After his marriage in 1837, Ferrier devoted his attention almost entirely to the philosophy he loved so well. He did not succeed--did not perhaps try to succeed--at the Bar, to which he had been called. Many qualities are required by a successful advocate besides the subtle mind and acute reasoning powers which Ferrier undoubtedly possessed: possibly--we might almost say probably--these could have been cultivated had he made the effort. He had, to begin with, a fair junior counsel's practice, owing to his family connections, and this might have been easily developed; his ambition, however, did not soar in the direction of the law courts, and he did not give that whole-hearted devotion to the subject which is requisite if success is to follow the efforts of the novice. But if he was not attracted by the work at the Parliament House, he was attracted elsewhere; and to his first mistress, Philosophy, none could be more faithful. In other lines, it is true, he read much and deeply: literature in its widest sense attracted him as it would attract any educated man. Poetry, above all, he loved, in spite of the tale sometimes told against him, that he gravely proposed turning _In Memoriam_ into prose in order to ascertain logically 'whether its merits were sustained by reason as well as by rhyme'--a proposition which is said greatly to have entertained its author, when related to him by a mutual friend. Works of imagination he delighted in--all spheres of literature appealed to him; he had the sense of form which is denied to many of his craft; he wrote in a style at once brilliant and clear, and carelessness on this score in some of the writings of his countrymen irritated him, as those sensitive to such things are irritated. He has often been spoken of as a living protest against the materialism of the age, working away in the quiet, regardless of the busy throng, without its ambitions and its cares. Sometimes, of course, he temporarily deserted the work he loved the best for regions less remote; sometimes he consented to lecture on purely literary topics, and often he wrote biographies for a dictionary, or articles or reviews for _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_. As it was to this serial that Ferrier made his most important contributions, both philosophic and literary, for the next fifteen years, and as it was in its pages that the development of his system may be traced, a few words about its history may not be out of place, although it is a history with which we have every reason to be familiar now.