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deviate with an equal degree of boldness from the vulgar creed, that a violent hue and cry was raised against him for his liberality; an epistolary, and, I believe, a printed correspondence, was entered into between bishop Hay, his diocesan, and himself; from which, however, as it was never published, I am not at li berty to make any quotation; and he was menaced with the pains of suspension from his ecclesiastical duties, unless he became more circumspect as to his conduct and conversation, and especially as to his occasional attendance upon the ministrations of his friend Mr.. Crawford. Little did such bigots know the spirit of the man they were opposing, and how impossible it would have been for all the tortures of a Portuguese inquisition to have made him retract his opinions, or deviate in any respect from a conduct sanctioned alike by his religion and his reason. He despised the menaces of the haughty prelate, and they were not at this time carried into execution.

"Still, however, he was not happy; his heart was afflicted by the injurious treatment he thus met with, and he grieved for the illiberality of his clerical brethren. But this was not his sole, nor even his chief cause of anxiety of mind. The scanty income to which he was limited, destroyed every hope he had for years in dulged of offering to the public a new and more correct translation of the Bible: he was still without a patron, and without a library, which were equally indispensable for the undertaking; and, mortifying as it must have been to him, he appears, in consequence hereof, to have relinquished, every pro

spect of accomplishing it, and to have banished the very idea from his mind. There was also another evil he was doomed to sustain, and which proceeded, in like manner, from the narrowness of his finances. In projecting the rebuilding of his chapel, and the improvements of his own house, he relied, with too sanguine a confidence, upon the pecuniary assistance of persons of his own persuasion. He was disappointed in his expectations; and having become personally responsible for the different debts contracted, he found himself in no small degree embarrassed and distressed. To assume the character of a public beggar, did not accord with the independence of his soul; but without some considerable contribution it was impossible to resist the demands that were perpetually urged against him. Here, however, he became more fortunate, and in a way that could not fail of gratifying him to the utmost. The late duke of Norfolk, who occasionally visited and resided upon a large family estate in Cum, berland, and who was himself a catholic, had heard of the zeal, liberality, and learning of the priest of Auchinhalrig, and ex pressed a wish for his acquaint ance. An interview shortly en sued, through the medium of lord Traquaire; and upon the first intimation of the difficulties in which he was involved, his grace took the deficit upon himself, and extricated our unfortunate speculator from the troubles that beset him.

"Being now completely relieved from every pecuniary distress, he was resolved to guard against a similar evil by getting beforehand with the world; and

for

for this purpose, to the spiritual charge of his church he added the temporal care of a small farm at Enzie in Fouchabers, in the immediate vicinity of Auchinhalrig; and having been accommodated with a sufficient loan of money to stock it, he set to work with his usual ardour and confidence, and expected in a few years, as his personal wants were inconsiderable, and easily satisfied, to realise what would to him be an independent fortune. And so far had the golden dream of success taken possession of his mind, that, in the desire of making the benefits of his religion commensurate with his worldly prosperity, he actually planned, and with but little foreign assistance erected, a second chapel at Fouchabers, on the very borders of his farm-house; which, though small in its dimensions, was equally neat and commodious, and where he proposed to officiate as well as at Auchinhalrig,

"Men of letters are but seldom men of figures, and the possessor of genius is perhaps never more out of his element than when he plunges into the calculations of the counting-house. Mr. Geddes's treasures were not of the countinghouse description, and he was never destined to be rich. Money he could borrow, and his farm he could stock: but he could not command the seasons; nor could he, which is an affair of much greater facility, command that time and attention which are indispensably necessary in the commencement of every new undertaking, and especially of an undertaking in which the projector has but little personal skill. He had been long in the habit of devoting the greater part of his time and talents to concerns of a very

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different description; and what, ever might be the prospect of gain with which he fondly flattered himself, he could not break off a habit he had so long indulged and so pertinaciously adhered to. 'It was in or about the year 1775 that he ventured to commence agriculturist; and in the year 1778, from a perpetual succession of unpropitious harvests, he found himself not only incapacitated from paying the arrears still due upon the chapel at Fouchabers, but from an accumulation of undischarged interest upon the money borrowed to complete his farming stock, in a state of embarrassment nearly equal to that from which his grace of Norfolk had relieved him but a few years before.

"His native good-humour and amenity of disposition still however adhered to him. His daily motto seems to have been that of the French poet,

'Si fortune me tormente, L'espérance me contente;'

and being completely foiled in the labours of his hands, he was determined to try whether those of his head might not be more productive. It cannot be supposed, that although a recluse, and closely shut up in a nook of the island but little known to fame, Alexander Geddes should be as ignorant of what was transpiring in the world as Alexander Selkirk in the island of Juan Fernandes. He had been an attentive and even a critical observer of men and manners; and viewing them from a distance, and free from the infectious fever of the multitude, he was perhaps more competent to draw a correct sketch of them than if he had been in the centre of the scene,

and

and partaken of the general tu- not only thus noticed the transac◄ mult:

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tions of his contemporaries, but had frequently endeavoured to de scribe them; and, taking Pope for his example, to describe them by an adaptation of the satires of Horace to his own time. We have now therefore to trace him in a new character, that of a poet;

a character which he had occasionally indeed assumed before, though he has left us few specimens of his earlier productions.”

DR. GEDDES'S General DISPOSITION and PURSUITS,

[From the same Work.]

T was about this period, the suaded me that the subject upon

I

quainted with Dr. Geddes. met him accidentally at the house of miss Hamilton, who has lately acquired a just reputation for her excellent Letters on Education; and I freely confess that at the first interview I was by no means pleased with him. I beheld a man of about five feet five inches high, in a black dress put on with uncommon negligence, and apparently never fitted to his form: his figure was lank, his face meagre, his hair black, long and loose, without having been sufficiently submitted to the operations of the toilet-and his eyes, though quick and vivid, sparkling at that time rather with irritability than benevolence. He was disputing with one of the company when I entered; and the rapidity with which at this moment he left his chair, and rushed, with an ele vated tone of voice and uncourtly .dogmatism of manner, towards his opponent, instantaneously per

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the utmost moment. I listened with all the attention I could command; and in a few minutes learn. ed, to my astonishment, that it related to nothing more than the distance of his own house in the New Road, Paddington, from the place of our meeting, which was in Guildford Street. The debate being at length concluded, or rather worn out, the doctor took possession of the next chair to that in which I was seated, and united with myself and a friend who sat on my other side in discoursing upon the politics of the day. On this topic we proceeded smoothly and accordantly for some time; till at length disagreeing with us upon some point as trivial as the former, he again rose abruptly from his seat, traversed the room in every direction, with as indeterminate a parallax as that of a comet, loudly, and with increase of voice, maintaining his position at every step he took. Not wishing

to

to prolong the dispute, we yielded to him without further interruption; and in the course of a few minutes after he had closed his harangue, he again approached us, retook possession of his chair, and was all playfulness, good-humour, and genuine wit.

"Upon his retirement, I inquired of our amiable hostess whether this were a specimen of his common disposition, or whether any thing had particularly occurred to excite his irascibility. From her I learned, that, with one of the best and most benevolent hearts in the world, he was naturally very irritable; but that his irritability was at the present period exacerbated by a slight degree of fever, which had for some time affected his spirits, and which had probably been produced by a considerable degree of very unmerited ill-usage and disappointment. I instantly regarded him in a different light: I sought his friendship, and I obtained it; and it was not long before I myself witnessed in his actions a series of benevolence and charitable exertions, often beyond what prudence and a regard to his own limited income would have dictated, that stamped a higher esteem for him upon my heart than all the general information and profound learning he was universally known to possess, and which gave him more promptitude upon every subject that happened to be started than I ever beheld in any other person. I saw him irritable, but it was the harmless corruscation of a summer evening's Aurora-it no sooner appeared than it was spent, and no mischief ensued. And when I reflected that it was this very irritability of nerve that excited him to a thousand acts of kindness, and prompt

ed him to debar himself of a thou-
sand little gratifications that he
might relieve the distressed and
comfort the sorrowful, I could
scarcely lament that he possessed
it; or, at least, I could not avoid
contending that it carried a very
ample apology along with it. Dr.
Geddes himself was by no means
insensible to this peculiar charac-
teristic of his nature: he has fre-
quently lamented it to me in pri-
vate, and I have often beheld him
endeavouring to stifle it in public,
either by abruptly quitting the
room, or introducing another sub-
ject. On one occasion I remem-
ber particularly his doing both.
He was dining with me in com-
pany with the late Dr. Henry
Hunter, of physiognomonic me-
mory, the celebrated abbé Delille,
and several other literary friends:
unfortunately one of the subjects
advanced was physiognomy itself.
Geddes had read Lavater with
much attention, and expressed him-
self extremely dissatisfied with the
confusion and want of system that
seemed to prevail in his writings:
and which, in his opinion, pre-
cluded all possibility of applying
his doctrines with precision. Hun-
ter, the friend and translator of
Lavater, immediately accepted the
gauntlet, and became his cham-
pion: the combat grew warm on
both sides; the good-humour of
Dr. Geddes was soon lost; and,
in proportion as he became vio-
lent, the company at large gave
evident tokens of espousing the
cause of his antagonist. He per-
ceived his error; and, at the mo-
ment when I most trembled for
the consequences, he rose sud-
denly from table, joined my two
children who were playing in the
same room before the fire, and
abruptly entered into their amuse,

ments..

ments. A debate of some other kind however shortly afterwards occurred, when, once more sensible of an undue degree of warmth in his language, he suddenly retired without daring to trust himself any longer in the contest. No man, I fully believe, was more sensible of his prevailing defect; and no man ever took more pains to remedy it: but it was inherent in his constitution, and he often laboured to no purpose.• I am not ill-natured,' says he of himself, and with strict justice, in his Letter to the Bishop of Centuria-those who know me, know the contrary. Animated and irascible I am, bet I am neither malevolent nor resentful. I may safely say that the sun has never set upon my wrath.'

66

Having introduced the subject of physiognomy, I shall take the opportunity it affords me of observing, that it was a science to which about this period he was much attached, and had devoted a great portion of his time. I have already remarked that he was dissatisfied with the bulky and sentimental work of M. Lavater; but he nevertheless approved of many of his general principles, and had endeavoured to form from one or two of them, a new, or rather, in his own opinion, a more accurate theory of application. Lavater has observed, and perhaps justly, that there is no muscle or even bone of the human body that does not, in some degree or other, sympathise in the prevailing passion of the mind, and bear evident marks of having been operated upon by its influence; while, as the bones and muscles of the face are nearest the scene of action, and most obvious to the view of the spectator, the predominant dispo

sition may be more easily studied and calculated from these than from any other, and especially from the eye, which is regarded by all physiognomists as the most perfect index of the soul. Admitting the general foundation of this position, Dr. Geddes denied the assertion which relates to the indicatory powers of the eye as an organ superior to the rest. There is scarcely any organ, he contended, that is more subject to the controul of the will than the eye itself, when that controul is strongly exercised; and when it is not, no organ that is so fluctuating and incessantly operated upon, not by the prevailing and habitual passion of life, but by all the fleeting passions of the day, whether of joy, anger, timidity, or grief; and consequently, however minutely it may indicate the mental feelings of the moment, it is too vacillating and uncertain an instrument by which to ascertain the master-passion of the man. His object therefore was to search out some feature of the face that was less subject to transitions, and for this purpose he selected the nose; and, voluntarily neglecting every other component part of the countenance, devoted a long and laborious attention to this organ alone. He endeavoured to investigate and arrange its multitudinous variations, and for this purpose fres quented, with considerable constancy, for many years, our principal places of public resort, and especially Kensington Gardens; and he has repeatedly told me that he has been occasionally so pleased with the structure of a particular nose, that he has crossed and recrossed the person to whom it belonged so incessantly, before he finally quitted him, as to give the

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