Well, perhaps, would it have been for Charles's memory had he been captured. His youth and bravery would have filled in a picture very different in colors to that which history now draws of him. Men would have remembered how he led the van over the broken arches of Warrington-bridge; how, too, sallying from the Royal Fort, he met face to face even Cromwell himself and his veteran troops, and for a time, too, drove them back; how, too, when the battle was going against him he once more rallied his troops, and when all hope was gone he tried to cheer them on again to the charge. But, as it is, we only learn from Charles's subsequent life that, sometimes, nothing in this world is sooner forgot than benefitsthat experience does not make some men one whit better or wiser, but quite the reverse-that the fact of knowing what persecution is does not necessarily make men generous to the suffering, but only qualifies them to inflict it all the more; and that acquaintance with fidelity and heroism only serves, with some, to inspire practical distrust in the existence of all virtue in women, and all honor in men. Instead of Charles's chivalry and his valor, we remember him only as having allowed the English flag to be insulted; instead of his patience under his hardships, we know of him only as one to whom his father bequeathed a rich legacy of his worst vices-as one who possessed the most winning manners but the lowest moralsthe dupe of mistresses and the slave of favorites, who held a levee of panders and kept a privy council of buffoons, and elevated adultery into a science. From the North British Review. THE COLLECTED WORKS OF DUGALD STEWART.* EVER since the decease of Dugald Stewart, now nearly thirty years ago, there has been a strong desire felt by many to have a memoir of him. This feeling has rather been increased by the circumstance, that those who never saw him have been able to form a very dim idea of the man, and of his character. He ever flits before our phantasy as an author or a professor; we see him walking up and down, cogitating a lecture, or dictating an essay; or we get a glimpse of him gliding through the college courts, or addressing a reverential body of students in the class-room. He is not one of those authors who throw their individual heart into their writings, so that their works are their fittest memoir. On the contrary, he keeps himself "The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, Esq." Edited by Sir WILLIAM HAMILTON, Bart. With a Memoir of Dugald Stewart. By JOHN VEITCH, M.A. Vols. I.-X., 1854-58. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Co. at a dignified distance from his readers, and seldom lays aside his classical stateliness. It seems that his son, Colonel Stewart, had prepared an account of the life and writings of his father, together with his correspondence with eminent individuals, and anecdotes from his journals. But, during his military service in India, Colonel Stewart had suffered from an attack of coup-de-soleil, which affected his intellect, and, in a rash moment, he committed to the flames the biography, as well as several papers by his father. The following letter, dated Čatrine, 1837, to a publishing house which had inquired after this literary property, will be read with a melancholy feeling, as coming from the son of such a sire, and as illustrative of a topic on which the father had often dwelt, the dark cloud which forever settles on the border country of mind and body: "You need not further trouble yourself on materials, but mainly from the peculiar character of Mr. Stewart himself. It is easiest to seize a likeness when the features are marked; but Stewart's mental character was distinguished for its regularity and its fine proportions, and was without prominences or excesses of any kind. Besides, while Stewart had no doubt a liberal heart, he contrives to keep it very much folded up from our view in his writ this head, because, finding myself getting on in life, and despairing of finding a sale for it at its real value, I have destroyed the whole of it. To this step I was much induced by finding my locks repeatedly picked during my absence from home, some of my papers carried off, and some of the others evidently read, if not copied from, by persons of whom I could procure no trace, and in the pursuit or conviction of whom, I never could obtain any efficient assistance from the judicial functionaries. As this may form, at some future period, a curious item in the his-ings, and in any recorded conversations or tory of literature," etc., etc. Every one rejoiced, in these circumstances, to find it announced that, in this edition of the collected works, there was to be a memoir of him by Sir William Hamilton, the metaphysician who occupied in this last age the high place which Stewart did, in a previous age. It turned out that Hamilton was obliged, from failing health, to depart from the idea of writing an original and connected narrative, and was to confine himself to a collection of materials, with notes and observations on Stewart's philosophy; and even this design was frustrated by his lamented death. We are grateful, in these circumstances, that we have now at last a memoir of Stewart by Mr. Veitch, one of Hamilton's most promising pupils, and already favorably known by his translations, with notes, of portions of Descartes. The biographer has taken a high standard, and has reached it. This is no other than the memoirs of Smith, Robertson, and Reid, by Stewart himself, who again seems to have taken as his model the Eloges of the French Academicians. Still, this dignified and rose-water style of biography is not after all the highest; as Stewart's admiring pupil, Francis Horner, remarks of him: "His conceptions of character, though formed with comprehensive design, want that individuality to which the painter of portraits must descend." It is evident throughout this life of Stewart, that the painter has been at pains to collect reminiscences from a variety of quarters, and that he has made a judicious combination of them, but it is just as clear that he has not seen the original. He has given us a wonderfully good likeness; but it is of the professor in his gown, rather than of the man in his inner and domestic life-his heart-his conscience and his religious experience. This we suspect is an unavoidable deficiency, arising not only from the want of letters preserved to us. That we should not have a living family portrait is no fault of the biographer, who has done his part with industry, integrity, and judg ment, and has given us a memoir characterized by clearness and accuracy of narrative, elegance of style, and a fine philosophic spirit. We rather think that this is precisely such an account as Stewart would have wished preserved of himself, and that he would have shrunk from a more searching anatomy of his inward motives, and declined a fuller narrative of incidents, which might have exhibited his infirmities. Dugald Stewart was born in the Old College buildings, Edinburgh, on Nov. 22d, 1753. His father was Dr. Matthew Stewart, at one time minister at Roseneath, and afterwards successor to Maclaurin in the mathematical chair in Edinburgh, and still known as one of those British mathematicians, who were applying with great skill and beauty, the geometrical method, while the continental mathematicians were far outstripping them by seizing on the more powerful instrument of the calculus. His mother was the daughter of an Edinburgh Writer to the Signet. He was thus connected on the part of his father (and also of his grandfather, who had been minister of Rothesay) with the Presbyterian ministry, and on the part of his mother with the Edinburgh lawyers-the two classes which, next to the Heritors, held the most influential position in Scotland. Dugald was a feeble and delicate infant. He spent his boyish years partly in Edinburgh, and partly in the maternal mansion house of Catrine, which we remember as being, when we paid pilgrimage thither a number of years ago, a whitewashed, broad-faced, common-place old house, situated very pleasantly in what Wordsworth calls expressively the "holms of bonnie Ayr," but unpleasantly near a cotton-mill and a thriving village, which, as they rose about 1792, destroyed to Stewart the charms of the place as a residence. Stewart | prepared to give as high an education as entered, at the age of eight, the High can be had in any University in the world. School of Edinburgh, where he had, in the The youth seems at this time to have had latter years of his attendance, Dr. Adam thoughts of entering the Church of Engfor his instructor, and where he was dis- land; and if he had gone south, we can tinguished for the elegance of his transla- conceive him rising to as high a dignity tions, and early acquired that love for the as a Scotchman sent to Oxford on that prose and poetical works of ancient Rome, foundation, has reached in our day, and, which continued with him through life. in that event, he would no doubt have He entered Edinburgh College in the ses- discharged the duties of the Episcopal sion 1765-66, that is, in his thirteenth office with great propriety and dignity. year. We remember that Bacon, David But a destiny better suited to his peculiar Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and character and gifts, was awaiting him. In many other original-minded men, entered the autumn of 1772, that is, when he was college about the same age; and we are at the age of nineteen, he became substistrengthened in the conviction, that, in tute for his father in the chair of matheorder to the production of fresh and inde- matics in Edinburgh. It is precisely such pendent thought, it is of advantage to an office as this, a tutorship or assistant have the drilling in the ordinary elements, professorship, that the Scottish Colleges all over at a comparatively early age, and should provide for their more promising then allow the mind, already well-stocked students; an office not to be reserved for with general knowledge, to turn its undi- sons or personal friends of professors, but vided energies to its favorite and evident- to be thrown open to public competition. ly predestinated field; and that the mo- This is the one thing needful to the Scotdern English plan of continuing the routine tish Universities, to enable them to comdiscipline in classics or mathematics till plete the education which they have so the age of twenty-two, while well fitted to well commenced, and to raise a body of produce good technical scholars, is not so learned youths, ready to compete with well calculated to raise up great reform- the tutors and fellows of Oxford and Camers in method and execution. What the bridge. In 1775 Mr. Stewart was elected Scottish Colleges have to deplore, is not assistant and successor to his father; in so much the juvenility of the entrants-1778, on Professor Adam Ferguson going though this has been carried to excess as the total want of a provision for bringing to a point, for carrying on, for consolidating and condensing the scattered education which has been so well begun in the several classes. But to return to the college youth; we find him attending, among other classes, that of Logic under Stevenson, for two sessions, that of Moral Philosophy, under Adam Ferguson, that of Natural Philosophy, under Russell, and from all of these he received a stimulus and a bent, which swayed him at the crisis of his being, and abode with him during the whole of his life. After finishing his course in Edinburgh, he went to Glasgow in 1771, partly by the advice of Ferguson, that he might be under Dr. Thomas Reid, and partly with the view of being sent to Oxford on the Snell Foundation, which has been of use to many students of Glasgow, but has in some respects been rather injurious to the college, as it has led many to ascribe to it the mere reflected glory of being a training-school to higher institutions, whereas Glasgow should assert of itself that it is to America as Secretary to a commission, he, upon a week's notice, lectured for him on Morals; and in 1785, Ferguson having resigned, Stewart was appointed to the office for which he was so specially fitted, to the chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. We pause in the narrative, in order to look at the circumstances which combined to influence the youth, to determine his career, and to fit him for the good work which he performed. First, we have a mind not, certainly, of bright original genius, or of great intellectual force, but with a blending of harmonious qualities, a capacity for inward reflection, and a disposition toward it, a fine taste, and consummate judgment. From his youth he breathed the air of a college. He was early introduced to Roman literature, and made it his model. Stevenson used Wynne's Abridgment of Locke's Essay as a text-book, and from it the student may have caught the fresh and observational spirit which Locke had awakened, while, at the same time, he was kept from what Cousin describes as the common defect of Like every other man not altogether self-contained, Stewart must have felt the spirit of his age, which, as coming in from every quarter, like air and sunshine, commonly exercises a greater influence on young men than individual teachers can possibly do through the special channels open to them. Hume had stirred the thoughts of thinkers to their greatest depths; and this was now the age in which Hume had to be met. Stewart was born fourteen years after the publication of the great skeptical work of modern times, the "Treatise on Human Nature;" and two years after the publication of the work from which all the debased modern utilitarianism has sprung, the "Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals." At the time when the youth was forming his convictions, Hume was living in Edinburgh, and the center of an influence radiating round the man, who was a mixture of the lively, good-natured animal, and of the intellectual giant, but with a terrible want of the high moral and spiritual. The original disposition of Stewart did not tempt him to daring speculation; his domestic training must have prepossessed him against infidelity; and he had been placed, in Glasgow, under the only opponent worthy of Hume, who had appeared; and so these earthquake shocks just made him look round for a means of settling fast the foundations of the temple of knowledge. the British philosophy-being "insular" intimacy with the lofty spirit of Plato, or, by the other text-books employed, better still, by an appreciation of the deep namely, the "Elementa Philosophia" of theological discussions which had collected Heineccius, and the "Determinationes around them so much of the English and Ontologica" of De Vries, works which Scottish speculative intellect of the two discussed, in a more abstract and scholas- preceding centuries. tic method, the questions agitated on the Continent posterior to the publication of the Philosophy of Descartes. A still greater influence was exercised over the youth by Ferguson, who, with no great metaphysical ability, but in an altogether Roman, and in a somewhat Pagan manner, discussed, with great majesty and sweep, the topics of which the pupil was ever after so fond-lying between mental science on the one hand, and jurisprudence on the other. From his own father, and through his own academical teaching, he acquired a taste for the geometrical method, so well fitted to give clearness and coherency to thought, and to teach caution in deduction. He thus became one of those metaphysicians (and they are not few) who have been mathematicians likewise, in this respect resembling (not to go back to Thales, Pythagoras, and Plato, in ancient times) Descartes, Leibnitz, S. Clarke, Reid, and Kant. In the class of Natural Philosophy he was introduced to the Newtonian physics, which had been taught at an early date in Scotland, and caught an enthusiastic affection for the inductive method and for Bacon, which continued with him through life, and is his characteristic among metaphysicians. But the teacher influencing him most, and indeed determining his whole philosophic career, was Thomas Reid, who, in a homely manner, but with unsurpassed shrewdness, and great independence and originality, was unfolding the principles of common-sense, and thus laying a foundation for philosophy, while he undermined the skepticism of Hume. Stewart has found in Reid the model instructor, and it may be added, that Reid has found in Stewart the model disciple. This whole course was an excellent training for a metaphysician; it would have been perfect if, along with his knowledge of natural philosophy, his somewhat dull apprehension had been whetted by an acquaintance-such as that of Locke in an earlier, and that of Brown in a later age -with the more fugitive and complicated phenomena of the physiology of the body; and if, in addition, his over-cautious temper had been raised heavenward by an Locke's philosophy had been the reigning one for the last age or two. Mr. Veitch speaks of the "tradition of sensationalism, which the Scottish universities during the first half of the century, and up to the time of Reid, had in general dispensed in Scotland." This statement is too sweeping: for, first, Locke had given as high a place to reflection as to sensation; and, secondly, he had given a high office to intuition; while, thirdly, Locke's philosophy had not been received in Scotland without modification, or in its worst aspects, as it had been in France. Stewart, like Reid, entertained a high admiration of Locke, and was unwilling to separate from him; but he saw at the same time the defects of Locke, and that there references to intuition, and moral sense, and inherent power, there was a deep mine, very much concealed till it was opened fully to the view by the penetration and perseverance of Reid. were fundamental laws in the mind which Locke had overlooked, or only incidentally noticed. In Glasgow he must have felt the influence left behind by a train of eminent men. There Hutcheson had been the founder of a school, afterwards called the In order to estimate the character of the Scottish school. We know that this honor age, it must also be taken into account, has been claimed for his predecessor in the that there was a strong expectation, that ethic chair, Gerschom Carmichael, the ed- results were to follow from the application itor of Puffendorf, and the author of a of inductive science, to mental phenomelittle Treatise on Natural Theology; we na, similar to those which had flowed from have looked into his works, and are per- its application to physics. Bacon had desuaded that he exercised an influence on clared that his method was as applicable the mind of Hutcheson, who was his pu- to mental as to material facts, though he pil, but it must have consisted mainly in seems to have had no idea of consciousconnecting him with the old and more ness being the agent to be employed in abstract philosophy of the schoolmen, and the inquiry into the laws of mind. Sir of the Continent, and in keeping him Isaac Newton had said, in his Optics: from falling altogether into the experiment-"And if natural philosophy, in all its parts, al method of Locke. In addition to the by pursuing this method, shall at length external and internal sense of Locke, be perfected, the bounds of moral philoHutcheson had called in a moral sense-a very inadequate account we grant-but still containing a truth, inasmuch as it represented moral good as discerned by an original and distinct moral power. In Glasgow, too, Adam Smith had expounded those original views which he afterwards published in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments," and his "Wealth of Nations." In Edinburgh, James Balfour of Pilrig, who was Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University from 1754 to 1764, had opposed Hume's ethical views, on grounds, however, which do not give morality a sufficiently deep foundation in the constitution of man or character of God. He begins his "Delineations of the Nature and Obligations of Morality," with the principle, that private happiness must be the chief end and object of every man's pursuit, shows how the good of others affords the highest happiness, and in order to sanction natural conscience, he calls in the authority of God, who must approve of what promotes the greatest happiness. But in his "Philosophical Essays," he opposes the theory which derives our ideas from sensation and reflection. "It may indeed be allowed that the first notions of things are given to the mind by some sensation or other; but then it may also be true, that after such notices are given, the mind, by the exercise of some inherent power, may be able to discover some remarkable qualities of such things, and even things of a very different nature, which are not to be discovered merely by any sense whatever." Still, with all these sophy will also be enlarged." Pope, too, had said in his Essay on Man: "Account for moral as for natural things." Turnbull, under whom Reid studied in Aberdeen, had quoted this language of New ton and Pope, in his work on the "Principles of Moral Philosophy," published in 1740; and his aim was to "apply himself to the study of the human mind, in the same way as to that of the human body, or to any other part of natural philosophy." Catching this spirit from Turnbull, Reid was even now employing it to discover principles deeper than any that had been systematically noticed by Locke, by Hutcheson, or any Scottish philosopher. To this same noble work Stewart now devoted himself; but seeking meanwhile to combine with the profound philosophy of Reid, a literary excellence like that of Hume and Smith. And this leads us to notice, that we can not form any thing like an adequate idea of the influences which combined to mould the character of Stewart, who cultivated literature as eagerly as he did philosophy, without taking into account, that he lived in an age of great literary revival in Scotland. The union between Scotland and England being now compacted, it was seen that the old Scottish dialect must gradually disappear, and ambitious youths were anxious to get rid of their northern idioms, and even grave seniors, including noblemen and dignified doctors, like Robertson, (as we learn from Lord Campbell's Life of Loughborough,) had formed a society, in order to be delivered from |