ritings
are adorned with their finest passages. He was familiar with a number of
modern languages; his own style is one of the best examples of strength
and perspicuity among English writers. He was ready on every subject of
learning and general literature. As a logician, he was considered by his
enemies, as well as his friends, to be unrivalled.

He was but little addicted to those exhilarations and contrarieties of
frame which characterize imaginative minds. His temperament was warm, but
not fiery. His intellect never appears inflamed, but was a glowing, serene
radiance. His immense labors were accomplished, not by the impulses of
restless enthusiasm, but by the cool calculations of his plans, and the
steady self-possession with which he pursued them. "Though always in
haste," he said, "I am never in a hurry." He was as economical with his
time as a miser could be with his gold; rising at four o'clock in the
morning, and allotting to every hour its appropriate work. "Leisure and I
have taken leave of each other," said he. And yet such was the happy
arrangement of his employments, that, amidst a multiplicity that would
distract an ordinary man, he declares that "there are few persons who
spend so many hours secluded from all company as myself." "The wonder of
his character," said Robert Hall, "is the self-control by which he
preserved himself calm, while he kept all in excitement around him. He was
the last man to be infected by fanaticism. His writings abound in
statements of preternatural circumstances; but it must be remembered that
his faults in these respects were those of his age, while his virtues were
peculiarly his own."

Though of a feeble constitution, the regularity of his habits, sustained
through a life of great exertions and vicissitudes, produced a vigor and
equanimity which are seldom the accompaniments of a laborious mind or of a
distracted life. "I do not remember," he says, "to have felt lowness of
spirits one quarter of an hour since I was born." "Ten thousand cares are
no more weight to my mind than ten thousand hairs are to my head." "I have
never lost a night's sleep in my life." "His face was remarkably fine, his
complexion fresh to the last week of his life, and his eye quick, keen,
and active." He ceased not his labors till death. After the eightieth year
of his age, he visited Holland twice. At the end of his eighty-second, he
says, "I am never tired (such is the goodness of God) either with