absence of conceit or assumption of any kind which also greatly distinguished his great cotemporary, our friend Walter Scott; in truth, both were too far elevated above other men to seek any adventitious distinction.  I wish our country could show more men like Chalmers to hold up to imitation, or if too exalted to be imitated, yet still to be proud of; and that they were fortunate enough to have admirers such as you, capable of recording their worth in an eloge, such as the public has the satisfaction of receiving at your hands.  Again I beg to thank you for your kind remembrance of me on the present occasion.—­Believe me, my dear Sir, yours very truly,

     J.H.  FORBES.

     Dr. CANDLISH to DEAN RAMSAY.

     4 S. Charlotte Street, Tuesday, 6th March.

My dear Sir—­I cannot deny myself the pleasure of expressing to you the deep interest and delight with which I listened to your discourse last night, so worthy, in every view, of the subject, the occasion, and the audience.  And while I thank you most sincerely for so cordial and genial a tribute to the memory of the greatest of modern Scotsmen, I venture to express my hope that we may be favoured with an earlier and wider publication of it than the Transactions of the Royal Society will afford.—­Pray excuse this intrusion, and believe me, yours very truly,

     ROB.  S. CANDLISH.

     Dean Ramsay.

I will indulge myself only with one phrase from the Dean’s memoir of Dr. Chalmers:—­“Chalmers’s greatest delight was to contrive plans and schemes for raising degraded human nature in the scale of moral living.  The favourite object of his contemplation was human nature attaining the highest perfection of which it is capable, and especially as that perfection was manifested in saintly individuals, in characters of great acquirements, adorned with the graces of Christian piety.  His greatest sorrow was to contemplate masses of mankind hopelessly bound to vice and misery by chains of passion, ignorance, and prejudice.  As no one more firmly believed in the power of Christianity to regenerate a fallen race, as faith and experience both conspired to assure him that the only effectual deliverance for the sinful and degraded was to be wrought by Christian education, and by the active agency of Christian instruction penetrating into the haunts of vice and the abodes of misery, these acquisitions he strove to secure for all his beloved countrymen; for these he laboured, and for these he was willing to spend and to be spent.”

That high yet just character not only shows Dean Ramsay’s appreciation of Chalmers, but seems to show that he had already set him up as the model which he himself was to follow.  At any rate, he attempted to stir up the public mind to give some worthy testimonial to the greatest of modern Scotsmen.  A few letters connected with this subject I have put together.  I