THE

CALCUTTA

STANFORD LIBRARY

SEPTEMBER, 1858.

ART. I.-1. The Poetical Remains of the late Dr. John Ley-. den, with Memoirs of his Life. By the REV. JAMES MORTON. London, 1819.

2. Asiatic Researches, Vol. X. On the Languages and Literature of the Indo-Chinese Nations. By J. LEYDEN, M. D. Calcutta, 1808.

3. Asiatic Researches, Vol. XI. On the Rosheniah Sect and its Founder Bayezid Ansári. By J. LEYDEN, M. D. Calcutta, 1810.

4. Malay Annals.

Translated from the Malay Language.
By the late DR. JOHN LEYDEN, with an Introduction
by SIR THOMAS STAMFORD RAFFLES, F. R. S., &c.,
&c. London, 1821.

5. Memoirs of Baber, Emperor of Hindustan, written by him-
self in the Jaghatae Turki, and translated partly by the
late J. LEYDEN and partly by WILLIAM ERSKINE,
Esq., with Notes and Geographical and Historical In-
troduction, together with a map of the countries, the Oxus
and Jaxartes, and a Memoir regarding its construction.
By CHARLES WADDINGTON, ESQ. London, 1826.
6. The Edinburgh Annual Register, Vol. IV. Biographical
Memoir of John Leyden, M. D. By SIR WALTER
SCOTT. Edinburgh, 1811.

7. The Complaynt of Scotland, written in 1548, with a Pre-
liminary Dissertation and Glossary. By JOHN LEY-
DEN. Edinburgh, 1802.

8. A Historical and Philosophical Sketch of the Discoveries and Settlements of the Europeans in Northern and Western Africa, at the close of the Eighteenth Century. By JOHN LEYDEN. Edinburgh, 1799.

THERE

HERE are few things so difficult in all literature as to present a fair and honest picture of the life of any man, and especially of such an one as John Leyden. To write without

SEPT., 1858.

B

life and enthusiasm, without entering into the inner nature
of the subject of the sketch, and sympathising thoroughly with
him in all his experiences, is to produce what is in itself repul-
sive, and in its results worse than useless.
The tendency

is rather to give way to that furor biographicus which insen-
sibly seizes the pen, and to launch forth on a course of
extravagant praise or undeserved and undiscriminating eulogy,
in which all faults are hidden, and all drawbacks to the
perfect picture kept in the background, or but obscurely
hinted at. Such has been too much the usual mode of pro-
ceeding in the case of Leyden. The tendency has been to
praise him overmuch, and as his biographers and admirers
have been usually those of his own country, he has been
naturally raised to a place of honour, considerably higher,
perhaps, than he would otherwise have filled in the estimation
of sober men. There was in Leyden everything calculated
to awaken the enthusiasm and call forth the admiration of his
countrymen and contemporaries. He appeared at a time when
Scotland had ceased to deserve that high reputation for scholar-
ship, which she had gained for herself in the middle ages
throughout the whole continent of Europe; her genius for
scholarship had become extinct; the spirit of Buchanan and
Major and Leslie had passed away; poverty had, instead of
sending her scholars to other lands to gain at once support
and renown, checked their growth altogether, and England
had completely carried off from her more barren rival the
palm of erudition. True, Scotland had never yielded in that
which was so emphatically her own-the metaphysical sciences,
but of scholarship in the high English sense of the term,
there was but little. That glorious scheme of education
which Knox had elaborated and vainly striven to carry out,
on the absorption of the church lands by the nobles and the
state, had never had fair play. Starved and stunted in its in-
fancy, limited to Parish schools, and a few ill-endowed strag-
gling Grammar schools, it had been still further shorn of
all power as a means for raising scholars, during the anarchy and
national woe of the times of Charles and the Second James. That
state of things which in England introduced a ribald and
artificial French literature with a foreign court, which con-
verted Dryden into a hypocrite and a sycophant, and polluted
the pure streams of our literature, produced no effect in
Scotland whatever, but total barrenness and gloomy silence.
The big heart of the Scotch nation ceased for a time audibly
to beat, her nationality became soon politically extinguished,
and her roll of great names miserably small.

The national system of education established by Knox

3

was well fitted to diffuse a sound but limited education among the many, but quite unfitted to carry it on to the higher regions of scholarship. Such endowments as Wolsey and Cranmer almost wrested from Henry VIII., on the dissolution of the monasteries and previous to that time, had no existence in Scotland. There was no Edward VI., no Elizabeth, under whose fostering care education might grow up a hardy plant, bringing forth the fruits of education and high refinement. What England had in intensity, Scotland had in extension and wide diffusion; and hence from that day to this, while England can point to her many scholars and her accurate learning among the favoured few-albeit her peasantry is ignorant and her lower classes degraded, Scotland can point to her noble yeomen, her intelligent cottars, her wellread peasantry, who are at once her pride and the basis of her universal success in the world. Deficient, however, as the Scotch have generally been in scholarship, they have none the less appreciated its importance, and envied the English its possession, and have at all times been ready to recognise its existence in however modified a form among themselves, to exalt cases which did occur to an undue position, and to look upon them with too flattering eyes. Hence one great source of Leyden's reputation in his own country. He was a scholar, in their eyes a real genuine scholar, who mastered whatever he applied his mind to with wonderful rapidity, who, at an early age, was supposed to shew the fruits of ripe scholarship, and who, in an incredibly short space of time, made himself master of many oriental tongues. The Scotch could triumph with him, they could set him over against Sir William Jones, and he himself almost led them to do so, by professedly making the rivalry, aye, the surpassing of Jones, the great object of his ambition.

A second reason for the over-estimate generally formed of Leyden is the fact that, in all his peculiarities and habits, he was essentially a Scotchman, and that to the last he continually gloried in his nationality. This was much more common a century ago than it is now. Placed as the Scotch continually were in the early ages of their history in continual antagonism to the English, they felt themselves driven to assert their separate and independent position, and ever to recur to the fact, circled by so many glowing memories, that they were Scotch. This was increased by the accession of a Scotch king to the English throne, and still more so by the political contests and animosities that were excited at the time of the Union. habits of the Scotch, too, but deepened this feeling, and The migratory

hard, and canny,' and dour as they seemed, their feelings were none the less real and intense, because they were deep and seldom manifested. The exile clung to the remembrance of his native land like the Switzer, and years of absence from it only strengthened the cord that bound him to it. This was emphatically the case with Leyden. Real deep affection, and no mere sentiment, filled his breast for Scotland, for the Tweed and the Teviot and the "scenes of infancy," and in both his poems and letters this is most markedly evident. His countrymen appreciated this, and to them he was all the dearer as being emphatically one of themselves.

A third reason for the over-estimation in which, not only Leyden, but all subjects of biography are held, is that the qualities of the man as such too often interfere with the impartiality of the judgment passed on his writings and his deeds. The heart' enters much as an element into the estimate in which a man is held. The warm sympathy that everywhere distinguishes Leyden is infectious, the grand enthusiasm that led him to pursue his favourite objects, to study ten hours a day when under an Indian fever, carries the critic away from soberness and calm decision. We look into his heart and see there all those social virtues that form at once the basis and the undying tie of friendship; we almost seem to feel the firm grasp of the hand of affection, and to look upon the lustrous eye that fascinates and attracts; we join in the merry laugh, or sit down at the jovial feast, and as we listen to the flow of wit and mirth and anecdote, we forget the scholar and the poet in the man, and transfer to the two former that which is only the delightful attraction of the latter. This was greatly the case with Leyden, both in his intercourse with Sir Walter Scott and the wits of the northern metropolis, and in his intimacy with Sir John Malcolm and his Indian friends.

His

Our estimate of such a man as Leyden is also very much affected by the circumstances and time of his death. youth and his manhood were alike promising; he had spent no little time and labour in sowing seed, the fruits of which he might reasonably expect soon to pluck. He had laboured for results which were, in part at least, beginning to be apparent, and which he might in time hope to gather in, in all their full fruition. The eyes of scholars of other lands as well as his own were on him, and the best wishes of all accompanied him. The friends of his youth, who had helped and guided him to honours, were ready to welcome him when he returned adorned with them. He had

reached a point in his career, when the sad laborious past was giving way to a golden present, and an auspicious future. He might well have hoped for that future. But it was not so. The tree was struck when covered by blossoms, ere fruit could be gathered, and its desolate branches and riven trunk told to the world the saddest of tales-of hope frustrated, of manhood blighted, of labour lost for this world. Such a fate was well calculated to call forth sympathy, and how easy was it to transfer that from the man to the scholar, and so to raise the reputation of the latter higher than was meet, to look upon him rather as ideal, as what he might possibly have been, had he been spared, than as what he really was!

While, however, we would desire to avoid that lavish praise and indiscriminate eulogy which many, and especially his own countrymen, have heaped upon Leyden, we think that there is much that is interesting in his career as a man and wonderful in his achievements as a linguist. Let us look a little at the details of his life, and shortly consider those works of his which have come down to posterity, and by which chiefly they may be enabled to judge of him.

He was born in Roxburghshire on the banks of the Teviota stream he often celebrates in his poems-September 8th, 1775. Denholm, the village in which he was born, was situated on the old estate of Cavers, whose present proprietor Mr. Douglas has lately become so well-known in religious and philosophical literature. His parents filled but a humble station in life, his father John being a farmer, not on his own account, but as the manager of a farm held by his mother's uncle. Having removed to this farm shortly after his birth, the boy spent his infancy and youth in a simple cottage at the foot of a hill, with wild and rude scenery all around. His biographer says it was such a scene as poets have imagined in their descriptions of the innocence and happiness of rural life. Like most Scotch children in their earliest years, his home was his school, and here, like Sir W. Jones with his mother, at his grand-mother's feet he learned to read, and first manifested that insatiable desire for knowledge of all kinds, which was one of the most marked characteristics of his after life. His library was but small, but was all the more used. As became a Scotch family the Bible was first and foremost, and in the pictured pages of the historical books of the Old Testament, and in the scenes of the life of Christ in the New, he took especial delight. The Bible and the History of Wallace and Bruce, with other parts of Scottish story, were all that his own cottage possessed, but among his neighbours he soon found out such books as Chapman's Homer, Sir David Lindsay's Poems, Milton's