other candidates, however, also advanced their pretensions; and, as the result of the election depended upon the votes of the members of the town council, or city corporation, a body consisting of thirty-three individuals, the contest soon became a keen and doubtful one. It was eventually carried on between Murray and a single opponent, one of the other candidates having in the most handsome manner withdrawn as soon as he learned that Murray had come forward, and another having found it impossible to command any interest which gave him a chance of success. A full account of this election, the progress of which was watched by the friends of learning with the deepest anxiety, is given in the "Scots' Magazine" for July, 1812. Murray's friends, with Principal Baird at their head, submitted a multitude of testimonials of his qualifications for the vacant chair, as honourable as ever were given to any candidate, whether we look to the decided terms in which they were expressed, or to the authority of the writers. One was from Mr. Hamilton, the very eminent professor of Oriental languages in the East India College at Haileybury, in which that gentleman says of Murray :—“ I happened last week to meet with him in Galloway, and found his acquisitions in Oriental literature and languages so extensive and various as greatly to exceed my power to appreciate them accurately. With the few languages in which I am conversant he discovered an acquaintance that surprised me exceedingly; but the range of his studies included many of which I am completely ignorant." Another was from Mr. Salt, one of the most distinguished of modern Orientalists. "My acquaintance with Mr. Murray," says he, "originated in my admiration of the deep erudition and extensive research displayed in his edition of Mr. Bruce's 'Travels in Abyssinia.' Having twice visited that country, I was led to pay particular attention to its history and literature, and in these pursuits I received so much assistance from Mr. Murray's labours, that I took an early opportunity, on my return to England in February, 1811, from the mission to Abyssinia in which I had been engaged, to recommend him to the Marquis Wellesley as the only person in the British dominions, in my opinion, adequate to translate an Ethiopic letter which I had brought from Ras Willida Selasé, addressed to the king. My recommendation was attended to, and Mr. Murray finished the translation in the most satisfactory way." There were others, from a host of distinguished names-among which may be mentioned Dr. James Gregory, Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Leslie, Mr. (afterwards Lord) Jeffrey,† Sir Walter Scott, Professors Playfair and Dugald Stewart, &c.

* After Dr. Murray's death, a pension of 801. a year was bestowed upon his widow by the king, in acknowledgment of this service.

+ Mr. Jeffrey, in his letter, mentions several articles in the earlier numbers of the "Edinburgh Review," of which Mr. Murray was the

writer. Among these is one (in No. 3) on General Vallancey's "Prospectus of an Irish Dictionary," some of the opinions expressed in which, it is curious to remark, are very much opposed to those adopted by the author on more mature consideration, and advocated in his great work on language. Mr. Jeffrey

-all bearing warm testimony to the general talents and worth of the candidate, even when there was no pretension to be able to appreciate his peculiar scholarship. Well was Murray entitled to say, as he did in a letter written from Urr to one of his most zealous supporters on the day after the election, but before he had learned its result, borrowing the noble words of the prayer of Achilles in Homer:-"If your efforts have been exerted for an unsuccessful candidate, they will not be forgotten, for we have perished in light!"

He was elected on the 8th of July by a majority of two votes,* and a few days after, the Senate of the University unanimously passed a vote of thanks to Dr. Baird for bringing his pretensions before the patrons, conferring at the same time the degree of Doctor of Divinity upon their new associate. But all these honours came only to make more radiant the setting of the luminary. On the 31st of October Dr. Murray entered upon the discharge of his public duties, in a weak state of health, but with an ardour in which all weakness was forgotten. Although declining in strength every day, he continued to teach his classes during the winter, persevering in the preparation and delivery of a course of most learned lectures on Oriental literature, which were attended by crowded and admiring audiences, and even carrying an elementary work through the press for the use of his students. A new impression of his edition of Bruce's "Travels " also appeared in the beginning of February. Engaged in these labours, he could not be persuaded that he was so ill as he really was; and when Mrs. Murray, who had been left behind him at Urr, urged him to permit her to come to town, it was with difficulty that he was at last brought to consent to her joining him by the 16th of April. Fortunately her affèction and her fears impelled her to set out on her journey a few days earlier than the appointed time, and she arrived in Edinburgh on the 13th. She found her husband surrounded by his books and papers, and even engaged in dictating to an amanuensis. But life was now ebbing rapidly. He retired that evening to the bed from which he never rose; and before the close of another day he was among the dead.

Thus perished in his thirty-eighth year, one who, if he had lived longer, would probably have reared for himself many trophies, and largely extended the bounds of human knowledge. His ambition had always been to perform in the field to which he more especially dedicated his powers something worthy of remembrance; and his latter years had been given to the composition of a work-his "History of European Languages," already mentioned—which, if time had been

notices also a very learned article which he received from Murray on Horne Tooke's "Diversions of Purley," which was never printed, and which he believed to be still in his possession. Even now, if this paper could be recovered, it might probably be found to

be worth giving to the world-along with any other remains that may exist of the labours of so rare a scholar.

*Of twenty-eight members of the town council who voted, fifteen voted for Murray and thirteen for his opponent.

allowed to finish it, would unquestionably have formed a splendid monument of his ingenuity and learning. It has been published since his death, in so far as it could be recovered from his manuscripts; and, although probably very far from what it would have been had he lived to arrange and complete it, is still a remarkable display of erudition and ingenious speculation. With all its defects, it formed at the time when it appeared an important contribution to philological literature.

Of Murray's short life, scarcely half was passed amidst those opportunities which usually lead to study and the acquisition of knowledge. The earlier portion of it was a continued struggle with everything that tends most to repress intellectual exertion and to extinguish the very desire of learning. Yet, in all the poverty and the many other difficulties and discouragements with which he had for his first eighteen years to contend, he went on pursuing his work of self-cultivation, not only as eagerly and steadily, but almost as successfully, as he afterwards did when surrounded by all the accommodations of study. It is a lesson that ought to teach us how independent the mind really is of circumstances, which tyrannize over us chiefly through our habits of submission, and by terrifying us with a mere show of unconquerable resistance. The worst are generally more formidable in their appearance than in their reality, and when courageously attacked are more than half overcome. Had there been any obstacles of a nature sufficient to check the onward course of this enterprising and extraordinary boy, how often would he have been turned back in the noble career upon which he had entered. But, one after another, as they met him, he set his foot upon them and crushed them; and at last, after years of patient, solitary, unremitting labour, and of hoping as it were against hope, he was rewarded with all he had wished and toiled for.

CHAPTER XXII.

SELF-TUITION OF POETS:-SHAKESPEARE; BURNS.

It is an interesting train of reflection which is excited by the fact, first noticed by Mr. Malone, that the father of SHAKESPEARE could not write his own name, a cross remaining to this day as his mark or signature in the records of the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, of which he was an alderman. Had the great dramatist himself been born half a century earlier, a few rudely scrawled crosses might have been the only efforts in the art of writing of that hand to which we owe so many an immortal page. That Shakespeare's own education, however, embraced not only English reading and writing, but also something of Latin, there can

scarcely be a doubt. Dr. Farmer, in a well-known essay, has attempted to show that he never had acquired any knowledge of the ancient languages, and owed his acquaintance with classical literature entirely to translations. This is not a fair representation of the case. Shakespeare was evidently a great reader; his poetry abounds with allusions, more or less accurate, to all the learning of his age, of which not even the most curious and abstruse departments seem to have escaped his attention. Of this any one may convince himself merely by perusing a few pages of the elaborate commentaries that have been written upon his works, and observing how the erudition of succeeding times has exhausted itself, sometimes in vain, in attempting to pursue the excursive range of his memory and his fancy. It may be conceded, however, that his native tongue was probably the only one which he read with much facility, and that to it he was indebted for most of what he knew. And it is not to be overlooked, that, in writing his plays in particular, it was probably deliberately, and upon system, that he preferred taking his version of the ancient story rather from the English translation than from the original author. In those days translations from the ancient tongues appear to have formed in this country, no small part of the reading of the people, as the numerous performances of this kind which were produced within a few years, some of them by the ablest writers of the time, and the rapid succession of editions of several of them with which the press teemed, may serve to testify. Now it would seem to have been a maxim with Shakespeare always, so far as possible, to give his auditors a story that was familiar to them, and with which they had been long acquainted, rather than one, the novelty of which they would not so easily comprehend, or with which their old impressions and affections were not so likely to sympathize. Hence, although the most original of all writers in everything else, he seldom has recourse to his own invention for the plot or story of his drama, but seizes merely upon the popular tale. And several peculiarities in his style seem clearly to show that he possessed a fair knowledge of the vocabulary of the Latin language, and its common forms of phraseology; or about as much as is retained of their school learning by the greater number of those who study the ancient tongues in their youth. This perhaps is, after all, the view of the matter most consistent with the expression of his friend, Ben Jonson, who, in the verses he has written to his memory, represents him, not as entirely ignorant of ancient literature, but only as having had "small Latin, and less Greek."

But, however this may be, he must have taken to literature as a profession entirely of his own accord, and commenced and pursued the business of cultivating his powers by study, in the midst of circumstances very unfavourable to the prosecution of such an aim. Imperfect and uncertain as are the accounts we have of his early years, tradition is

uniform in representing him to have led for some time an unsettled life. He has been supposed, when very young, to have been for a short period in the office of a country attorney; but it is certain that he left his native place, and came up to London, with nothing but chance and his talents to depend upon, when he was about twenty-two years of age, having already a wife, to whom he had been married four or five years before, and several children. He gradually raised himself by his own exertions, till, from an actor he became a theatrical proprietor; when, after having spent about twenty-six years in London, he returned to his native place, and purchased an estate, where he resided in affluence and respectability till his death.

Unfortunately, we know nothing of his studies, except by their imperishable produce. But, judging from his works, it seems plain that he must have been, as we have already said, an ardent and unwearied reader, a student both of the world of men and of the world of books. Indeed, when he first appeared in London, whatever his mere school education had been, his acquaintance with literature, owing to the nature of his subsequent pursuits and his scanty opportunities, could not but have been exceedingly circumscribed, and he must have made himself all that he afterwards became. His whole history, in so far as we know it, goes to prove him to have been, in his maturer days, a person of even and regular habits of life; first accumulating what was in those times an ample fortune by the sedulous exertions of many years, and then, as soon as he had acquired this competency, wisely bidding adieu to the contests and fatigues of ambition, and retiring from the town and from fame to the country to enjoy it. Nor shall we arrive at a different conclusion with regard to his diligence and application, from a considerate examination of those matchless creations of his fancy, which he has been ignorantly assumed to have thrown off with a careless and random precipitancy. That a mind so rich and plastic as his, formed and gave forth its conceptions with a facility such as slower powers may not emulate, may be easily believed; but, although very probably a rapid, he was certainly not a careless writer. It is curious enough that Jonson himself, to whom has been attributed the expression of a wish that his deceased friend had blotted much of what he has allowed to remain in his compositions, speaks in the poem already quoted, of his

-"well-turned and true-filed lines;"

an expression which seems to impute to him rather consummate elaboration than inattention or slovenliness as a writer. The truth may probably be best gathered from the words of the address to the reader, prefixed to the first folio edition of the plays, in which his theatrical associates Heminge and Condel say, or are made to say, of him :-"Who, as he was a happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle