the ordinary man, the signs by which he thought, and, as
such, formed an important element in the power of his thinking. I have
seen his Astronomical Discourses disparagingly dealt with by a slim and
meagre critic, as if they had been but the chapters of a mere treatise
on astronomy--a thing which, of course, any ordinary man could
write--mayhap even the critic himself. The Astronomical Discourses, on
the other hand, no one could have written save Chalmers. Nominally a
series of sermons, they in reality represent, and in the present century
form perhaps the only worthy representatives of, that school of
philosophic poetry to which, in ancient literature, the work of
Lucretius belonged, and of which, in the literature of our own country,
the "Seasons" of Thomson, and Akenside's "Pleasures of the Imagination,"
furnish adequate examples. He would, I suspect, be no discriminating
critic who would deal with the "Seasons" as if they formed merely the
journal of a naturalist, or by the poem of Akenside as if it were simply
a metaphysical treatise.

The autumn of this year brought me an unexpected but very welcome
visitor, in my old Marcus' Cave friend Finlay; and when I visited all my
former haunts, to take leave of them ere I quitted the place for the
scene of my future labours, I had him to accompany me. Though for many
years a planter in Jamaica, his affections were still warm, and his
literary tastes unchanged. He was a writer, as of old, of sweet simple
verses, and as sedulous a reader as ever; and, had time permitted, we
found we could have kindled fires together in the caves, as we had done
more than twenty years before, and have ranged the shores for shell-fish
and crabs. He had had, however, in passing through life, his full share
of its cares and sorrows. A young lady to whom he had been engaged in
early youth had perished at sea, and he had remained single for her
sake. He had to struggle, too, in his business relations, with the
embarrassments incident to a sinking colony; and though a West Indian
climate was beginning to tell on his constitution, his circumstances
though tolerably easy, were not such as to permit his permanent
residence in Scotland. He returned in the following year to Jamaica; and
I saw, some time after, in a Kingston paper, an intimation of his
election to the Colonial House of Representatives, and the outline of a
well-toned sensible address to his constituents, in which he urged that
the sole