pretence or affectation; and knows how to respect this quality in others, without prudery or intolerance.  He can censure a friend or a stranger, and serve him effectually at the same time.  He expresses his disapprobation, but not as an excuse for closing up the avenues of his liberality.  He is a Scotchman without one particle of hypocrisy, of cant, of servility, or selfishness in his composition.  He has not been spoiled by fortune—­has not been tempted by power—­is firm without violence, friendly without weakness—­a critic and even-tempered, a casuist and an honest man—­and amidst the toils of his profession and the distractions of the world, retains the gaiety, the unpretending carelessness and simplicity of youth.  Mr. Jeffrey in his person is slight, with a countenance of much expression, and a voice of great flexibility and acuteness of tone.

[Footnote A:  The style of philosophical criticism, which has been the boast of the Edinburgh Review, was first introduced into the Monthly Review about the year 1796, in a series of articles by Mr. William Taylor, of Norwich.]

* * * * *

MR. BROUGHAM—­SIR F. BURDETT.

There is a class of eloquence which has been described and particularly insisted on, under the style and title of Irish Eloquence:  there is another class which it is not absolutely unfair to oppose to this, and that is the Scotch.  The first of these is entirely the offspring of impulse:  the last of mechanism.  The one is as full of fancy as it is bare of facts:  the other excludes all fancy, and is weighed down with facts.  The one is all fire, the other all ice:  the one nothing but enthusiasm, extravagance, eccentricity; the other nothing but logical deductions, and the most approved postulates.  The one without scruple, nay, with reckless zeal, throws the reins loose on the neck of the imagination:  the other pulls up with a curbbridle, and starts at every casual object it meets in the way as a bug-bear.  The genius of Irish oratory stands forth in the naked majesty of untutored nature, its eye glancing wildly round on all objects, its tongue darting forked fire:  the genius of Scottish eloquence is armed in all the panoply of the schools; its drawling, ambiguous dialect seconds its circumspect dialectics; from behind the vizor that guards its mouth and shadows its pent-up brows, it sees no visions but its own set purpose, its own data, and its own dogmas.  It “has no figures, nor no fantasies,” but “those which busy care draws in the brains of men,” or which set off its own superior acquirements and wisdom.  It scorns to “tread the primrose path of dalliance”—­it shrinks back from it as from a precipice, and keeps in the iron rail-way of the understanding.  Irish oratory, on the contrary, is a sort of aeronaut:  it is always going up in a balloon, and breaking its neck, or coming down in the parachute.  It is filled