Francis Horner died of consumption in Italy before he was forty years of age, and there is nothing of surpassing brilliancy or power in any of his writings.  Yet he made a most extraordinary impression upon his contemporaries.  His name is never mentioned by his associates except with unusual respect.  Brougham, when he alludes to him, even in a letter, seems to check his pen into soberness, and to be as cautious as if he were speaking on a religious subject.  Search through the published correspondence of Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh, and Horner is found uniformly mentioned, not with peculiar affection or kindness, not with any intention of doing him honor, but as a man whose qualities were quite superior to those of other men, and whose destiny it was to be the first statesman of his country.  Lord Cockburn, who was a schoolmate of Horner, relates that the latter was at one time selected by his class to present a book to the master, and adds:  “As he stepped forward at the close of a recitation, and delivered the short Latin presentation-address, I thought him to be a god.”  This fascination is hard to be explained.  The great seriousness of Horner’s character may in part account for it.  He could not bear trifling on important subjects, and could not help frowning on all jests which were not more wise than witty.  The calm determination, the unvarying earnestness of his character, may aid in explaining it.  From a boy, he never swerved from great purposes, pursued the most useful though difficult knowledge, and cultivated with equal zeal the ornaments of taste and those recondite historical and statistical studies which are the roots of political science.  He was as far from being flighty as Immanuel Kant.  Everything that he did was marked both by temperance and sagacity.  Philosophically speaking, a personality, any personal being, is undoubtedly the most mysterious thing in the universe.  How abstract ideas come together to grow and bloom in a young bosom is wholly past the comprehension of philosophy.  As personality in the abstract fascinates a philosopher by its mystery, so a personality of uncommon purity, intensity, and completeness fascinates all men, and thus, perhaps, is explained the high estimation in which Horner was held.  He was regarded by those who knew him, as Pythagoras was by his disciples, with the deference commanded by a superior person.

The indefatigable character of Lord Brougham, the only survivor of this group, cannot yet be sketched in a paragraph.  To Sydney Smith we shall presently return.

The second group of young men was formed fifteen years later.  They were the antagonists of the Edinburgh reviewers, the authors of the “Noctes Ambrosianae,” the main support of “Blackwood’s Magazine,” almost from its beginning.  Their names were John Wilson, J.G.  Lockhart, James Hogg, and, for a time, William Maginn.  These were very high, as well as, excepting Hogg, very young Tories.  It