but one other sophism in the language that at all approaches it in the elegance and delicacy of its form, and which resembles it, too, in its perfect honesty and good faith; for both authors wrote as they felt, and failed in producing more than partial truth, which is always tantamount to error, simply because they both lacked a faculty all essential to the separate inquiries which they conducted. Both were fully sensible of the immense power of association in eliciting images of delight; but the one, insensible to the beauty of simple sounds, from the want of a musical ear, attributed all the power of music to association alone; and the other, insensible to the beauty of simple colours, attributed, from a similar want of appreciating faculty, all their power of gratifying the eye to a similar cause. All our readers are acquainted with the article on the Beautiful; but the following fine stanzas, the production of John Finlay, a Scottish poet, who died early in the present century, when he had but mastered his powers, may be new to most of them : "Why does the melting voice, the tuneful string, Some lovely maid who on thy bosom hung, Wept at the strain he caroll'd when a child. O'er many a weary waste the traveller passed, And haply some green spot the pilgrim found, That, as it melted, passed into his soul,— "Oh, Bothwell bank!'-each thrilling sound conveyed With vigorous arm the falchion lift on high, Fight as their fathers fought, and like their fathers die." Long as our extract is, there are, we suppose, few of our readers who will deem it too long. Independently, too, of its exquisite vein, it illustrates better both the merits and the defects of Lord Jeffrey's theory of beauty than any other passage in the round of our literature with which we are acquainted. For there are scores whose degree of musical taste compels them to hold that there is a beauty in "simple sounds" altogether independent of association, for the single individuals whose sense of the beauty of "simple colours" is sufficiently strong to convince them that it, like the other sense, has an underived existence, wholly its own. We have left ourselves but little space to speak of the distinguished man so recently lost to us, as a lawyer, a statesman, and a judge. He will be long remembered in Edinburgh as one of the most accomplished and effective pleaders that ever appeared at the Scottish bar. It has become common to allude to his appearances in the House of Commons as failures. We know not how his speeches may have sounded in the old chapel of St Stephen's; but this we know, that of all the speeches in both Houses of which the Reform Bill proved the fruitful occasion, we remember only his we can ever recall some of its happy phrases, as when, for instance, he described the important measure which he advocated as a firmament which was to separate the purer waters above from the fouler and more turbulent waters below,—the solid worth of the country, zealous for reform, from its wild unprincipled licentiousness, bent on subversion; and, founding mainly on this selective instinct of our memory, we conclude that the speech which is said to have disappointed friends and gratified opponents must have been really one of the best delivered at the time,-perhaps the very best. As a judge, the character of Jeffrey may be summed up in the vigorous stanza of Dryden :— "In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abethdin With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean, All accounts agree in representing him as in private life one of the kindest and gentlest of mortals, ever surrounded by the aroma of a delicate sense of honour and a transparent truthfulness, equable in temper, full in conversation of a playful ease, and, with even his ordinary talk, ever glittering in an unpremeditated wit, "that loved to play, not wound.” Never was there a man more thoroughly beloved by his friends. Though his term of life exceeded the allotted three score and ten years, his fine intellect, like that of the great Chalmers, whom he sincerely loved and respected, and by whom he was much loved and respected in turn, was to the last untouched by decay. Only four days previous to that of his death he sat upon the bench; only a few months ago he furnished an article for his old "Review," distinguished by all the nice discernment and acumen of his most vigorous days. It is further gratifying to know, that though infected in youth and middle age by the wide-spread infidelity of the first French Revolution, he was for at least the last few years of his life of a different spirit: he read much and often in his Bible; and he is said to have studied especially, and with much solicitude, the writings of St Paul.-January 30, 1850. FIRE AT THE TOWER OF LONDON. THREE of the most interesting ancient buildings of Britain destroyed by fire within less than ten years! "Are such calamities as these really unavoidable?" asks a writer in the Times, "and ought we to make up our minds to hear of the conflagration of some great national treasure every five or ten years as a thing that must be ?" Treasures of at least equal value still survive to England,-Windsor, Hampton Court, the British Museum, and the great University Libraries. How are they to be protected? Increased vigilance and care are recommended by this writer. Fires smoulder for hours ere they burst forth so as to be detected by the watchmen outside; and they have then, in most cases, become too formidable to be got under. But by stationing careful persons within our more valuable buildings, instructed to visit every apartment and passage once every hour, might not the mischief be detected at a stage when it could be easily overmastered? Statistical fact, however, comes in to show that the suggestion is less wise than obvious: buildings so watched are found more liable to destruction from fire than those for whose safety no such precautions are taken. The private watchman has to use a light in his rounds; in cold weather he requires a fire; though essential that he be of steady character, there is a liability to be deceived, on the part of the employer, considerable enough to tell in the statistical table as an element of accident. Even when there is no unsteadiness, inattention is apt to creep on men watching against an enemy that has just a chance of visiting what they guard, once in five hundred years. In short, the result of the matter is, that insurance offices, founding on their tables, demand a higher premium for houses guarded in this manner than for houses left altogether unprotected. To meet with the evil thus indicated, the writer in the Times suggests that the watchmen, in order to keep up their vigilance, should be changed once every two years; that each at the end of his term should have to look forward to some certain promotion as a reward of his diligence and care; and that none but active, prudent, trustworthy men, should be chosen for the office. The scheme, of course, lies open to the objection just hinted at; the inevitable liability of employers to be deceived in character would in not a few cases render the precaution useless. We question, too, whether the attention of a watchman who visited every part of a large building some ten or twelve times each night for two years together, could be so continually kept up, that more than a balance would be struck between the dangers he introduced and those he pre |