a market-town of England, Lincolnshire, in a fenry country on the left bank of the Welland, 34 miles S.E. of Lincoln, and 122 N. of London. It has four principal streets, and most of the houses are well built. In the centre of a large market-place stands a brick town-hall. The parish church is old, and has a fine tower and spire. Spalding contains also several places of worship for Dissenters, a theatre, alms-houses, and a grammar-school, of which the great Bentley was at one time head-master. The river has been made navigable for small vessels up to the town; and an active trade is carried on in corn, timber, coal, wool, flax, and hemp. Spalding is connected with London by the Great Northern Railway, on which it is a station. Pop. of the parish, 8829.

JOHANN JOACHIM, one of the best pulpit orators of Germany, was born on the first of November 1714, at Triebsee, in Swedish Pomerania. After having studied with success at Rostock and Griefswalde, he rose through various posts until, in 1757, he was appointed first preacher at Barth. He likewise began to publish his various theological works about this period, which were received with high approbation by the German public. His fame both as an author and as an orator had become so great, that he was invited to be provost and preacher at the Nicolaikirche in Berlin, and he was subsequently chosen a member of the chief consistory. The sermons of Spalding were characterised by profound thought, animated feeling, luminous arrangement, and eloquent and forcible language. Although written at a comparatively early period in the history of the German language, they contain few words that a modern reader would wish to blot. The "Religionsdicht" subsequently issued by the mystics put a check upon the free thought and free expression of Germany, and as it came recommended by royal mandate, Spalding had to resign his various offices. He went into retirement, and died on the 2d of March 1804, at the great age of 90 years. The principal of Spalding's works are:—Uber die Bestimmung des Menschen, 1748; Gedanken über den Werth der Gefühle in dem Christenthum, 1761; Uber die Nutzbarkeit des Predigtamts, 1772; Religion, eine Angelegenheit des Menschen, 1797; and his Selbstbiographie, 1804. His son, Georg Ludwig Spalding, edited the latter volume with notes. Born at Barth in 1762, the younger Spalding pursued his studies at Göttingen and Halle. After returning from a tour through Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and Holland, he returned to Berlin, and was appointed professor in 1787. He subsequently became engrossed in an edition of Quintilian which he had engaged to complete, and he refused numerous situations of more emolument and of greater influence, solely on account of this elegant old author. After spending nineteen years on it, during which time he only published 3 volumes, he died in 1811, and left his darling task to be completed by other hands.

WILLIAM, an esteemed writer on logic, rhetoric, and other branches of literature, was born in 1809. He was the son of an advocate in Aberdeen, in which city he spent his youth, and received a very complete classical and philosophical education at the grammar school and in Marischal College, where he took the degree of A.M. He attended the divinity hall for two years, not with a view to entering the church, but to widen the range of his acquirements, and prolong his opportunities for study. He attained to great proficiency in the learned languages, and loved the study, which he held to be an excellent discipline for exercising the powers of the youthful mind, and a good foundation for the highest species of mental culture at a later period. In this, and in all the other divisions of the curriculum of arts, he was a bright example of unrewarded diligence, and of the success which attends it. Well aware at the same time of the vast utility of those modern tongues, which along with our own are the great repositories of scientific and philosophic thought, he acquired a thorough knowledge of French, Italian, and German, was able to converse in either of these languages, and made himself familiar with the classic authors, both in poetry and prose, of all the three. In the end of 1830 he came to Edinburgh, and went into the office of Carnegie and Shepherd, writers to the signet, with whom he remained till he was called to the bar in the summer of 1833. In that year he published a

Letter on Shakespeare's authorship of the Two Noble Kinsmen, a drama commonly ascribed to John Fletcher. The intimate knowledge of the old dramatists displayed in this brochure, and the critical acumen with which the great poet's share in the play (for it was a joint performance) was traced out, and separated from the heavier work of his coadjutor, Fletcher, attracted the notice of Jeffrey, and was followed by an invitation to Mr Spalding (of which he afterwards availed himself) to become a contributor to the Edinburgh Review. But his thoughts had often been occupied with the project of a tour on the continent, which he resolved to carry into effect before settling down to the business of the bar. He commenced his journey in the summer of 1833, passed a short time in Paris, thence proceeded by Geneva and the Pass of the Great St Bernard to Turin, Milan, Genoa, Florence, and Rome. After a minute exploration of the ancient capital, he went on to Naples, crossed the Apennines to Ancona, visited Bologna, Mantua, Venice; then crossed the eastern Alps by Innspruck, spent some time in Leipsic and Berlin, and returned home by Hamburg, after an absence of fifteen months.

The fruits of his sojourn beyond the Alps were given to the public in 1841, in 3 vols., under the title of Italy and the Italian Islands, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time. It is such a book as only a man of rare acquirements could have written; nor is it perhaps too much to say, that, in proportion to its scale, it is the most complete account of all that is interesting in the annals and the ancient and modern condition of any one country that has appeared in recent times. To judge of its merit, we must keep in view the comprehensiveness of its plan. It embraces history, antiquities, topography, literature, art, laws, religion, politics, morals, biographical sketches of illustrious men, &c.; and each of these topics has a triple treatment—first for the ancient epoch, next for the middle ages, and, thirdly, for modern times. The amount of erudition, the wide range of reading, the knowledge of art required to carry out such a plan, is not easily estimated. And no subject is handled superficially; no statements or opinions are taken on trust; and his remarks on subjects the most diverse—on scenery, architecture, painting, national character, manners, literary works,—all bear the impress of an original and richly-stored mind. Indeed, the only fault of the book arises from the compression forced upon him by the wide variety and superabundance of good matter it contains, a compression which sometimes deprives his best ideas of their due relief. The book went through five editions in a few years. Of his contributions to the Edinburgh Review we have not a very accurate record. The first of which we can speak with certainty was an article on Darley's edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's works, which appeared in the number for April 1841. It is a masterly sketch of the history of the English drama from Marlowe to Fletcher, and bespeaks an extent of reading in these old authors, and an appreciation of their spirit and their distinctive merits, which could only have been gained by a minute and patient study of their works individually. Perhaps his partiality for the Greek dramatists led him to this as a kindred subject; and no doubt he was also attracted by the rich mine of poetical thought these works afford and the copious light they throw on the manners of the period. It must be remembered, that about the end of the 15th century the drama absorbed the activity of the first minds in England, and its history was to no small extent the history of English literature. "It was the favourite vehicle," as he observes, "of public sentiment, and every other walk of the poetic art was deserted in favour of it. All men wrote plays who could write at all, and many wrote indifferent plays who might have attained eminent success in other departments of poetry." In 1845 he contributed to the same journal an elaborate review of the two valuable editions of Shakspeare's works published by Mr Charles Knight and Mr Payne Collier. It is a very able disquisition on the many difficult questions that have been mooted respecting the text of the plays; the varieties in the different editions, and the sources of those varieties; how far they were alterations made by the poet himself, how far suppressions or interpolations introduced by others; how far the blunders of careless transcribers, or the worse blunders supposed to be committed by piratical reporters, who took down the plays from the mouths of the actors in Shakspeare's own theatre. These and many other points are discussed with sagacity and a range of information which inspire full confidence in the conclusions come to. Such investigations are not idle exercises of ingenuity. The poet's reputation is national property; and it is satisfactory to know that we have the plays almost exactly as he left them; that the corruptions due to would-be improvers of the text are neither numerous nor important; that "for almost everything that is grossly faulty, no less than for all in them that is superlatively excellent, the poet himself must stand solely accountable;"—further, that he was not the hasty and careless writer some have supposed; that "several of his dramas were subjected by himself to a process of alteration, which is not adequately described unless we call it re-writing;" and that several others, though not changed so materially, received from his hand verbal corrections so numerous, so careful, and so characteristic, as to be even more unequivocal proof than re-writing would have been, of modest, thoughtful, patient industry." We know only of two other articles from his pen in the Edinburgh Review; on Glassford's Translations from the Italian Lyric Poets, and on Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's poem of King Arthur. They are less elaborate than his reviews of the dramatists, but spirited and graceful.

To Blackwood's Magazine he contributed, in November 1835, a picturesque and amusing narrative of his journey across the Apennines, entitled Eight Days in the Abruzzi. In Tai's Magazine he was the author of a review of Burke's Correspondence; Maitland on the Dark Ages; Thiers' History of France under Napoleon; La Motte Fouqué's Theodolf; Life of Arezzo; Michelel's Priests, Women, and Families; two tales from the German of Tschokke, and probably some others. In 1835 he published The History of English Literature, a concise outline of the origin and growth of the English language, which has had a very extensive sale. Mr Spalding supplied above fifty biographical notices to the supplement of the Penny Cyclopedia, including the names of Arminius, Gauden, Greene, Galt, Gillies, Mitford, &c., and a number to this Encyclopaedia, including Addison, Bacon, Demosthenes, Sir Walter Scott, &c. He likewise wrote the articles Logic and Rhetoric for this work. In the composition of the former, Mr Spalding adopted hints from the German authorities, from the excellent treatise of Mr Mill and from Sir William Hamilton; but the work as a whole is highly original, and far in advance of any manual hitherto published in this country. Its merit was acknowledged in complimentary letters from high authorities in England and Germany. The article Rhetoric is in substance a theory of literature, and contains much that is new both in form and matter. The first part is psychological, and deals with the faculties exercised in the action of mind on mind. The second consists of an analysis of the processes which constitute the art of eloquence. Both treatises are profound, and severely scientific in form. Mr Spalding seemed eminently fitted for the labours of the bar by his careful study of the law, his singular acuteness and readiness, and great powers of application. But his success did not correspond to his expectations, and perhaps his proud and fastidious spirit saw something in the means by which unpatronised men like himself often rise into extensive practice to which he was averse. Probably from some such motives, when Mr Moir resigned the chair of rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh in 1838, he became a candidate for it and was successful. He resigned it in 1845, when he was appointed professor of logic in the University of St Andrews, and in this situation he remained till his death on the 16th November 1859. His natural abilities, which were of a high order, were improved by an excellent education in his youth, and by unrewarded study in after life. His apprehension was quick, his memory tenacious, and in the pursuits to which he gave his mind no amount of labour deterred him. Hence the wide range and the solidity of his acquisitions. What he knew he knew accurately, and could avail himself of readily. His style is distinguished by clearness, precision, and purity; it is rarely ornate, never ambitious or florid. As a teacher he devoted himself to his duties with an amount of zeal and industry rarely exemplified, sparing neither himself nor his pupils; or as one of them expressed it, "No Scotch professor ever did so much work for his students, or obtained so much work from them." With the quick feeling of honour which belongs to a gentleman, he united a deep sense of religion; and in all the private relations of life, as a husband, a father, and a friend, he was an exemplary man. He fell a victim to disease of the heart in his fifty-first year, and with all his faculties in full vigour, leaving a widow and four children.