these floating nurseries are at present in no inconsiderable danger of great restriction, and of ultimate abolition. Ship-building has advanced far beyond the style of the old collier brigs, which, even when excellently manned, seldom managed above a trip from Tyne to Thames per month; and a new school of clipper screwsteamers have been started, intended to sail three feet to one of the lumbering collier brigs, and at once to reduce the time and expense of transit. But even the new coal-clippers have in the railways nearly as formidable an antagonism as they themselves present to the colliers. One farthing per ton per mile, without the vexatious dues and duties, monopolies and unjust privileges, existing both upon the Tyne and the Thames, will make the collier-owners open their eyes. But it is difficult to see how they can fight against the altered circumstances of the times. The old collier brig was an unmitigated tub, and a disgrace to our trade and our marine. She is now doomed; but her seamen will be absorbed into the far finer and more scientific vessels now being launched by hundreds on the waters; while it may be reasonably expected that the price of fuel-which at any considerable distance from the colliery is mainly made up of the cost of carriage—will fall in due proportion, as the means of distribution become more easy and more expeditious.

Ո

E is the most indefatigable man in Europe, and the man of the largest acquaintance: thus said

A

the Abbé Gregoire of the late Sir John Sinclair. He was truly, in many respects, a very extraordinary person; but the basis of all his distinction lay in his benevolent and disinterested desire to be useful in his day and generation. private gentleman, born in a remote part of the United Kingdom, he became, purely through his zeal for the good of the community, one of the most conspicuous and one of the most honoured men of his age. Besides receiving diplomas from twenty-five learned and scientific societies on the continent, he had a vote of thanks for his national services decreed separately

to him by twenty-two counties in Great Britain, as well as by numerous towns, where he was gratefully acknowledged as a general benefactor to his country. Testimonials were publicly presented to him on five different occasions; he became the confidential friend of Pitt, Perceval, Lord Melville, and all the leading statesmen of his time; he served in parliament during thirty years, and was distinguished by having frequent personal intercourse and correspondence with George III., who created him a privy-councillor; as well as by the esteem of George IV., who caused a letter to be written by Sir Herbert Taylor on the occasion of Sir John's decease, expressing his own sympathy with the family on the loss of so distinguished a patriot.

Alison, the accomplished author of the Essay on Taste, when himself on his death-bed, in a last interview with one of his own intimate friends, thus expressed himself respecting the subject of this memoir, whom he had long known and esteemed :-' I reflect --and sleepless nights have given me frequent opportunities of reflecting on the great moral lesson to be derived from Sir John's admirable life. I consider whether, during the many years in which he flourished, there was any man whom I could fix upon as having laboured with the same assiduity, and with the same success, for the benefit of mankind. I think upon that great work, The Statistical Account of Scotland, upon the difficulties, all but insurmountable, in the way of its completion, and upon the many useful works of the same kind, and the many valuable suggestions to which it gave rise. I think upon the impulse which Sir John has given to agriculture in his native county, in Great Britain, and throughout the world. I dwell on his elaborate History of the Public Revenue, and on the practical wisdom and foresight of his financial views and recommendations. I try to reckon up the other departments of usefulness in which he exerted himself, the meritorious individuals for whom he procured a reward, and the important inventions and discoveries he introduced to public notice. I then advert to the disinterestedness which appeared in all his various undertakings; and the longer I consider the subject, the more I am convinced, that during the last half century, no man has arisen either so patriotic or so useful, as Sir John Sinclair; and that no volumes have for many years been produced which embody so impressive an example of patriotism, as Archdeacon Sinclair's memoirs of his life."

Sir John was born on the 10th of May 1754, at Thurso Castle, an ancient edifice built by the sixth Earl of Caithness. That singular old residence of his ancestors is in the near neighbourhood of John o' Groat's House, and stands almost within sea-mark on the Pentland Firth, where in stormy weather the spray has sometimes passed over the roof. Fish have been caught with a line from the drawing-room window; and vessels been wrecked so close under the turrets, that the voices of the drowning sailors could be heard.

The father of Sir John Sinclair, a learned and pious Christian, educated by the celebrated Dr Watts, lived under a solemn consciousness, from constitutional symptoms, that he must die very suddenly, and made it the subject of his daily fervent prayer, that he might be 'always on his watch-tower, so that when God was pleased to call him, he should be ready to answer.' In the prime of life, he was carried off by apoplexy, without immediate warning; and from that time Sir John constantly used the form of prayer found among the papers of his exemplary parent.

Sir John was now left, at the early age of sixteen, personally under the guardianship of his only surviving parent, Lady Janet Sinclair, sister to the seventeenth Earl of Sutherland. It is frequently asserted that talent is chiefly inherited from the mother, and in his case it probably was so. Beloved as well as revered by all the numerous tenantry of her son, her memory is still vividly preserved in Caithness for the extraordinary tact and energy with which she managed his affairs. Even in that far northern district, no one could be 'too far north' for her! Such was the opinion entertained at Thurso of her ability for business, that a simple-minded gentleman, being told, when the Lord HighCommissioner came into office, that she was appointed to preside over an Edinburgh Assembly, directed a letter of his own to 'Lady Janet Sinclair, Moderator of the General Assembly, Edinburgh.'

Reside as much in Caithness as

The following short extract of the letter written by Lady Janet to her son, in the immediate prospect of death, when she had attained her seventieth year, cannot fail to be deeply interesting:'Before this can be delivered to you, I shall bid a final adieu to this vain world, to all its concerns, and all my connections in it. . . May religion and virtue be the rule of all your actions; and suffer not the temptations or allurements of a vain world to make you swerve from your duty. possible, and do not trust too much to the management of others. You'll find few to trust. Even my long experience was not proof against their arts. Keep short accounts with those you employ in every capacity. To be in debt is a most disagreeable situation. To contract it is easy, but how very difficult to repay! It lessens one's importance, chagrins the temper, and ruins a family. Beware of engagements for others. . . . I have had a variety of trials and afflictions in life, from malice, unpro voked disrespect, and indifference. These I did not merit nor resent, and I now forgive. . . . . Adieu, my dearest son, till we meet in another world, as I trust in the mercy of God, and through the merits of an all-sufficient Saviour, that we shall meet in a state of bliss and endless happiness, where the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary are at rest.'

Lady Janet having commissioned the celebrated Dr Blair to find Sir John a tutor, Mr Logan, afterwards a poet and divine of some

eminence, arrived with his credentials at Thurso Castle; but his uncouth aspect having caused Lady Janet hastily to express dissatisfaction, the accomplished professor of rhetoric, in defence of his own protégé, replied: Your ladyship, in selecting a tutor for your son, should prefer a scholar to a dancing-master. Sir John afterwards attended the university of Glasgow, from whence he proceeded to Trinity College, Oxford, and he continued always a keen advocate for a public education, as he thought many a private tutor not merely a Mentor, but a tor-mentor; and that those who are to be public men must begin with being public boys.' .

Sir John became a member of the bar, both in England and in Scotland, having resolved to pass in each, though intending to practise in neither; but at the end of his preliminary ordeal at Edinburgh, one of his examiners, astonished at the extent of the young candidate's information, exclaimed: 'I believe you know more of the subject than any one of us!' His first publication, at the age of eighteen, consisted of letters under the signature of 'Julius Cæsar,' written in defence of the Highland proprietors, accused of drawing exorbitant rents. Sir John, in after-life, disapproved as much of writing anonymous books, as of anonymous letters, and desired his family never to publish what they could not openly acknowledge; but on this occasion his nameless essay caused so much favourable criticism in society, that the young author became encouraged to wield the quill again. Seventy years afterwards, when the active labours of a long life reached their close, his executor found printed copies of 367 pamphlets which had been published by Sir John on various subjects, besides eighteen volumes in crown octavo, and The Statistical Account of Scotland in twenty-one! The baronet's next undertaking was a quarto essay against what he then considered a too strict and Puritanical observance of the Sabbath in Scotland; but with singular conscientiousness, he destroyed the whole manuscript on hearing this remark from his friend Dr Adam Smith, which was the more memorable, as coming from the apologist of David Hume: 'Your book, Sir John, is very ably composed; but the Sabbath, as a political institution, is of inestimable value, independently of its claims to divine authority.'..

Being anxious more entirely to assimilate the conversational language of England and Scotland, as well as to assist his countrymen in attaining purity of expression, Sir John, early in life, published a collection of the most remarkable words and phrases by which the natives of North Britain excited the ridicule of their southern neighbours. Among his own intimate friends, Lord Melville had one day asked Mr Pitt, in Scottish phraseology, to lend him a horse the length of Richmond;' to which the minister facetiously replied, that he had none quite so long. Another Scotchman having remarked in the House of Commons, that as there was a ca-báll against the ministers, he would give them his supp'rt; an English member laughingly replied, that he was happy to second