The appointment of Sir James Mackintosh to a Judgeship in India was one, which, however flattering to his vanity or favourable to his interests, was entirely foreign to his feelings and habits.  It was an honourable exile.  He was out of his element among black slaves and sepoys, and Nabobs and cadets, and writers to India.  He had no one to exchange ideas with.  The “unbought grace of life,” the charm of literary conversation was gone.  It was the habit of his mind, his ruling passion to enter into the shock and conflict of opinions on philosophical, political, and critical questions—­not to dictate to raw tyros or domineer over persons in subordinate situations—­but to obtain the guerdon and the laurels of superior sense and information by meeting with men of equal standing, to have a fair field pitched, to argue, to distinguish, to reply, to hunt down the game of intellect with eagerness and skill, to push an advantage, to cover a retreat, to give and take a fall—­

  “And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.”

It is no wonder that this sort of friendly intellectual gladiatorship is Sir James’s greatest pleasure, for it is his peculiar forte.  He has not many equals, and scarcely any superior in it.  He is too indolent for an author; too unimpassioned for an orator:  but in society he is just vain enough to be pleased with immediate attention, good-humoured enough to listen with patience to others, with great coolness and self-possession, fluent, communicative, and with a manner equally free from violence and insipidity.  Few subjects can be started, on which he is not qualified to appear to advantage as the gentleman and scholar.  If there is some tinge of pedantry, it is carried off by great affability of address and variety of amusing and interesting topics.  There is scarce an author that he has not read; a period of history that he is not conversant with; a celebrated name of which he has not a number of anecdotes to relate; an intricate question that he is not prepared to enter upon in a popular or scientific manner.  If an opinion in an abstruse metaphysical author is referred to, he is probably able to repeat the passage by heart, can tell the side of the page on which it is to be met with, can trace it back through various descents to Locke, Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, to a place in some obscure folio of the School-men or a note in one of the commentators on Aristotle or Plato, and thus give you in a few moments’ space, and without any effort or previous notice, a chronological table of the progress of the human mind in that particular branch of inquiry.  There is something, we think, perfectly admirable and delightful in an exhibition of this kind, and which is equally creditable to the speaker and gratifying to the hearer.  But this kind of talent was of no use in India:  the intellectual wares, of which the Chief Judge delighted to make a display, were in no request there.  He languished after the friends and the society he had left behind;