pect of obtaining; and for which he conceived his talents to be much better adapted than for the profession he had chosen. In this opinion he was probably in the right, as he was generally considered by his fellow-students as far inferior in medical science to several of his companions.

The very scanty knowledge which the public possesses with respect to Akenside's life and character, will, I trust, be a sufficient excuse for recording these slight particulars.

Note (C.) p. 201.

The late Dr. Thomas Brown was a person of rare and admirable talents; of the most extensive and various learning; and, in conversing upon metaphysical questions, which do not lie far removed from the surface, one of the quickest men, and most acute arguers that I have ever known. Like most other men, however, of very quick parts, he was too confident in his rapid judgments; too ready to conclude that there were no difficulties in his way when he was unable to see them; and not sufficiently aware, that, in this science, much more than in any other, the success of our inquiries depends on that capacity of patient thinking, to which Newton had the modesty to ascribe all the merit of his greatest discoveries. In this capacity, I cannot help thinking that Dr. Brown was remarkably deficient; and to this cause, more than to any other, I am disposed to impute his very loose and inaccurate use of language on various important occasions.* To this cause

* I shall confine myself here to one instance; the use which he has made of the words will and desire as synonymous; a confusion of terms, by which the question concerning the freedom of the will is completely prejudged. I select this in preference to others for various reasons: 1. Because the distinction between them was long ago clearly pointed out by Locke, the substance of whose remarks on this head may be concisely stated in the two following propositions: 1st, That at the same moment a man may desire one thing, and will another. 2d, That at the same moment a man may have contrary desires, but cannot have contrary wills. These decisive observations Locke has accompanied by the following sarcastic remark, "I find the will often confounded with desire, and one put for the other, and that by men who would not willingly be thought not to have very "distinct notions of things, and not to have written very clearly about them." (Essay on Human Understanding, Vol. I. p. 203.) 2. Because Dr. Brown fell into this error at an early period of his life; and as I was anxious to correct it, and was aware even then of his unwillingness to abandon any of his declared opinions, I endeavoured indirectly to call his attention to it, by inserting the passage just quoted from Locke in a note (which, for obvious reasons, I was sure Dr. Browm would read) at the end of the second edition of my first Volume. See Note (0.) In order to convey my suggestion with still greater delicacy, I took no notice of Dr. Brown's slip, but referred to a passage in his antagonist Darwin, who, by a singular and somewhat ludicrous coincidence, had been guilty of the very same abuse of words. I must own it was with some regret, that, in the third edition of his Cause and Effect, published as late as the year 1818, I found him not only persevering in the same mistake, but employing many pages of discussion in retorting on those philosophers by whom the distinction had been made (See p. 49. et seq.)

also, I apprehend we ought in candour to ascribe the countenance he has given to some doctrines, which, to more cautious and profound thinkers, appear to have a practical tendency altogether at variance with his known principles and opinions. In short, what La Harpe has remarked of his friend Voltaire, as an apology for some inconsistencies in his metaphysical speculations, may be applied to Dr. Brown, and perhaps to most other poets who have engaged in similar inquiries. Les objets de méditation étoient trop étrangers à l'excessive vivacité de son esprit. Saisir forte"ment par l'imagination les objets qu'elle ne doit montrer que "d'un côté, c'est ce qui est du poëte; les embrasser par toutes "les faces, c'est ce qui est du philosophe; et Voltaire etoit trop "exclusivement l'un pour être l'autre."-(Cours de Littérature, Tom. XV. pp. 46, 47.)

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The account given of Dr. Brown's posthumous work by his ingenious and friendly biographer bears ample testimony to the truth of some of these remarks. "It gives an additional value to the "printed lectures to know, (and there is the most satisfactory evi"dence upon the subject,) that nearly the whole of the lectures that are contained in the first three volumes were written during the first year of his professorship, and the whole of the re"maining lectures the following season.

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"In going over his lectures the following year, his own surprise "was great, to find that he could make but little improvement 66 upon them. He could account for it in no other way but by "his mind having been in a state of very powerful excitement. "As he continued to read the same lectures till the time of his "death, they were printed from his manuscripts exactly as he "wrote them, without addition or retrenchment." (Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Brown, M. D., by the Reverend D Welsh, minister of Crossmichael, p. 196.) A few pages before we are told, (what indeed I had always suspected,) that the sub'ject of many of his lectures he had never reflected upon till he "took up the pen; and many of his theories occurred to him du"ring the period of composition." p. 193.

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On another occasion, we are assured by the same authority, "That Dr. Brown preferred poetry to philosophy. The rapidity "with which he arrived at the knowledge of the questions that "have been discussed among philosophers, made him feel it as an irksome task to dwell upon those intermediate steps which were

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necessary for the satisfaction of other minds, though to his quicker glance the conclusions seemed intuitively obvious." (Ibid. p. 394.) The same writer observes in a note, that "when the third edition of Dr. Brown's Cause and Effect was going to "the press, in reading some of the most abstruse passages, he "would say, now this really seems to me more like the multiplica"tion table than any thing else." *

* In turning over the leaves of this bulky yolume, (which I never had done till

The respectable author from whom I have copied these details, with an amiable, though not always well-judged solicitude about the fame of his friend, considers them as giving an additional value to his posthumous work; but he would perhaps have acted more wisely if he had mentioned them as an apology for the imperfections, which, under all the circumstances of the case, were unavoidable in the labours of any human being who did not write under the immediate influence of inspiration.

But the most exceptionable passages in Mr. Welsh's book (because, from the oracular tone which he has been pleased to assume in them, they are the most likely to impose on shallow understandings,) are those in which he speaks of Dr. Brown's powers of Analysis, when he ought rather to have warned novices (who are always most liable to be misled by an overweening vanity) of the danger of attempting to analyze things unsusceptible of analysis; or, in Mr. Locke's homely but expressive language, to have exhorted them to «C stop when they are at the end of their tether.” They who are competent to form a judgment for themselves in such matters will at once understand my meaning, when I request them, after perusing Dr. Brown's three long lectures on personal identity, to take up Bishop Butler's very short essay on the same subject, annexed to his Analogy.

The parts of Dr. Brown's work which I read with the most unmixed pleasure, were those eloquent passages of a moral and practical tendency, where, without giving way to a spirit of over-refinernent, he follows the powerful impulse of his own feelings. These had to me a peculiar charm, as I recognised in all his sentime nts a faithful picture of his benevolent, liberal, and elevated mind.

The foregoing remarks, some of which I offer with extreme reluctance, have been extorted from me by a perusal of the work of his learned but not very judicious biographer, who, notwithstanding the aids he has derived from the instrument of phrenology,* seems to me not unfrequently to be subject to the same delusion which so often misled Dr. Brown, of fancying, when he had got to the end of his own sounding-line, that he had reached the bottom of the ocean. After the severe, and not very respectful stric

I had read Mr. Welsh's work) I was sometimes forced to acknowledge the truth of the old saying, that " easy writing is not always the easiest reading." Whoever may have the courage carefully to peruse it from beginning to end, and happens to add to his powers of patient reading, the much rarer power of patient thinking, may perhaps be of opinion with me, that the anecdote recorded in the above passage might as well have been suppressed.

* For Mr. Welsh's own statement of the length to which he carries his admiration of phrenology, see his Life of Dr. Brown, Note N, p. 519. From this long and very amusing Note, I have room only to extract a single sentence. "I am "convinced that the time is speedily approaching when, great as Dr. Brown's "merits in other respects will always be allowed to be, his greatest merit will be seen to consist in the near approach that he has made to many of the doctrines of phrenology, without the aids of the instrument that phrenology presents."

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tures on Dr. Reid, to which he has called my attention in Dr. Brown's Lectures, my total silence might be construed into an acquiescence in their justness, and into an unqualified approbation of this new mode of extemporary philosophising. I thought, therefore, that this public declaration of my sentiments was no more than what was due to the memory of my venerable and revered preceptor, if it had not been still more imperiously called for by the deep interest I can never cease to take in the future progress of the Philosophy of the Human Mind.

As it is more than probable that this may be the last opportunity I shall have of addressing the public, I cannot refrain from earnestly recommending to the attention of my successors in this branch of study, the memorable words of Mr. Locke, in one of his letters to his friend Mr. Molyneux, that "even great parts will "not master any subject without great thinking;" to which I would beg leave to add, as a caution to the young and inexperienced, that they may not be led by the illusions of self-love, to flatter themselves that their minds, when in a state of very powerful excitement, are in a favourable mood for the investigation of truth.

Note (D.) p. 205.

Molle atque facetum

Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camœnæ.

Horat. Sat. lib. i. 10.

"To Virgil, the muses that delight in rural scenes have granted the delicate "and the elegant."

Such is the version of Christopher Smart, whose translation of Horace, notwithstanding the carelessness with which it was evidently executed by that ingenious and unfortunate man, is entitled to more attention than most prose versions of the Latin poets. I cannot help thinking, that in the choice of both these epithets he has misapprehended the meaning of his author. With respect to the first, when I reflect on the numberless strokes of the pathetic that occur in Virgil, I cannot doubt that the word molle is to be understood here in the same sense in which it is used in the wellknown passage of Juvenal.

Mollissima corda

Humano generi dare se natura fatetur

Quæ lacrymas dedit. Hæc nostri pars optima sensus.

In rendering facetum by elegant, Smart has been evidently misled by the following passage in Quinctilian: "Facetum non tan"tum circa ridicula opinor consistere. Neque enim diceret Ho"ratius facetum carminis genus natura concessum esse Virgilio. "Decoris hanc magis et excultæ cujusdam elegantiæ appellationem "puto." (Lib. vi. chap. 3.) But Quinctilian, it is plain from the

manner in which he introduces this comment, does not mean to exclude that quality, which, in our language, is denoted by the word humorous: this, on the contrary, he seems to consider as the primary and most obvious sense of the word; he only gives it as his opinion, that Horace intended to express something more; a refinement, to wit, and elegance of taste, which knew how to restrain this humour within the bounds of decorum.* Perhaps he meant to insinuate farther, that this refinement of taste was still more characteristical of the genius of Virgil than the talent which the common acceptation of facetum is apt at first to suggest. It is certain that a quick discernment of the exact limit which propriety prescribes to humour, is the most unequivocal of all tests of an elegant mind; and hence, probably, it is that lepidus as well as facetus conveys the idea both of humour and of elegance. "Socratem opinor in hac ironia dissimulationeque, longé lepore et "humanitate omnibus præstitisse. Genus est perelegans." is this combination which so remarkably distinguishes the taste of Addison.

It

An affinity of a similar kind may be remarked among the different significations of urbanus. The transition by which this word has passed from its literal sense, to denote a man of wit, is sufficiently obvious; as it is by habits of social intercourse with persons of refined manners that the accomplishment of wit is formed, and it is only in a great city that such a society is at all times to be found. For the same reason, too, that facetum came gradually to imply, along with its primitive meaning, the highest degree of taste and elegance, a like extension has been given to urbanum ; insomuch that, in process of time, what was at first regarded merely as an accessary, seems to have figured as the principal, (probably because the rarest,) quality expressed by the word. Horace, accordingly, appears to have considered the judgment and selfcommand, necessary to check and regulate the excursions of wit, as the most important quality connected with that talent.

"Interdum urbani parcentis viribus, atque
"Extenuantis eas consulto."

It is certainly curious, that all the three words facetus, lepidus, and urbanus, should agree with each other in implying, along with a certain vein of pleasantry, an elegance and refinement of taste and manners. Is not this a proof that the Romans considered the due regulation of this dangerous gift as the most infallible test of a highly polished delicacy?

*To the same purpose Cicero has remarked that the word facetum is not applicable to every thing that is ridiculous. He particularly excepts buffoonery and grimace, and in general what is commonly called broad humour. "Atque hoc "etiam animadvertendum est, non esse omnia ridicula faceta. Quid enim potest "esse tam ridiculum, quam sannio est?" &c. &c. (Cic. de Orat. Lib. ii. 61.) t Cic. de Oratore, Lib. ii. 67.