was a native of London; on the strength I imagine of Burnet's assertion, that he was sent from thence to be educated in Scotland. This, however, is inferring too much: for he may have been carried up, in his infancy, from Scotland to London, when his father settled in that city. Craig also claims him. for her son but this claim seems to have no stronger foundation, than the fact of his direct or collateral ancestors having been considerable proprietors in that village; a fact too weak to sustain the hypothesis raised on it by the inhabitants, through a virtuous solicitude to make out their affinity with so eminent a person. To my mind there are unanswerable reasons for assigning that distinction to Edinburgh. In the inscription on his tomb-stone, Leighton is said to have died in his 74th

year; and deducting 73 from 1684, the undisputed year of his decease, we shall have 1611 for the year of his nativity. The same amount is obtained by deducting 30, the number of his years when he took orders, from 1641, which is the date of that transaction. Now his father was at that time professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh college, and did not go up to London until two years afterwards *; and it is certainly to be presumed, not a shadow of evidence appearing to the contrary, that the son was born in the place wherein the father was then residing. He had one brother, of whom mention will be made hereafter, who was younger than he; and two

*See Chalmers's Biograph. Dict.

sisters, one of whom was married to a Mr. Lightmaker, a gentleman of landed property in Sussex; and the other to a Mr. Rathband, as appears from a single allusion in one of her brother's letters.

Of his early years there is left but a scanty though valuable notice. It comes to us on the unquestionable authority of his sister, that his singular teachableness and piety, from his tenderest age, endeared him greatly to his parents; who used to speak with admiration of his extraordinary exemption from childish faults and follies.

At college, his behaviour was so uniformly excellent, as to attract the notice of his superiors; and one of them, in a letter to Dr. Leighton, congratulates him on having a son, in whom Providence has made him abundant compensation for his sufferings. There is still in existence a humorous poem on Dr. Aikenhead warden of the college, which Leighton wrote when an undergraduate. It evinces a good-natured playfulness of fancy, but is not of a merit that calls for publication.

After taking his degree, Leighton past several years in travel, and in the studies proper to qualify him for future usefulness. It was his mature opinion, that great advantages are to be reaped from a residence in foreign parts; inasmuch as a large acquaintance with the sentiments of strangers, and with the civil and religious institutions, the manners and usages of other countries, conduces to unshackle the mind of indigenous prejudices, to abate the self-sufficiency of partial knowledge, and to pro

duce a sober and charitable estimate of opinions that differ from our own. Many years afterwards, he recommended a similar course to his nephew, alleging, that "there is a very peculiar advantage in travel, not to be understood but by the trial of it; and that for himself he nowise repented the time he had spent in that way."

During his stay abroad, Leighton was often at Douay, where some of his relations were settled. In this seminary he appears to have met with some religionists, whose lives were framed on the strictest model of primitive piety. Though keenly alive to the faults of popery, he did not consider the Romish church to be utterly antichristian; but thought he discerned in it beautiful fragments of the original temple, however disfigured with barbarous additions, and almost hid beneath the rampant growth of a baleful superstition. Having learnt from these better portions of that corrupt establishment, that its constitutions were not altogether dross, he went on to discover that the frame of his own church was not entirely gold: nor did it escape him, that in the indiscriminate extermination, so clamorously demanded in Scotland, of all those offices of devotion which symbolized with the Roman Catholic services, there would be swept away some of the noblest formularies and most useful institutes of the primitive church. It was probably from this period that his veneration for the presbyterian platform began to abate.

He was thirty years old before he took holy

orders and in postponing to so ripe an age his entrance on the ministry, as well as in retiring so early as he did from its more laborious province, he acted agreeably to his avowed opinion, that "some men preach too soon, and some too long." His judgment of what is most reverent towards God corresponded with those canons of the Levitical economy, which prescribe a mature age for engaging in the more arduous department of the sacerdotal office, and grant an honourable superannuation at that period of life, when the strength of mind and body commonly begins to decay. It was on the sixteenth day of December, A. D. 1641, that Leighton was ordained and admitted minister of Newbottle, in Midlothian, a parish in the presbytery of Dalkeith. All diligence has been used to retrieve traditional reminiscences of the manner, in which this holy man discharged the duties of the office, in undertaking which he had evinced so much religious caution. But research has been fruitless. No distinct traces remain of those parochial ministrations, which doubtless fill an ample page in that book of the Divine remembrance, from which no work of faith, no labour of love, is ever obliterated.

Of the general tenor, however, of his life and ministerial occupations, we have a few short but invaluable notices in Burnet's History of his own Time. Engrossed with the care of his parish, he seldom mixed in the convocations of the presbyters, whose practice of descanting on the Covenant from the pulpit he greatly disapproved; and still more their

stern determination to force that bitter morsel on conscientious objectors. It was his aim not to win proselytes to a party, but converts to Jesus Christ. And exemplary indeed must he have been, since the picture of a finished evangelist, which his intimate friend has drawn in the beautiful Discourse of the Pastoral Care, was correctly copied from the lively pattern exhibited by Leighton. Yet the blameless sanctity of his manners, his professional excellence, and his studious inoffensiveness, were not enough to content the zealots of his church. In a synod he was publicly reprimanded for not "preaching up the times." Who," he asked, "does preach up the times?" It was answered that all the brethren did it. "Then," he rejoined, "if all of you preach up the times, you may surely allow one poor brother to preach up Christ Jesus and eternity."

Although Leighton was averse, both by temper and principle, from meddling with politics, yet there were certain conjunctures of perplexity and peril, in which he thought himself bound to set an example to his flock of intrepid loyalty. In the year 1648, he acceded to the Engagement for the King; a step which would have involved him in serious trouble with the republican government, but for the interposition of the Earl of Lothian, and the charm of his personal character. When the Engagement expired, in the discomfiture of those enterprises to which it had given birth, he was placed in a very delicate predicament; in which, however, his beha