MR small's biographical SKETCH OF PROF. ADAM FERGUSON. 619 



letter addressed to Dr Carlyle, gives an account of their proceedings while on 

 the Continent : — 



" Blackheath, April 29th, 1775. 

 " My dear Carlyle, — In answer to the two or three letters which you have 

 written to me, I can give you five or six which I had written in my own mind to 

 you, before I received any of yours. The first was from Geneva, where, having 

 had the advantage of lodging in Calvin's own house, and having access to some 

 of his most secret manuscripts, I thought myself, without vanity, qualified to 

 give you some light into the more intricate recesses of our Church. My second 

 was from Ferney, the seat of that renowned and pious apostle, Voltaire, who 

 saluted me with a compliment on a gentleman of my family who had civilized 

 the Russians.* I owned this relation, and at this and every successive visit 

 encouraged every attempt at conversation — even jokes against Moses, Adam and 

 Eve, and the rest of the Prophets — till I began to be considered as a person who, 

 tho' true to my own faith, had no ill humour to the freedom of fancy in others. 

 As my own compliment had come all the way from Russia, I wished to know 

 how some of my friends would fare, but I found the old man in a state of perfect 

 indifference to all authors except two sorts— one, those who write Panegyrics, 

 another who write Invectives on himself. There is a third kind, whose names 

 he has been used to repeat, fifty or sixty years, without knowing anything of 

 them — such as Locke, Boyle, Newton, &c. I forgot his competitors for fame, of 

 whom he is always either silent, or speaks slightingly. The fact is, that he reads 

 little or none, his mind exists by reminiscence, and by doing over and over what 

 it has been used to do. Dictates tales, dissertations, and tragedies ; even the 

 latter with all his elegance, tho' not with his former force. His conversation is 

 among the pleasantest I ever met with ; he lets you forget the superiority which 

 the public opinion gives him, which is indeed greater than what we conceive in 

 this Island. But he is like to make me forget all the rest of my letters. The 

 third was from the face of a snowy mountain in Savoye, higher than all the 

 mountains of Scotland piled upon one another, and containing more eternal ice 

 in its recesses than is to be found in all Scotland in the hardest winter. The 

 bottom of this ice is continually melting in the valleys, like the bottom of a roll 

 of butter placed on end in a frying pan. It is perpetually creeping down from 

 the mountain, where fresh snows continually fall in snotters. Masses come down 

 from the mountains sometimes, and shake all the rocks with a force that nothing 

 but an earthquake can imitate, and drive the air out of the narrow valleys with 

 the force of a hurricane, that roots up trees on the opposite hills. I wrote you 

 this letter in the full belief that you are a great natural philosopher, and disposed 



* Ferguson's ' Institutes of Moral Philosophy,' having been translated into Russian, was 

 used as a Text-Book in the Russian universities. 



VOL. XXIII. PART III. 8 E 



