Scottish antiquary, was born at Fochabers, and was educated there and at King’s College, Aberdeen. Having afterwards studied law at Edinburgh, in 1763 he went to North America, where he practised as a lawyer at Baltimore till the breaking out of the war of independence. He then settled in London (1775), and was appointed clerk to the Board of Trade in 1786. Of his thirty-three works the chief is “Caledonia; an Account, Historical and Topographical, of North Britain” (vols. I–III, 1807–24). In 1888–95 it was reprinted at Paisley in 7 vols., comprising the matter prepared for the unpublished 4th vol., and furnished with a much-needed index. Among his other works are: “A Collection of Treaties between Great Britain and other Powers” (2 vols. 1790); Lives of Defoe, Paine, Ruddiman, and Mary Queen of Scotts; and editions of Allan Ramsay and Lyndsay.

General

  This gentleman is the Atlas of Scotch antiquaries and historians; bearing on his own shoulders whatever seems to have been collected, and with pain separately endured, by his predecessors; whom, neither difficulties tire nor dangers daunt: and who, in a green and vigorous old age, is yet laying the foundation of works for the enlargement of a legitimate fame, and the edification of a grateful posterity.

  The “Caledonia” is to the “Anglo-Saxon History” what Stonehenge is to a carved font in an old cathedral. It is one of the children of Anak. In deep research the heaping together of matter, the “Britannia” of Camden fades away before it. A life, and a long and busy one, was almost exclusively devoted to this stupendous work: the author lived to complete it, and no more. The concluding volume is still in manuscript; and no bookseller has appeared willing to hazard the expense of giving to the world a thousand pages quarto. This is one of those cases in which literature is not its own reward; and had Chalmers lived in any land under the sun save this, his “Caledonia” would have been published by the government, and the learned author pensioned.

  You will sometimes see the work of Chalmers referred to. It is an immense, heavy, tedious book, to explain the legal history of the different colonies of America. It should be consulted on all such points. It goes down to the revolution of 1688. But it is impossible to read it. The leaves, however, should be turned over, for curious particulars often occur, and the nature of the first settlement and original laws of each colony should be known. The last chapter, indeed, ought to be read. The right to tax the colonies became a great point of dispute. Chalmers means to show that the sovereignity of the British parliament existed over America, because the settlers, though emigrants, were still English subjects and members of the empire.

  The life of Chalmers is comprised in a record of the works which he compiled with indefatigable industry, and issued without a break during the last fifty years of his long life. His fame rests on one of them, the “Caledonia,” which he called his standing work. The rest have been superseded by better editions, or become antiquated through his want of originality or mistaken views. Even the “Caledonia,” has not stood the test of time. It is below the standard of Camden’s “Britannia” or the works of Dugdale, the English antiquarian treatises which can most fairly be compared with it. Still, to have composed what is, though never completed, the fullest account of the antiquities of a nation which has specially cultivated that department of history is a merit not to be despised, and subsequent writers have borrowed from Chalmers without acknowledging their obligations.