special sins mentioned, and to impress men with a sense of terror against the commission of them. No doubt these judicial laws were conformable to the principles of eternal justice. These principles award the punishment of death for every sin. God has a right to inflict this punishment for all offences against his law, and does actually inflict it in his providential government. But the question is, whether a Christian government is bound, as it would be loyal to God, to inflict the punishments prescribed in the Jewish law? If so, then there can be no mitigation, no remission of punishment. Would it not be alike a mockery of God and man, a state of things fitted to undermine the authority of all law, to inscribe in our statute book, that the Sabbathbreaker, for example, should be punished with death, and to permit the law to remain dead, unexecuted? The very end of government would, in this way, be defeated, for its object is to bring law into operation. Our author seems to falter at his own reasoning. He contends that many of these offences which, according to the Jewish code, were punishable with death, were not in the actual administration of the law so visited; that an example of severity was made at the first, but that afterwards the administration of the law was relaxed. Does he mean, then, by asking our adoption of the Jewish judicial code, nothing more than this, that we should hold certain offences to be in their nature worthy of death, but that the actual infliction of the punishment should be regulated by other principles? If this be all, his conclusion may be harmless enough.

It is a question far from being easy of solution, how far, and in what respects the Jewish polity is binding upon modern states? We dare not repudiate the idea that, in some respects, it is so. We do not think our author has satisfactorily solved the question. It is one, however, eminently worthy of consideration; and as our author has entered upon this field of investigation, and so far successfully cultivated it, we would fain encourage him to persevere. With his gifts, and knowledge of the subject, we are not without the hope that he will ultimately reach a safer landing-place than he has yet gained, and enlighten the world with profounder views of the true polity of a Christian State. It will be, in such a case, especially worth his while to consider, whether any portions of the Jewish polity, and if so, what portions of it, have a manifest or probable reference to the introduction of Christianity; and whether such provisions in their code of laws were not, in their nature, local and temporary.

ART. IX.-The Late Lord Jeffrey.

FRANCIS JEFFREY died on the afternoon of Saturday the 26th January 1850. Four days before, he occupied his accustomed place on the Bench, as vigorous, clear, and discursive under the weight of seventy-seven years, as in the most brilliant period of his manhood. Time had not pressed more heavily on the elasticity of his step, than on his cheerful and playful spirit ; and he trod the streets of our city, which his name has contributed to make famous, on that last fatal day, with a strength which seemed to promise a still prolonged evening to his bright, though declining sun. But the triumph of an insidious disease, with which he had wrestled at intervals for more than twenty years, was at last at hand. On the morning of the 26th, it was rumoured that he was sinking under an attack of bronchitis. In the evening, it was told that he was dead. Though those at a distance may only have reverberated the too accustomed and soon forgotten sound of a great man's death, no one that did not witness it can appreciate the sadness that spread over our metropolis on the event of that mournful evening. The sounds of festivity were subdued; a gloom settled on the countenances of those who knew him least; and the melancholy awe of a great calamity chilled even the stranger within our gates. Of the burst of sorrow that overwhelmed his friends, we need not speak. But even his antagonists, in his long and hardly fought career, the few whom the arm of death had spared so long, were overcome by the intensity of deep and absorbing grief. So loved, so honoured, so lamented, passed from this mortal scene a man whose name for many a year was the mark for all the rancour of party animosity, the bitter revilings of literary enmity, and the outpourings of personal spleen.

In the first number of this Journal, several years ago, we made the literary works and character of Jeffrey the subject of a somewhat elaborate criticism. Although at that time we were to a certain extent restrained in speaking of his personal merits and fame, by considerations which, sadly for us, have now ceased, we do not feel that this is a time or occasion fit for resuming in detail the analysis we then attempted. Still less can we undertake anything like a narrative of his long, arduous, and eminently useful career, to tell which truly would be to write the political and literary history of our country for the last half century. That task we have no doubt will be fulfilled by fitting hands;

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but time and distance are necessary before such a portrait can be drawn with success. We simply propose to ourselves as a labour not less of love than of duty, to recall a few of the honoured lineaments of our greatest citizen, and to lay on the altar of his memory our tribute of homage to his genius and his virtues, and of grief for his irreparable loss.

In the short and rapid delineation which we mean to attempt, we do not feel very confident of succeeding; not so much be cause the proximity of our recent bereavement is in danger of absorbing our attention, and of bewildering our judgment, but because none of the ephemeral notices of him that have yet appeared seem to us to come at all up to the character or distinctive qualities of one of the most remarkable men of our time. It may be that his intellectual, like his physical features, were of that mobile and versatile cast-so finely blended and so rapid in their changes, as to baffle any attempt to pourtray them-or that he presented in union so many qualities rarely found combined, that the prominence of one may to ordinary observers have eclipsed or obscured others. But so it is, that great as his reputation was-more widely diffused over the world than it has often been the fortune of a literary name to be, it has not hitherto called forth any account of his character or his career displaying a discriminating appreciation of either.

The truth is, that although Jeffrey was principally known to the world as the monarch of a critical throne which he himself established, his labours in that literary field were comparatively but a small proportion of his achievements or indication of his powers. The mental energy and vivid grasp of conception which he threw into that task were employed on it more as a pastime than a business: and had it not been that his lot was cast in the happier, we believe, but comparatively unambitious walks of the Scottish bar, he would, we doubt not, have asserted for himself that foremost place in affairs which he gained with so much ease and success in the ranks of criticism.

His early career presented no very striking or salient incidents. He was the second son of George Jeffrey, DeputeClerk of Session, and was born in 1772. He thus died in his seventy-seventh year. He received his education at the High School of Edinburgh, from which he went to Glasgow College, and thence to Queen's College, Oxford, and returned to Edinburgh in 1792. He passed at the Scottish Bar in 1794, and about the same time he took the hardly less important step of joining the Speculative Society-a well-known debating club connected with the College of Edinburgh, which was then, and continued for many years afterwards, as it does still, to flourish in great vigour.

The Speculative Society.

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He came to the Bar in the hottest days of old Scottish Exclusivism at a time when the ancient leaven of Scottish Jacobitism had been fanned into a red-hot flame by the blasts of the French Revolution. It is not wonderful, therefore, that the young barrister, starting without patronage or connexions, and without the most remote drop of Dundas blood in his veins, should have found the first years of his legal life arduous and thorny. But against all disadvantages-aristocratic frowns, and political discouragement, his native vigour of intellect, and brilliancy of thought and language, early began to make their way. He soon became renowned as a debater in the Speculative-and the reputation he gained there, among the junior advocates and writers, spread quickly to the floor of the Outer House. We have heard that even in his second year at the Bar he was employed in many criminal cases of importance, and was already looked upon as a rising man. It was many years, however, before the stream of civil business began to flow towards him. It was in the Speculative Society, and among the associates he met there, that he found the theatre and comrades of his glory, and laid the foundations of his future fame.

Scott was a member of the Society when Jeffrey entered it, and acted as its Secretary, as far as we recollect, for two years. In this manner commenced the friendship of these two distinguished men, which, though disturbed during their lives by the jarrings of literary differences, was never seriously interrupted while the great novelist lived. But shortly afterwards he formed acquaintances with whom his political and literary tastes had more in common. In 1797, Henry Brougham, Francis Horner, Lord Lansdowne, John Peter Grant, and others, joined the Society; and long after Jeffrey and most of his companions had passed at the bar, they would repair weekly to this counterfeit Forum, and discuss, with eloquence and earnestness, which, perhaps, they never afterwards surpassed, the deepest questions of philosophy and Government.

It has often been said, in unfriendly quarters, that Jeffrey failed in Parliament. What may be called failure in Parliament, under the circumstances in which he entered or left it, were difficult to say. The habits and instincts of a parliamentary orator are not things to be acquired intuitively; and that Jeffrey, entering Parliament, as he did, when on the verge of sixty, did not at once assume the place of a practised debater, is only saying, that a result followed which was inevitable. This, however, is quite certain, that in that early gymnasium he more than held his own against Brougham and Horner: not so powerful, perhaps, as the first, nor so profound as the second; but sharp in sarcasm, dauntless in speculation, inexhaustible in

all the armory of dialectics, and unbounded in fertility of illustration; and gifted with a playfulness and richness of fancy far beyond either of his competitors. There can be no doubt, that if his career had been destined to the same field as theirs, with the same early practice, and the same experience in that most capricious of all arenas, the House of Commons, he would have maintained there that intellectual ascendency which he asserted in all other situations, even against antagonists the most formidable.

Indeed, although the menagerie of the House of Commons embraces many strange animals, and the sounds which command stillness, and receive favour, are not always those which sound sweetest to the unpractised ear, we think that Jeffrey was peculiarly well qualified to have taken a prominent place in that assembly. That justice has never been done to his powers of public debate, and still more, his masterly apprehension of public policy, has arisen entirely from the circumstance of the late period of life when he entered Parliament, and the short apprenticeship he served there. To a command of language very rare indeed, even in our greatest public orators, and that not a shallow stream, but a perennial flow of well-chosen words; and the most vivid conception of the most subtle differences, and the happiest power of banter, illustration, and retort, he added a fund of practical wisdom-a calm, liberal, candid spirit, and a cool-headed knowledge of human nature, for which his more shining and popular qualities perhaps prevented his obtaining due credit.

It was a singular coincidence that united in the debatingroom of a Scotch college three young men whose names were afterwards destined to revolutionize both literature and politics. One-not the least powerful of the three, perished in the flower of his manhood, when the promise of fruit for his country was the greatest. But probably no two men could be named who have contributed so much to that remarkable alteration in the tone, tastes, politics, and habits of thinking and writing which have taken place since the beginning of this century, as Jeffrey and Brougham.

In October 1802, this coterie of the Speculative commenced their great undertaking of the Edinburgh Review. We have no space to enter into what is a curious enough episode, the history of the establishment of the Review; Sydney Smith was the first editor, and Brougham, we believe, did not join till the third Number. But beyond all doubt Jeffrey was the soul and directing spirit of this celebrated and most successful enterprise. When it started, he was a man verging on thirty, in the full vigour of his ever active mind, and with the matured power not