adorable nature I gave him such information as I thought he could, in some measure, comprehend. The lesson affected him greatly, and he never forgot either it or the circumstance that introduced it." So great was the docility of this boy, that before he had reached his twentieth year, he had been thought capable of succeeding his father in his office of public professor. When death had extinguished those hopes, the comfort and expectation of the parent were directed to his only surviving child, who, with less application and patience, had yet a quickness of perception that promised to supply the place of those qualities. But this prospect did not continue to cheer him long. In March 1796, the youth was attacked by a fever, which, in seven days, laid him by the side of his brother. He was in his eighteenth year. The sole consolation, with which this world could now supply Beattie, was, that if his sons had lived, he might have seen them a prey to that miserable distemper under which their mother, whose state had rendered a separation from her family unavoidable, was still labouring. From this total bereavement he sometimes found a short relief in the estrangement of his own mind, which refused to support the recollection of such a load of sorrow. "Many times," says Sir William Forbes, "he could not recollect what had become of his son; and after searching in every room of the house, he would say to his niece, 'Mrs. Glennie, you may think it strange, but I must ask you, if I have a son, and where he is?'" That man must be a stern moralist who would censure him very severely for having sought, as he sometimes did, a renewal of this oblivion in his cups. He was unable any longer to apply himself to study, and left most of the letters he received from his friends unanswered. Music, in which he had formerly delighted, he could not endure to hear from others, after the loss of his first son; though a few months before the death of the second, he had begun to accompany him when he sang, on his own favourite instrument, which was the violoncello. Afterwards, as may be supposed, the sound of it was painful to him. He still took some pleasure in books, and in the company of a very few amongst his oldest friends. This was his condition till the beginning of April 1799, when he was seized with a paralytic stroke, which rendered his speech imperfect for several days. During the rest of his life he had repeated attacks of the same malady: the last, which happened on the 5th of October, 1802, entirely deprived him of motion. He languished, however, till the 18th of August in the following year, when nature being exhausted, he expired without a struggle. He was interred, according to his own desire, by the side of his two sons, in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, at Aberdeen, with the following inscription from the pen of Dr. James Gregory, Professor of Physic, at Edinburgh.