S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.

Sir James Mackintosh

[A British author and statesman; born near Inverness, Oct. 24, 1765; educated at Aberdeen, and studied medicine; answered Burke by the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ,” 1791; abandoned medicine for the law, 1795; recorder of Bombay, 1804, and judge, 1806; entered Parliament, 1813; professor of law and politics in Haileybury College; died May, 1832, leaving unfinished his “History of the Revolution of 1688.”]

Instead of quarrelling with our views, he should have said that he did not like our prospects.

To Lord John Russell, of the remark of Copley [Lord Lyndhurst] when solicitor-general, in a speech on the Blasphemous Libel Bill of 1819, that during his short parliamentary experience he had seen nothing in the views of the Whigs to induce him to join them.—JENNINGS: Anecdotal History of Parliament.

“How is it,” Mackintosh was once asked, “I never hear a word about the blessings of liberty, and the glory of the British Constitution, in your debates?”—“Because we take all that for granted,” was the reply.—Ibid.

You are the advance guard of liberty.

To the jury in the case of Peltier, a French emigrant, who was tried for a libel on Napoleon, defended with great forensic ability by Mackintosh, and acquitted.

Of Mackintosh’s encyclopædic learning, the Rev. Robert Hall, his college companion and friend in later life, said, “I have been with Mackintosh this morning; but O sir, it was like the Euphrates pouring itself into a teacup.”

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