HAMILTON 423 published, with an introductory essay by Rob- ert Turnbull, D. D., New York, 1855). In 1836 Sir William was elected professor of logic and metaphysics in the university of Ed- inbungli ; and then began a new era in his life and in the academical life of Scotland. He entered upon his professorship with every qual- ification. His personal appearance was the very finest. Above the middle height, of a sinewy and well compacted frame, with a mas- sive head, decisive and finely cut features, a dark, calm, piercing eye, perfect self-possession and reliance, finished courtesy of manners, and a voice remarkably distinct, silvery, and melo- dious, he stood before his hearers the perfection of a man in every physical adornment. " What- ever," says Mr. Baynes, his class assistant, " the previous expectations of Sir William's appear- ance might be, they were certainly realized" if not surpassed ; and however familiar one might afterward become with the play of thought and feeling on that noble countenance, the first im- pression remained the strongest and the last that it was perhaps altogether the finest head and face you had ever seen, strikingly hand- some, and full of intelligence and power. When he began to read, Sir William's voice confirmed the impression his appearance and manner had produced. It was full, clear, and resolute, with a swell of intellectual ardor in the more mea- ured cadences, and a tone that grew deep and t in reading any striking extracts from vorite author, whether in prose or poetry m Plato or Pascal, Lucretius or Virgil, iger or Sir John Davies, whose quaint and .ervous lines Sir William was fond of quoting." He had methodized all his views on logic and metaphysics, and in his lectures he now put them into an admirable form for academic instruction. He disciplined his pupils by se- vere examinations and in the writing of essays, which excited the most intense mental activ- ity. In 1846 Sir William published his edition of Reid's works, which was undertaken ten years before, as a book for the use of his class. It made a profound impression in Scotland, and Lord Jeffrey, in a letter to the editor of the "Edinburgh Review," expressed his ad- miration of "the immensity of its erudition, its vigor, completeness, and inexorable march of ratiocination." His last literary labor was an edition of the works of Dugald Stewart, in nine volumes, with a life of Stewart by Mr. John Veitch, one of his pupils. For ten years he had been enfeebled by a severe pa- ralysis, but had never relaxed his labors as a teacher, and only lessened them as an au- thor. He finished his lectures of the session of 1855 and 1856, and distributed the prizes to his class ; and after an illness of ten days he died at his residence in Great King street. As a metaphysician Hamilton stands among the greatest. His disquisition on the Epis- tol(R Obscurorum Virorum gave an example which astonished even the Germans ; his po- lemic against phrenology, in the several papers appended to the first volume of his " Lectures," is a wonder of experimental sagacity ; and his immense erudition has quickened the scholar- ship of the world. The most important of his writings, next to those on philosophy, are his papers on educational reform. In one of these he made a powerful attack on Whewell's theory that mathematics is a better logical discipline than logic itself. Sir William Hamilton's phi- losophy, though it professes to be little more than an elucidation and elaboration of Reid's, is universally recognized and treated as his own. It accepts consciousness as an infallible witness, and therefore declares, in opposition both to idealism and to the doctrine of repre- sentative perception, that there is in reality an external world, and that we have an imme- diate perception of that world ; it teaches also that the highest speculation is within the com- prehension of this philosophy of common sense, and that there is a moral universe, known to us through our moral nature, which implies a moral order and a moral governor of all. Many of Hamilton's notes are included in the abridgment of Reid's " Essays on the Intel- lectual Powers " by Dr. James Walker (Cam- bridge, 1850). A selection from his writings by O. W. Wight, entitled " The Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton," was published in New York in 1853, and " Metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton," edited by Prof. Francis Bo wen, in Cambridge in 1861. A selection of his aca- demical lectures, edited by Mansel and Veitch, was published in 4 vols. in 1859-'61. See "Memoir of Sir William Hamilton," by John Veitch (Edinburgh, 1869), and "Examination of the Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton," by John Stuart Mill (2 vols., London, 1865). HAMILTON, William Gerard, an English states- man, born in London in January, 1729, died there, July 16, 1796. He was educated at Westminster school and Oxford university, and in 1754 entered parliament as member from Petersfield, Hampshire. On Nov. 13 of the succeeding year he delivered the famous speech which earned him his well known sobriquet of " Single-Speech Hamilton." Of this speech no copy was ever taken. Contrary to the belief long entertained that this was his soli- tary oratorical effort, he spoke again in par- liament in the succeeding February, and after- ward at least twice in the Irish parliament. From 1761 to 1784 he held office in Ireland as principal secretary of the lord lieutenant and as chancellor of the exchequer. A posthumous work by him was published by Malone, en- titled "Parliamentary Logic " (London, 1808). HAMILTON, William Richard, an English ar- chgeologist, born Jan. 9, 1777, died July 11, 1 85 9. His university education was interrupted by ill health. In 1799 he became secretary to Lord Elgin in the embassy to Constantinople. He secured for the British museum the cele- brated trilingual Rosetta stone, whicfy un- daunted by the plague which had broken out among the crew, he seized on board of the ship
