We had fondly hoped that for a man so singularly gifted, and who had but reached the ripe maturity of middle life, there remained important work yet to do. He seemed peculiarly fitted, if but placed in a commanding sphere, for ministering to some of the intellectual wants, and for withstanding with singular efficiency some of the more perilous tendencies, of the religious world in the present day. That Athenian thirst for the new so generally abroad, and which many have so unhappily satisfied with the unwholesome and the pernicious, he could satisfy with provision at once sound and novel. And no man of the age had more thoroughly studied the prevailing theological errors of the time in their first insidious approaches, or could more skilfully indicate the exact point at which they diverge from the truth. But his work on earth is for ever over; and the sense of bereavement is deepened by the reflection that, save in the memory of a few, he has left behind him no adequate impress of the powers of his understanding or of the fineness of his genius. It is strange how much the lack of a single ingredient in a man's moral constitution--and that, too, an ingredient in itself of a low and vulgar cast--may affect one's whole destiny. It was the grand defect of this gifted man, that that sentiment of self-esteem, which seems in many instances so absurd and ridiculous a thing, and which some, in their little wisdom, would so fain strike out from among the components of human character, was almost wholly awanting. As the minister of an attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty led him to study much and deeply; and he poured forth _viva voce_ his full-volumed and many-sparkling tide of eloquent idea as freely and richly as the nightingale, unconscious of a listener, pours forth her melody in the shade. But he could not be made to understand or believe, that what so impressed and delighted the privileged few who surrounded him was equally suited to impress and delight the many outside, or that he was fitted to speak through the press in tones which would compel the attention not merely of the religious, but also of the literary world. And so his exquisitely-toned thinking perished like the music of the bygone years, has died with himself, or, we should perhaps rather say, has gone with him to that better land, where all those fruits of intellect that the human spirits of greatest calibre have in this world produced, must form but the comparatively meagre beginnings of infinite, never-ending acquirement.