cracy,
but they are, with all their ingenuity and grace of style, so
provokingly vague and loosely expressed that there can seldom
be found in them a proposition with which one can agree, or
from which one can differ. E. de Laveleye's well-known book is
not much more substantial, but instruction may (as respects
France) be found in the late Edmond Scherer's _De la
Democratie_, and (as respects England and the United States) in
M. Ostrogorski's recent book, _Democracy and the Organisation
of Political Parties_.

WILLIAM ROBERTSON SMITH

Robertson Smith,[48] the most widely learned and one of the most
powerful teachers that either Cambridge or Oxford could show during
the years of his residence in England, died at the age of forty-seven
on the 31st of March 1894. To the English public generally his name
was little known, or was remembered only in connection with the
theological controversy and ecclesiastical trial of which he had been
the central figure in Scotland fifteen years before. But on the
Continent of Europe and by Orientalists generally he was regarded as
the foremost Semitic scholar of Britain, and by those who knew him as
one of the most remarkable men of his time.

He was born in 1846 in the quiet pastoral valley of the Don, in
Aberdeenshire. His father, who was a minister of the Scottish Free
Church in the parish of Keig, possessed high mathematical talent,
and his mother, who survived him six years, was a woman of great
force of character, who retained till her death, at seventy-six years
of age, the full exercise of her keen intelligence. Smith went
straight from his father's teaching to the University of Aberdeen, and
after graduating there, continued his studies first at Bonn in
1865, and afterwards at Gottingen (1869). When only twenty-four he
became Professor of Oriental Languages in the College or Divinity
School of the Free Church at Aberdeen, and two years later was
chosen one of the revisers of the Old Testament, a striking honour
for so young a man. In 1881 he became first assistant-editor and
then editor-in-chief of the ninth edition of the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_. He was exceptionally qualified for the post by the
variety of his attainments and by the extreme quickness of his
mind, which rapidly acquired knowledge on almost any kind of subject.
Those who knew him are agreed that among all the eminent men who have
been