sation. After
raising herself to a convenient position, she generally addressed
them upon the importance of preparing for another world while
health and strength remained; and tried to direct their attention to
the merits and sufferings of the Saviour as the only sure ground of
hope upon which sinners could rest their salvation in the hour of
trial.' As for her own departure, she 'had a thousand reasons,' she
said, 'for wishing to be gone; but there was one reason which
overbalanced them all--God's time had not yet arrived.' But at
length it did arrive. 'Lay me down,' she said, for the irritability
of her nervous system had rendered frequent change of posture
necessary, and her friends had just been indulging her,--'Lay me
down; let me sleep my last sleep in Jesus.' And these were her last
words. Her grandson John seems to have cherished, when a mere boy,
years before she died, the design of writing her story; and the
whole tone of his memoir (apparently one of his earlier prose
compositions) shows how thorough was the respect which he entertained
for her memory. She forms the subject, too, of a copy of verses
evidently of later production, and at least equal to any he ever
wrote, in which he affectingly tells us how, when sadness and
disease pressed upon the springs of life, and he lingered in
suspense and disappointment, the hopes which she had so long
cherished--

'The glorious hopes which flattered not--
Dawned on him by degrees.'

He found the Saviour whom she had worshipped; and one of the last
subsidiary hopes in which he indulged ere he bade the world farewell,
was that in the place to which he was going he should meet with his
beloved grandmother. We have occupied so much space with our
narrative, brief as it is, that we cannot follow up our original
intention of showing how, in principle, the intellectual history of
Bethune is an epitome of that of his country; but we must add that it
would be well if, in at least one important respect, the history of
his country resembled his history more. The thoughtful piety of the
grandmother prepared an atmosphere of high-toned thought, in which the
genius of the grandson was fostered. It constituted, to vary the
figure, the table-land from which he arose; but how many of a
resembling class, and indebted in a similar way, have directed the
influence of their writings to dissipate that atmosphere--to lower
that table-land! We refer the reader to the interestin