world; but it must almost be welcomed as putting an end to the physical sufferings that, if overwork induced them in the first instance, were only rendered tolerable by heroic persistence in overwork.
John Elliot Cairnes was born at Drogheda in 1824. His father was a brewer in that town, and he began life with the intention of carrying on his father's business. He chose, however, to give himself a much more thorough education than was necessary to success in the family calling. He matriculated at Trinity College, Dublin, and supplemented the business occupations of the day by close and constant study in the evening. Thus were laid the seeds of the malady that has caused his premature death. When the time came for him to decide whether he should slacken his studies or husband his strength by transferring to the day-time some of the work that had hitherto encroached on the night-hours, he chose the latter course — to the extent, at least, of quitting the brewery and devoting himself wholly to a student's life, though he seems thereby rather to have augmented his opportunities of intellectual work than to have supplemented them with the needful amount of rest and leisure. To this course he appears to have been partly induced by home discomforts, growing out of convictions on theological matters which separated him more and more widely from the somewhat narrow Protestantism that opposed itself to the dominant Catholicism of Drogheda. He settled down in Dublin, having taken his bachelor's degree in 1848; and in 1854, after a somewhat long interval, and at a somewhat mature age, he "commenced" as master of arts. It is worth remembering that the year in which he took his B.A. degree was the year in which Mr. Mill's "Principles of Political Economy" appeared, "Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy" having been published four years before. Mr. Cairnes made a careful study of law, and was called to the Irish bar; but political economy was his favourite pursuit, and he was able to consider it under all the new light that Mr. Mill had thrown on the subject, and in all the new bearings that Mr. Mill had suggested. His shrewd observation of all that was going on around him, his quick apprehension of all the deep problems involved even in occurrences that seemed trivial, and his power of discussing them at once with humour and with sobriety, eminently fitted him to be a journalist of the highest type, and he became a valued and, we believe, a frequent contributor to the most important and influential of the Protestant newspapers published in Ireland. He was a conspicuous member, moreover, of the more intellectual circles of Dublin society, then presided over by Archbishop Whately, whose great liberality of opinion on religious and social affairs was not less remarkable than his kindly interest in every young man of talent who came in his way. Mr. Cairnes became one of Whately's favourites, and in late years he took pleasure, when the current of conversation suggested it, not only in testifying to the good old archbishop's sterling qualities as a man, but also in quoting from memory many of his witticisms which have never appeared among the published Whateliana.
Why Whately should have taken as much interest as he did in political economy, which he proposed to darken with the new name of "catallactics," and the scope and purport of which he limited to "inquiry into the nature, production, and distribution of wealth, not its connection with virtue and happiness," it is hard to understand, unless this was due to his accidental appointment as professor of the science at Oxford in 1829; but he had that interest, and gave solid proof of it immediately after he was made archbishop, by endowing, in the University of Dublin, a Whately professorship of political economy, tenable for five years. The first professor whom he appointed, in 1832, was Mr. Isaac Butt; the second, in 1837, was the present Judge Lawson; the sixth, in 1857, was Mr. Cairnes. In that last appointment he showed excellent judgment, and by it he enabled, or perhaps forced, Mr. Cairnes to take a much more prominent position among public teachers than his own modesty might otherwise have allowed. It was a condition of the Whately professorship that at least one of each year's lectures should be published within the year. Mr. Cairnes published, or rather the archbishop published for him, not one lecture, but the whole opening course of six. This work was "The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy," which was lately republished with sufficiently important additions to make it a new book, and which was reviewed at some length in our columns only three weeks ago. We do not propose here to review it again; but it is important to note the contents of the original volume, as they precisely indicate the position taken up by Mr.
