or three sessions to rally his ambition and energy, recover the ground which he had lost, and reassert his reputation and authority.

But the failure was confined within the walls of Parliament. His continuation of Hume's History of England was announced: the talents of the author, and the merits of the work, were estimated by the magnificent price which he was to receive; and the public, upon his word, placed him by anticipation, as the classic historian of his country and age, by the side of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. He possessed the talent of conversation; and his reputation in society raised still higher the expectations of the world. Society is said to be less cultivated in London than in other great capitals. It attained at this period its greatest éclat since the age of Anne. The genius and popularity of English living poets, the high estimation of the art, the marvellous events and extraordinary excitement of the time, the influx of distinguished foreigners from the different countries of Europe, rendered certain circles in London brilliant beyond example. Lord Byron was now at the height of his eccentric career; and Madame de Staël, after having paraded herself and her grievances, during ten years, from city to city on the Continent, came to London for the purpose of gathering homage through every gradation, from Grub-street to Holland House. Sir James Mackintosh squandered his mornings, his evenings, and his faculties on those dazzling circles. He did the honours of the genius of Madame de Staël; he escorted, introduced and exhibited her; he was himself among those whose acquaintance was sought by strangers, as one of the leading intellects of his nation: his presence was thought necessary wherever distinguished talents and the best company were combined for social enjoyment or for ostentation. But what were those frivolous successes of society-those perishable vanities of an hour-compared with the sacrifice of so large a portion of the small compass of human life, which might have been devoted in the solitude of his cabinet to the production of lasting monuments to his reputation? The only remains of his labours at this period are a few occasional papers in the "Edinburgh Review." Of his contributions to this publication some obtained a certain celebrity, and were known to be his others are less known to the general reader, and were not read as his beyond the literary coteries of London.

The first paper by him appeared in November, 1812, on Dugald

Stewart's account of a boy born deaf and blind. A more interesting subject could not present itself to one who had made the philosophy of mind his particular study. Sir James gives the following account of the means which the sister of this singular creature had invented for communicating with him:

"His sister has devised means for establishing that communication between him and other beings, from which nature seemed for ever to have cut him off. By various modifications of touch, she conveys to him her satisfaction or displeasure at his conduct. Touching his head with her hand is her principal method. This she does with various degrees of force, and in various manners; and he seems readily to understand the intimation intended to be conveyed. When she would signify her highest approbation, she pats him much and cordially, on the head, back, or hand. This expression more sparingly used signifies simple assent; and she has only to refuse him these signs of approbation entirely, and repel him gently, to convey to him in the most effectual manner the notice of her displeasure. In this manner she has contrived a language of touch, which is not only the means of communication, but the instrument of some moral discipline. To supply its obvious and great defects, she has had recourse to a language of action, representing those ideas which none of the simple natural signs cognisable by the sense of touch could convey. When his mother was from home, his sister allayed his anxiety for her return, by laying his head gently down on a pillow once for each night that his mother was to be absent; implying that he would sleep so many times before her return. It was once signified to him that he must wait two days for a suit of new clothes, and this also was effectually done by shutting his eyes, and bending down his head twice. In the mode of communicating his ideas to others, there is a very remarkable peculiarity. When his eye was pressed by Dr. Gordon, he stretched out his arm, as if to denote that the pressure reminded him of the operation performed at the most distant place which he had visited. When he wishes for meat, he points to the place where he knows it to be; and when he was desirous of informing his friends that he was going to a shoemaker's shop, he imitated the action of making shoes. But though no information is intentionally communicated to him without touching some part of his body, he did not attempt in any of these cases to touch that of others. To say that he addressed these signs to their sight would be incorrect; but he must have been conscious that they were endowed with some means of interpreting signs without contact, by an incomprehensible faculty which nature had refused to him."

"As the materials of all human thought and reasoning enter the mind, or arise in it at a period which is prior to the operation of memory, and under the simultaneous action of all the senses, it is extremely difficult to ascertain what perceptions belong originally and exclusively to each of the organs of external sense. Our notion of every object is made up of the impressions which it makes on all the organs. Whatever may be thought of the mental acts which originally unites these various Impressions, it seems evident that, in the actual state of every human understanding, the labour is to disunite them. Every common man thinks of them, and employs them in their compound state. To analyse them is an operation suggested by philosophy; and which, in the usual state of things, must always be most imperfectly performed. A man who, from the beginning, had all his senses complete, must have had all these impressions; and never can banish any of them from his mind.

He can, indeed, attend to some of them so much more than to others, that he may seem to exclude altogether that which he neglects. But to the perceptions of which he is conscious much will adhere, composed of ingredients so minute and subtle, as to elude the power of will, and to escape the grasp of consciousness. He can approach analysis only by efforts of attention very imperfectly successful, and by suppositions often precarious, and, when pressed to their ultimate consequences, often also repugnant and inconceivable. For such purposes some philosophers have imagined intelligent beings with no other sense than that of vision; and others have represented their own hypothesis respecting the origin and progress of perception, under the history of a statue successively endowed with the various organs of sense. It is evident, however, that such suppositions can do no more than illustrate the peculiar opinions of the supposer, and cannot prove that which, in the nature of things, they pre-suppose.

"But when one inlet is entirely blocked up, we then really see the variation in the state of the compound, produced by the absence of part of its ingredients; and hence it has happened, that the cure and education of the deaf and blind, besides their higher character among the triumphs of civilised benevolence, acquire a considerable, though subordinate, value, as almost the only great experiments which metaphysical philosophy can perform. Even these experiments are incomplete. Knowledge, opinion, and prejudice, are infused into the blind through the ear; and when they are accustomed to employ the mechanism of language, they learn the use of words as signs of things unknown, and speak with coherence and propriety on subjects where they may have no ideas. To fix the limits of the thoughts of a blind man who hears and speaks, is a problem beyond the reach of our present attainments in philosophy. That Saunderson and Blacklock could use words correctly and consistently, without corresponding ideas, seems to be certain; but how far their privation of thought extended beyond the province of light and colours, we do not seem yet to possess the means of determining. On the other hand, the deaf employ the sense of sight,-the most rapid and comprehensive of the subordinate faculties, of the highest importance for the direct original information which it conveys, as well as for the great variety of natural signs of which it takes cognisance, and for the conventional signs which the abbreviation of its natural language supplies. Massieu, evidently a mind of a far higher order than that of the poet or the mathematician whom we have mentioned, is also excluded from less knowledge; and if he were to reason on the theory of sound, there appears no ground for expecting that he might not employ his words with as much exactness as Sanderson displayed in the employment of algebraic signs. The information conveyed by the ear, respecting the condition of outward objects, is comparatively small. But its great importance consists in being the organ which renders it possible to use a conventional language on an extensive scale, and under almost all circumstances. The eye is the grand interpreter of natural signs. A being almost entirely deprived of both is a new object of philosophical examination."

Sir James Mackintosh had not witnessed the theatric exhibitions of Massieu at the school of the deaf and dumb in Paris, when he thus supposed him to possess a higher order of mind than Sanderson. The prodigy in Massieu was his dictating by signs, with the precision and rapidity of speech, to another deaf and dumb pupil who wrote down the verses of Voltaire or Racine, in the "Henriade" or the "Andromaque." But this proved rather the perfection

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to which the language of signs had been brought, than the capacity of those who executed the process. His definitions of terms expressing complex ideas were fanciful or sentimental, rather than metaphysical or correct; his understanding of the vocabulary of the French language was limited and uncertain; he gave no proof of his being more than ordinarily endowed with the reasoning and inventive power.

The next appearance of Sir James is in the number dated October, 1813, as the reviewer of "Poems by Samuel Rogers." He speculates upon the philosophy of poetry as follows:

"It may seem very doubtful, whether the progress and the vicissitudes of the elegant arts can be referred to the operation of general laws, with the same plausibility as the exertions of the more robust faculties of the human mind, in the severer forms of science and of useful art. The action of fancy and taste seems to be affected by causes too various and minute to be enumerated with sufficient completeness for the purposes of philosophical theory. To explain them may appear to be as hopeless an attempt as to account for one summer being more warm and genial than another. The difficulty must be owned to be great. It renders complete explanations impossible; and it would be insurmountable, even in framing the most general outline of theory, if the various forms assumed by imagination, in the fine arts, did not depend on some of the most conspicuous as well as powerful agents in the moral world. They arise from revolutions of popular sentiments. They are connected with the opinions of the age, and with the manners of the refined class, as certainly, though not as much, as with the passions of the multitude. The comedy of a polished monarchy never could be of the same character with that of a bold and tumultuous democracy. Changes of religion and of government, civil or foreign wars, conquests which derive splendour from distance, or extent, or difficulty; long tranquillity ;-all these, and, indeed, every conceivable modification of the state of a community, show themselves in the tone of its poetry, and leave long and deep traces on every part of its literature. Geometry is the same, not only at London and Paris, but in the extremes of Athens and Samarcand. But the state of the general feeling in England, at this moment, requires a dif ferent poetry from that which delighted our ancestors in the time of Luther or Alfred. It ought to be needless to guard this language from misconception, by an observation so obviously implied, as that there are some qualities which must be common to all delightful poems of every time and country.

"During the greater part of the eighteenth century, the connexion of the character of English poetry with the state of the country was very easily traced. The period which extended from the English to the French Revolution was the golden age of authentic history. Governments were secure; nations tranquil; improvements rapid; manners mild beyond the example of any former age. The English nation, which possessed the greatest of all human blessings, a wisely-constructed popular government, necessarily enjoyed the largest share of every other benefit, The tranquillity of that fortunate period was not disturbed by any of those calamitous, or even extraordinary, events, which excite the imagination and inflame the passions. No age was more exempt from the prevalence of any species of popular enthusiasm. Poetry, in this state of things, partook of that calm, argumentative, moral, and directly useful character, into which it naturally subsides, when there

are no events which call up the higher passions; when every talent is allured into the immediate service of a prosperous and improving society; and when wit, taste, diffused litterature, and fastidious criticism, combine to deter the young writer from the more arduous enterprise of poetical genius. In such an age, every art becomes rational. Reason is the power which presides in a calm; but reason guides rather than impels; and though it must regulate every exertion of genius, it never can rouse it to vigorous action."

It may be doubted, from the foregoing passage, whether the mind and habits of Sir James Mackintosh were not better suited to generalise upon morals and metaphysics than upon works of imagination and taste. The reader may ask himself how far he is enlightened by this passage, and will, perhaps, detect some obvious truisms disguised in the vocabulary of speculation. It is easy to perceive that he was already touched with the German fashion of literary criticism, but without those abstruse principles, the difficulty of fathoming which may arise from darkness as well as from depth. Having followed the progress of poetry, and traced the history of taste, from the rude ages to his own time, he thus characterises the genius of two living poets, then objects of distant gaze to the reading public, and inhaling in person the luxurious incense of fashionable society in London. Of Byron he says,

"Even the direction given to the traveller by the accidents of war has not been without its influence. Greece, the mother of freedom and of poetry in the West, which had long employed only the antiquary, the artist, and the philologist, was at length destined, after an interval of many silent and inglorious ages, to awaken the genius of a poet. Full of enthusiasm for those perfect forms of heroism and liberty, which his imagination had placed in the recesses of antiquity, he gave vent to his impatience of the imperfections of living men and real institutions, in an original strain of sublime satire, which clothes moral anger in imagery of an almost horrible grandeur; and which, though it cannot coincide with the estimate of reason, yet could only flow from that worship of perfection, which is the soul of all true poetry."

The following, with an equivocal bow in passing to the supremacy of Scott, is his sketch of Moore:

"The tendency of poetry to become national was in more than one case remarkable. While the Scottish middle age inspired the most popular poet, perhaps, of the eighteenth century, the national genius of Ireland at length found a poetical representative, whose exquisite ear and flexible fancy wantoned in all the varieties of poetical luxury,-from the levities to the fondness of love, from polished pleasantry to ardent passion, and from the social joys of private life to a tender and mournful patriotism, taught by the melancholy fortunes of an illustrious country, -with a range adapted to every nerve in the composition of a people susceptible of all feelings which have the colour of generosity, and more exempt, probably, than any other from degrading and unpoetical vices."