 1782, in the eightyseventh year of his age.

Lord Kames was a very conspicuous man in his time, and deserved to pass down to posterity in a record of considerable length. He has rendered a material service to literature by his "Elements of Criticism ;" and from the work before us it is evident, that his professional studies contributed the most important advantages to both the theory and the administration of law in Scotland. The improvement in agriculture also, in that country, seems to have taken its rise, in a great measure, from his zeal and his example. He received from nature an extraordinary activity of mind, to which his multiplied occupations allowed no remission, even in his advanced age; we find him as indefatigable in his eightieth year, as in the most vigorous and ambitious season of his life. The versatility of his talents was accompanied by a strength and acuteness, which penetrated to the essence of the subjects to which they were applied. The intentions with which he prosecuted such a wide diversity of studies, appear often excellent; very few men so ingenious, so speculative, so systematic, and occasionally so fanciful, have kept practical utility so generally in view. The great influence which he exerted over some of the younger philosophers of the time, several of the most distinguished of whom were proud to acknowledge themselves his pupils, was employed to determine their speculations to useful purposes. His conduct in the office of judge appears to have impressed every impartial man that witnessed it, with an invariable opinion of his talents and integrity. As a domestic and social man, his character was that of frankness, good humour, and extreme vivacity. His prompt intelligence continually played around him, and threw its rays on every subject that even casualty could introduce into conversation. His defects as a speculatist were, that he had not, like the very first order of minds, that simplicity of intellect that operates rather in the form of power than of ingenuity, and is too strong to be either captivated or amused by the specious fallacies of a fantastic theory; and that, as far as we have the means of judging, he had a higher respect for

the conjectures of mere reason, than for the authority of revelation.

The name of Lord Kames is sufficiently eminent to render an account of his life interesting, though it appear more than twenty years after his death. But we greatly admire the modesty with which Lord Woodhouselee, better known to the literary world under the name of Mr. Fraser Tytler, has been waiting, during this extended interval, for some abler hand to execute a work, to which he, very unaccountably, professes himself inadequate. This long delay, however, has been of immense service to the magnitude of the performance, which has perhaps been growing many years, and has risen and expanded at length, into a most ample shade of cypress over the tomb of Lord Kames.

In order to give the book this prodigious size, the author has chosen to take advantage of Lord Kames's diversified studies, to enlarge on the several subjects of those studies; of his profession of law, to deduce the history of Scottish law, and of the lives of its most distinguished professors and practitioners, accompanied by dissertations on law in general; and of his happening to be a Scotchman, to go back as far as the tenth century in order to prove that there were scholars then in Scotland, and return all the way downward, proving that there have been scholars there ever since. In his youth Lord Kames was acquainted with a particular species of beaux, peculiar to those times, which animals had, if our author is to be believed, a singular faculty of uniting the two functions of fluttering and thinking; and therefore several individuals are to be separately described, (vol. i. p. 57, &c.) It was extremely proper to give us a short account of the species, as forming a curious branch of entomology; but it does not seem to have been so indispensable to describe, individually, beau Forrester and beau Hamilton. Because one of Lord Kames's early friends, a Mr. Oswald, was a member of parliament, a sheet and a half must be occupied by uninteresting letters, which this Mr. Oswald wrote to him about temporary and party politics. A larger space is filled with letters from Dean Tucker, which, excepting one, and perhaps two or three paragraphs of another, are not of the smallest consequence, further than their being written to Lord Kames; but therefore they are inserted. Lord Kames was acquainted with David Hume, and, therefore, in his life, there must be a very long account of the publication and reception

of "Hume's Treatise of Human Nature," with a very long extract from its conclusion. Lord Kames wrote a well known book called the "Elements of Criticism," and therefore actually fifteen pages at once are filled with an extract from that book. We have taken all due pains, but ineffectually, to reconcile ourselves to this mode of enlarging the size of a book by uninteresting letters, and indolent extracts. But even if a large work were constructed without this lazy expedient, and consisted almost wholly of the honest workmanship of the author, we have still an invincible dislike to the practice of pouring forth the miscellaneous stores of a common-place book, of relating the literary, the legal, the philosophical, and the political transactions of half a century, and of expending narrative and panegyric to a vast amount on a crowd of all sorts of people, under the form and pretence of recording the life of an individual. It is an obvious charge against this species of writing, that it can have no assignable limits, for as the object is undefinable, we can never be certain that it is gained; and therefore the writer may go on adding volume to volume, still pretending that all this is necessary to his plan, till his whole stock of miscellaneous materials is exhausted; and then he may tell us with a critical air of knowing what he is about, that he has executed, however imperfectly, the plan which he had considered as best adapted for doing justice to the interesting subject. But if instead of this he were to tell us, (perhaps on having found another drawer-full of materials) that another volume was necessary for giving right proportions and a right conclusion to his work, we could not contradict him, because we should not know where to seek for the rules or principles by which to decide what would be a proper form or termination; unless we were to refer the case to be settled by our patience, or our purse, according to which authorities in criticism, we may possibly have passed, a good way back, the chapter or paragraph, which appeared very proper for a conclusion. Every work ought to have so far a specific object, that we can form some notion what materials are properly or improperly introduced, and within what compass the whole should be contained. Those works that disdain to recognise any standard of prescription according to which books are appointed to be made, may fairly be regarded as outlaws of literature, which every prowling reviewer has a right to fall upon wherever he finds them.

Another serious objection against this practice of making a

great book of a mass of materials so diverse that they have no natural connexion, and in such quantity that the slender narrative of an individual's life is insufficient to form an artificial connexion, is, that it is extremely injurious to the good order of our intellectual arrangements; as it accustoms the reader to that broken, immethodical, and discursive manner of thought which is preventive or destructive of the power both of prolonged attention and continuous reasoning. Just when a man has resolved, and possibly begun, to put his mind under severe discipline, in order to cure its rambling propensities, when he has perhaps vowed to do penance in mathematics for his mental dissipation, he is met by one meretricious pair of volumes after another, presenting all the seducing attractions of novelty, variety, facility of perusal, amusement somewhat dignified by an admixture of grave sense, and all this in an attire of the utmost elegance, from the type to the outside covering. The unfortunate sinner renounces his vows, throws away his mathematics, and becomes as abandoned a literary libertine as ever. If it be said, that a book thus composed merits, at the most, no more serious accusation than merely that of its being a miscellany, and that we have many miscellanies and collectanea which are well received by the public as a legitimate class of books; we answer, yes, we have miscellanies and collectanea without number, and they are a pest of literature; they reduce our reading to a useless amusement, and promote a vicious taste that nauseates the kind of reading, which alone can supply well-ordered knowledge, and assist the attainment of a severe and comprehensive judgment. These heterogeneous productions drive away the regular treatises, the best auxiliaries of mental discipline, from the tables of both our male and female readers; and the volumes of our Lockes, and Hartleys, and Reids, are reduced to become a kind of fortifying wall to the territory of spiders, on the remotest and dustiest shelf in all the room.

Against an assemblage of multifarious biography of distinguished men, under the ostensible form of a record of the life of an individual, we have to observe that it has the fallacious effect of making that individual appear as always the king of the whole tribe. This would not be the effect, if merely so much were mentioned, concerning other eminent persons, as should be indispensable to the history of the one immediately in question. These short references might just give us an impression of the high rank of those other persons,