Nearly a-kin to this delicacy, or squeamishness, or whatever it may be called, respecting the flesh of animals, is an abhorrence prevalent, not only in the Highlands, but, all the moorland and poorer districts of Scotland, of mixture in farinaceous food. In the Merse, the Lothians, the Carses of Gowrie and Falkirk, and other fertile tracts, producing all kinds of grain, they make bread of all kinds of flour mixed up together; barley-meal, peas-meal, oatmeal, rye-meal, &c. In the mountainous and moorish, that is, in the poor parts of the country, this custom would appear very disgusting, or on some account or other, very improper bread. Of any one kind of grain they will eat without scruple, and be very glad to get it, but not of any two or more of them mixed. But I return to the Loch of Kilconquhar, on the margin of which, eels of an enormous size are found lying in a state of putrefaction, or their bones picked by carrion crows; while those of an ordinary size are carefully caught and carried home to the neighbouring villages and hamlets.

At the village of Kilconquhar, I went just to take a glance of the minister's house, the residence of the late

Dr. John Chalmers, of whom I had heard so much in so many parts of Scotland. Though I had not any letter of introduction, I might have presented myself to his intelligent, enlightened, and amiable successor, who, I am sure, would have received any stranger kindly and hospitably, and I would have profited much by his conversation. Dr. Chalmers was not an author, or at least if he was, he never published any thing; but he was as well known,

and as much esteemed and admired, as any of the most celebrated literati in Scotland. Indeed, both his genius and learning were considered, by those who knew him best, and were the most competent to judge, as of a cast superior to those of any of his cotemporaries. Having said this, I must observe that Dr. Chalmers departed this life in the year 1790, aged upwards of eighty years. He was more intimately acquainted with the philosophical writers of Greece and Rome, particularly those of Xenophon and Plato, than any of the Scotch literati; and this was universally, I believe, acknowledged. But his favourite author among ancients or moderns was Plato; and he carried all the fine reasoning and irony of Socrates into his conversation and disputes on philosophical subjects.

His wit was not confined to irony. Having a quick sense or perception of whatever was weak, absurd, or ridiculous, and an imagination stored with a very great variety of ideas taken from all subjects, and at the same time being extremely lively, he would, by some very unexpected association of ideas, provoke irresistible laughter, or confound an antagonist with the smartness of repartee. For the exercise of these powers he had frequent opportunities in the different kirk courts of Scotland, as well as in private companies. But his wit and his raillery was perfectly good-humoured and without gall; and he was perfectly free from that affectation of wit, or ambition. of displaying it, which characterizes punsters and other witlings, such as most of our players, who are forever on the stretch to say good things. His wit seemed to be incorporated with his very turn of thinking and manner

of viewing arguments and objects. It was, indeed, like that of his own Socrates, the wit of reason.

It is certainly a very unequivocal symptom of the decay of learning in the latter part of the last century and at the present day, that we have so many translators of the ancient writers. In the seventeenth, and the first part of the eighteenth century, not only scholars, such as Hooker, Cudworth, and Stillingfleet, but even accomplished gentlemen, or men of the world, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Fletcher of Saltoun, Algernon Sydney, and others, read the ancients in the original; in which, indeed alone, the force of their reasonings, or the charm of their eloquence, is to be felt and tasted. In our days there does not appear to be many who study the ancients merely for the sake of deriving instruction from them or enjoying their beauties.

Those who are, or take themselves to be, capital Greek scholars, are not contented with their private instruction or entertainment,

Scire tuum nihil est, Nisi te scire hoc, sciat alter.

HORAT.

They are eager to publish translations, with notes, perhaps, or preliminary discourses, in order to shew that they themselves are excellent scholars. That this vanity, or love of praise, not the information of the world, is their object, is evident from the jealousy and animosity with which they treat one another. They are very sore, when any one else pretends to know what they know. The gabble set up between the translators of Aristotle, Plato, &c. is not certainly so great a proof either that they themselves

have caught the true spirit of those sublime and acute philosophers, or that they are desirous of communicating that spirit to others, as that they themselves should be considered both as very learned men and great philosophers.

Nothing of this silly, and indeed, odious affectation was about Dr. Chalmers. If ever a man could translate Plato and Aristotle he could. But, instead of translating and publishing translations, he read them over and over in the original Greek, and recommended to all who wished to be acquainted with them to do the same.' He was very accessible, and even invited the acquaintance of studious youth, particularly students in divinity, to whom he recommended, instead of an immense number of commentators and controversial theologists, to read PLATO and the BIBLE. These alone were sufficient to form an orthodox, accomplished, and eloquent divine. He had the highest veneration for our English translators of both the Old and New Testament; yet he recommended to read the Scriptures, particularly the Pentateuch and the New Testament in the originals. As a general recommendation and introduction to Plato, he was at pains to shew, that the unity of the Divine Being, or source of all existence, is not only asserted in the writings of the Grecian philosophers, particularly the Platonists, who themselves derived it from patriarchal ages and the East, but that the nature, manner, and mode of his existence and attributes, or at least, the manner or mode in which the human intellect may conceive it to be possible for them to exist, is in some measure explained. The pro

ductions of nature, more exquisite than those of art, flow not from any fortuitous concourse of elements, but from design; but design, wherever it is found, implies mind; something which, when it acts, both knows what it is doing, and knows that it knows it-KNOWs its KNOWLEDGE; the character that distiguishes the human kind from other animals-something that is furnished with ideas of its intended works, agreeably to which ideas those works are fashioned. The whole visible world is nothing more than so many passing pictures of those invisible archetypes. Through these the universe attains even a semblance of immortality, and continues throughout ages to be specifically ONE amidst all those particular changes that every moment befal it. It is in these comprehensive and permanent forms that the Deity views at once, without going abroad, all possible productions, both present, past, and future. This intellectual system Dr. Chalmers embraced, and sought for every opportunity to shew, from the pulpit and in private conversation, that it was perfectly consonant with the doctrines of the Christian religion, which teaches that "God is all, and in all." Even the doctrine of the Trinity is taught in the writings of Plato.

Though Dr. Chalmers never published any translation or commentary on Plato, he was not a little active in maintaining his system, and VIVA VOCE. He would go a great way to converse with Dr. Oswald, Dr. Reid, and others of those who have been distinguished, sometimes by the name of the common sense philosophers. He shewed, that the same sceptical arguments that have been urged by