y practically drums out a new and certainly most
promising recruit for his supposed share in the business, and inveighs
in the most passionate terms against the imputation. It is undesirable
to enter at length into any such matters here. It need only be said that
Allen, one of the founders of the _Edinburgh_, and always a kind of
standing counsel to it, is now acknowledged to have been something
uncommonly like an atheist, that Sydney Smith (as I believe most
unjustly) was often, and is sometimes still, regarded as standing
towards his profession very much in the attitude of a French _abbe_ of
the eighteenth century, that almost the whole staff of the _Review_,
including Jeffrey, had, as every Edinburgh man of position knew,
belonged to the so-called Academy of Physics, the first principle of
which was that only three facts (the words are Lord Cockburn's) were to
be admitted without proof: (1) Mind exists; (2) matter exists; (3) every
change indicates a cause. Nowadays the most orthodox of metaphysicians
would admit that this limitation of position by no means implied
atheism. But seventy years ago it would have been the exception to find
an orthodox metaphysician who did admit it; and Lockhart, or rather
Baron von Lauerwinkel, was perfectly justified in taking the view which
ordinary opinion took.

These jars, however, were long over when Jeffrey became Lord Jeffrey,
and subsided upon the placid bench. He lived sixteen years longer,
alternating between Edinburgh, Craigcrook, and divers houses which he
hired from time to time, on Loch Lomond, on the Clyde, and latterly at
some English watering-places in the west. His health was not
particularly good, though hardly worse than any man who lives to nearly
eighty, with constant sedentary and few out-of-door occupations, and
with a cheerful devotion to the good things of this life, must expect.
And he was on the whole singularly happy, being passionately devoted to
his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren; possessing ample means,
and making a cheerful and sensible use of them; seeing the increasing
triumph of the political principles to which he had attached himself;
knowing that he was regarded by friends and foes alike, as the chief
living English representative of an important branch of literature; and
retaining to the last an almost unparalleled juvenility of tastes and
interests. His letters to Dickens are well known, and, though I should
be very sorry to stake his