een
on the 29th of March 1759. He was educated as a doctor, but gave up this
profession for journalism, and he was for some time editor of the
_Morning Herald_. Besides editions of the works of Shakespeare, Beattie,
Fielding, Johnson, Warton, Pope, Gibbon, Bolingbroke, he published _A
General Biographical Dictionary_ in 32 vols.(1812-1817); a _Glossary to
Shakspeare_ (1797); an edition of Steevens's Shakespeare (1809); and the
_British Essayists_, beginning with the _Tatler_ and ending with the
_Observer_, with biographical and historical prefaces and a general
index. He died in London on the 19th of December 1834.

CHALMERS, GEORGE (1742-1825), Scottish antiquarian and political writer,
was born at Fochabers, a village in the county of Moray, in 1742. His
father, James Chalmers, was a grandson of George Chalmers of Pittensear,
a small estate in the parish of Lhanbryde, now St Andrews-Lhanbryde, in
the same county, possessed by the main line of the family from about the
beginning of the 17th to the middle of the 18th century. After
completing the usual course at King's College, Aberdeen, young Chalmers
studied law in Edinburgh for several years. Two uncles on the father's
side having settled in America, he visited Maryland in 1763, with the
view, it is said, of assisting to recover a tract of land of some extent
about which a dispute had arisen, and was in this way induced to
commence practice as a lawyer at Baltimore, where for a time he met with
much success. Having, however, espoused the cause of the Royalist party
on the breaking out of the American War of Independence, he found it
expedient to abandon his professional prospects in the New World, and
return to his native country. For the losses he had sustained as a
colonist he received no compensation, and several years elapsed before
he obtained an appointment that placed him in a state of comfort and
independence.

In the meantime Chalmers applied himself with great diligence and
assiduity to the investigation of the history and establishment of the
English colonies in North America; and enjoying free access to the state
papers and other documents preserved among what were then termed the
plantation records, he became possessed of much important information.
His work entitled _Political Annals of the present United Colonies from
their Settlement to the Peace of 1763_, 4to, London, 1780, was to have
formed two volumes; but the second, which should have cont