tribute to the
memory of the greatest of modern Scotsmen, I venture to
express my hope that we may be favoured with an earlier and
wider publication of it than the Transactions of the Royal
Society will afford.--Pray excuse this intrusion, and believe
me, yours very truly,

ROB. S. CANDLISH.

Dean Ramsay.

I will indulge myself only with one phrase from the Dean's
memoir of Dr. Chalmers:--"Chalmers's greatest delight was to
contrive plans and schemes for raising degraded human nature
in the scale of moral living. The favourite object of his
contemplation was human nature attaining the highest
perfection of which it is capable, and especially as that
perfection was manifested in saintly individuals, in
characters of great acquirements, adorned with the graces of
Christian piety. His greatest sorrow was to contemplate
masses of mankind hopelessly bound to vice and misery by
chains of passion, ignorance, and prejudice. As no one more
firmly believed in the power of Christianity to regenerate a
fallen race, as faith and experience both conspired to assure
him that the only effectual deliverance for the sinful and
degraded was to be wrought by Christian education, and by the
active agency of Christian instruction penetrating into the
haunts of vice and the abodes of misery, these acquisitions
he strove to secure for all his beloved countrymen; for these
he laboured, and for these he was willing to spend and to
be spent."

That high yet just character not only shows Dean Ramsay's
appreciation of Chalmers, but seems to show that he had
already set him up as the model which he himself was to
follow. At any rate, he attempted to stir up the public mind
to give some worthy testimonial to the greatest of modern
Scotsmen. A few letters connected with this subject I have
put together. I did not think it necessary to collect more,
since the object has been attained under difficulties of time
and distance which might have quelled a less enthusiastic
admirer. It is pleasant to notice the general consent with
which we agree that no one else was so fitted to recommend
the Chalmers memorial as Dean Ramsay.

It was to do honour to my own little book that I ventured,
without asking leave, to print the few lines which follow,