nests on the steps, the owners being very much amazed at the sight of visitors. Nor did one climb in a day always suffice. On 5th August he climbed the tower of Boston Church in the morning, and that of Lincoln in the afternoon—the one 351 steps, the other 336. At this time he was an elderly and not very lightly-built man of fifty-three. Some gentlemen’s mansions, like Haddon and Chatsworth, were visited with much interest. But Chatsworth, with all its wonders, did not impress him so much as some other castles. What he liked was a grand baronial residence, befitting the time when the owner was really the head of his people, ready for any expedition which the public interest required, and not merely a landlord drawing his rents. Places that had a connection with great men were peculiarly attractive. We have noticed his reverence for Trinity College, Cambridge, as the abode of Isaac Newton. Kingston, near Canterbury, acquired a classic character, because the rector’s wife was great-grandniece of Bishop Butler, and showed him a snuff-box, a memorandum-book, and an annotated Greek Testament, which had belonged to the author of the _Analogy_.⁴ In the immediate neighbourhood of Kingston was the church where Richard Hooker ministered. House and church were accordingly visited. And when he came to Sunderland, its great interest was that Dr. Paley had been its rector, and that he saw the study in which he wrote, the room in which he died, and the field around which he took excursions on horseback. Newton, Butler, and Paley were among the very chief of Chalmers’s instructors and friends. ⁴ When asked to record in this Testament his opinion of Butler, he declined, because he did not feel worthy of the honour, but, being pressed, he wrote as follows: ’Butler is in theology what Bacon is in science. The reigning principle of the latter is that it is not for man to theorise on the works of God; and of the former that it is not for man to _theorise_ on the ways of God. Both deferred alike to the certainty of experience, as being paramount to all the possibilities of hypothesis; and he who attentively studies the writings of these great men will find a marvellous concurrence between a sound philosophy and a sound faith. July 3, 1833.’