more ambitious of enriching himself with knowledge of other kinds. He was curious in making inquiries about mechanism, whenever an opportunity occurred. His mind was naturally contemplative; and he mingled intellectual activity with corporeal indolence. He never excelled in any of those boyish pastimes which require much dexterity of hand or celerity of foot. But he appears to have imbibed an early taste for the amusement of fishing; and this taste remained unimpaired, or rather invigorated, to a late period of his life. In one of his portraits he is represented with a fishing rod and line. His cheerfulness and drollery are said to have made him a favourite with his school-fellows. Before he left school he one year attended the assizes at Lancaster, where he is said to have been so much interested by the judicial proceedings he had witnessed, that he introduced them into his juvenile games, and presided over the trials of the other boys.

In November 1758, Paley was admittea a sizer of Christ's College, Cambridge. He proceeded to the University on horseback, in company with his father; and in after-life he thus described the disasters that befell him on the way.

"I was never a good horseman," said he, " and when I followed my father on a pony of my own, on my first journey to Cambridge, I fell off seven times I was lighter then than I am now; and my falls were not likely to be serious: My father, on hearing a thump, would turn his head half aside, and say-Take care of thy money, lad."

Young Paley did not become a resident member in the University till the October in the year after his matriculation. His father is said to have anticipated his future eminence, and to have remarked, with parental delight, the force and clearness of his intellectual operations.

Mr. Paley took with him to the University such a considerable share of mathematical science, that the mathematical, tutor, Mr. Shepherd, excused his attendance at the college lectures with the students of his own year But he was regularly present at Mr. Backhouse's lectures in logic and metaphysics.

Whatever might be his assiduity in those studies which the discipline of the University required, he had little of the appearance, and none of the affectation, of a hard student. His room was the common resort of the juvenile loungers of his time; but it must be remembered that Mr. Paley possessed the highly desirable power of concentrating his attention in the subject before him; and that he could read or meditate in the midst of noise and tumult with as much facility as if he had been alone. During the first period of his undergraduateship, he was in the habit of remaining in bed till a late hour in the morning, and as he was much in company during the latter part of the day, many wondered how he found leisure for making the requisite accession to his literary stores.

But the mind of Paley was so formed that, in reading, he could rapidly select the kernel and throw away the husk. By a certain quick and almost intuitive process, he discriminated between the essential, and the extraneous matter that were presented to his mind in the books that he perused; and, if he did not read so much as many, he retained more of

what he read.

The hilarity and drollery, which Mr. Paley had manifested at school, did not desert him when he entered the University. Thus his company was much sought; and the cumbrousness of his manner, and the general slovenliness of his apparel, perhaps contributed to increase the effect of his jocularity.

When he made his first appearance in the schools, he surprised the spectators by a style of dress, very different from his ordinary habiliments. He exhibited his hair full dressed, with a deep ruffled shirt, and new silk stockings.

When Paley kept his first act, one of the theses in support of which he proposed to dispute was, that the eternity of punishments is contrary to the Divine Attributes. But finding that this topic would give offence to the master of his college (Dr. Thomas,) he went to Dr. Watson, the moderator, to get it changed. Dr. Watson told him that he might put in non before contradicit. Mr. Paley, therefore, defended this position, that "Eternitas pœnarum non contradicit Divinis Attributis ;" or that the eternity of punishments is not contrary to the Divine Attributes. As he had first proposed to argue against the eternity of future punishments, we may suppose that that was his undissembled opinion; and therefore, it would have been more honourable to his candour, to have taken an entirely new question, rather than to have argued in opposition to his real sentiments. Through the whole course of his life, Dr. Paley seemed too willing to support established doctrines; and to find plausible reasons for existing institutions; even in cases in which he must have felt those doctrines to be at variance with truth, and those institutions in opposition to the best interests of mankind.-His great and vigorous mind ought to have disdained the petty subterfuges of disingenuous subtlety and interested sophistication.

Mr. Paley acquired no small celebrity in the University by the ability which he displayed in keeping his first act; and the schools were afterward uniformly crowded when he was expected to dispute. He took his degree of bachelor of arts in January 1763; and was the senior wrangler of the year.

After taking his bachelor's degree he became second usher in an academy at Greenwich. Here his office was to teach the Latin language. During his leisure hours he often visited London, and rambled about the metropolis, which affords such numerous opportunities for edifying contemplation to an active and discriminating mind. He pursued knowledge and amusement with equal, or nearly equal, eagerness and avidity. The mind cannot always be kept upon the stretch; and those minds which are capable of great intensity of exertion, seem most to require proportionate relaxation. One of the characteristics of a great mind is flexibili. ty of attention to a diversity of objects. Mr. Paley attended the playhouses and the courts of justice with similar delight. Every scene furnished him with intellectual aliment.

In 1765, Mr. Paley obtained one of the prizes, which are annually given by the members of the University for the two best dissertations in Latin prose. The subject was " A Comparison between the Stoic and) Epicurean philosophy with respect to the influence of each on the morals

of the people." Mr. Paley vindicated the Epicurean side of the question. He had afterward to read his dissertation in the senate-house before the University. His delivery is reported not to have done justice to the merits of the composition.

In June 1766, Mr. Paley was elected fellow of Christ's College. This occasioned his return to the University, where he soon became one of the tutors of his college. Tuition was a province, in which his clear and vigorous understanding, the lucid perspicuity with which he could develope his ideas, and the diversified modes in which he could illustrate his positions, combined with no small share of hilarity and good-humour, rendered him peculiarly qualified to excel. Mr. Law, son of the master of Peterhouse, was his coadjutor in the business of tuition; and the union of so much ability soon raised the fame of the college to an unusual height. The intimacy which was thus cemented between Mr. Paley and Mr. Law, contributed to promote the interest of our author by the friendship to which it led with Mr. Law's father; who, on his elevation to the see of Carlisle in 1769, made Mr. Paley his chaplain.

ty.

In his province of tutor to Christ's College, Mr. Paley lectured on metaphysics, morals, the Greek Testament, and, subsequently, on diviniThe whole substance of his moral instructions is contained in his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy; and it is well known that hardly a single idea has found its way into his subsequent publications, which he had not previously promulgated in his lectures.

In his theological lectures, he very judiciously avoided, as much as possible, all matter of polemical strife or sectarian animosity. He used to consider the thirty-nine articles of religion, as mere articles of peace, of which it was impossible that the framers could expect any one person to believe the whole, as they contain altogether about two hundred and forty distinct, and many of them inconsistent, propositions.

Notwithstanding the great liberality of opinion which Mr. Paley exhibited in his lectures, and constantly inculcated upon his pupils, he refused to sign the clerical petition to the House of Commons in 1772, for a relief from subscription to articles of religion, though he approved the object of the petition, and wished to see it accomplished Ought he not then to have given the petition the sanction of his name? On this occasion he is reported to have said,-" I cannot afford to have a conscience;" but no serious stress ought to be laid on such effusions of jocularity or inconsideration. If all a man's light, humorous, or inadvertent sayings were to be brought up in judgment against him, the purest virtue, and the brightest wisdom, would hardly be able to endure the ordeal. The best and the wisest men are often remarkable for particular inconsistencies.

Though Mr. Paley refused to lend his name to the clerical petition yet he appears afterward to have vindicated the object which it proposed to obtain, in the defence of a pamphlet written by Bishop Law, entitled, "Considerations on the propriety of requiring a subscription to Articles of Faith." The defence which is just mentioned has been uniformly ascribed to Mr. Paley: and though it must be reckoned among his more juvenile performances, yet it must be allowed, in

many instances, to have exhibited a display of ability, and a force of argument, worthy of his more improved judgment, and his more matured abilities.

While Paley was engaged in the office of tuition at Christ's College, his celebrity induced the late Earl Camden to offer him the situation of private tutor to his son. But this was incompatible with his other occupations, and was accordingly declined.

In 1775, Mr. Paley began to receive solid proofs of Bishop Law's regard. The ecclesiastical patronage, which is attached to the see of Carlisle, is very scanty and poor; but after providing for his son, Bishop Law conferred upon Paley the best benefices which he had to bestow. He was collated to the rectory of Musgrove in Westmoreland, which was at that time worth about £80 a-year. He was soon after presented to the vicarage of Dalston in Cumberland: and on the 5th of September, 1777, he resigned the rectory of Musgrove upon being inducted to the more valuable benefice of Appleby. Whilst he was in possession of this benefice, he published a little work, denominated "The Clergyman's Companion in Visiting the Sick." Such a book was much wanted; and as it contains a judicious selection of prayers for different occasions, it has supplied the clergy with a very useful auxiliary in their devotional occupations.

In 1780, Paley was preferred by his patron, Bishop Law, to a preDendal stall in the cathedral of Carlisle, which was worth about four hundred pounds a-year. And in August, 1782, he was appointed Archdeacon of Carlisle, a sort of sinecure, but by which his clerical dignity was increased, and his temporal income enlarged.

In 1785, the period arrived when Mr. Paley, who had hitherto published only a pamphlet, or a few occasional sermons, was to appear as an author in a larger and more substantial form. It was in this year that his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy issued from the press. This work soon experienced a degree of success, not indeed greater than its general excellence deserves, but greater than any work of merit, on its first appearance, usually receives. In this most useful production Paley exhibits no dazzling novelties, and makes no parade of new discoveries; for what that is new was likely to be said on such a subject, of which the great principles are coeval with the existence of man upon the habitable globe? But though the matter, of which this work consists, is so old, and has so often been fabricated into a diversity of forms by other writers, yet the capacious mind of Paley has formed it anew into a system in which there is so much clearness in the arrangement, so much cogency in the reasoning, and so much precision in the language, that there is no moral treatise by which it is surpassed in the great merit of general usefulness. Mr. Paley did not make his materials; he found them already made; but his own hands raised the fabric; and of that fabric the merit is all his own.

Some few parts of Mr. Paley's moral, and more of his political reasoning are liable to objections, but with all its defects, his "Moral and Political Philosophy" constitutes a valuable addition to that department of our literature. As it forms one of the lecture books for the students

in the University of Cambridge, this circumstance must have tended greatly to augment its circulation, and to extend its usefulness.

In addition to his other honours and emoluments in the see of Carlisle, Mr. Paley was, at the end of the year 1785, appointed chancellor of that diocese. In the year 1787, he lost his venerable friend and patron, the Bishop of Carlisle, who died on the 14th of August, at the advanced age of eighty-four. Bishop Law was an honest and intrepid inquirer after truth; and though he was inferior to his younger friend in intellectual energy, yet it would have made no small addition to Paley's fame, if he had equalled his affectionate and revered patron in the fearless declaration of all his theological opinions.

It is highly honourable to Paley that he was among the first of those, who expressed a decided opinion against the iniquity of the slave-trade. What he wrote on that subject, and particularly his unreserved reprobation of the abominable traffic, in his Moral Philosophy, contributed very much to accelerate the abolition. It was, for a long time, a mere question of interest with a considerable part of the community; but moral considerations, in unison with the amiable spirit of the gospel, and the tender sympathies of humanity, at length triumphed over the sordid projects of avarice and cruelty.

Mr. Paley, much to his honour, suggested a plan for promoting the civilization of Africa, and for making some restitution to that outraged continent, for the cruelty, the injustice, and the oppression, which it had so long experienced. He proposed to export from the United States of America several little colonies of free Negroes, and to settle them in different parts of Africa, that they might serve as patterns of more civilized life to the natives in their several vicinities.

In the year 1790, Mr. Paley published his Horæ Paulinæ, in which he appears to have displayed more originality of thought, more sagacity of remark, and more delicacy of discrimination, than in any of his other works. The great object of this volume is to illustrate and enforce the credibility of the Christian revelation, by shewing the numerous coincidences between the Epistles of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. These coincidencies, which are often incorporated or intertwined in references and allusions, in which no art can be discovered, and no contrivance traced, furnish numerous proofs of the truth of both these works, and consequently of that of Christianity. The Epistles of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles mutually strengthen each other's credibility; and Mr. Paley has shewn, in the clearest manner, how one borrows light from the other; and how both conjunctively reflect the splendour of their united evidence on some of the principal facts and most important truths in the memoirs of the Evangelists.

Some of the coincidences which Mr. Paley discovers, seem too minute for common observation; but his remarks shew their importance, while they evince the keenness of his intellectual sight. The merit of this performance, though it has been generally acknowledged both at home and abroad, is even yet greater than the celebrity it has acquired, or the praise it has received.

In 1790, Mr. Paley delivered an excellent charge to the clergy of