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Old and New Edinburgh Vol. IV

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204 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Moray Place. ~~ reputation, but he was too much a votary of the regular old rhetorical style of poetry to be capable of appreciating the Lake school, or any others among his own contemporaries; and thus he was apt to make mistakes, draw wrong deductions as to a writer?s future, and indulge in free-and-easy condemcation. He \vas passionately attached to his native city, Edinburgh, and was always miserable when away from it. It was all the same through life - he never could reconcile himself to new places,new people, or strange habits ; and thcs it was that his letters, in age, from Oxford, from London? and America, teem with complaints, and longing for home. His in. dustry was indefatigable, and his general information of the widest range, perfectly accurate, and alway- s at command He died in 1850, in his seventyseventh year, and was borne from Moray Place to his last home in the cemetery at the Dean. In No. 34 lived the Hon. Baron successively Sheriff of Berwickshire and of West Lothian, Professor of Scots Law in the University of Edinburgh, and Baron of Exchequer till the abolition of the Court in 1830. His great work on the Criminal Law of Scotland has been deemed the text-book of that department of jurisprudence, and is constantly referred to as an authority, by bench and bar. It was published in 2 vols. quarto in 1799. He died at Edinburgh on the 30th August, FRANCIS, LORD JEFFRLY. (A/er fhe Pmt7a.i 6y Cnluin Smith, R.S.R.) David Hume, of the Scottish Exchequer in 1779 and 1780, nephew of the historian, and an eminent writer on the criminal jurisprudence of the country, one of the correspondents of the Mirror Club, and who for many years sat with Sir Walter Scott, at the Clerks? table in the first Division of the Court of Session. . No. 47 was long the abode of Sir James Wellwood Moncreiff, Bart., of Tullibole in Kinross-shire, who was called to the Scottish bar in 1799, and was raised to the bench in 1829, under the title of Lord MoncreifT, and died in 1851. His contemporary Baron Hume, tilled various important situations with great ability, having been 1S38, and left in the hands of the secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh a valuable collection of MSS. and letters belonging to, or relating to his celebrated uncle, the historian of England. In Forres Street -a short and steep one opening south from Moray Place-No. 3 was the residence of the great Thomas Chalmers, D.D., the leader of the F r e e C h u r c h movement, a largehearted, patriotic, and devout man, and of whom it has been said, that he was preeminently in the unity of an undivided life, at once a man of man of the world. God, a man of science, and a He was born on the 17th of March, 1780. As a preacher, it is asserted, that there were few whose eloquence was capable of producing an effect so strong and irresistible as his, without his ever having recourse to any of the arts of common pulpit enthusiasm. His language was bold and magnificent; his imagination fertile and distinct, gave richness to his style, while his arguments were supplied with a vast and rapid diversity of illustration, and all who ever heard him, still recall Thomas Chalmers with serious and deep-felt veneration. He is thus described in his earlier years, and
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Foms StRet.1 THOMAS CHALMERS. 205 of high entranced enthusiasm. But the shape of the forehead is perhaps the most singular part of the whole visage ; and indeed it presents a mixture so very singular, that I should have required some little time to comprehend the meaning of it. . . . In the forehead of Dr. Chalmers there is an arch of imagination, carrying out the summit boldly and roundly, in a style to which the heads of very few poets present acything comparable-while over this again there is a grand apex of veneration and love, such as might have graced the bust of Plato himself, and such as in living men I had never beheld equalled in any but the majestic head of Canova. The whole is edged with a few crisp locks, which stand boldly forth and afford a fine relief to the death-like paleness of those massive temples.? He died on the 3rst May, 1847, since when his Memoirs have been given to the world by Dr. William Hanna, with his life and labours in long before he took the great part he did in the storm of the Disruption :- ?At first sight his face is a coarse one-but a mysterious kind of meaning breathes from every part of it, that such as have eyes cannot be long without discovering. It is very pale, and the large halfclosed eyelids have a certain drooping melancholy about them, which interested me very much, I understood not why. The lips, too, are singularly pensive in their mode of falling down at the sides, although there is no want of richness and vigour in their central fulness of curve. The upper lip from the nose downwards, is separated by a very deep line, which travels in North America followed; but the work by which he is best known-his pleasant ? I Fragments of Voyages and Travels, including Anec dotes of Naval Life,?in three volumes, he published at Edinburgh in 1831, during his residence in St. Colme Street where some of his children were born. I? Patchwork,? a work in three volumes, he published in England in 1841. He married Margaret, daughter of Sir John Hunter, Consul-general in Spain, and died at Portsmouth in 1844, leaving behind him the reputation of having been a brave and intelligent officer, a good and benevolent man, and a faithful friend. Ainslie Place is an expansion of Great Stuart Street, midway between Moray Place and Randolph Crescent. It forms an elegant, spacious. and symmetrical double crescent, with an ornamental garden in the centre, and is notable for containing the houses in which Dugald Stewart and Dean Ramsay lived and died, namely, Nos. 5 and 23. Glasgow, his residence in St. Andrews, and his final removal to Edinburgh, his Visits to England, and the lively journal he kept of what he saw and did while in that country. St. Colme Street, the adjacent continuation of Albyn Place, is so named from one of the titles of the Moray family, a member of which was commendator of Inchcolm in the middle of the 16th century. Here No. 8 was the residence of Captain Bad Hall, R.N., the popular writer on several subjects. He was the second son of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, Sart., and Lady Helena Douglas, daughter af Dunbar, third Earl of
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