LESLIE, or Lesley, Charles (1650-1722), a prominent nonjuror, famous as the author of A Short and Easy Method with the Deists, was born in 1650 in Ireland, where his father, Dr John Leslie, was bishop of Raphoe and subsequently of Clogher. His early education was received at Inniskilling, Fermanagh, and in 1664 he was admitted a fellow commoner in Trinity College, Dublin, where he continued until he commenced master of arts. On his father’s death in 1671, removing to England, he entered himself as a student of law at the Temple, but soon afterwards turned his attention to theology, and took orders in 1680. Seven years later he became chancellor of the cathedral of Connor and a justice of the peace, and began a long career of public controversy by responding in public disputation at Monaghan to the challenge of the Roman Catholic bishop of Clogher. Although an eager and uncompromising opponent of Roman Catholicism, Leslie was a firm supporter of the Stuart dynasty, and, having declined at the Revolution to take the oath to William and Mary, he was on this account deprived of his benefice. In 1689 the growing troubles in Ireland induced him to withdraw to England, where he employed himself for the next twenty years in writing various controversial pamphlets in favour of the nonjuring cause, and in numerous polemics against the Quakers, Jews, Socinians, and Papists, and especially in that against the Deists with which his name is now most commonly associated. A warrant having been issued against him in 1710 for his pamphlet The Good Old Cause, or Lying in Truth, he in that year resolved to quit England and to accept an offer made by the Pretender (with whom he had previously been in frequent correspondence) that he should reside with him at Bar-le-duc. After the failure of the Stuart cause in 1715, Leslie accompanied his patron into Italy, where he remained until 1721, in which year, having found his sojourn amongst Roman Catholics extremely unpleasant, he sought and obtained permission to return to his native country. He died at Glaslough, Monaghan, on April 13, 1722.

The Theological JVorks of Leslie were collected and published by himself in 2 vols, folio in 1721; a later edition, slightly enlarged, appeared at Oxford in 1832 (7 vols. 8vo). They handle the controverted points of which they treat with considerable force of argument and vigour of style; he had the somewhat rare distinction of making several converts by his reasonings, and probably persons might still be found who are prepared to concur in Dr Johnson’s dictum that “Leslie was a reasoner, and a reasoner who was not to be reasoned against.” But the questions in dispute are no longer discussed on the basis which seems to have been pretty unanimously accepted by the orthodox theologians of that age. This is sufficiently seen when the promise given in the title of his best-known work is contrasted with the actual performance. The book professes to be A Short and Easy Method with the Deists, wherein the certainty of the Christian Religion is Demonstrated by Infallible Proof from Four Rules, which are incompatible to any imposture that over yet has been, or that can possibly be (1697). The four rules which, according to Leslie, have only to be rigorously applied in order to establish not the probability merely but the absolute certainty of the truth of Christianity are simply these:—(1) that the matter of fact be such as that men’s outward senses, their eyes and ears, may be judges of it; (2) that it be done publicly, in the face of the world; (3) that not only public monuments be kept up in memory of it, but some outward actions be performed; (4) that such monuments and such actions or observances be instituted and do commence from the time that the matter of fact was done. Other publications of Leslie are The Snake in the Grass (1696), against the Quakers; A Short Method with the Jews(1689); The Socinian Controversy Discussed (1697); The True Notion of the Catholic Church (1703); and The Case Stated between the Church of Rome and the Church of England (1713).

LESLIE, Charles Robert (1794-1859), one of the most popular of English genre-painters, was born in London on the 19th of October 1794. His parents were American, and when he was five years of age he returned with them to their native country. They settled in Philadelphia, where their son was educated and afterwards apprenticed to a bookseller. He was, however, mainly interested in painting and the drama, and when George Frederick Cooke visited the city he executed a portrait of the actor, from recollection of him on the stage, which was considered a work of such promise that a fund was raised to enable the young artist to study in Europe. He left for London in 1811, bearing introductions which procured for him the friendship of West, Beechey, Allsten, Coleridge, and Washington Irving, and was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy, where he carried off two silver medals. At first, influenced by West and Fuseli, he essayed “high art,” and his earliest important subject depicted Saul and the Witch of Endor; but he soon discovered his true aptitude and became a painter of cabinet-pictures, dealing, not like those of Wilkie, with the contemporary life that surrounded him, but with scenes from the great masters of fiction, from Shakespeare and Cervantes, Addison and Molière, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett. Of individual paintings we may specify Sir Roger de Coverley going to Church, 1819; May-day in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, 1821; Sancho Panza and the Duchess, 1824; Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, 1831; La Malade Imaginaire, act iii. sc. 6, 1843; and the Duke’s Chaplain Enraged leaving the Table, from Don Quixote, 1849. Many of his more important subjects exist in varying replicas. He possessed a sympathetic imagination, which enabled him to enter freely into the spirit of the author whom he illustrated, a delicate perception for female beauty, an unfailing eye for character and its outward manifestation in face and figure, and a genial and sunny sense of humour, guided by an instinctive refinement which prevented it from overstepping the bounds of good taste. In 1821 Leslie was elected Λ.R.A., and five years later full academician. In 1833 he left for America to become teacher of drawing in the military academy at West Point, but the post proved an irksome one, and in some six months he returned to England, where he practised his profession with unfailing assiduity till his death on the 5th of May 1859.

In addition to his skill as an artist, Leslie was a ready and pleasant writer. His Life of his friend Constable, the landscape painter, appeared in 1845, and his Handbook for Young Painters, a volume embodying the substance of his lectures as professor of painting to the Royal Academy, in 1845. In 1860 Tom Taylor edited his Autobiography and Letters, which contain interesting reminiscences of his distinguished friends and contemporaries.

LESLIE, Sir John (1766-1832), geometrician and physicist, was born of humble parentage at Largo, Fifeshire, on April 16, 1766, received his early education there and at Leven, ami in his thirteenth year, encouraged by friends who had even then remarked his aptitude for mathematical and physical science, entered the university of St Andrews. On the completion of his arts course, he nominally studied divinity at Edinburgh until 1787; in 1788-89 he spent rather more than a year as private tutor in a Virginian family, and from 1790 till the close of 1792 he held a similar appointment in Staffordshire, employing his spare time in experimental research and in preparing a translation of Buffon’s Natural History of Birds, which was published in nine 8vo vols, in 1793, and brought him some money. For the next twelve years (passed chiefly in London or at Largo, with an occasional visit to the Continent) he continued his physical studies, which resulted in numerous papers contributed by him to Nicholson’s Philosophical Journal, and in the publication (1804) of the Experimental Inquiry into the Nature and Propagation of Heat, a work which gained for its author the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society of London. In 1805 he was elected to succeed Playfair in the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh, not, however, without violent though unsuccessful opposition on the part of a narrowminded clerical party who accused him of heresy in something he had said as to the “unsophisticated notions of mankind” about the relation of cause and effect. During his tenure of this chair he published two volumes of a Course of Mathematics— the first, entitled Elements of Geometry, Geometrical Analysis, and Plane Trigonometry, in 1809, and the second, Geometrical Analysis, and Geometry of Curve Lines, in 1821; the third volume, on “Descriptive Geometry” and the “Theory of Solids” was never completed. With reference to his invention (in 1810) of a process of artificial congelation, he published in 1813 A Short Account of Experiments and Instruments depending on the relations of Air to Heat and Moisture·, and in close connexion with the subject of this treatise he also wrote a paper on the aethrioscope, which appeared in 1818 in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1819, on the death of Playfair, he was promoted to the more congenial chair of natural philosophy, which he continued to hold until his death, and in 1823 he published, chiefly for the use of his class, the first volume of his never-completed Elements of Natural Philosophy. Leslie’s main contributions to physics were made by the help of the “differential thermometer,” an instrument whose invention was contested with him by Count Rumford. By adapting to this instrument various ingenious devices he was enabled to employ it in a great variety of investigations, connected especially with photometry, hygroscopy, and the temperature of space. In 1820 he had been elected a corresponding member of the Royal Institute of France, the only distinction of the kind which he valued, and early in 1832 he was, on the recommendation of Lord Chancellor Brougham, created a knight of the Guelphic order. He died at Coates, a small property which he had acquired near Largo, on November 3 of the same year.

LESLIE, Thomas Edward Cliffe (1827-1882), one of the ablest and most original English economists of the present century, was born in the county of Wexford in (as is believed) the year 1827. He was the second son of the Rev. Edward Leslie, prebendary of Dromore, and rector of Annahilt, in the county of Down. His family was of Scotch descent, but had been connected with Ireland since the reign of Charles I. Amongst his ancestors were that accomplished and energetic prelate, John Leslie, bishop first of Raphoe and afterwards of Clogher, who, when holding the former see, offered so stubborn a resistance to the Cromwellian forces, and the bishop’s son Charles, the well-known nonjuror. Cliffe Leslie received his elementary education from his father, who resided in England, though holding church preferment as well as possessing some landed property in Ireland; by him he was taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, at an unusually early age; he was afterwards for a short time under the care of a clergyman at Clapham, and was then sent to King William’s College, in the Isle of Man, where he remained until, in 1842, being then only fifteen years of age, he entered Trinity College, Dublin. He was a distinguished student there, obtaining, besides other honours, a classical scholarship in 1845, an<l a senior moderatorship (gold medal) in mental and moral philosophy at his degree examination in 1846. He became a law student at Lincoln’s Inn, was for two years a pupil in a conveyancer’s chambers in London, and was called to the English bar. But his attention was soon turned from the pursuit of legal practice, for which he seems never to have had much inclination, by his appointment, in 1853, to the professorship of jurisprudence and political economy in Queen’s College, Belfast. The duties of this chair requiring only short visits to Ireland in certain terms of each year, he continued to reside and prosecute his studies in London, and became a frequent writer on economic and social questions in the principal reviews and other periodicals. In 1870 he collected a number of his essays, adding several new ones, into a volume entitled Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England, and Continental Countries. J. S. Mill gave a full account of the contents of this work in a paper in the Fortnightly Review, in which he pronounced Leslie to be “one of the best living writers on applied political economy.” Mill had sought his acquaintance on reading his first article in Macmillaη ’ s Magazine ; he admired his talents and took pleasure in his society, and treated him with a respect and kindness which Leslie always gratefully acknowledged.

In the frequent visits which Leslie made to the Continent, especially to Belgium and some of the less-known districts of France and Germany, he occupied himself much in economic and social observation, studying the effects of the institutions and system of life which prevailed in each region, on the material and moral condition of its inhabitants. In this way he gained an extensive and accurate acquaintance with Continental rural economy, of which he made excellent use in studying parallel phenomena at home. The accounts he gave of the results of his observations were among his happiest efforts; “no one,” said Mill, “was able to write narratives of foreign visits at once so instructive and so interesting.” In these excursions he made the acquaintance of several distinguished persons, amongst others of M. Léonce de Lavergne and M. Émile de Laveleye. To the memory of the former of these he afterwards paid a graceful tribute in a biographical sketch (Fortnightly Review, February 1881); and to the close of his life there existed between him and M. de Laveleye relations of mutual esteem and cordial intimacy.

Two essays of Leslie’s appeared in volumes published under the auspices of the Cobden Club, one on the “Land System of France” (2d ed., 1870), containing an earnest defence of la petite culture and still more of la petite propriété·, the other on “Financial Reform” (1871), in which he exhibited in detail the impediments to production and commerce arising from indirect taxation. Many other articles were contributed by him to reviews between 1875 and 1879, including several discussions of the history of prices and the movements of wages in Europe, and a sketch of life in Auvergne in his best manner; the most important of them, however, related to the philosophical method of political economy, notably a memorable one which appeared in the Dublin University periodical, Hermathena. In 1879 the provost and senior fellows of Trinity College published for him a volume in which a number of these articles were collected under the title of Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy. These and some later essays, which ought one day to be united with them, together with the earlier· volume on Land Systems, form the essential contribution of Leslie to our economic literature. He had long contemplated, and had in part written, a work on English economic and legal history, which would have been his magnum opus— a more substantial fruit of his genius and his labours than anything he has left to us. But the MS. of this treatise, after much pains had already been spent on it, was unaccountably lost at Nancy in 1872; and, though he hoped to be able speedily to reproduce the missing portion and finish the work, it is feared that but a small part of it, if any, has been left in a state fit for publication. What the nature of it would have been may be gathered from an essay on the “History and Future of Profit” in the Fortnicjhtly Review for November 1881, which is believed to have been in substance an extract from it.

That he was able to do so much may well be a subject of wonder when it is known that his labours had long been impeded by a painful and depressing malady, from which he suffered severely at intervals, whilst he never felt secure from its recurring attacks. To this disease he in the end succumbed at Belfast, whither he had gone to discharge his professorial duties, on the 27th of January 1882, in the fifty-fifth year of his age.

Leslie’s work may be distributed under two heads, that of applied political economy, and that of discussion on the philosophical method of the science. The Land Systems belonged principally to the former division. The author perceived the great and growing importance for the social welfare of both Ireland and England of what is called “the land question,” and treated it in this volume at once with breadth of view and with a rich variety of illustrative detail. His general purpose was to show that the territorial systems of both countries were so encumbered with elements of feudal origin as to be altogether unfitted to serve the purposes of a modern industrial society. The policy he recommended is summed up in the following list of requirements, “a simple jurisprudence relating to land, a law of equal intestate succession, a prohibition of entail, a legal security for tenants’ improvements, an open registration of title and transfer, and a considerable number of peasant properties.” The volume is full of practical good sense, and exhibits a thorough knowledge of home and foreign agricultural economy; and in tlιe handling of the subject is everywhere shoλvιι the special power which its author possessed of making what he wrote interesting as well as instructive. The way in which sagacious observation and shrewd comment are constantly intermingled in the discussion not seldom reminds us of Adam Smith, whose manner was more congenial to Leslie than the abstract and arid style of Ricardo.

But what, more than anything else, marks him as an original thinker, and gives him a place apart among contemporary economists, is his exposition and defence of the historical method in political economy. Both at home and abroad there has for some time existed a profound and growing dissatisfaction with the method and many of the doctrines of the hitherto dominant school, which, it is alleged, under a “fictitious completeness, symmetry, and exactness” disguises a real hollowness and discordance with fact. It is urged that the attempt to deduce the economic phenomena of a society from the so-called universal principle of “the desire of wealth.” is illusory, and that they cannot be fruitfully studied apart from the general social conditions and historic development of which they are the outcome. Of this movement of thought Leslie was the principal representative, if not the originator, in England. There is no doubt, for he has himself placed it on record, that the first influence which impelled him in the direction of the historical method was that of Sir Henry Maine, by whose personal teaching of jurisprudence, as well as by the example of his writings, he was led ‘ ‘ to look at the present economic structure and state of society as the result of a long evolution.” The study of those German economists who represent similar tendencies doubtless confirmed him in the new line of thought on which he had entered, though he does not seem to have been further indebted to any of them except, perhaps, in some small degree to Roscher. And the writings of Comte, whose “prodigious genius,” as exhibited in the Philosophie Positive, he admired and proclaimed, though he did not accept his system as a whole, must have powerfully co-operated to form in him the habit of regarding economic science as only a single branch of sociology, which should always be kept in close relation to the others. The earliest writing in which Leslie’s revolt against the so-called “orthodox school” distinctly appears is his Essay on Wages, which was first published in 1868, and was reproduced as an appendix to the volume on Land Tenures. In this, after exposing the inanity of the theory of the wage-fund, and showing the utter want of agreement between its results and the observed phenomena, he concludes by declaring that “political economy must be content to take rank as an inductive, instead of a purely deductive science,” and that, by this change of character, “it will gain in utility, interest, and real truth far more than a full compensation for the forfeiture of a fictitious title to mathematical exactness and certainty.” But it is in the essays collected in the volume of 1879 that his attitude in relation to the question of method is most decisively marked. In one of these, on “the political economy of Adam Smith,” he exhibits in a very interesting way the co-existence in the Wealth of Nations of historical-inductive investigation in the manner of Montesquieu with a priori speculation founded on theologico-metaphysical bases, and points out the error of ignoring the former element, which is the really characteristic feature of Smith’s social philosophy, and places him in strong contrast with his soi-disant followers of the school of Ricardo. The essay, however, which contains the most brilliant polemic against the “orthodox” school, as well as the most luminous account and the most powerful vindication of the new direction, was that of which we have above spoken as having first appeared in Hermathena. It may be recommended as supplying the best extant presentation of one of the two contending views of economic method. On this essay mainly rests the claim of Leslie to be regarded as the founder and first head of the English historical school of political economy. How far his opinions on the philosophical constitution of the science are destined to prevail must for the present remain doubtful. Those who share his views on that subject regard the work he did, notwithstanding its unsystematic character, as in reality the most important done by any recent English economist. But even the wannest partisans of the older school are ready to acknowledge that he has done excellent service by insisting on a kind of inquiry, heretofore too much neglected, which is of the highest interest and. value, in whatever relation it may be supposed to stand to the establishment of economic truth. The members of both groups alike recognize his great learning, his patient and conscientious habits of investigation, and the large social spirit in which he treated the problems of his science.