tending and uneventful. This was, in an eminent degree, the case with the subject of these memorial volumes.

The story of Dr. Alexander's life, as one might naturally anticipate after what has been said, can soon be told. He was born on the 24th of April, 1809, and removed to Princeton, as already intimated, in 1813. As he advanced in his boyhood he attended different schools, and came under the instruction, among other teachers, of Robert Baird, who afterwards became so well known to the Christian world. To him he seems to have been indebted for much inspiration and efficient guidance in his linguistic studies. The friendship resulting from their intercourse at this period continued through life, and was alike honorable to both. At the age of fifteen, he had made such progress that he was able to enter the Junior Class in Princeton College. Inmediately he took a prominent position among his classmates, and was esteemed by them all as a man of extraordinary powers. "The boys at the Academy," says his biographer, "thought he knew as much Greek as Mr. Baird, and that it was impossible for him to be entangled amidst the intricacies of mathematics; and some of his associates of the college fancied that he was superior, on the score of his attainments, to most of his instructors of the college faculty. This was not only the enthusiastic estimate of youth, but the deliberate and mature judgment of riper years." Such judgments respecting classmates are oftener formed by college students than they are justified by the facts of the case, but occasionally, no doubt, they are true, and, if we look at certain departments of study, they were no doubt true in the present instance. At the graduation of his class, in September, 1826, he shared the first honors of the college with two others. By lot the Valedictory Oration was assigned to him, and thus he was put forward as the speaker for the class. Though only five months beyond his seventeenth birthday, he is said to have acquitted himself on this occasion so well, that several eminent persons at once predicted for him a very brilliant career. A year afterward he was elected to the office of Tutor in the college, but declined it, and devoted himself for a while to private study, after which he engaged in teaching, and, at the same time, in editorial labors. The college, however, was not content to

wait long for his services. In 1830 he became Adjunct Professor of Ancient Languages and Literature, an office for which his previous studies had thoroughly qualified him. About the same time he formed the resolution to prepare himself for the work of the ministry. This resolution he was enabled to carry out even while discharging the duties of his position in the college; and accordingly we find him devoting himself to studies in Systematic Theology, Biblical Criticism, and History -giving the time which he had at command during four days in every week to the first-mentioned branch, and during the remaining two days to the other two branches. It was, at this time, that he may be said to have commenced that work which afterwards became the chief employment of his life. He had, indeed, pursued the study of Greek and of Hebrew at an earlier period. But now he undertook to master these languages much more perfectly, and with the definite object of making himself a thorough Biblical scholar. No doubt his first design in doing this was to gain that knowledge of the Word of God in the original languages, which he felt that every cultivated minister ought to possess. His peculiar linguistic tastes and capabilities, however, soon led him to a point beyond this. The work, which was begun only as a means to a further end, became an end in itself-and he was in a course of preparation, which resulted in the ministerial office being secondary to that of the scholar and teacher. There is very little of incident connected with his life in this professorship, and very little which may afford us any adequate idea of what his success as an instructor was. But, in regard to his method of study, a single extract from his diary, which is quoted with exclamations of wonder by his biographer, will present the young scholar quite distinctly before us:

"This," he says, "is my Hebrew day. My object, at present, is to obtain as accurate a knowledge as I can of the lexicography and grammar of the language. I choose a passage, therefore, merely to serve as a text, and go over it twice. In Hebrew I do this first in Kennicott, without the points, looking for every word in Gesenius's lexicon, and reading the whole article upon it carefully. This is my way of studying the passage lexicographically. I then take the pointed text, and analyze it moet minutely, reading at large every article in Gesenius's Elementarbuch which has a bearing upon the subject. By pursuing this plan I shall soon have read a large proportion of the lexicon, and grounded

myself pretty completely in the grammar. In this sort of study, the grammar and lexicon are the real objects of attention; the Hebrew passage only serving as an index to the parts to be consulted. In another branch I shall make the exegesis of the passage my chief aim. Even in the former mode, however, I shall be slowly, but surely, gaining a thorough knowledge of some parts of the Bible."

When we consider the fact that he was but twenty-one years of age, at this time, it must be admitted that his earnestness and thoroughness were quite remarkable. It would certainly have been a great mistake, if such a man had turned aside to any work outside of the scholastic life. It seems, indeed, as if there could have been but one future opening before him.

After two years and a half, in April, 1833, he resigned his professorship and sailed for Europe, where he passed the following year. We get little idea of what he accomplished as a student abroad. Indeed he appears to have been resident in Germany only four or five months; too short a time for any considerable results, though his biographer speaks of him, in fond phrase, as returning "laden with the honeyed spoils of European learning." His European experience in general, if we may judge from his diary or letters, was not any more interesting than that of most cultivated young men whom it has been our fortune to know. His affectionate nephew, however, seems ready, almost everywhere throughout the volumes, to supply us with comments suggesting what Dr. Alexander would no doubt have said, had he known that his life was to be written. And if such vivifying suggestions are made to inspire all the words which the great man has left behind him— as perhaps they ought to be—he was as far beyond most other men in respect to this matter, as in respect to many others.

Immediately on his return he became an instructor in the Theological Seminary at Princeton. Here he remained, in one capacity or another, during all the rest of his life. At first he declined the office of Adjunct Professor of Oriental Literature, if we understand his biographer correctly, but he substantially performed its duties from the beginning-being associated with Dr. Charles Hodge as his assistant. Whether this course was taken by reason of a modest and self distrustful view of his qualifications, or for the sake of making a trial as to his

success in this department of instruction before committing himself to it, is a point which is not quite clear to us. But, from whatever cause, he deferred his acceptance for three years, until, in 1838, he was inaugurated Professor, with a reputation already established, and with no further doubts in his own mind, or in the minds of others, that he was in the right place. The concluding portion of the first volume of the biography, and the whole of the second volume, are taken up with the narrative of the quiet and uneventful years, which followed this time, and reached to the hour of his death, nearly a quarter of a century afterward. It is a noticeable fact, that his ordination to the ministry was in 1839-nearly nine years after he had first resolved to devote himself to that profession, and four years after he had entered upon his Seminary duties. He had, indeed, preached to a considerable degree, and with very great acceptance. But, as in the case of his professorship, he was slow and cautious in taking upon himself the sacred office. The world had determined his reputation already, before he consented to present himself before it as claiming or holding the stations to which he was invited. From the time of his ordination, however, his two great works were carried on, side by side, and he was hardly less eminent in the branch of the Presbyterian Church to which he belonged as a preacher, than he was as a scholar.

At this point we leave the narrative, because there is nothing further to be referred to, beyond what may readily come before us as we consider his work and his character. Dr. Alexander was, undoubtedly, a scholar quite superior to most of those whom the department of Biblical Literature has called to itself in this country. He had extraordinary powers of acquiring foreign languages; an extraordinary love of learning; an extraordinary memory which enabled him to retain what he had once learned; an extraordinary patience which shrank from no labor necessary to attain the end he had in view; an extraordinary physical constitution which seemed to require no exercise to keep it in health and vigorous action; and an extraordinary freedom from all craving for social intercourse, so that his whole time could be uninterruptedly devoted to books. This wonderful combination of

powers and peculiarities gave him a vast advantage, as compared with other men, in the one thing to which his life was devoted. A man who cares nothing for society, for example, and can live alone, with no desires or calls from the outward world, escapes an incalculable amount of interruption, and saves for study an immense amount of time. So, too, with a man whose bodily organs take care of themselves, no matter how much he neglects them, or a man whose memory never loses what it has had entrusted to its keeping. No wonder that such a man leaves behind him many of his companions, learning ten languages while they are learning two or three. We do not say that he leads a better, or more useful, or happier life; but, if he has such powers, he will surely know more in his own line of study than they will, or than they canThe volumes before us abound in evidences of all these things to which we have alluded. Beyond the immediate and narrow circle of his nearest friends, Dr. Alexander had little to do with the world. He buried himself in the privacy of his own room, where he was able to concentrate his mind upon books from morning till night. Persons who attempted to see him were not, indeed, always rejected. They were sometimes kindly received. But his reputation as a lover of solitude, and as a person of not very uniform graciousness of manner, was such that comparatively few ventured to disturb him. He seems to have been so free from all bodily weakness as to have almost despised any special attention to the care of his health. Except for a certain depression arising from peculiar states of the weather, he was never in any other than full working condition. As for his memory, it is sufficient to call attention to the fact, that, after having read the works of various authors and commentators in preparation for his own commentaries, he was able to lay them all aside, and, keeping their various views fully in mind, to write his volumes in a place removed from his library and his home. His acquiring so largely the knowledge of Arabic in his early years, having commenced the study of it at the age of nine, will show his love of learning; while his patience is indicated by extracts like that quoted above on page 76th, or like the following, with which the biography abounds: