His inventive powers seem to have been of a high order. The new chemical vocabulary, with all its philosophical ingenuity, is constructed on principles exactly similar to those which he divulged more than a hundred years prior to its invention, in the preface to his Universal Language. By what process could it be anticipated that the judgment which had enabled him to fix upon these principles, should have suffered him to urge in favour of that language the facility it afforded in the making of anagrams! As a scholar, he is perhaps not much overrated by the critic whose character of him I have just transcribed. It is remarked of the Greek language by Monboddo, that, “were there nothing else to convince him of its being a work of philosophers and grammarians, its dual number would of itself be sufficient; for, as certainly as the principles of body are the point, the line, and the surface, the principles of number are the monad and the duad, though philosophers only are aware of the fact.” His Lordship, in even this--one of the most refined of his speculations--was anticipated by Sir Thomas. He, too, regarded the duad, “not as number, but as a step towards number--as a medium between multitude and unity;” and he has therefore assigned the dual its proper place in his Universal Language. And is it not strikingly anomalous, that, with all this learning, he should not only have failed to detect the silly fictions of the old chroniclers, but that he himself should have attempted to impose on the world with fictions equally extravagant! We find him, at one time, seriously pleading with the English Parliament that he had a claim, as the undoubted head and representative of the family of Japhet, to be released from the Tower. We see him at another producing solid and powerful arguments to prove that a union of the two kingdoms would be productive of beneficial effects to both. When we look at his literary character in one of its phases, and see how unconsciously he lays himself open to ridicule, we wonder how a writer of such general ingenuity should be so totally devoid of that sense of the incongruous which constitutes the perception of wit. But, viewing him in another, we find that he is a person of exquisite humour, and the most successful of all the translators of Rabelais. We are struck in some of his narratives (his narrative of the death of Crichton, for instance) by a style of description so gorgeously imaginative, that it seems to partake in no slight degree of the grandeur and elevation of epic poetry. We turn over a few of the pages in which these occur, and find some of the meanest things in the language. And his moral character seems to have been equally anomalous. He would sooner have died in prison than have concealed, by a single falsehood, the respect which he entertained for the exiled Prince, at the very time when he was fabricating a thousand for the honour of his family. Must we not regard him as a kind