before these lines were printed, his illustrious historian had followed him. William had laid the foundation of a great political constitution, or rather he had presided and moderated, and controlled, while our forefathers laid these foundations for themselves. It was a mighty task, and it was performed with an amount of vigour, power, foresight and prudence, without which it must have failed in the midst of difficulties which to most men would have been utterly insurmountable. In this last volume Macaulay abates somewhat of his excessive laudation of his hero, and reduces him in some degree to a more sober level. Even he can hardly forgive him for the sombre aversion with which he viewed everything English, and the keen sense of admiration he had for everything Dutch; but his portrait was finished, and the lineaments which he has drawn will never be forgotten by posterity. That part, at all events, of his history is perfect. He has rescued the reputation of the great monarch from the cobwebs which a century of servility had hung around it, and has paid back to his memory the debt of gratitude which the nation has been so slow to acknowledge.

This labour completed, the pen falls from the hands of the historian. He, too, had a great work to do; he has nobly performed it; and in the great temple of English liberty no name will be more deeply or more honourably engraven than that of Macaulay.

ART. VII. THE LATE JOHN RICHARDSON.

THE nineteenth century is fast drifting away from the intellectual glories of its commencement. We are already far advanced in its second epoch; and the generation which produced the giants-the generation which knew them, along with their achievements-is receding from contemporaneous to historical fame. The great men who led opinion, intellect, and taste in the earlier part of the century, are nearly all gone; and when we come to reckon up the catalogue of memories which have been carved on the nation's history by the hand of genius during this period, the brilliancy of the muster-roll is clouded by the recollection of how few survive to enjoy their own fame, or to recount that of their friends. Crabbe, Rogers, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Campbell, Scott, Byron, Horner, Jeffrey, have all left the stage. They, and many a not unworthy associate, have departed, leaving scarcely one to tell us from his own knowledge after what sort these men of mark lived, conversed, and acted. One indeed remains, a venerable pine in the levelled forest, in the person of Brougham; but he stands mighty and alone.

One of the last of that generation has lately followed his distinguished contemporaries to the grave. In an article on Beattie's Life of Campbell, in the Quarterly Review for June 1849, the reviewer, speaking of Thomas Campbell, said—

"While yet in real obscurity, he had knit a friendship, to be dissolved only by death, with John Richardson (of Fludyer Street), then a law-student, then, as now, a student of everything good and graceful, and who will go down with the singular distinction of having enjoyed confidential familiarity throughout life with three of the brightest of his age, Thomas Campbell, Walter Scott, and Joanna Baillie."

This was true, and it was a high distinction; but far from being his only one. In taking as our theme our reminiscences and traditions of John Richardson, who died at his residence of Kirklands, in Roxburghshire, in the course of last month, in his eighty-fifth year, we are led to speak of one of the most interesting men of his time. Not that, in the comparatively unambitious lot in life which he selected, he achieved notoriety, although he commanded success. Of fame, perhaps, little remains behind him, excepting in the affectionate memories of a younger generation, and in the preserved records of the love and respect of his own. But it was his rare good fortune and good fortune of that kind never comes without rare desert-to have lived in the society and the confidence of the greatest men of that greatest brotherhood; so that, as Sir Thomas Dick Lauder said of 1 Quarterly Review, vol. lxxxv. No. 169, p. 47.

him, with literal truth, he was the personal friend "of Scott, and indeed of every really intellectual being that has existed, or that does exist, during his time." A man full of present kindness and pleasant memories, with a singular appreciation of the intellectual and the beautiful, and one whose heart appeared to contain a responsive chord for every variety of genius. He was not an author, he was not a politician, he was not a philosopher; but authors, politicians, and philosophers deferred to his judgment, and courted his society. While the troubles and anxieties of genius or of ambition, left the calm serenity of his life undisturbed, he yet had the good fortune to "pursue the triumph and partake the gale" in the company of the most brilliant of the band. The devouring fire of personal vanity, or even of ambition, left him unscathed. He reaped the fruits of intellectual enjoyment without its tares; maintaining with dignity an unassuming equality with half a century of the most distinguished of his contemporaries.

In this,

For this result, which was the delight and solace of his long life, he was indebted to qualities of no common order, both of head and heart. He was a man of clear vigorous intellect, as he evinced in the only field of active pursuit in which he ever cared to display it; and probably if he had possessed more of that tormenting and restless will, that never satisfied energy, which frequently accompany an intellectual temperament such as his, he would have been a more celebrated, and a less happy and contented man. He said of himself at school, that "little application being requisite to accomplish my daily tasks, I dwindled into a listless dreamer, and have never recovered." however, he did himself injustice, for listlessness never was his failing. In business he was ardent, intent, and successful, and in his professional eminence, which was very high, did great service to the public, and he was ever busy on something when the daily toil was over. But he found, and used the gift wisely, that the faculty of pleasant dreams which kind nature had given him, a rare and elegant fancy which surrounded his daily thoughts, lent a greater charm to his social life, his home circle, and his intercourse with congenial minds, than the tearing anxieties of authorship, or the fretful chances of ambition could have brought him. It was a fancy the images of which were constantly tending outwards,--woven round his friends, their fortunes and their families, and creating in his heart, for their prosperity and success in things great and small, a genuine kindly interest which was a source of the purest pleasure.

Engaged as he was, down to a very late period of his long career, in the active pursuit of his profession as a Parliamentary Solicitor in London, and of a spirit gentle but manly, and as "Rivers of Scotland," Tait's Magazine, vol. xiv. p. 742.

independent as it was courteous, he could not have formed and retained the close relations in which he stood to so large and distinguished a circle of intellectual men, without the possession of high and uncommon qualities. A time-serving Atticus, no doubt, who never did anything to make his own name famous, comes down to posterity as the foil or the shadow of an immortal friend; or a pliant Boswell, after trotting at the skirts of a great man's coat all his life, has the good fortune to be remembered in that position after death. But Richardson was no hunter of celebrities. Most of the abiding friendships which yielded so large a harvest of enjoyment in after life were formed when neither fame nor fortune had reached any of the circle; and in subsequent years, while the public verdict on his companions hung in suspense, and the vicissitudes of life distracted them, Richardson was often the "guide, philosopher, and friend," the good-tempered but judicious critic, the sagacious adviser, the cool-headed arbiter, who restrained within the orbit of moderation and sense the erratic course of genius. No one, whatever his rank or fame, ever formed his friendship without finding it a source equally of pleasure and profit. “In saying, speak to nobody," says Scott in a letter to Campbell in 1816, about a project he wished kept private, "In saying, speak to nobody, I do not include our valuable friend, John Richardson, or any other sober or well-judging friend of yours;"1 a kind of exception which was very frequently made.

Richardson was born at Gilmerton, in the county of Midlothian, on the 9th of May 1780, His father died when he was eight months old, and his mother some time afterwards removed to Leith, but she also died when he was in early childhood. He says that he remembers her but faintly, but that the form that haunts his memory is a very lovely one, and the plaintive songs which she used to sing rang in his ears and to his heart at a very distant day. By the father's side he was descended from an old Covenanting family. He has preserved, on the fly-leaf of an old family Bible, which was handed down to him from these worthies, an account of his family; and it is so pleasant a little bit of pedigree that we owe no apology to our readers for giving it in his own words :---

"Roland Richardson was born in the year 1624. He was the eldest son of a large family, of the marriage between James Richardson, who was born in the year of King James the Sixth's accession to the throne of England, and Marion Paterson. Roland was possessed of considerable property in land and houses in the village of Gilmerton.

1 Beattie's Life, vol. ii. p. 317.