LORD WOODHOUSELEE. 555 
public business, and the sufferings of infirm health, he has been 
able to execute it; yet 1 know not if the friends of Lord Woon- 
HOUSELEE’s literary fame have not some reason to lament his 
choice of a subject ; and there are circumstances in the extent 
and variety of Lord Kames’s powers, which seem to me to 
place him almost beyond the reach of the biographer. 
The fortunate subjects of biography are those, where some 
powerful and uniform interest is maintained,—where great 
minds are seen advancing to some lofty and determinate ob- 
ject,—and where, amid the toils or the difficulties they have to 
encounter, the mind of the reader feels somewhat of the same 
anxious and unbroken interest, with which we follow the pro- 
gress of the drama, or the narrative of the epic poet. The lives 
-of conquerors, and of legislators,—of discoverers in science, 
_or of inventors in the arts,—of. the founders of schools in phi- 
losophy, or of sects in religion, it is impossible even for the 
rudest hand to trace, without awakening an interest which ail 
men can understand, and in which all can participate; and 
even the history of inferior men can yet always be made inte- 
resting, when one object of ambition is seen to be steadily pur- 
sued, and one correspondent sympathy is awakened. Of this 
unity of pursuit, and of interest, the Life of Lord Kames was 
singularly destitute. There was a vigour in his powers, and 
an elevation in his ambition, that were incapable of being re- 
‘strained within the limits of any one pursuit ; and he seems to 
have felt it to be his peculiar destiny, to take the lead in 
every science by which the reputation of his country could be 
-exalted, and in every art by which its prosperity could be in- 
creased. To delineate the progress of such a mind; to follow 
his steps in all the various fields of inquiry through which he 
travelled,—to mark with precision the accessions that science 
derived from his labours, or the arts from his suggestions, was 
Von. VIII. P. II. 4A a 
