was necessary for him to bestow in combating the keenness of his passions; and although he frequently expressed his regret that he had not been able to overcome them, yet, after an intimate connexion for more than twenty years, I am unacquainted with even a single instance, in which they betrayed him into any irregularity of conduct. Passions thus regulated are rather objects of desire than of regret; for it is by these alone that the cool indifference of philosophy can be made to partake of the tender feelings of human nature. In one word, Dr HOPES Conduct through life exhibited, to every attentive and candid observer, a striking picture of an able philosopher, an amiable physician, a sincere friend, an affectionate parent, and a worthy man.

THE author of these pages had the advantage of attending Dr HOPES botanical lectures, and his practice as physician to the Royal Infirmary; and still remembers, with much pleasure, his excellent lectures on the physiology of vegetables, and his clear exposition of the LINNAEAN system of botanical arrangement. His humane and enlightened attention to the diseases of the patients un

der his care in the Royal Infirmary, and his judicious prescriptions for curing or alleviating their disorders, were most exemplary and instructive. He was an ornament to the University and to his profession, and a model to his students most worthy of imitation.

MR SMELLIE lived in great intimacy with the late Sir ALEXANDER DICK of Prestonfield, Bart. a most respectable, worthy, and ingenious member of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, of which he was President for seven successive years. Mr SMELLIE was long in use to visit that gentleman at his country-house, about a mile from Edinburgh, every Saturday evening, where he remained till the Monday morning. This intimacy continued unabated during the life of Sir ALEXANDER, who died in 1785, at the advanced age of eighty-two, in the full enjoyment of his faculties.

IN giving a selection from the early correspondence which passed between Mr SMELLIE and several of his youthful literary friends, we labour under some difficulties, and find it impossible to reduce the letters into any sa

tisfactory order or consecutive series. It has been formerly noticed, that a large portion of this early correspondence has perished, along with many other valuable papers that would have been highly useful to these Memoirs. Almost all the copies or draughts of his own letters which yet remain are without dates, and have no dockets of the persons for whom they were intended, or are only indistinctly marked by initials. The remaining original letters from several of his correspondents are either altogether undated, both as to time and place, or have only the day of the week expressed, omitting the month and year. And a great number of these are marked only by almost illegible initials, as if intended to prevent any third person from being able to ascertain who were their writers.

THE Correspondence which has been chosen as the commencement of the subsequent series, and which is known to have begun about the year 1759, when Mr SMELLIE was in his nineteenth year, particularly labours under all these difficulties and imperfections with regard to dates and regularity of series; and is, therefore, merely grouped as seemed best to agree with the subjects to

which they refer, without any anxious endeavours to reduce them to an absolutely unattainable chronological order. Where

dates could be ascertained, or guessed at, these have been inserted or supplied in notes. It would perhaps have added to the interest of this early literary correspondence of Mr SMELLIE with some of the most respectable friends and companions of his youth, to have been enabled to indicate the names of the persons with whom it took place; which could have been easily done from internal evidence amounting almost to moral certainty: But as this could not be accomplished without a breach of delicacy, which there was reason to know or believe might be painful to the feelings of very worthy and respectable persons, we shall only say, that it does much credit to the heads and hearts of Mr SMELLIE and his young friends, and that we regret so very little of it now remains. Anxious alike to improve their minds, and to exercise their talents for composition and ratiocination on literary and scientific subjects, which then constituted their studies, they long carried on a free intercourse of epistolary disquisition, on every topic that occurred to them as worthy of be

ing investigated. This correspondence ap pears to have been continued for many years; and from that portion of it which still remains, the following letters have been selected for insertion in this work; suppressing some whole letters, and a few passages in those now printed, which contained some slight unreserved freedoms that might have offended fastidious hypercriticism.

In this selection, the editor has anxiously endeavoured to direct his choice by what he conceived might have been the deliberate feelings of the parties themselves. Freedoms of discussion respecting persons, and circumstances, and opinions, may be indulged in with the strictest propriety in the unreserved intercourse of familiar and private converse and correspondence, which one or other of the parties might not incline to see laid open to the world by a third person, more especially in a publication of a miscellaneous na

ture.