asonable. Once more, farewell! God bless you.

These are affecting testimonials, and show singular tenderness of heart
and truth of attachment; for they were written, to be transmitted only
in case of death. Those who in after times saw Lord Stowell on the
bench, the solemn, and even the stern depository of justice, could
scarcely imagine, in that searching glance and compressed lip, the
softness of heart which those fragments indicate. Death may be a great
subduer of the fierce spirit of man as it approaches; but their language
is not the phrase of puling softness, or pusillanimous alarm; it is at
once calm and fond, collected and fervid. The writer's natural and
honourable feelings are all alive at the moment when the last pang might
seem to be at hand; and though nothing is said of his Christian hopes,
(probably because the care of his family demanded more urgent
consideration than his personal conceptions,) language like theirs could
scarcely have come but from a Christian. His disorder was a violent
bilious fever, which exhausted him so much that his recovery was slow.
But to those who are in the habit of consigning their friends to
"inevitable death" on every infliction of disease, it may excite some
useful doubt of their own infallibility, to know that this dying man,
then thirty-eight, survived for half a century, dying in his
ninety-first year.

But the whole biography is a warning--especially against despondency.
Who could suppose that, after Lord Eldon's success up to this point; his
distinction on the principal circuit; the compliments of the judges; the
respect of his seniors in the profession, some of them very remarkable
men; his silk gown in the days of Erskine; his seat in Parliament; and,
more than all, the consciousness which men of large faculties naturally
have of their suitableness, and almost their certainty, to command
fortune at some tine or other; we should find the future peer and
chancellor desponding? Yet what but deep complaints of his cloudy
prospects could have produced this reply from his clever friend Lee,
(who, within three weeks' became Attorney-General?)

DEAR SCOTT--Your letter, which I received this minute,
was a very cheering one to me. But _keep up your
spirits_, and let it not be said that a good
understanding, and an irreproachable life, and an
uncommon success, and every virtuous expectation, are
insufficient to support tranquility and composure of