NAPIER, Maccvey, descended from an ancient and respectable family in the west of Scotland, was born in 1776. He received his elementary education in the public school of his native parish; and subsequently studied in the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, at both of which he attracted the favourable notice of some of the most distinguished professors. Being destined for the profession of the law, he was apprenticed to a member of the Society of Writers to the Signet. But the literary and philosophical studies to which he had early attached himself, withdrew his attention from the less interesting though more lucrative business of the law; and he speedily began to regard the latter as being, in his case at least, subsidiary only to his advancement in the former.
When yet very young, he was elected to the responsible situation of librarian to the Writers to the Signet. In this capacity Napier discovered an extensive knowledge of books, and a judicious discrimination in the selection of those best suited to the establishment over which he pre-
sided. At a subsequent period, the Writers to the Signet gave a marked proof of the increased estimation in which he was held, by selecting him for a lectureship on conveying, founded by the society, and shortly afterwards converted into a professorship in the university of Edinburgh. When the late Mr Constable purchased, in 1814, the copyright of the Encyclopædia Britannica, he at once fixed upon Napier as the individual best qualified to carry into effect the great improvements he projected in that publication. He was not disappointed in his expectations; and it is not going too far to say that the appearance of the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, edited by Napier, forms a memorable era in the history of British literature. Such was the confidence placed in the discretion and good taste of the editor, that the names of a host of individuals distinguished for learning, philosophy, and science are to be found among the contributors to this great work; which in consequence became the depository of a lengthened series of original and profound disquisitions in most departments of human knowledge.
The experience he had acquired in conducting the Supplement, his extended acquaintance with literature and literary men, and the confidence placed in him by the latter, naturally pointed Napier out as the proper, or rather as the only, person to undertake the task of editing a new edition of the Encyclopædia itself which should be worthy of the age and of the country. The misfortunes by which Mr Constable was unhappily overtaken made no change in this respect. The proposed edition was completed under its present publishers on the same scale on which it had been originally projected.
A vacancy in the situation of principal clerk of session having occurred some time after, when the Whig party came into power in 1830, Napier was appointed to the vacant place; and on receiving this appointment, he resigned his office of librarian.
Mr Napier had for a lengthened period been an occasional contributor to the Edinburgh Review; and on the appointment of Jeffrey to be dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1829, he succeeded him as editor. Though he wrote little himself, his contributions are remarkable for ability, research, and perspicuity of statement; and he commanded in a high degree the confidence and esteem of those whose assistance was most necessary to sustain and extend the reputation of the leading Whig journal. Those who knew Napier only through the works he edited, or even through his lectures, could form no just idea of the man. He was at once a firm, an intelligent, and an honest friend.
For many years previously to his death, his health was very indifferent, and he occasionally suffered much. But his habitual cheerfulness never forsook him; and he continued to the last in the full enjoyment of his intellectual powers and of the society of his friends. He died in his seventy-first year, on the 11th February 1847.