humor, strong, rough, instinctive, and knotty sense was the leading feature of his mind. Every thing like mystification, sophistry, and humbug, fled before the first glance of his piercing eye; every thing in the shape of affectation excited in him a disgust “as implacable” as even a Cowper could feel. If possible, with still deeper aversion did his manly nature regard cant in its various forms and disguises; and his motto in reference to it was, “spare no arrows.” But the mean, the low, the paltry, the dishonorable, in nations or in individuals, moved all the fountains of his bile, and awakened all the energy of his invective. Always lively, generally witty, he is never eloquent, except when emptying out his vials of indignation upon baseness in all its shapes. His is the ire of a genuine “English gentleman, all of the olden time.” It was in this spirit that he recently explained, in his own way, the old distinctions of Meum and Tuum to Brother Jonathan, when the latter was lamentably inclined to forget them. It was the same sting of generous indignation which, in the midst of his character of Mackintosh, prompted the memorable picture of that extraordinary being who, by his transcendent talents and his tortuous movements—his head of gold, and his feet of miry clay—has become the glory, the riddle, and the regret of his country, his age, and his species. As a writer, Smith is little more than a very clever, witty, and ingenious pamphleteer. He has effected no permanent _chef d’oeuvre_; he has founded no school; he has left little behind him that the “world will not willingly let die;” he has never drawn a tear from a human eye, nor excited a thrill of grandeur in a human bosom. His reviews are not preserved by the salt of original genius, nor are they pregnant with profound and comprehensive principle; they have no resemblance to the sibylline leaves which Burke tore out from the vast volume of his mind, and scattered with imperial indifference among the nations; they are not the illuminated indices of universal history, like the papers of Macaulay; they are not specimens of pure and perfect English, set with modest but magnificent ornaments, like the criticism of Jeffrey or of Hall; nor are they the excerpts, rugged and rent away by violence, from the dark and iron tablet of an obscure and original mind, like the reviews of Foster; but they are exquisite _jeux d’esprit_, admirable occasional pamphlets, which, though now they look to us like spent arrows, yet assuredly have done execution, and have not been spent in vain. And as, after the lapse of a century and more, we can still read with pleasure Addison’s “Old Whig and Freeholder,” for the sake of the exquisite humor and inimitable style in which forgotten feuds and dead logomachies are embalmed, so may it be, a century still, with the articles on Bentham’s Fallacies and on the Game Laws, and with the letters of the witty and ingenious Peter Plymley. There