and could not help frowning on all jests which were not more wise
than witty. The calm determination, the unvarying earnestness of his
character, may aid in explaining it. From a boy, he never swerved from
great purposes, pursued the most useful though difficult knowledge, and
cultivated with equal zeal the ornaments of taste and those recondite
historical and statistical studies which are the roots of political
science. He was as far from being flighty as Immanuel Kant. Everything
that he did was marked both by temperance and sagacity. Philosophically
speaking, a personality, any personal being, is undoubtedly the most
mysterious thing in the universe. How abstract ideas come together to
grow and bloom in a young bosom is wholly past the comprehension of
philosophy. As personality in the abstract fascinates a philosopher
by its mystery, so a personality of uncommon purity, intensity, and
completeness fascinates all men, and thus, perhaps, is explained the
high estimation in which Horner was held. He was regarded by those
who knew him, as Pythagoras was by his disciples, with the deference
commanded by a superior person.

The indefatigable character of Lord Brougham, the only survivor of this
group, cannot yet be sketched in a paragraph. To Sydney Smith we shall
presently return.

The second group of young men was formed fifteen years later. They were
the antagonists of the Edinburgh reviewers, the authors of the "Noctes
Ambrosianae," the main support of "Blackwood's Magazine," almost from
its beginning. Their names were John Wilson, J.G. Lockhart, James Hogg,
and, for a time, William Maginn. These were very high, as well as,
excepting Hogg, very young Tories. It would be an apotheosis of loyalty
to say that they were also eminently religious, though they drank many
bumpers to their religion. When they meet in the third of the "Noctes"