476 L E S L E S 8vo, Liege, 1570-71; Pise affllcti animi consolat tones, ad Mariam Scot. Reg., 8vo, Paris, 1574; Pro libertate impetranda Oratio, ad Elizabciham, 8vo, Paris, 1574; DC origine, moribus, et rebus gestis Scotorum, libri decem, 4to, Rome, 1578 and 1675; DC illustrium faminarum in republica administranda authoritate libcllns, 4to, Rheims, 1580 ; De tituloct jure Marise Scot. Reg., quo regni Anglise successioncm sibi juste rindicat, 4to, Rheims, 1580; A treatise touching the right of Marie Quccne of Scotland, and of King James her graces sonne to the succession of the croune of England, 8vo, 1584; Congratulatio Alberto Archiduci Austria dc ejus advcntu ad regimen provinciarum inferior is Germanise, 8vo, Brussels, 1596; The History of Scotland from 1436 to 1561, edited for the Banna- tyue Club by Thomas Thomson from a MS. in the possession of the earl of Leven and Melville, 4to, Edinburgh, 1830. Several of Lesley s works, of which the originals are very rare, will be found reprinted in Anderson s Collections relating to the History of Queen Mary; and in Jebb, DC, vita Marise Reg. Scotorum. LESLIE, ALEXANDER. See LEVEN, EARL OF. LESLIE, or LESLEY, CHAKLES (1650-1722), a pro minent nonjuror, famous as the author of A tiliort and Easy Method with the Deists, was bom in 1G50 in Ireland, where his father, Dr John Leslie, was bishop of Raphoe and subsequently of Clogher. His early education was received at Inniskilling, Fermanagh, arid in 1664 he was admitted a fellow commoner in Trinity College, Dublin, where he continued until he commenced master of arts. On his father s death in 1671, removing to England, lie entered himself as a student of law at the Temple, but soon afterwards turned his attention to theology, and took orders in 1680. Seven years later he became chancellor of the cathedral of Connor and a justice of the peace, and began a long career of public controversy by responding in public disputation at Monaghan to the challenge of the Roman Catholic bishop of Clogher. Although an eager and uncompromising opponent of Roman Catholicism, Leslie was a firm supporter of the Stuart dynasty, and, having declined at the Revolution to take the oath to William and Mary, he was on this account deprived of his benefice. In 1689 the growing troubles in Ireland induced him to withdraw to England, where he employed himself for the next twenty years in writing various controversial pamphlets in favour of the nonjuring cause, and in numerous polemics against the Quakers, Jews, Socinians, and Papists, and especially in that against the Deists with which his name is now most commonly associated. A warrant having been issued against him in 1710 for his pamphlet The Good Old Cause, or Lying in Truth, he in that year resolved to quit England and to accept an offer made by the Pretender (with whom he had previously been in frequent correspondence) that he should reside with him at Bar-le-duc. After the failure of the Stuart cause in 1715, Leslie accompanied his patron into Italy, where he remained until 1721, in which year, having found his sojourn amongst Roman Catholics extremely unpleasant, he sought and obtained permission to return to his native country. He died at Gbislough, Monaghan, on April 13, 1722. The Theological Works of Leslie were collected and published by himself in 2 vols. folio in 1721; a later edition, slightly enlarged, appeared at Oxford in 1832 (7 vols. 8vo). They handle the con troverted points of which they treat with considerable force of argument and vigour of style ; he had the somewhat rare distinction of making several converts by his reasonings, and probably persons might still be found who are prepared to concur in Dr Johnson s dictum that " Leslie was a reasoner, and a reasoner who was not to be reasoned against." But the questions in dispute are no longer discussed on the basis which seems to have been pretty unanimously accepted by the orthodox theologians of that age. This is suffi ciently seen when the promise given in the title of his best-known work is contrasted with the actual performance. The book pro fesses to })s A Short and Easy Method with the Deists, wherein the certainty of Hie Christian Religion is Demonstrated by Infallible Proof from Four Rules, which are incompatible to any imposture that ever yet has been, or that can possibly be (1697). The four rules which, according to Leslie, have only to be rigorously applied in order to establish not the probability merely but the absolute cer tainty of the truth of Christianity are simply these : (1) that the matter of fact be such as that man s outward senses, their eyes and ears, may be judges of it; (2) that it be done publicly, in the face of the world ; (3) that not only public monuments be kept up in memory of it, but some outward actions be performed ; (4) that such monuments and such actions or observances be instituted and do commence from the time that the matter of fact was done. Other publications of Leslie are The Snake in the Grass (1696), against the Quakers; A Short Method ^vith the Jews (1689); The Socinian Controversy Discussed (1697); The True Notion of the Catholic Church (1703); and The Case Stated between the Church of Rome and the Church of England (1713). LESLIE, CHAKLES ROBERT (1794-1859), one of the most popular of English genre-painters, was born in London on the 19th of October 1794. His parents were American, and when he was five years of age he returned with them to their native country. They settled in Philadelphia, where their son was educated and afterwards apprenticed to a bookseller. He was, however, mainly interested in painting and the drama, and when George Frederick Cooke visited the city he executed a portrait of the actor, from recollection of him on the stage, which was considered a work of such promise that a fund was raised to enable the young artist to study in Europe. He left for London in 1811, bearing introductions which procured for him the friendship of West, Beechey, Allston, Coleridge, and Washington Irving, and was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy, where he carried off two silver medals. At first, influenced by West and Fuseli, he essayed "high art," and his earliest important subject depicted Saul and the Witch of Endor ; but lie soon discovered his true aptitude and became a painter of cabinet-pictures, dealing, not like those of Wilkie, with the contemporary life that surrounded him, but with scenes from the great masters of fiction, from Shakespeare and Cervantes, Addison and Moliere, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett. Of individual paintings we may specify Sir Roger de Coverley going to Church, 1819 ; May-day in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, 1821 ; Sancho Panza and the Duchess, 1824; Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, 1831 ; La Malade Imrtffinaire, act iii. sc. 6, 1843 ; and the Duke s Chaplain Enraged leaving the Table, from Don Quixote, 1849. Many of his more important subjects exist in varying replicas. He possessed a sympathetic imagination, which enabled him to enter freely into the spirit of the author whom he illustrated, a delicate perception for female beauty, an unfailing eye for character and its outward manifestation in face and figure, and a genial and sunny sense of humour, guided by an instinctive refinement which prevented it from overstepping the bounds of good taste. In 1821 Leslie was elected A.R.A., and five years later full academician. In 1833 lie left for America to become teacher of drawing in the military academy at West Point, but the post proved an irksome one, and in some six months he returned to England, where he practised his profession with unfailing assiduity till his death on the 5th of May 1859. In addition to his skill as an artist, Leslie was a read} and pleasant writer. His Life of his friend Constable, the landscape painter, appeared in 1845, and his Handbook for Young Painters, a volume embodying the substance of his lectures as professor of painting to the Royal Academy, in 1845. In 1860 Tom Taylor edited his Autobiography and Letters, which contain interesting reminiscences of his distinguished friends and contemporaries. LESLIE, SIR JOHN (1766-1832), geometrician and physicist, was born of humble parentage at Largo, Fifeshire, on April 16, 1766, received his early education there and at Leven, ami in his thirteenth year, encouraged by friends who had even then remarked his aptitude for mathematical and physical science, entered the university of St Andrews. On the completion of his arts course, he nominally studied divinity at Edinburgh until 1787; in 1788-89 he spent rather more than a year as private tutor in a Virginian family, and from 1790 till the close of
