while the whole were revised and corrected. The total number of articles exceeds nine thousand. For many years Chalmers was employed by the booksellers in revising and enlarging the ‘Dictionary;’ but at the time of his death only about one-third of the work, as far as the end of the letter ‘D,’ was ready for the press. A competent authority, Mr. Chancellor Christie, remarks that ‘Chalmers's own articles, though not without the merit which characterises a laborious compiler, are too long and tedious for the general reader, and show neither sufficient research nor sufficient accuracy to satisfy the student.’ John Nichols, his intimate acquaintance, states that Chalmers was ‘a warm and affectionate friend and a delightful companion, being very convivial, and his conversation replete both with wit and information.’ His portrait has been engraved.
[Gent. Mag. new ser. iii. 207; Nichols's Illustr. of Lit.; Nichols's Lit. Anecd.; Quarterly Review, clvii. 203; Poynder's Literary Extracts, i. 98; Evans's Cat. of Engraved Portraits, Nos. 13874, 13875; J. R. Smith's Cat. of Engraved Portraits (1883), Nos. 1322, 1323; Biog. Dict. of Living Authors (1816), 59.]
CHALMERS or CHAMBERS, DAVID (1530?–1592). [See Chambers.]
CHALMERS, Sir GEORGE (d. 1791), portrait painter, was born in Edinburgh. The fortunes of his family had been forfeited owing to a connection with the exiled Stuarts, so that he inherited the bare title. He studied painting under Ramsey, and afterwards travelled, staying some time in Rome. On his return he settled first at Hull. Between 1775 and 1790 we find him exhibiting at the Royal Academy twenty-four portraits in all. One or two of his paintings have been engraved in mezzotint. He died in London, 1791.
[Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Graves's Dict. of Artists.]
CHALMERS, GEORGE (1742–1825), Scottish antiquary and historian, was almost the last of the extinct race of authors who were antiquarians rather than historians, collectors and publishers rather than minute critics of historical antiquities. They existed in all countries, but Scotland produced several notable examples. The life of Chalmers is comprised in a record of the works which he compiled with indefatigable industry, and issued without a break during the last fifty years of his long life. His fame rests on one of them, the ‘Caledonia,’ which he called his standing work. The rest have been superseded by better editions, or become antiquated through his want of originality or mistaken views. Even the ‘Caledonia’ has not stood the test of time. It is below the standard of Camden's ‘Britannia’ or the works of Dugdale, the English antiquarian treatises which can most fairly be compared with it. Still, to have composed what is, though never completed, the fullest account of the antiquities of a nation which has specially cultivated that department of history is a merit not to be despised, and subsequent writers have borrowed from Chalmers without acknowledging their obligations. Born at Fochabers in Moray, a descendant of the family of Pittensear, Chalmers was educated at the parish school of Fochabers and King's College, Aberdeen. He afterwards studied law in Edinburgh. When twenty-one he accompanied his uncle to Maryland, and practised as a lawyer at Baltimore. Returning to Great Britain at the outbreak of the civil war, he settled in London in 1775, and devoted himself to literature. His first publications were political, and chiefly connected with the colonies. An answer from the electors of Bristol to Burke's letter on the affairs of America, published in 1777, appears to have been the latest, and it was soon followed by ‘Political Annals of the present United Colonies,’ 1780; an ‘Introduction to the History of the Revolt of the Colonies,’ vol. i. 1782; ‘Estimate of the comparative Strength of Great Britain during the present and four preceding Reigns,’ 1782; ‘Three Tracts on Ireland,’ 1785. In 1786 he was appointed chief clerk of the committee of privy council for trade and foreign plantations, and in 1790 he issued a ‘Collection of Treaties between Great Britain and other Powers.’ He next turned to biography, and published lives of De Foe, Thomas Paine (under the pseudonym of Oldys), and Thomas Ruddiman, the Scottish grammarian and printer, one of his best known works, containing much interesting matter conveyed in a style copied from Dr. Johnson. He was one of the literati deceived by Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries, and published several tracts on that controversy. In the beginning of this century he was attracted to the poetry and history of his native country, which had been too much neglected, and he printed editions of the poems of Allan Ramsay and Sir David Lyndsay, with lives of these poets. In 1807 he issued the first volume of his ‘Caledonia,’ designed to embrace the whole antiquities and history of Scotland in six volumes, but only three were published, the second in 1820, and the third in 1824. Scarcely a year passed without some new work, but none of them have now any but a bibliographical interest except his ‘Life of Mary Queen of Scots,’ with subsi-
