10 MAY 1856, Page 8

SCOTLAND.

The prominent event in the intelligence from Scotland is the death of Sir William Hamilton, Edinburgh's most distinguished Professor, and most regretted scholar. Sir William died on Tuesday morning, at the age of sixty-eight. He was born in 1788; at Glasgow ; the lineal representa- tive of the Hamilton of Preston. He succeeded to a baronetage, some time dormant in that family, in 1816. In his youth he took first- class honours at Oxford. He was called to the Scottish bar in 1813. In 1821 he was appointed Professor of Universal History in the University of Edinburgh ; and in 1836 he obtained the chair of Logic and Meta- physics, which he occupied till the period of his death. His son, Wil- liam, born in 1830, is now in India.

The Times of Thursday published the following tribute to the memory of Sir William evidently written by one who had opportunities of know- ing the departed master well. "For years he had been in delicate health, and with energ of mind un- diminished struggled bravely against an attack of paralysis that affected. the whole of his right side from the eve to the foot. With seine little as- aistance from a reader, he regularly every year went through the arduous duties of his chair, climbing with difficulty a steep staircase to his lecture-room, and his spirit was so indomitable that his class was known to the last as the best worked and most enthusiastic in the whole University. He had just concluded the usual winter session in his accustomed health ; and the news of his death, which in the last instance we believe arose from congestion of the brain, will take his friends and pupils by surprise. He had projected so many works which have been promised to the public for years that it would seem at first as if he had died before his time. But his work was really accomplished in the system of thought which he developed in his lec- tures and in his contributions to the Edinburgh _Review • and the works on which he was engaged were chiefly either editorial or historical, which called for powers of memory and research possessed by many, rather than for powers of thought possessed by few. His research was indeed enormous; and, amid the general poverty of Scottish scholarship, he achieved a reputation as one of the most learned men of his time. In scholastic literature his erudition was probably unrivalled ; and,- unless some of his pupils undertake to arrange his notes, immense stores of information from the most recondite sources are lost to the world. He was always adding to these stores ' - and not long before his decease he might be seen stretched on a sofa, his right eye in a shade, and his right arm in a sling, with some ponderous tome of the middle ages before him : in this way, indeed, he submitted to the drudgery of making an index to one of Duga'ld Stewart's treatises, which he was preparing for the press. Sir William's lectures will, we suppose, be published : they are very carefully written out, and when these are given to the world the public will have some better idea of his systems, both of

metaphysics and of logic, than can now be gathered from the fragments which have already appeared."

So far as we can gather from the local press, both the Lord Advocate's Bills on Education are generally approved in the Scottish towns ; but at the recent county meetings -the Parochial Schools Bills has in nearly every instance met with entire or qualified disapproval, or has been re- ferred to Select Committees.

There are now no fewer than 40,000 miners on strike in the West of Scotland: a few have returned to work at Newmills at the reduced wages, but as yet the great majority hold out. Meanwhile, much dis- tress prevails, and some apprehensions of violence are felt.