of
reading volumes in a few hours which would seem to demand many
days even from the most rapid reader. I have heard of Southey, who
would read a book through as he stood in a bookseller's shop; that
is, his eye would glance down the page, and by a process partly
mechanical, partly intellectual, formed by long habit, he would
extract in his synoptical passage all that he required to know.
(Macaulay was, and George Lewis is, just as wonderful in this
respect.) Some of the books that Mackintosh talks of, philosophical
and metaphysical works, could not be so disposed of, and I should
like much to know what his system or his secret was. I met Sydney
Smith yesterday, and asked him why more of the journals had not
been given. He said because the editors had been ill advised, but
that in another edition more should be given; that Mackintosh was
the most agreeable man he had ever known, that he had been
shamefully used by his friends, and by none more than by Brougham.
So, I said, it would appear by what you say in your letter. 'Oh
no,' he said, laughing and chuckling, and shaking his great belly,
'you don't really think I meant to allude to Brougham?'
'Mackintosh's son,' he said 'is a man of no talents, the
composition (what there is of it) belongs to Erskine, his
son-in-law, a sensible man.' To be sure there are some strange
things said by Mackintosh here and there; among others, that Lord
Holland only wanted voice--not to be impeded in his utterance--to
be a greater orator than Canning or Brougham! If he had not been a
man 'whom no sense of wrongs could rouse to vengeance,' he would
have flung the India Board in Lord Grey's face when he was
insulted with the offer of it.[3] What are we to think of the
necessary connection between intellectual superiority and official
eminence, when we have seen the Duke of Richmond invited to be a
member of the Cabinet, while Mackintosh was thrust into an obscure
and subordinate office--Mackintosh placed under the orders of
Charles Grant! Well might he regret that he had not been a
professor, and, 'with safer pride content,' adorned with unusual
glory some academical chair. Then while he was instructing and
delighting the world, there would have been many regrets and
lamentations that such mighty talents were confined to such a
narrow sphere, and innumerable speculations of the greatness he
would have achieved in political life, and how the irresistible
force of his genius and his eloquenc