Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 4.djvu/201

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author of the magnificent portico of London University College, the National Gallery, and of other important edifices in London. He was latterly compelled by the declining state of his health and by repeated attacks of the gout, to retire from his professional engagements, though he did not abandon those studies which had formed his delight and occupation from his earliest years. In 1837, he published bis "Prolusiones Architectonicæ, or Essays on subjects connected with Grecian and Roman Architecture," which were designed, in some degree, as a substitute for those lectures, which, under other circumstances, he would have been called upon to deliver, as Professor of Architecture, to the students of the Royal Academy. During the last year of his life, though constantly confined to his bed, and extremely weakened and emaciated by disease, he still continued his favourite pursuits until within a few days of his death, which took place on the last day of August last.

The Rev. Archibald Alison, senior Minister of St. Paul's Chapel, Edinburgh, was born in 1757, became a member of the University of Glasgow in 1772, and of Baliol College, Oxford, in 1775, and took the degree of B.C.L. in 1784: he soon afterwards took holy orders in the English Church, and was presented to several ecclesiastical preferments by Sir William Pulteney, Lord Chancellor Loughborough, and Bishop Douglas of Salisbury. In 1784 he married tlie daughter of the celebrated Dr. John Gregory of Edinburgh, with whom he lived in uninterrupted happiness for forty years of his life. His celebrated Essay "on the Nature and Principles of Taste" was first published in 1790, and speedily became incorporated into the standard literature of Great Britain. Towards the close of the last century, he became a permanent resident in his native city as minister of the Episcopal chapel, Cowgate, and afterwards of St. Paul's, where he was connected by congenial tastes and pursuits with Dugald Stewart, Playfair, Henry Mackenzie, Dr. Gregory, and the many other distinguished men who, during so many years, made that beautiful and picturesque city the metropolis of British literature. In 1814, he published two volumes of sermons; and at a later period, a very interesting memoir of his accomplished friend the Hon. Eraser Tytler Lord Woodhouslee. Mr, Alison was a man of very pleasing and refined manners, of great cheerfulness and equanimity of temper, of a clear and temperate judgment, and possessing a very extensive knowledge of mankind. He was habitually pious and humble-minded, exhibiting, in the whole tenor of his life, the blessed influence of that Gospel of which he was the ordained minister. All his writings are characterized by that pure and correct taste, the principles of which he had illustrated with so much elegance and beauty.

Edmund Law Lushington was born in 1766, at the lodge of St. Peter's College, Cambridge, of which his grandfather. Bishop Law, was master. He became a student, and afterwards a fellow of Queen's College in that University, and attained the fourth place on the mathematical tripos in 1787. After practising for some years at the bar, he was appointed Chief Justice of Ceylon, a station