THE name of THOMAS PRINGLE deserves to be held in affectionate remembrance as that of a benefactor, in more than one region of the globe. Without power, without wealth, his abilities were so well directed, and the providential circumstances of his life, harmonising with the purity of his views, afforded such wide scope for his modest, but efficient labours, that posterity will be largely his debtor. How few among the number of those who have devoted themselves to literary employments, have lived for so good a purpose, and left behind so unsullied a name! There was in Mr. Pringle's whole course, a sort of dramatic propriety, which eminently marked its close: he died in the field of usefulness, at the moment that his specific work seemed to be done. The life of this estimable man was divided, by his successive residence in Scotland, South Africa, and England, into three distinctly marked portions, all bearing upon each other, and tending to the same results. He was a native of Scotland, and his early years were spent amid the pastoral and secluded scenery which he has described with so much true poetic feeling in his "Ephemerides." An unfinished letter, found among his papers, dated February, 1832, supplies some biographical details relating to his early days, which cannot be better given than in his own pleasing language :— "I was born on the 5th of January, 1789, at Blaiklaw, (or Easterstead, as it was then usually called,) a farmhouse about four miles south from Kelso, in the parish of Linton, Roxburghshire. The farm, consisting of about five hundred acres, of which one-half, or more, was wild moorland, belonged to the family of Wauchope, of Niddry. My grandfather had first become tenant of it in 1759, and my father succeeded to a renewed lease of it, after his decease, in 1782. "Our family was originally from Selkirkshire, and, according to the tradition handed down by my grandfather, derived their lineage from the ancient house of Whytbank. All that I could make out from our family papers, however, when I took up the antiquarian trade,' was, that my great-great grandfather was one William Pringle, who occupied the farm of Yair (now the residence of the Whytbank family,) as a 'tenant' under the laird, whose 'cousin' or kinsman he is reported to have been; and that he lived in an old tower, or peel, at the foot of the Craig-hill of Yair, on Tweed side. Some slight sort of intercourse appears also to have existed between my |