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JAMES BEATTIE, LL.D.

Late Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic in the
Marischal College and University of Aberdeen,

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TO WHICH ARE PREFIXED,

A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR,

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WILS 15 JAN 3 $1

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To the scholar and the poet, whose laurels may be now slowly ripening in obscurity, the Life of Dr. Beattie will present consolation and hope: not perhaps more than the lives of some other literary men, but at least as much. To the obscurity of his birth, were added other impediments in his career of fame, which only genius could surmount. Sequestered in a remote village of a remote province of Scotland, far from the circle of patronage and the opportunities for exertion, ambition found no aliment but what it derived from that inward consciousness of something superior, which is

perhaps always united with extraordinary endowments. It is this. consciousness which swells the heart with high forebodings; which prompts the soul to o'erleap its present state, and to snatch a brief glance at futurity; which accompanies the youthful genius to his midnight pillow, and gives a colour to the dreams of sleep; which awakens with him in the fresh morning hour, and sheds around his steps the dubious anticipations of that renown which is to give his name to posterity, and to compensate for the cold and comfortless neglect that now envelopes him. The acknowledgement of these feelings would be too nearly allied to repulsive egotism, to expect that they should be displayed by those who have felt them: but can it be doubted that the existence of those lofty powers which constitute the poet and the man of genius, have ever been unaccompanied by the silent conviction of superiority, which, like the rose of spring, awaits the fostering sun of public praise to expand it into maturity and beauty? With a rapid, timid, but rapturous eye, the youthful Shakspeare or Milton pierced, perhaps, through the shadows that surrounded the future, and hung with rapture on the glorious scene that glanced upon

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