uniformly adopted the mythology of ancient Greece in preference to the figurative language of the Bible. The reason, however, is obvious; for, notwithstanding Mr. Wakefield's very valuable theological labours, he is chiefly known to the world as a classical critic -as an ardent admirer and most excellent commentator upon the best poets of Greece and Rome. As adventuring upon a new undertaking, Dr. Geddes may therefore be considered as highly successful -though the task does not seem to sit quite so easy upon him, nor is conducted with quite so much discrimination as when engaged in subjects that allow him to exchange the fictitious scenery of the Greeks for the solid sublimities of the Hebrews. It is an admirable elegy, nevertheless, considering the circumstances under which it was produced; and although, perhaps, not equal either in pathos or diction to that composed on the death of lord Petre, ranks, if I err not, immediately next to it, and consequently second in the whole class of his Latin exercises.

"Our learned but unfortunate friend, Gilbert Wakefield, died Sept. 9, in the present year (1801); and the above elegy was written October 12, about a month after his decease. The last two couplets contain all the truth of prophecy or actual presentiment.

'Nec ventura dies distat qua, stamine vitæ

Truncato, celeri te pede, Amice, se quar.

Morbificus languor jam fessos occupat

"In effect, it was not more than a day or two afterwards that the bed on which he died was removed from his own chamber on the second floor into the front room, or chief library, on the first, in consequence of his being now incapable of moving either up or down stairs without extreme pain; and from this bed he scarcely ever rose afterwards. To this assertion I nevertheless remember one exception, and it affords a strong proof of the occasional triumph of the mind, when roused to a high degre of excite ment, over all the pains and infirmities of the body. I called at his house one morning, doubtful whether I should find him alive or dead: he had not actually expired, but had refused admittance to all except his professional friends. He was alone, and requested to see

me.

He was lying on his bed agonised with torture, ghastly countenance, and extremely depressed in his spirits. He seized my hand with avidity; Forgive me, my dear friend!' said he abruptly, while the tears started from his eyes- Forgive me this weakness! I did think I should have been able to have endured suffering with more fortitude and resignation; but I cannot support it, and am impatiently wishing for death.' I endeavoured to console him-and added, that instead of accusing him of weakness, all his friends were astonished at the general tranquillity and strength of mind with which he submitted to his affliction. By degrees I drew him into a conversation upon one or two subjects which I knew lay nearest his heart. I introduced his version of the Bible; I requested information upon a passage in the Song of Soloman, which I was then

in

:

in the act of translating our ideas upon this passage did not altogether coincide; he became animated in the defence of his own opinion-he forgot the disease he was labouring under-suddenly rose from his bed-and to my utter astonishment ran rapidly up stairs in pursuit of some annotations of his own, which he had formerly written upon the controverted question. I remained with him for about half an hour afterwards, and he still continued to enjoy himself: he suffered me to depart with great reluctance, and thanked me most cordially for the good I had done him. He soon, however, relapsed, and died a few days after wards, February 26, 1802, in the sixty-fifth year of his age; the rites of his own communion having been regularly administered to him, and received with great consolation on his own part, by M. St. Martin, a catholic clergyman and confiden

tial friend.

"It has been insinuated in a journal of extensive circulation, and insinuated moreover in terms equally uncandid and untrue, that on his death-bed he recanted many of his opinions, and that such recantation has been studiously concealed. What the opinions may be which are here referred to, or to what incident such a rumour owes its birth, I have not been able to learn, although I have spared no pains in the investigation. On the day anterior to his decease he was, as usual, visited by his friend M. St. Martin, professor of theology and a doctor of the Sorbonne, who had officially attended him as his priest during the whole of his illI have been minute in my inquiries of this gentleman as to the conversation that occurred in the course of this and former inter

ness.

views, that I might have the fuller opportunity of proving the gross falsehoods of the charge thus advanced. On entering the room, M. St Martin found the doctor extremely comatose, and believed him to be in the utmost danger : he endeavoured to rouse him from his lethargy, and proposed to him to receive absolution. Dr. Geddes observed that, in such case, it was necessary he should first make his confession. M. St. Martin was sensible that he had neither strength nor wakefulness enough for such an exertion, and replied that in extremis this was not necessary: that he had only to examine the state of his own mind, and to make a sign when he was prepared. M. St. Martin is a gentleman of much liberality of sentiment, but strenuously attached to what are denominated the orthodox tenets of the catholic church: he had long beheld, with great grief of heart, what he conceived the aberrations of his learned friend; and had flattered himself, that in the course of this last illness he should be the happy instrument of recalling him to a full belief of every doctrine he had rejected; and with this view he was actually prepared upon the present occasion with a written list of questions, in the hope of obtaining from the doctor an accurate and satisfactory reply. He found, however, from the lethargic state of Dr. Geddes, that this regular process was impracticable. He could not avoid, nevertheless, examining the state of his mind as to several of the more important points upon which they differed. You fully,' said he, 'believe in the scriptures?" He roused himself from his sleep, and said, Certainly. In the doctrine of the trinity?'- Certainly, but not in the manner you C3

mean.

mean. In the mediation of Jesus Christ?' No, no, no-not as you mean: in Jesus Christ as our saviour-but not in the atonement.' I inquired of M. St. Martin if, in the course of what had occurred, he had any reason to suppose that his religious creed either now, or in any other period of his illness, had sustained any shade of difference from what he had formerly professed. He replied, that he could not positively flatter himself with believing it had: that the most comfortable words he heard him utter, were immediately after a short pause, and before the administration of absolution, I consent to all;' but that to these he could affix no definite meaning. I showed him the passage to which I now refer, in the Gentleman's Magazine:-he carefully perused it, and immediately added, that it was false in every respect. It would have given me great pleasure,' said he, to have heard him recant, but I cannot with certainty say that I perceived the least dispositio in him to do so; and ven the expression, "I consent to all," was rather, perhaps, uttered from a wish to oblige me as his friend, or a desire to shorten the conversation, than from any change in his opinions. After having thus examined himself, however, for some minutes, he gave a sign of being ready, and received absolution as I had proposed to him. I then left him: he shook my hand heartily upon quitting him, and said that he was happy he had

seen me.'

doctor's physicians had strictly prohibited his being seen by any of his friends that evening, in consequence of which M. St. Martin returned home with much reluctance; and on renewing his visit the next morning, found he was just dead. A domestic of the catholic persuasion who lived in an adjoining house, and had been frequent in her inquiries concerning the doctor, knocked at his door as he was in the very act of dying; and his confidential servant, terrified at the appearance of her master, readily opened the door and requested her to walk up stairs. She beheld him almost at his last gasp, and immediately repeated, according to the rites of her church, the Creed, Paternoster, and Ave. Maria: Dr. Geddes just opened his eyes as she had concluded, gave her his benediction, and expired.

"I am sorry I am compelled to add, that the conduct of the liberalminded, the truly catholic, and truly christian M. St. Martin was not followed by his clerical superiors; and that the ceremony of saying public mass for the deceased was prohibited by an express interdict of Mr. Douglas, his vicar apostolic. Let not the reader, however, condemn the whole body of English catholics for this act of malevolent bigotry; a bigotry which would follow with its persecution an honest and conscientious man into the next world, after having contributed all that was in its power to curtail his days in the present. I know, and am authorised to say, that this malignant prohibition was lamented and objected to by many of the most respectable laymen of the catholic church: and whatever be its blame therefore, it only attaches to that intolerant and contracted spirit

which has been uniformly more obvious in the catholic priesthood than in the people at large, from the fanaticism imbibed in the course of a foreign education, and which strenuously opposed and had nearly frustrated the two last very important statutes in favour of its own community. Such an interdict might, perhaps, have been justified had Dr. Geddes been formally excommunicated from the catholic pale-but its vindication requires arguments not readily to be advanced by the keenest casuist in the case of a member, who, like the deceased, had neither voluntarily withdrawn himself, nor been forcibly rejected by his community-who had avowed, through the whole of his life, a zealous at tachment to the catholic church, and in death had duteously complied with her most solemn requi

his corporeal make he was slender, and in the bold and formidable outlines of his countenance not highly prepossessing on a first interview: but never was there a face or a form through which the soul developed itself more completely than through his own. Every feature, and indeed every limb, was in harmony with the entire system, and displayed the restless and indefatigable operations of the interior of the machine. A play of cheerfulness beamed uniformly from his cheeks, and his animated eyes rather darted than looked benevolence. Yet such was the irritabi

lity of his nerves, that a slight degree of opposition to his opinions, and especially when advanced by persons whose mental powers did not warrant such opposition, put to flight in a moment the natural character of his countenance, and cheerfulness and benevolence were exchanged for exacerbation and tumult. Of this physical and irresistible impulse in his constitution, no man was more thoroughly sensible than himself; and if no man ever less succeeded in subduing it, no man ever took more pains to obtain a victory. Let us, however, fairly strike the balance, and we shall find, that if such a peculiar construction of body had its evil, it also had its advantage; and that the very irritability of soul, which occasionally hurried him, against his consent, into a violence of controversy not perfectly consistent with the polished maners of the day, hurried him a thousand times oftener, and with a thousand times more rapidity, because assisted instead of opposed by his judgement, into acts of kindness and benevolence. The moment he beheld the possibility of doing good by his own exertions, the good was instantly done, although it were to a man, who, perhaps, had causelessly quarrelled with him a few hours before. It was not in his nature to pause with our academic and cold-blooded philosophers ofthe present day, that he might first weigh the precise demand of moral or political justice, and inquire into the advantage that would accrue to himself, or in what manner the world at large might be benefited either by a good action or a good example-it was stimulus enough for him that distress existed, and that he knew it-and it afterwards afforded him satisfaction enough

that he had removed or mitigated

it.

"In intellectual talents he had few equals, and fewer still who had improved the possession of equal talents in an equal degree. To an ardent thirst after knowledge in all its multitudinous ramifications, he added an astonishing facility in acquiring and retaining it; and so extensive was his erudition, that it was difficult to start a subject into which he could not enter, and be heard with both attention and profit. But theology was the prime object of his pursuits, the darling science of his heart, which he had indefatigably studied from his infancy, and to which every other acquisition was made to bend. From his verbal knowledge of the Bible he might have been regarded as a living concordance; and this not with respect to any individual language alone, or the various and rival renderings of any individual language, but a concordance that should comprise the best exemplars of the most celebrated tongues into which the Bible has ever been translated. As an interpreter of it, he was strictly faithful and honest tothe meaning of what he apprehended to be the meaning of his original; and though in his critical remarks upon the text he allowed himself a latitude and a boldness which injured his popularity, and drew down upon his head a torrent of abusive appellations, how seldom have we seen a man systematically educated in the characteristic tenets of any established community whatsoever, and especially of the church of Rome, who, when he has once begun to feel his independence, and has determined to shake off his fetters, and to think for himself, has not flown much further from the goal at which he started! The ge

neral ambition, corruption, and profligacy of the catholic hierarchy

of those very pontiffs who claim to be the direct successors of the apostles-and through whose medium alone he believed himself capable of being acknowledged a member of Christ's visible churchwhose persons he was bound to revere, and whose ordinances impli citly to obey-became the first stumbling-block to his faith: and let those who conceive that the situation of a mind thus liberated from the bondage of its former crced, and all afloat in pursuit of a new and a better, is not in the highest degree critical and perilous-who find no difficulty in fixing the precise point between blindly believing too much and philosophically believing too little, once more return to the history of Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, and their fellow Encyclopedists, who, instructed in re. vealed religion from the same source, disgusted with the same criminalities and contradictions, and resolved, upon similar grounds, to act and determine for themselvesfled from catholicism to infidelity, and confounded the truths and simplicity of the Gospel with the frauds, superstitions, and mummeries, with which in their own country they had been too generally interwoven.

"To an universal knowledge of the Bible, Dr. Geddes added a deep and elaborate acquaintance with the history of his own church; and so thoroughly was he versed in its annals, in its jurisprudence, in its polemics, that I have good authority for asserting, that even at the Vatican it was doubted whether the papal dominions themselves could produce his superior...

"His classical attainments, if not of the first rate, were of a very distinguished character; and,

when