to purchase the volume, with Mr Cadell, for one hundred pounds. The sale was so rapid and extensive, and the approbation of the public so high, that, to their honour be it recorded, the proprietors made Dr Blair a present, first of one sum, and afterwards of another, of fifty pounds; thus voluntarily doubling the stipulated price. Perhaps, in no country, not even in his own, were these compositions so highly appreciated as in England. There they were received with the keenest relish, not only on account of their abstract excellence, but partly from a kind of surprise as to the quarter from which they came—no devotional work, produced by Scotland, having ever before been found entitled to much attention in the southern section of the island. The volume speedily fell under the attention of George III., and his virtuous consort, and was by them very highly admired. His majesty, with that wise and sincere attention to the interests of religion and virtue, which has given to his reign a respectability above all that military or political glory can purchase, was graciously pleased to judge the author worthy of a public reward. By a royal mandate to the exchequer in Scotland, dated July 25, 1780, a pension of £200 a-year, was bestowed on Dr Blair. It is said that the sermons were first read in the royal closet, by the Earl of Mansfield; and there is little reason to doubt that they were indebted in some degree to the elocution of the "elegant Murray" for the impression which they produced upon the royal family.
During the subsequent part of his life, Dr Blair published three other volumes of sermons; and it might safely be said that each successive publication only tended to deepen the impression produced by the first. These compositions, which were translated into almost every language hi Europe, formed only a small part of the discourses which he prepared for the pulpit The number of those which remained, was creditable to his professional character, and exhibited a convincing proof that his fame as a public teacher had been honourably purchased, by the most unwearied application to the private and unseen labours of his office. Out of his remaining manuscripts, he had prepared a fifth volume, which appeared after his death; the rest, according to an explicit injunction in his will, were committed to the flames. The last sermon which he composed was one in the fifth volume, "on a life of dissipation and pleasure." Though written at the age of eighty-two, it is a dignified and eloquent discourse, and may be regarded as his solemn parting admonition to a class of men whose conduct is highly important to the community, and whose reformation and virtue he had long laboured most zealously to promote.
The Sermons of Blair, are not now, perhaps, to be criticised with that blind admiration which ranked them, in their own time, amidst the classics of English literature. The present age is now generally sensible that they are deficient in that religious unction which constitutes the better part of such compositions, and are but little calculated to stir and rouse the heart to a sense of spiritual duty. Every thing, however, must be considered more or less relatively. Blair's mind was formed at a time when the fervours of evangelical divinity were left by the informed classes generally, to the lowly and uninstructed hearts, which, after all, are the great citadels of religion in every country. A certain order of the clergy, towards the end of the eighteenth century, seemed to find it necessary, in order to prevent an absolute revolt of the higher orders from the standards of religion, to accommodate themselves to the prevailing taste, and only administer moral discourses, with an insinuated modicum of real piety, where their proper purpose unquestionably is to maintain spiritual grace in the breasts of the people, by all the means which the gospel has placed within their reach. Thus, as Blair preached to the most refined congregation in Scotland, he could hardly have failed to fall into this prevalent fashion; and he perhaps considered, with
