rsity in which it forms so much the greater part of education, I am
ignorant; but that he was versed to a degree both in geometry and
astronomy, is evident, from the work I have named, and some pieces of his
poetry, which I have had access to. The cause that led him to leave the
navy and enter the army is unknown; it is most likely to have been
disgust and impatience of the subordination, which in our fleets is rigid
in the extreme, and never softened by that alternation of social
intercourse, at a common table at which in the army, all the officers of
the regiment meet daily, and from which they rise with a feeling, not
only that insulting and overbearing command upon duty would be a
violation of an implied pledge of kindness, but injury to themselves, as
diminishing in the gloom that would spread over their next meeting, the
common stock of enjoyment. The condition of our naval service is, in
some respects, improved since Erskine was a member of it; but then all
knowledge beyond that of the conduct of a ship, was deemed unnecessary,
impertinent, and even adverse to the attainment of nautical skill. The
intercourse of the officers even on the shore, was confined almost
entirely to one another, for not to speak of the uncouthness of their
habits, which made them as incapable of mingling in society on land, as
the beings of their element on which their avocation lay, are of living
in the air, their language was technical to a degree that rendered it to
all, except themselves, almost unintelligible. With such persons for
companions, and to use Terence's expression, quotidian and tedious
sameness of a life at sea, we need look no further for Erskine's desire
to change his profession. When we consider the great capacity which he
possessed for observation, and his extraordinary power of combining the
knowledge that he so acquired, the period which he gave to the naval
service must have been, to a spirit so active, a period of painful
constraints. I remember that in a conversation upon Lord Erskine, with
Mr. Capel Loft, after enumerating the many great causes in which the
great advocate had been engaged, he exclaimed, "what an infinite
multitude of ideas must have passed through that man's mind." The remark
is not an empty one; I doubt whether there ever was a man who exercised
the faculty of reasoning more, who drew a greater number of distinct
conclusions, or whose materials of thought were more the collection and
prop