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UNDER THE SUPERINTENDENCE OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE DIFFUSION OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE.

THE
GALLERY OF PORTRAITS:
WITH
MEMOIRS.
VOLUME V.

LONDON:

CHARLES KNIGHT, 22, LUDGATE-STREET.

1835.

[PRICE ONE GUINEA, BOUND IN CLOTH.]

LONDON:

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,

Duke-Street, Lambeth.

PORTRAITS AND BIOGRAPHIES
CONTAINED IN THIS VOLUME.

Engraved by W. Holl.
JEREMY TAYLOR.
From the original Picture in the Hall of All Souls College, Oxford.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

TAYLOR.

If this great ornament of our church did not boast of an exalted lineage, he numbered among his forefathers one at least, the worthy ancestor of such a descendant, Dr. Rowland Taylor, chaplain to Cranmer, and rector of Hadleigh, distinguished among the divines of the Reformation for his abilities, learning, and piety, as well as for the courageous cheerfulness with which he suffered death at the stake in the reign of Queen Mary. Jeremy Taylor was the son of a barber, resident in Trinity parish, Cambridge; and was baptized in Trinity church, August 15, 1613. He was “grounded in grammar and mathematics” by his father, and entered as a sizar at Caius College, August 18, 1626. Of his deportment, his studies, even of the honours and emoluments of his academical life, we have no certain knowledge. It is stated by Dr. Rust, in his Funeral Sermon, that Taylor was elected fellow: but this is at least doubtful, for no record of the fact exists in the registers of the college. He proceeded to the degree of M. A. in 1633; and in the same year, though at the early age of twenty, we find him in orders, and officiating as a divinity lecturer in St. Paul’s Cathedral. His talents as a preacher attracted the notice of Archbishop Laud, who sent for him to preach at Lambeth, and approved of his performance, but thought him too young. Taylor begged his Grace’s pardon for that fault, and promised that, if he lived, he would mend it. By that prelate’s interest he was admitted to the degree of M. A. ad eundem, in University College, Oxford, October 20, 1635, and shortly after nominated to a fellowship at All Souls College. It was probably through the interest of the same powerful patron that he obtained the rectory of Uppingham in Rutlandshire, tenable with his fellowship, March 23, 1638. The fellowship, however, he vacated by his marriage with Phœbe Langsdale, May 27, 1639, who died in little more than three years, leaving two sons.

Taylor attracted notice at Oxford by his talents as a preacher; but he does not seem to have commenced, during this period of ease and tranquillity, any of those great works which have rendered him illustrious as one of the most laborious, eloquent, and persuasive of British divines. The only sermon extant which we can distinctly refer to this period, is one preached by command of the Vice-chancellor on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, 1638. This piece requires notice, because it is connected with a report, circulated both during Taylor’s residence at Oxford and afterwards, that he was secretly inclined to Popery. It is even said that he “wished to be confirmed a member of the church of Rome,” (Wood, Athenæ Oxon.) but was rejected with scorn in consequence of the things advanced against that church in this sermon. Of this whole statement Bishop Heber, in his ‘Life of Taylor,’ has expressed his disbelief; and the arguments on which his opinion is founded appear to us satisfactory. Not even during his peaceable abode at Uppingham do Taylor’s great works appear to have been projected, as if his amiable, affectionate, and zealous temper had been fully occupied by domestic cares and pleasures, and by the constant though quiet duties of a parish priest. The year 1642, as it witnessed the overthrow of his domestic happiness by his wife’s death, saw also the beginning of those troubles which cast him out of his church preferment, a homeless man. We do not know the date of the sequestration of his living; but as he joined Charles I. at Oxford in the autumn of the year; published in the same year, by the King’s command, his treatise ‘Of the sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy, &c.;’ was created D. D. by royal mandate; appointed chaplain to the King, in which capacity he frequently preached at Oxford, and attended the royal army in the wars; it is probable that he was among the first of those who paid the penalty of adhering to the losing cause. Little is known of this portion of Taylor’s history. It appears that he quitted the army, and retired into Wales, where he married, became again involved in the troubles of war, and was taken prisoner at Cardigan, Feb. 4, 1644. We do not know the date of his release, or of his marriage to his second wife, Joanna Bridges, a lady possessed of some landed property at Mandinam, near Golden Grove, in the Vale of Towy, in Carmarthenshire, who was commonly said to be a natural daughter of Charles I., born before his marriage. But Heber conjectures that Taylor’s marriage was anterior to his imprisonment, and that his wife’s estate was amerced in a heavy fine, in consequence of his being found engaged in the royal cause at Cardigan. It is at least certain that until the Restoration he was very poor, and that he supported himself during part of the time by keeping a school.

During this period of public confusion and domestic trouble, Taylor composed an ‘Apology for authorized and set Forms of Liturgy,’ published in 1646, and his great work, a ‘Discourse on the Liberty of Prophesying,’ published in 1647, “the first attempt on record to conciliate the minds of Christians to the reception of a doctrine which, though now the rule of action professed by all Christian sects, was then, by all sects alike, regarded as a perilous and portentous novelty.”[^[1]] As such, it was received with distrust, if not disapprobation, by all parties; and if it was intended to inculcate upon the Episcopalians the propriety of conceding something to the prejudices of their opponents, as well as to procure an alleviation of the oppression exercised on the Episcopal church, we may see in the conduct of the government after the Restoration, that Taylor preached a doctrine for which neither the one nor the other were then ripe. It is the more to his honour that in this important point of Christian charity he had advanced beyond his own party, as well as those by whom his party was then persecuted. But though his views were extended enough to meet with disapprobation from his contemporaries, he gives a greater latitude to the civil power in repressing error by penal means, than the general practice, at least in Protestant countries, would now grant. “The forbearance which he claims, he claims for those Christians only who unite in the confession of the Apostles’ Creed,” and he advocates the drawing together of all who will subscribe to that ancient and comprehensive form of belief into one church, forgetting differences which do not involve the fundamental points of Christianity. And he inculcates the “danger and impropriety of driving men into schism by multiplying symbols and subscriptions, and contracting the bounds of communion, and the still greater wickedness of regarding all discrepant opinions as damnable in the life to come, and in the present capital.” For a fuller account of this remarkable work, we refer to the Life by Heber, p. 201–218, or still better, to the original.

[1]. Heber’s Life of Taylor, p. xxvii.

It was followed at no long interval by the ‘Great Exemplar of Sanctity and Holy Life, described in the Life and Death of Jesus Christ.’ This, the first of Taylor’s great works which became extensively popular, is almost entirely practical in its tendency, having been composed, as the author tells us, with the intention of drawing men’s minds from controverted doctrines, to the vital points on which all men are agreed, but which all men forget so easily. It is not an attempt to connect the relations of the four Evangelists into one complete and chronologically consistent account; but a “series of devout meditations on the different events recorded in the New Testament, as well as on the more remarkable traditions which have usually been circulated respecting the Divine Author of our religion, his earthly parent, and his followers,” set off by that majestic style, that store of illustrations derived from the most recondite and miscellaneous learning, and, above all, that fervent and poetical imagination, by which Taylor is distinguished perhaps above all the prose writers in our language. Such qualities, even without a digested plan and connected strain of argument, which, requiring a more continuous and attentive perusal, would not perhaps have made the book more acceptable or useful to the bulk of readers, ensured for it a favourable reception; and the author followed up the impression which he had produced, at no distant period, by two other treatises of a similar practical tendency, which, from their comparative shortness, are better known than any other of Taylor’s works, and probably have been as extensively read as any devotional books in the English language. We speak of the treatises on Holy Living and on Holy Dying.

It has been mentioned that near Mandinam stood Golden Grove, the seat of the Earl of Carbery, a nobleman distinguished by his abilities and zeal in the Royal cause. He proved a constant and sincere friend to Taylor; and the grateful scholar has conferred celebrity upon the name and hospitality of Golden Grove by his ‘Guide to Infant Devotion,’ or manual of daily prayers, which are called by the name of that place, in which they, and many other of the author’s works, were meditated; especially his Eniautos, or course of sermons for all the Sundays in the year.

Considerable obscurity hangs over this portion of Taylor’s life: but it appears that in the years 1654–5 he was twice imprisoned, in consequence of his advocacy of the fallen causes of Episcopacy and Royalty. At some time in 1654 he formed an acquaintance with Evelyn, which proved profitable and honourable to both parties; for the layman, as is evident from his Memoirs and Diary, highly valued and laid to heart the counsels of the man whom he selected as his “ghostly father,” and to whose poverty he liberally ministered in return out of his own abundance.

We learn from Evelyn’s Diary that Taylor was in London in the spring of 1637, and his visits, if not annual, were at least frequent. He made many friends, and among them the Earl of Conway, a nobleman possessed of large estates in the north-east of Ireland, who conceived the desire of securing Taylor’s eminent abilities for the service of his own neighbourhood, and obtained for him a lectureship in the small town of Lisburne. Taylor removed his family to Ireland in the summer of 1658. He dwelt near Portmore, his patron’s splendid seat on the banks of Lough Neagh; and some of the islands in that noble lake, and in a smaller neighbouring piece of water called Lough Beg, are still recorded, by the traditions of the peasantry, to have been his favourite places of study and retirement. To this abode his letters show him to have been much attached.

In the spring of 1660 Taylor visited London, to superintend in its passage through the press the ‘Rule of Conscience, or Ductor Dubitantium.’ This, it appears from the author’s letters, was considerably advanced so early as the year 1655. It was the fruit of much time, much diligence, and much prayer; and that of all his writings concerning the execution of which he seems to have felt most anxiety. In this case, as it often happens, the author seems to have formed an erroneous estimate of the comparative value of his works. Neither on its first appearance, nor in later times, did the ‘Ductor Dubitantium’ become extensively popular. Its object, which even at the first was accounted obsolete, was to supply what the Romish church obtained by the practice of confession, a set of rules by which a scrupulous conscience may be guided in the variety of doubtful points of duty which may occur. The abuses are well known, to which the casuistic subtlety of the Romish doctors gave birth; and it may be doubted whether it were wise to lay one stone towards rebuilding an edifice, which the general diffusion of the Scriptures, a sufficient rule, if rightly studied, to solve all doubts, had rendered unnecessary. The work, in spite of its passages of eloquence and profusion of learning, is too prolix to be a favourite in these latter days, but it is still, says his biographer, (p. ccxciii.) one “which few can read without profit, and none, I think, without entertainment. It resembles in some degree those ancient inlaid cabinets, (such as Evelyn, Boyle, or Wilkins might have bequeathed to their descendants,) whose multifarious contents perplex our choice, and offer to the admiration or curiosity of a more accurate age a vast wilderness of trifles and varieties with no arrangement at all, or an arrangement on obsolete principles, but whose ebony drawers and perfumed recesses contain specimens of every thing that is precious or uncommon, and many things for which a modern museum might be searched in vain.”

Taylor’s accidental presence in London at this period, when the hopes of the Royalists were reviving, was probably serviceable to his future fortunes. He obtained by it the opportunity of joining in the Royalist declaration of April 24; and he was among the first to derive benefit from the restoration of that King and that Church, of whose interests he had ever been a most zealous, able, and consistent supporter. He was nominated Bishop of Down and Connor, August 6, 1660, and consecrated in St. Patrick’s Cathedral January 27, 1661. In the interval he was appointed Vice-chancellor of the University of Dublin, which during past troubles had been greatly dilapidated and disordered, in respect both of its revenues and discipline. He was the principal instrument in remodelling and completing the statutes, and settling the University in its present form.

In the spring of 1661 Taylor was made a member of the Irish Privy Council, and the small diocese of Dromore, adjacent to Down, was assigned to his charge, “on account,” in the words of the writ under the Privy Seal, “of his virtue, wisdom, and industry.” This praise was well deserved by his conduct in that difficult time, when those who had displaced the episcopal clergy were apprehensive of being in their turn obliged to give way, and religious differences were embittered by thoughts of temporal welfare. Taylor had to deal chiefly with the wilder and most enthusiastic party, and his advances towards an intercourse of Christian charity were met with scorn and insult. But his exemplary conduct, and persevering gentleness of demeanour, did much to soften at least the laity of his opponents; for we are told that the nobility and gentry of the three dioceses over which he presided came over, with one exception, to the Bishop’s side.

His varied duties can now have left little time for the labour of the pen; still he published sermons from time to time, and in 1664 completed and published his last great work, a ‘Dissuasive from Popery,’ undertaken by desire of the collective body of Irish bishops. He continued after his elevation to reside principally at Portmore, occasionally at Lisburne. Of his habits, and the incidents of this latter part of his life, we know next to nothing; except that he suffered the severest affliction which could befal a man of his sensibility and piety, in the successive deaths of his three surviving sons, and the misconduct of two of them. One died at Lisburne, in March, 1661; one fell in a duel, his adversary also dying of his wounds; the third became the favourite companion of the profligate Duke of Buckingham, and died of a decline, August 2, 1667. Of the latter event the Bishop can scarcely have heard, for he died on the 13th of the same month, after ten days’ sickness. He was buried at Dromore. Two of his daughters married in Ireland, into the families of Marsh and Harrison; and several Irish families of repute claim to be connected with the blood of this exemplary prelate by the female line.

The materials for Bishop Taylor’s life are very scanty. The earliest sketch of it is to be found in the funeral sermon preached by his friend and successor in the see of Dromore, Dr. Rust, who sums up the virtues of the deceased in a peroration of highly-wrought panegyric, of which the following just eulogy is a part—“He was a person of great humility; and notwithstanding his stupendous parts, and learning, and eminency of place, he had nothing in him of pride and humour, but was courteous and affable, and of easy access, and would lend a ready ear to the complaints, yea, to the impertinence of the meanest persons. His humility was coupled with an extraordinary piety; and I believe he spent the greatest part of his time in heaven.... To all his other virtues he added a large and diffusive charity; and whoever compares his plentiful income with the inconsiderable estate he left at his death, will be easily convinced that charity was steward for a great proportion of his revenue. But the hungry that he fed, and the naked that he clothed, and the distressed that he supplied, and the fatherless that he provided for, the poor children that he put to apprentice, and brought up at school, and maintained at the university, will now sound a trumpet to that charity which he dispensed with his right hand, but would not suffer his left hand to have any knowledge of it.

“To sum up all in a few words, this great prelate had the good humour of a gentleman, the eloquence of an orator, the fancy of a poet, the acuteness of a schoolman, the profoundness of a philosopher, the wisdom of a counsellor, the sagacity of a prophet, the reason of an angel, and the piety of a saint; he had devotion enough for a cloister, learning enough for an university, and wit enough for a college of virtuosi; and had his parts and endowments been parcelled out among his poor clergy that he left behind him, it would perhaps have made one of the best dioceses in the world. But, alas! ‘Our Father! our Father! the horses of our Israel, and the chariot thereof!’ he is gone, and has carried his mantle and his spirit along with him up to heaven; and the sons of the prophets have lost all their beauty and lustre which they enjoyed only from the reflection of his excellencies, which were bright and radiant enough to cast a glory upon a whole order of men.”

There is a life of Taylor by Archdeacon Bonney; and a copious memoir, enriched by a minute analysis of all the more remarkable compositions of our author, is prefixed to Bishop Heber’s edition of Taylor’s works. From this the materials of the present sketch are taken. Nor can we better conclude than with the eloquent estimate of Taylor’s merits, with which the accomplished biographer concludes his work. “It is on devotional and moral subjects that the peculiar character of Taylor’s mind is most, and most successfully, developed. To this service he devotes his most glowing language; to this his aptest illustrations, his thoughts, and his words, at once burst into a flame, when touched by the coals of this altar; and whether he describes the duties, or dangers, or hopes of man, or the mercy, power, and justice of the Most High; whether he exhorts or instructs his brethren, or offers up his supplications in their behalf to the common Father of all, his conceptions and his expressions belong to the loftiest and most sacred description of poetry, of which they only want, what they cannot be said to need, the name and the metrical arrangement.

“It is this distinctive excellence, still more than the other qualifications of learning and logical acuteness, which has placed him, even in that age of gigantic talent, on an eminence superior to any of his immediate contemporaries; and has seated him, by the almost unanimous estimate of posterity, on the same lofty elevation with Hooker and with Barrow.

“Of such a triumvirate, who shall settle the precedence? Yet it may, perhaps, be not far from the truth, to observe that Hooker claims the foremost rank in sustained and classic dignity of style, in political and pragmatical wisdom; that to Barrow the praise must be assigned of the closest and clearest views, and of a taste the most controlled and chastened; but that in imagination, in interest, in that which more properly and exclusively deserves the name of genius, Taylor is to be placed before either. The first awes most, the second convinces most, the third persuades and delights most: and, according to the decision of one whose own rank among the ornaments of English literature yet remains to be determined by posterity (Dr. Parr), Hooker is the object of our reverence, Barrow of our admiration, and Jeremy Taylor of our love.”

Engraved by C. E. Wagstaff.
LAVOISIER.
From the original Picture by David in a Private Collection at Paris.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

LAVOISIER.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier was born in Paris, August 26, 1743. He was educated under the eye of his father, a man of opulence, with discernment to appreciate his son’s abilities, and liberality to cultivate them without regard to cost. Lavoisier early showed a decided inclination for the physical sciences; and before he was twenty years old, had made himself master of the principal branches of natural philosophy.

In 1764 the government proposed an extraordinary premium for the best and cheapest project of lighting the streets of Paris, and other large cities. To this subject, involving a knowledge of several branches of science, Lavoisier immediately devoted his attention. He produced so able a memoir, full of the most masterly, accurate, and practical views, that the gold medal was awarded to him. This production was the means of introducing him into the Academy of Sciences, of which, after a severe contest, he was admitted a member, May 13, 1768; and he proved himself through life one of its most useful and valuable associates.

At this time the whole range of chemical and physico-chemical science was in an extremely imperfect state; and the first steps to a more improved system involved the necessity of clearing away a vast mass of error which encumbered the path to truth. For instance, one of the fanciful ideas, the offspring of the alchemy of the dark ages, which still continued to haunt the regions of science, was the belief of the conversion of water into earth by gradual consolidation. This subject Lavoisier treated in the true spirit of the experimental method, and clearly showed that the pretended conversion was either a deposition of earthy particles, or a sediment arising from the action of the water on the internal surface of the retort. He also laboured on the analysis of the gypsum found in the neighbourhood of Paris, and on the crystallization of salts. He discussed the project of conveying water from L’Yvette to Paris, and the theory of congelation; and to these researches added extensive observations on the phenomena of thunder and the Aurora Borealis.

He next directed his attention more especially to mineralogy; and made excursions, in conjunction with Guettard, into all parts of France, endeavouring to form from different districts a complete collection of their characteristic mineral productions. He made advances towards a systematic classification of facts connected with the localities of fossils, which afterwards served as the basis of his work on the revolutions of the globe and the formation of successive strata, of which two admirable abstracts were inserted in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, for 1772 and 1787.

Thus during the earlier part of his life, Lavoisier does not seem to have devoted himself in particular to any one branch of science. But about the year 1770 the announcement of the existence of more than one species of gaseous matter, arising out of the successive researches of Black, Scheele, Priestley, and Cavendish, had the effect of fixing his attention to the subject of pneumatic chemistry. The invaluable discoveries just alluded to had opened a new world to the inquirer into nature; and the labours of those distinguished experimentalists had conspired to commence a fresh era in science. Lavoisier was one of the first to appreciate at once the importance of the results they had arrived at, and the immense field of further research to which those results had opened the way. He perceived by a sort of instinct the glorious career which lay before him; and the influence which this new science thus, as it were, created, must have over every sort of physical research. Priestley possessed precisely those qualifications which are most available for striking out new and brilliant discoveries of facts; a boundless fertility of invention; a power of rapidly seizing remote analogies; and an equal readiness in framing and in abandoning hypotheses, which have no value, but as guides to experiment. Lavoisier, less eminent in these respects, possessed in a more peculiar degree the mental characteristics which enable their owner to advance to grand generalizations and philosophical theories upon the sure basis of facts. He possessed, in its fullest sense, the true spirit of inductive caution, and even geometrical rigour; and his observations, eminently precise and luminous, always pointed to more general views.

In 1774, he published his ‘Opuscules Chimiques,’ in which, after a full and truly philosophical examination of the labours of preceding experimenters in the discovery of the gases and their characteristic properties, he proceeds to describe his own beautiful and fundamentally important researches, from which resulted the ‘True Theory of Combustion,’ which may be termed the very sun and centre of the whole modern system of chemistry.

To the vague dreams of the alchemist had succeeded the remarkable theory of Hooke, who maintained that a certain ingredient of the atmospheric air (which also enters as an ingredient into several other bodies, especially nitre) was the solvent which absorbed a portion of the combustible. This process was continued in proportion as more of the solvent was supplied. The solution took place with such rapidity, as to occasion those motions or pulsations in which Hooke believed heat and light to consist.

This near approach to the truth was thrown into discredit by the more brilliant and imposing theory of Stahl, who captivated the imaginations of chemists by his doctrine of phlogiston, the principle or element of fire, a sort of metaphysical something, which conferred the property of being combustible. Stahl taught that the process of combustion deprived bodies of their phlogiston, which, in the act of separation, exhibited its latent energies in the evolution of light and heat.

This wild chimera long maintained its ground, and received successive modifications in the hands of several distinguished chemists, the most important of which was that of Kirwan; but these all retained the fundamental error that something was abstracted from the burning body. Yet Rey, so early as 1630, and Bayer afterwards, had both shown that metals by calcination increase in weight, or have something added to them. Lavoisier turned his attention to the defects of the existing theory about 1770; and the last-named experiments probably directed him more specifically to the essential point of the inquiry. He pursued his researches with unwearied industry; and by a long series of experiments of the most laborious and precise nature, he succeeded in determining that, in all cases of combustion, that substance which is the real combustible invariably receives an addition, or enters into a new combination; and the matter with which it combines is in all cases that same substance which had now been shown by Priestley to be one of the constituents of the atmosphere, and which was then known by the name of vital air.

It was however long before Lavoisier gained a single convert. At length M. Berthollet, at a meeting of the Academy in 1785, publicly renounced the old opinions and declared himself a convert. Fourcroy followed his example. In 1787, Morveau, during a visit to Paris, became convinced, and declared the conclusions of Lavoisier irresistible. The younger chemists speedily embraced the new views; and their establishment was thus complete. There only remained some lurking prejudices in England, where the Essay of Kirwan retained its credit. Lavoisier and his coadjutors translated this essay into French, accompanying each section by a refutation. So completely was this done, that the author himself was convinced; and, with that candour which distinguishes superior minds, gave up his views as untenable, and declared himself a convert.

These discoveries introduced Lavoisier to the notice of the most eminent persons in the State; and in 1776, Turgot engaged him to superintend the manufacture of gunpowder for the Government. He introduced many valuable improvements in the process, and many judicious reforms into the establishment.

In 1778, Lavoisier having been incessantly engaged on the subject of gases and combustion, announced another great discovery, “that the respirable portion of the atmosphere is the constituent principle of acids,” which he therefore denominated oxygen.

The question as to “the acidifying principle” had long formed the subject of discussion. The prevalent theory was that of Beccher with various modifications, which made the acid principle a compound of earth and water regarded as elements. Lavoisier found in the instance of a great number of the acids, that they consisted of a combustible principle united with oxygen. He showed this both analytically and synthetically, and hence proceeded to the conclusion that oxygen is the acidifying principle in all acids. Berthollet opposed this doctrine, and contended that, in general, acidity depended on the manner and proportion in which the constituents are combined. The fact is, that, in this instance, Lavoisier had advanced a little too rapidly to his conclusion. Had he contented himself with stating it as applying to a great number of acids, it would have been strictly true; but he had certainly no proof of its being universally the case. When Sir H. Davy, some years after, showed that one of the most powerful acids (the muriatic) does not contain a single particle of oxygen, and when the researches of Guy Lussac and others had exhibited other proofs of the same thing, it became evident that Lavoisier’s assertion required considerable modification. And though nearly all acids have been since included under the general law of containing some supporter of combustion, yet there appear to be exceptions even to this; the cautious language of Berthollet has been completely justified; and a perfect theory of acidity is perhaps yet wanting. Nevertheless, Lavoisier’s discovery is one of first-rate magnitude and importance, and with this qualification, certainly forms the basis of all our present knowledge of the subject.

Another important research in which Lavoisier engaged, in conjunction with Laplace, was the determination of the specific heats of bodies, by means of an ingenious apparatus, which they denominated the calorimeter: these were by far the most precise experiments on the subject which had as yet been made, though some inaccuracies in the method have since been pointed out.

Lavoisier owed much, it must be owned, to those external advantages of fortune, the absence of which, though it cannot confine the flights of real genius, yet may seriously impair the value and efficiency of its exertions; and the presence of which, though it cannot confer the powers of intellect, may yet afford most invaluable aids to the prosecution of research, and the dissemination of knowledge. In the instance before us, these advantages were enjoyed to the full extent, and turned to the best use. Lavoisier was enabled to command the most unlimited resources of instrumental aid; he pursued his researches in a laboratory furnished with the most costly apparatus, and was able to put every suggestion to the test of experiment, by the assistance of the most skilful artists, and instruments of the most perfect construction.

But as he could thus command these essential advantages for the prosecution of his own investigations, he was equally mindful of the extension of similar advantages to others: he always evinced himself ready to assist the inquiries of those who had not the same means at their disposal; and was no less liberal in aiding them by his stores of information and able advice. Indeed no one could be more sensible how much there is of mutual advantage in such intercourse between those engaged in the same scientific labours; and this conviction, joined with a full perception of the immense benefits accruing from personal acquaintance among men of kindred pursuits, and the interchange of social good offices, led him to the regular practice of opening his house on two evenings in every week, for an assembly of all the scientific men of the French capital; which very soon became a point of general resort and reunion to the philosophers of Europe.

At these meetings general discourse and philosophic discussion were agreeably intermingled; the opinions of the most eminent philosophers were freely canvassed; the most striking and novel passages in the publications of foreign countries were made known, recited, and animadverted upon; and the progress of experiment was assisted by candid comments and comparison with theory. In these assemblies might be found, mingling in instructive and delightful conversation, all those whose names made the last century memorable in the annals of science. Priestley, Fontana, Landriani, Watt, Bolton, and Ingenhouz, were associated with Laplace, Lagrange, Borda, Cousin, Monge, Morveau, and Berthollet. There was also an incalculable advantage in bringing into communication and intimacy men engaged in distinct branches of science: the intercourse of the mathematician with the geologist, of the astronomer with the chemist, of the computer with the experimenter, and of the artist with the theorist, could not fail to be of mutual advantage. In no instance were the beneficial effects of such intercourse more strikingly displayed than in the chemical sciences; which, from this sort of comparison of ideas and methods, began now to assume a character of exactness from an infusion of the spirit of geometry; and a department hitherto abandoned to the wildest speculations, and encumbered with the most vague and undefined phraseology (derived from the jargon of the alchemists), began to assume something like arrangement and method in its ideas, and precision and order in its nomenclature. This influence was strongly marked in the physical memoirs produced in France from this period downwards. The precision and severity of style, and the philosophical method of the mathematicians, was insensibly transfused into the papers of the physical and chemical philosophers.

Lavoisier individually profited greatly by the sources of improvement and information thus opened. Whenever any new result presented itself to him, which, perhaps, from contradicting all received theories, seemed paradoxical, or at variance with all principles hitherto recognised, it was fully laid before these select assemblies of philosophers; the experiment was exhibited in their presence, and they were invited with the utmost candour to offer their criticisms and objections. In perfect reliance on the mutual spirit of candour, they were not backward in urging whatever difficulties occurred to them, and the truth thus elicited acquired a firmness and stability in its public reception proportioned to the severity of the test it had undergone. Lavoisier seldom announced any discovery until it had passed this ordeal.

At length he combined his philosophical views into a connected system, which he published in 1789, under the title of ‘Elements of Chemistry:’ a beautiful model of scientific composition, clear and logical in its arrangement, perspicuous and even elegant in its style and manner. These perfections are rarely to be found in elementary works written by original discoverers. The genius which qualifies a man for enlarging the boundaries of science by his own inventions and researches is of a very different class from that which confers the ability to elucidate, in a simple and systematic course, the order and connexion of elementary truths. But in Lavoisier these different species of talent were most happily blended. He not only added profound truths to science, but succeeded in adapting them to the apprehension of students, and was able to render them attractive by his eloquence.

In 1791 he entered upon extensive researches, having for their object the application of pneumatic chemistry to the advancement of medicine, in reference to the process of respiration. With this view he examined in great detail the changes which the air undergoes, and the products generated in that process of the animal economy. He had previously, however, as far back as 1780, detailed a series of experiments to determine the quantity of oxygen consumed and carbonic acid generated by respiration, in a given time, in the Memoirs of the French Academy.

In the twenty volumes of the Academy of Sciences, from 1772 to 1793, are not less than forty memoirs by Lavoisier, replete with all the grand phenomena of the science:—the doctrine of combustion in all its bearings; the nature and analysis of atmospheric air; the generation and combinations of elastic fluids; the properties of heat; the composition of acids; the decomposition and recomposition of water; the solutions of metals; and the phenomena of vegetation, fermentation, and animalization. These are some of the most important subjects of his papers; and during the whole of this period he advanced steadily in the course which was pointed out to him by the unerring rules of inductive inquiry, to which his original genius supplied the commentary. So well did he secure every point of the results to which he ascended, that he never made a false step. It was only in one subject, before alluded to, that he may be said to have gone a few steps too far. Nor did he ever suffer himself to be discouraged, or his ardour to be damped by the difficulties and obstacles which perpetually impeded his progress. He traced new paths for investigation, and founded a new school of science; and his successors had ample employment in following out the inquiries which he had indicated, and exploring those recesses to which he had opened the way.

In the relations of social and civil life Lavoisier was exemplary; and he rendered essential service to the state in several capacities. He was treasurer to the Academy, and introduced economy and order into its finances: he was also a member of the board of consultation, and took an active share in its business. When the new system of measures was in agitation, and it was proposed to determine a degree of the meridian, he made accurate experiments on the dilatation of metals, in conjunction with Laplace (1782), to ascertain the corrections due to changes of temperature in the substances used as measuring rods in those delicate operations.

By the National Convention he was consulted on the means of improving the manufacture of assignats, and of increasing the difficulty of forgery. He turned his attention to matters of rural economy, and, by improved methods of cultivation, on scientific principles, he increased the produce of an experimental farm nearly one half. In 1791 he was invited by the Constituent Assembly to digest a plan for simplifying the collection of taxes: the excellent memoir which he produced on this subject was printed under the title of ‘The Territorial Riches of France.’ He was likewise appointed a Commissioner of the National Treasury, in which he effected some beneficial reforms.

During the terrors of Robespierre’s tyranny, Lavoisier remarked that he foresaw he should be stripped of all his property, and accordingly would prepare to enter the profession of an apothecary, by which he should be able to gain a livelihood. But the ignorant and brutal ruffians who were then in power had already condemned him to the scaffold, on which he was executed, May 8, 1794, for the pretended crime of having adulterated snuff with ingredients destructive to the health of the citizens! On being seized, he entreated at least to be allowed time to finish some experiments in which he was engaged; but the reply of Coffinhall, the president of the gang who condemned him, was characteristic of the savage ignorance of those monsters in human form:—“The Republic does not want savans or chemists, and the course of justice cannot be suspended.”

Lavoisier in person was tall and graceful, and of lively manners and appearance. He was mild, sociable, and obliging; and in his habits unaffectedly plain and simple. He was liberal in pecuniary assistance to those in need of it; and his hatred of all ostentation in doing good probably concealed greatly the real amount of his beneficence. He married, in 1771, Marie-Anni-Pierrette Paulze, a lady of great talents and accomplishments, who after his death became the wife of Count Rumford.

SYDENHAM.

The celebrated physician, Thomas Sydenham, in many respects the most eminent that England has produced, was born in the year 1624, at Wynford-Eagle, in Dorsetshire, where his father, William Sydenham, enjoyed a considerable estate. The mansion in which he was born is now converted into a farm-house, and stands on the property of Lord Wynford.

In the year 1642, when eighteen, he was admitted as a commoner at Magdalen-Hall, Oxford; but quitted it in the same year, when that city became the head quarters of the royal army, after the battle of Edge-hill. He was probably induced to take this step by reasons of a political nature; for we find that his family were active adherents of the opposite party. Indeed he is said, though on doubtful authority, to have held a commission himself under the Parliament during his absence from Oxford; and his elder brother, William, is known to have attained considerable rank in the republican army, and held important commands under the Protectorate.

The political bias of his family is not without interest, as affording a probable explanation of some circumstances in his life which would otherwise be rather unaccountable,—such as the fact, that though he reached the first eminence as a practising physician, he was never employed at court, and was slighted by the college, who invested him with none of their honours, nor even advanced him to the fellowship, though a licentiate of their body, and qualified by the requisite University education.

When Oxford was surrendered to the Parliament, Sydenham determined to resume his academical studies; and passing through London

Engraved by E. Scriven.
SYDENHAM.
From the Picture in the Hall of All Souls College, Oxford.
Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

on his way, he met accidentally with Dr. Thomas Coxe, a physician of some repute at that time, who was attending his brother. The choice of a profession became the subject of a conversation between them, which determined him in favour of medicine; for in a letter addressed to Dr. Mapletoft, thirty years after this time, which forms the preface to one of his writings, he refers with much warmth to this conversation as the origin of his professional zeal, and, consequently, of whatever useful advances he had made in medicine. Thus his success, both in the practice and reformation of his art, may show the advantage of waiting till the faculties are fully matured, before they are exercised in a study which requires independence as well as vigour in thinking: for the circumstances of his family being sufficiently affluent to place him above the necessity of choosing a profession early, he had not turned his attention to physic till an age at which the medical education is generally almost completed. We are not, however, to believe in the justice of an accusation brought against him, that he had never studied his profession till he began to practise it; for though we do not know what particular line of study he pursued on his return to Oxford, it is clear from many passages in his works that he had studied the writings of the ancient physicians with no common care; and as his own show no defect of acquaintance with whatever real information had been collected before his time, we may reasonably conclude that this contemporary censure was mistaken or malicious. He certainly held the opinions of his modern predecessors in very little respect, for he does not often mention them, even for the purpose of confutation; and in the letter to Dr. Mapletoft already referred to, he says that he had found the best, and, in fact, the only safe guide, through the various perplexities he had met with in his practice, to be the method of actual observation and experiment recommended by Lord Bacon. This sentiment is often repeated in his works; but it surely does not countenance the idea that he had begun to practise without endeavouring to make what preparation he could, or would have had others follow such an example; for the charge against him goes to this length. The notion might arise from a foolish anecdote related by his admirer, Sir Richard Blackmore, of his having recommended Don Quixote as the best introduction he knew to the practice of medicine, which Sydenham must have intended as a jest, or perhaps as a sarcasm on the narrator himself.

At Oxford he formed a close friendship with John Locke, better known afterwards as a philosopher than as a physician. Their intimacy, which lasted to the end of Sydenham’s life, probably contributed not a little to give form to the disgust which he soon displayed at the unsatisfactory and fluctuating state of medical opinion, and to the zeal with which he sought to establish it on surer grounds; for he appeals, as to the highest authority, in confirmation of some of his new views on the treatment of fever, to the approval of his illustrious friend, who even paid him the compliment of prefixing a eulogy in indifferent Latin verse to the treatise in which these views are developed.

On the 14th of April, 1648, he took the degree of bachelor of medicine, being then twenty-four years old; and in the same year obtained a fellowship at All Souls College, by the interest of a relation. The degree of doctor he subsequently took at Cambridge, where, being among those who thought with him in politics, he probably found himself more at his ease. After a visit of some length at Montpellier, then considered the best practical school of medicine on the continent, he settled in Westminster, and soon after married.

His progress to eminence in his profession must have been unusually rapid, which might be owing, in some measure, to the call for men of good capacity to the more stirring scenes of civil strife; for at thirty-six he had succeeded in establishing a first-rate reputation, which he continued to sustain in spite of much hostility and ill-health for upwards of twenty years.

He witnessed the breaking out of the plague in 1665, but when it reached the house adjoining his own, he was induced to remove with his family some miles out of town. Of this desertion of his post, however, he seems to have repented; for he afterwards returned, and occupied himself diligently in visiting the victims of that devastating malady, and has left a short but interesting account of his opinions respecting it, and of the treatment he adopted; for the comparative success of which, he appeals to the physicians who had witnessed or followed his practice.

At the age of 25, though a man of remarkably temperate and regular habits, he became afflicted with gout and stone, from which he suffered extreme torment with great resignation and patience for the rest of his life. Of course he did not neglect the opportunity of studying those diseases in his own person, and recording the result of his observations. His account of gout, especially, is considered to be a most accurate and able history of that disease.

He died, leaving a family, at his house in Pall-Mall, on the 29th of December, 1689, in the 66th year of his age, and was buried in the parish church of St. James, Westminster, where, in 1810, a tablet was erected to his memory by the College of Physicians, who became, as a body, tardily but fully convinced of his extraordinary merit and eminent claims to the gratitude and respect of his profession.

He is said to have been a man of the most retiring and unobtrusive disposition, and the utmost placidity of temper. In a biographical sketch by Dr. Samuel Johnson, prefixed to an English edition of his works by Swan, in 1742, it is remarked, that if he could not teach us in his writings how to cure the painful disorders from which he suffered, he has taught us by his example the nobler art to bear them with serenity. Nor was he less patient of mental than of bodily inflictions; for though he was the object of much asperity among the physicians of his time, he made no reprisals upon the reputations of those who slandered him: though he often speaks of their bitterness, he never even mentions their names,—a forbearance to which, as his biographer pungently remarks, they are indebted for their escape from a discreditable immortality. His writings breathe throughout a spirit of warm piety, candour, and benevolence: he is said to have been extremely generous in his dealings with his patients; for which, with other reasons, his practice though large was not very gainful, and he did not leave much wealth behind him. He never was sought after by the great, like his successor and disciple Radcliffe; and had none of the talents by which that singular man was able to push his fortune and establish a kind of professional despotism. Yet, whatever medical skill the latter evinced seems to have been derived from Sydenham, whose doctrines and treatment he contrived to bring into a much more early and general repute in England than they would probably have otherwise obtained. Each had his reward: the one will be long remembered as the founder of a magnificent library; the other can never be forgotten as the author of modern medicine.

The bent of Sydenham’s mind was eminently practical; he thought that the business of a physician is to acquire an accurate knowledge of the causes and symptoms of diseases, and the effects of different remedies upon them, that if he cannot prevent them, he may at least recognise them with certainty, and apply with promptitude the means most likely to cure them: with Hippocrates and the ancient empirical physicians, whose tenets he professed to follow, he condemned all curious speculations upon the intimate nature of disease, as incapable of proof, and therefore always useless, and often hurtful; and maintained that the only trustworthy source of opinion in medicine is experience resulting from observations frequently repeated, and experiments cautiously varied; and that no theories worth attention can be framed until the recorded experience of many observers, under many different circumstances, and even through successive ages, shall be embodied into one general system; and he boldly declared his belief that every acute disease might then be cured. An instance, which unfortunately as yet stands alone in support of this rather sanguine expectation, may be taken from the history of small-pox. The observation of its contagious nature led to the general practice of inoculation, and this to the immortal discovery of Jenner, by which a disease but yesterday the scourge of the earth has been almost extinguished. It is remarkable that Sydenham, who first pointed out the important difference between its distinct and confluent forms,—who so materially improved the treatment by changing it from stifling to cooling,—and who studied and has described it with a laborious accuracy hardly paralleled in the history of medicine,—was not aware of this, to us, its most striking characteristic of contagion. A person conversant with such subjects will feel no surprise at this: to the general reader it may be a sufficient explanation, that it lies dormant for ten days; and that as it can only be taken once, and was always prevalent in London, the number of persons susceptible at any given time, and in obvious communication with each other, were comparatively few: so that opportunities were not so likely to arise as might be imagined of tracing its progress in single families or neighbourhoods from one source of contagion.

Sydenham is justly celebrated for the happiness of his descriptions, and his skilful application of simple methods of cure, which are as effectual as they were novel in that age when a medical prescription sometimes contained a hundred different substances; but he has merit of a higher kind, as a discoverer of general laws. Among others, he was the first to notice that there is a uniformity in the fevers prevailing at any one time, which is subject to periodical changes; and that other acute diseases often partake largely of the same general character, and sometimes even merge in it altogether, as the plague is said to have swallowed up all other diseases. This, which he ascribed to some peculiar state of the atmosphere, he called its epidemic constitution; and to be aware of its vicissitudes must of course be very important to the physician as a guide to practice. The value of these laws, which Sydenham deduced from a multitude of observations, has been attested by almost every medical writer since his time.

His works have been repeatedly printed in the original Latin, as well as in English and the continental languages. The first was published after he had been sixteen years in practice; the last he edited himself, is dated three years before his death; and an elegant compendium of his experience was published posthumously by his son. They all appear to have been extorted by the importunity of his friends or the misrepresentations of his enemies. It is said that they were composed in English, and translated into Latin by his friends Mapletoft and Havers: there is, however, little reason for attaching credit to this report, as we are assured, on the authority of Sir Hans Sloane, who knew him well, that Sydenham was an excellent classical scholar, and perfectly capable of expressing himself elegantly in Latin. They are most carefully written and clearly expressed, and bear marks of the utmost truth and impartiality in the narration of facts, and judgment in arranging them. They are not voluminous, as he studiously refrained from overloading them with trivial matter, and from entering into the detail of a greater number of cases than might be sufficient to illustrate his method of practice. His object was to confine himself to the results of his own observation: to this he pretty strictly adhered, so that little space is occupied in his writings by quotations or criticism. It must be admitted that he occasionally lapses into theoretical discussion, in violation of his own principles; but as he seldom or never permitted his fancy to divert him from what was practically useful, he may be pardoned, if in that age of speculation he could not entirely resist the seduction. A graver charge against him is, that he overlooked or undervalued the immense body of information to be obtained from examining the effects of diseased actions after death, and devoted himself too exclusively to the study of the symptoms during life, and the effect of remedies upon them. It is hardly a sufficient justification of a man of so much independence of spirit to reply, that such examinations were opposed by the prejudices of the age in which he lived. Others have overcome the same obstacles, and with them many of those difficulties which perplexed and misled even the mind of Sydenham. He had equal or greater difficulties to contend against in the deep-rooted absurdities of the chemical and mechanical schools, which in the early part of his life held an almost equally divided sway in medicine: the former originated with Paracelsus and his disciples, and had the advantage of a longer prescription; and the latter had received a fresh accession of strength from the recent discoveries of Harvey: both, however, gave way before his energetic appeal to fact and experience. Scarcely less credit is due to him for his successful opposition to the popular superstition in favour of a host of futile remedies, which are now happily consigned to oblivion with the family receipt books and herbals in which their virtues were paraded, than for his victory over false principles and dangerous rules of practice.

On the whole, it may be safely advanced that medicine, as a practical science, owes more to the closely-printed octavo, in which the results of his toilsome exertions are comprised, than to any other single source of information.

Engraved by C. E. Wagstaff.
LORD CLARENDON.
From the Picture in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

CLARENDON.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, the third son of Henry Hyde, of Dinton, Esquire, a younger branch of an ancient family long established in Cheshire, was born at Dinton, near Salisbury, February 18, 1609. The most valuable part of his early education he received from his father, who was an excellent scholar: from his residence at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he entered in 1622, and took his bachelor’s degree in 1625, according to his own account he obtained little benefit. In February 1627, he was entered at the Middle Temple. At the age of twenty-one, he married his first wife, who died within six months of their union. After the lapse of three years he was again married, to the daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, Master of Requests to the King, by whom he left a numerous family. He was called to the bar in Michaelmas term, 1633. To the study of law he entertained in the first instance a strong dislike, and applied himself chiefly to history and general literature. But from the time of his second marriage he devoted himself steadily to the pursuit of his profession, in which he early acquired considerable practice and reputation. His business was, however, more frequent in the Court of Requests, in the Star Chamber, than in the courts of common law, and his name rarely appears in the reports of that period.

Soon after he was called to the bar, Mr. Hyde was concerned in a transaction of considerable moment, which produced important consequences in his future life, by introducing him to the favourable notice of Archbishop Laud. It arose out of certain Custom-House regulations, by which the London merchants found themselves aggrieved. The leading men among them applied to Mr. Hyde, who, on finding all remonstrances with the Lord Treasurer unavailing, advised them to state their grievances in a petition to the King, which he drew for them. On the death of the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Portland, the affairs of the Treasury were placed under the management of several commissioners, of whom Laud was one. The Archbishop soon found occasion to investigate the complaint of the merchants; and in consequence he sent for, and held several interviews with, Mr. Hyde: to whom he became a valuable and efficient patron, noticing him particularly when he appeared as counsel in the Star Chamber, and consulting and employing him on many public occasions.

Laud’s favour introduced Mr. Hyde to the Lord Keeper Coventry, the Earl of Manchester, then Lord Privy Seal, and other political and legal characters of high rank, of the court party. With the leaders of the popular, or country party also he was upon friendly terms, “having,” as he says, “that rare felicity, that even they who did not love many of those upon whom he most depended, were yet very well pleased with him and with his company.”

Upon the summoning of what was called the Short Parliament, which met April 3, 1640, Mr. Hyde was elected member for Wootton-Basset, and for Shaftesbury. He chose to take his seat for the former place. His first and only speech during the session was in the celebrated debate on the subject of grievances, introduced by a motion of Mr. Pym; on which occasion Mr. Hyde directed the attention of the house to the enormous abuses of the Earl Marshal’s Court. Whitelocke says that “he gained much credit by his conduct in this business.” In the warm debate which took place in the House of Commons upon the question of a supply, it was hinted by members of the house connected with the court, that Charles, upon hearing of their proceedings, would probably dissolve the parliament in displeasure. Mr. Hyde perceived the injurious tendency of such a measure, and immediately went from the house to Archbishop Laud, to entreat him to dissuade the King from so injudicious a course. The Archbishop heard him as usual with patience, but refused to interfere: and the Parliament was dissolved in less than three weeks after its first meeting.

The necessities of the King compelled him to call the Long Parliament in the following November, of which Mr. Hyde was also a member. The elections having in general favoured the popular party, the temper of this parliament was at its commencement decidedly more opposed to the court than the last. At first, Mr. Hyde, whose familiarity with Laud was well known, was an object of jealousy and dislike. His conduct as chairman of the committee appointed to consider the abuses of the Earl Marshal’s Court, which led to the total abolition of that unauthorized jurisdiction, and his avowed disapprobation of several obnoxious branches of the prerogative, restored him in some degree to the good opinion of the house, while his influence with the moderate party, both in the court and the parliament, daily increased. Having given up his professional practice since the beginning of the parliament, he was much employed in the ordinary business of the house. He was chairman of the committee appointed to inquire into the legality and expediency of the courts of the President and Council of the North, commonly called the Courts of York; and in April, 1641, he was commissioned to communicate to the House of Lords the resolutions of the Commons against those courts. The performance of this duty he accompanied by a speech, in which he explained to the Lords, with much clearness and precision, the origin and nature of this obnoxious jurisdiction, and which he says in his History, “met with good approbation in both houses.” In July following he was chairman of the committee for inquiring into the conduct of the judges in the case of ship-money; and the management of the impeachment of the Lord Chief Baron Davenport, Baron Weston, and Baron Trevor, before the Lords, was afterwards entrusted to him. Upon this occasion, he delivered an excellent speech, exhibiting, in eloquent language, the destructive effects of the corruption of the judges upon the liberty of the subject and the security of property. During the same year, he appears from the Commons’ journals to have been usually named on the most important committees both of a public and private nature.

The course adopted by Mr. Hyde with reference to the Earl of Strafford’s prosecution cannot be precisely ascertained. That he was employed in arranging the preliminary steps for the impeachment, appears from the journals; but in his History he does not explicitly declare what part he took upon the introduction of the bill of attainder. Some of his biographers state that he warmly opposed it; but no evidence is given in support of the assertion; and it is quite clear that neither his name, nor that of Lord Falkland, his political and personal friend, appear amongst those which were posted as “Straffordians, Betrayers of their Country,” for having voted against the measure. Though he cordially acquiesced in many of the measures at this time introduced by the popular leaders for the redress of grievances, his political opinions, as well as his ultimate views and intentions, differed widely from those of the predominant party. He strenuously opposed a bill for depriving the bishops of their seats in parliament, which passed the House of Commons, though it was rejected in the House of Lords by a great majority. In no degree discouraged by this discomfiture, the leaders of the Puritan party soon afterwards introduced a measure for the total abolition of episcopacy, known by the title of ‘The Root and Branch Bill,’ which was read a first time and committed. Mr. Hyde was appointed chairman of the committee, by common consent of both parties; the one wishing to get rid of his opposition in the committee, the other to secure a chairman of their own views. The result proved the latter party to be in the right; for Hyde contrived so to baffle the promoters of the measure, that they at last thought proper to withdraw it, Sir Arthur Haselrig declaring in the house, that “he would never hereafter put an enemy into the chair.” His conduct respecting this measure was warmly approved by the King; who before he went to Scotland in 1641, sent for Mr. Hyde, to express how much he was beholden to him for his services, “for which he thought fit to give him his own thanks, and to assure him that he would remember it to his advantage.”

Before the King left Whitehall, in consequence of the tumults occasioned by his indiscretion in demanding the Five Members, he charged Mr. Hyde, in conjunction with Lord Falkland and Sir John Colepeper, to consult constantly together upon the state of affairs in his absence, and to give him on every occasion their unreserved advice, without which he declared solemnly that he would take no step in the parliament. Though much discouraged by the previous conduct of the King respecting the Five Members, which he had adopted without consulting them, and entirely against their judgment, they undertook and faithfully executed the charge imposed upon them; and after the King had left London, they met every night at Mr. Hyde’s house in Westminster, to communicate to each other their several intelligences and observations, and to make such arrangements as they thought best adapted to stay the falling fortunes of the royal cause.

Mr. Hyde’s good understanding with the leaders of the popular party had rapidly declined, since his opposition to the proposed measure for ejecting the bishops from the House of Lords; and after his conduct in the committee for abolishing episcopacy he was regarded as a declared enemy, and his nightly consultations with Falkland and Colepeper were watched with the utmost jealousy. Though his situation at this time was one of considerable danger, he remained at his post after the King’s departure to York, and constantly took his seat in the House of Commons. About the latter end of April, 1642, Mr. Hyde received a letter from the King, requiring him immediately to repair to him at York; with which requisition he complied in the course of the next month, having first rendered a signal service to the royal cause by persuading the Lord Keeper Littleton to send the Great Seal and also to go himself to the King. In consequence of this step the House of Commons passed a resolution, in August, 1642, disabling him from sitting again in that parliament; and their indignation was raised to such a degree, that Mr. Hyde was one of the few persons who were excepted from the pardon which the Earl of Essex was afterwards instructed to offer to those who might be induced to leave the King and submit to the parliament. On joining the King at York, Mr. Hyde continued to be one of his most confidential advisers, and was soon afterwards knighted and made Chancellor of the Exchequer. In this capacity he negotiated with the parliamentary commissioners sent to Oxford in 1643; and in 1645 he acted as one of the King’s commissioners at the treaty of Uxbridge. After the breaking off of that treaty it was thought expedient to send the Prince of Wales into the west of England, both to secure his person from the dangers with which his father was environed, and to give encouragement to the Royalists in that part of the country. Sir Edward Hyde accompanied him as one of his council. The parliamentary successes in the west compelled the Prince to migrate, first to Scilly, thence to Jersey, from which place he departed into France in July, 1646. Hyde remained in Jersey for the space of two years, devoting himself wholly to his History of the Rebellion, which he had commenced in the Scilly Islands, and of which he completed the four first books at that time. While engaged in this manner, he received several letters from the King, expressive of his approbation of his undertaking, and supplying him with a particular relation of the occurrences which had taken place from the departure of the Prince until the period of his joining the Scotch army.

In May, 1648, Hyde received the King’s commands to join the Prince of Wales at Paris. On the way thither, he met Lord Cottington and others at Rouen, where he learned that the Prince was gone to Holland, and was ordered to follow him. After many difficulties and dangers, Cottington and Hyde met their young master at the Hague in the month of August, and were soon afterwards joined by several other members of the King’s council.

On the announcement of the execution of his father, Charles despatched Sir Edward Hyde and Lord Cottington as his ambassadors to Spain. After a fruitless negotiation of fifteen months, they received a message from court shortly after the arrival of the news of Cromwell’s victory at Dunbar, desiring them to quit the Spanish dominions. Hyde then repaired to Antwerp, where he resided with his wife and family, until, at the end of 1651, he was summoned to Paris, to meet Charles II., after his memorable escape from the battle of Worcester. He resided at Paris with the exiled court for nearly three years, and during this period enjoyed the unlimited confidence of his master, who left the arduous and difficult task of corresponding and negotiating with the English royalists entirely to his management. At this period the exiled royalists were frequently reduced to great pecuniary distress. The miserable dissensions and petty jealousies which prevailed among them are fully described in the History of the Rebellion. At length Charles, wearied and disgusted by the intrigues and broils which perpetually disturbed his council, while subject to the interference of the Queen Mother, determined to leave Paris; and accordingly he quitted that city in June, 1654, and went to reside at Cologne, Sir Edward Hyde and the rest of his court still following his humble fortunes. Upon the execution of the treaty with Spain, Charles removed from Cologne to Bruges in 1657, and in the course of that year bestowed upon Sir Edward Hyde the then empty dignity of Lord High Chancellor of England. Soon after this event the prospects of the Royalists began to brighten. The government of Cromwell had been for some time growing infirm, in consequence of domestic dissensions, the exhausted state of the revenue, and the distrust entertained towards the Protector, who had successively deceived and disappointed all parties. These seeds of discord were sedulously cultivated by the English royalists; and at last the death of that extraordinary man led to a series of events which introduced the restoration of Charles II.

At the Restoration Sir Edward Hyde was continued as Lord Chancellor; and notwithstanding the constant hostility of the Queen Mother and her faction at court, he maintained for some time a paramount influence with the King, who treated him with the confidence and friendship which his great industry and talents for business, and his faithful attachment to himself and his father so well deserved. In November, 1660, he was raised to the peerage, by the title of Baron Hyde of Hindon in the county of Wilts, and in the spring of the following year he was created Viscount Cornbury and Earl of Clarendon. He was also about this time elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Among the tribes of expectant cavaliers who now flocked to the court of the restored monarch, all impatient to obtain something in recompense for their alleged services and sufferings in the royal cause, these honours and distinctions bestowed upon the Earl of Clarendon raised a storm of envy and malice which eventually caused his ruin. The King’s easiness of access, and, as Lord Clarendon calls it, that “imbecillitas frontis, which kept him from denying,” together with the moral cowardice which induced him to escape from the most troublesome importunities, by sending petitioners to the Chancellor for their answers, necessarily increased the dislike with which he was regarded. The discovery of the marriage of his daughter to the Duke of York, afterwards James II., though it probably took place without the knowledge of the Chancellor, gave ample opportunity to the malice of his enemies. The King, however, behaved on this occasion in a manner which did him credit. He not only required the Duke to acknowledge his wife, on being certified that the ceremony had been duly performed, but refused with passion the proffered resignation of the Chancellor, who offered to reside in future beyond seas, and conjured him “never more to think of those unreasonable things, but to attend and prosecute his business with his usual alacrity, since his kindness should never fail him.”

The first open act of hostility against Lord Clarendon was undertaken by the Earl of Bristol, who, in 1663, exhibited articles of high treason and other misdemeanors against him in the House of Lords. These articles, which contained a great variety of vague and inconsistent charges, were forwarded by the House of Lords to the King, who informed them, that “he found several matters of fact charged, which upon his own certain knowledge were untrue; and that the articles contained many scandalous reflections upon himself and his family, which he looked upon as libels against his person and government.” Upon a reference by the House of Lords to the judges, they reported that “the whole charge did not amount to treason though it were all true;” and upon this the proceedings were abandoned.

But it was at last the fate of Lord Clarendon to experience the proverbial ingratitude of princes. From the period of the Restoration a powerful union of discontented parties had gradually combined against him. All hated him—the old cavaliers, because they thought he neglected their just claims upon the bounty of the King; the papists and the dissenters, because they found him an uncompromising opponent of all concessions to those whom he regarded as enemies of the established church; the licentious adherents of an unprincipled court, because his honest endeavours to withdraw the King from his levity and profligacy to serious considerations, thwarted their intentions and interrupted their pleasures. Their united efforts erased from Charles’s mind the recollection of services of no common value, and caused him to abandon his best and most faithful counsellor, without having even the appearance of a reason for his conduct, beyond what he called “the Chancellor’s intolerable temper.”

The Great Seal was taken from Lord Clarendon in August, 1667; and in the month of November following, after an angry debate, he was impeached by the Commons, in general terms, of high treason and other crimes and misdemeanors; but the Lords, upon the impeachment being carried up, refused to commit him, or to sequester him from parliament, on the ground of the generality of the charge. Before the formal articles of impeachment were prepared, Lord Clarendon left England, in consequence of repeated messages from the King advising him to take that course, having previously addressed to the Lords a vindication of his conduct. Immediately after his departure a bill was introduced into the House of Lords, and rapidly passed, by which he was condemned to perpetual banishment, and declared to be for ever incapable of bearing any public office or employment in England.

The charges made against Lord Clarendon at this time were scarcely less multifarious and inconsistent than those which were instituted by Lord Bristol a few years before. He was accused of designing to govern by a standing army,—of accusing the King of popery,—of receiving bribes for patents,—of selling offices,—of acquiring a greater estate than he could lawfully have gained in a short time,—of advising the sale of Dunkirk to the French,—of causing Quo Warrantos to be issued against corporations in order that he might receive fines on renewals of charters, and many other particulars of alleged corruption. From most of these accusations Lord Clarendon vindicated himself in an address delivered to the House of Lords upon his departure; but during his retirement at Montpellier, he prepared, and transmitted to his children in England a fuller apology, in which he answered each article of the charges objected to him by the Commons.

After some hesitation, Lord Clarendon determined to reside at Montpellier, where he arrived in July, 1668. He was treated with much courtesy and respect by the governor of the city, as well as the French and English inhabitants of all ranks. His first task was to write the vindication of his conduct above-mentioned. During his retirement he made himself master of French and Italian, and read the works of the most eminent writers in both those languages. He also completed his History of the Rebellion, and wrote an answer to Hobbes’s Leviathan, an Historical Discourse on Papal Jurisdiction, a volume of Essays, divine, moral, and political, and also those fragments of his Life, which were first published by the University of Oxford in 1759. Engaged in these pursuits he passed nearly three years at Montpellier in great tranquillity and cheerfulness. He left that city in 1672, and went first to Moulins, then to Rouen, where he died, December 9, 1673. His remains were brought to England and interred in Westminster Abbey.

The political conduct of Lord Clarendon, though variously described by writers of opposite parties, appears to have been generally as consistent and upright as can reasonably be expected from men of warm tempers, deeply interested in the most violent civil dissensions. His earliest impressions were decidedly in favour of the popular party; and even after he had become familiar with Archbishop Laud, and was favourably noticed by Charles I., he strenuously supported that party in the removal of actual grievances, and resisted with zeal and energy the encroachments of prerogative. That he afterwards refused to join in the wild and intemperate actions committed by the Parliament, and supported the royal cause against the continually increasing demands of those with whom he had previously acted, is not to be ascribed to inconsistency in his conduct, but to the development of designs and measures at all times repugnant to his principles. His advice to Charles I. and to Laud was always temperate and wise, and was given with boldness and candour. After the Restoration, in the height of his power and influence, he displayed the same moderation in his opinions and conduct, and acted upon the same principles of dislike to fundamental changes, which had influenced him as a member of the Long Parliament. It has been imputed to Lord Clarendon that he neglected to exert himself for the relief of those unfortunate cavaliers whose attachment to the King had involved them in penury and ruin. It is difficult to ascertain the exact truth of this charge; but, whether true or false, such an accusation was sure to be made in a case where the applicants for compensation were numerous, and the means of satisfying them inconsiderable.

In the discharge of the legal functions of his office of Lord Chancellor, as presiding in the Court of Chancery, he was by no means distinguished; he promoted some reforms in the practice of his court, and continued the judicious improvements effected during the Commonwealth; but Evelyn says “he was no considerable lawyer,” and the circumstance that he never decided a case without requiring the presence of two judges is, if true, a sufficient acknowledgment of his judicial incompetency.

For his judicial appointments Lord Clarendon is entitled to unqualified praise. Hale, Bridgeman, and other judges of the highest eminence for learning and independence, were appointed by him immediately after the Restoration, and contributed in a great degree to give stability and moral strength to the new government, by the confidence which their characters inspired in the due administration of the law.

As an historian Lord Clarendon was unquestionably careless and inexact to a surprising degree, which may in some measure be excused by the necessity of writing very much from recollection; and he was a perpetual advocate and partisan of the Royal cause, though by no means of most of its supporters. But though his narration constantly betrays the bias of party, and cannot therefore be safely relied upon for our historical conclusions, his misrepresentations arise from the avowed partiality and intense concern he feels for the cause he is advocating, and not from any design to suppress or distort facts. His style is luxuriant and undisciplined, and his expression in the narrative parts of his history is diffuse and inaccurate; but his fervent loyalty and the warmth of his attachment to his political friends have infused a richness of eloquence into his delineations of character, which has perhaps never been surpassed in any language.

Engraved by J. Posselwhite.
SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.
From a Picture by himself in his Majesty’s Collection.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

SIR J. REYNOLDS.

“Sir Joshua Reynolds,” says Burke, “was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country.” Without staying to inquire how far the literal truth of this assertion may be affected by the priority in date of Wilson and Hogarth, not to mention their less illustrious predecessors, it may safely be affirmed, not only that Reynolds was the founder of the English school, but that the most valuable qualities in the art of painting were almost lost sight of throughout Europe when he began his career. In Holland, the rich manner of Rembrandt, feebly sustained by his imitators, had been succeeded by no less opposite a style than that of Vanderwerf; the still more laboured finish of Denner, a native of Hamburgh, followed; while the minute perfection which was in vogue found a more legitimate application in the flower-pieces of Van Huysum. Reynolds was twenty-four years old at the decease of Denner, who had twice visited London, and had been much employed there. The French school about the middle of the last century took its tone from Boucher, a name now almost forgotten, and if remembered, synonymous with the extreme of affectation; he was principal painter to Louis XV. The native country of Claude and Poussin was indeed more illustrious during this time in the department of landscape, as Vernet produced his views of sea-ports about the period alluded to; but this example, however respectable, was itself indicative of a declining taste, and the style of view-painting in the hands of the foreign artists who practised it in Italy, with the Prussian Hackert at their head, had the effect of extinguishing for a time all invention in landscape. The academy at Berlin was under the direction of a Frenchman; Oeser was the greatest name at Leipzic and Dresden; and the south of Germany still imported imitations of the latest Italian styles in fashion. The state of the arts in Spain may be judged of by the fact, that when, in 1761, Mengs, who was himself a native of Germany, repaired to Madrid in the service of Charles III., the chief painters established there were a Venetian and a Neapolitan, Tiepolo and Corrado Giaquinto. The Venetian school, sometimes entirely losing its original character, seemed at least to maintain a consistent degeneracy in the styles of Sebastian Ricci and the above-named Giambattista Tiepolo, both weak and mannered imitators of Paul Veronese, but still preserving, at least the latter, some brilliancy of colour and pleasing execution. With Tiepolo the characteristic merits of the school seem however to have ceased altogether: towards the latter part of the century, the chief employment of the Venetian painters was the restoration of old pictures.[^[2]] A particular school was established in 1778 for this purpose, and a description of the extraordinary labours of the artists is preserved in the thirty-eighth volume of Goëthe’s works. In Rome, the talents of Maratta and Sacchi, and “the great but abused powers of Pietro da Cortona,” had been succeeded by feebler efforts, descending or fluctuating through the styles of Cignani, Trevisani, and others, till the time of Sebastian Conca, and Pompeo Battoni. The last-named was approaching the zenith of his short-lived reputation, and almost without a rival (for Mengs was as yet young, and Conca already aged), when Reynolds visited Rome.

[2]. It is worthy of remark that about the same time the sculptors in Rome were as exclusively employed in restoring antique statues.

Laborious detail on the one hand, and empty facility on the other, formed the distinguishing characteristics of these different schools; but however opposite in execution, mind was alike wanting in both. Denner may be considered the representative of the microscopic style; a style, if it deserves the name, which he applied even to heads the size of life; and as mere finish never was, and probably never will be carried to a more absurd length, his name, though comparatively obscure, marks an epoch in the art. The same scrupulous minuteness obtained about the same time in landscape; among the view-painters, Hendrick Van Lint, surnamed Studio, may be named as the most remarkable of his class. Reynolds alludes to him in one of his discourses, as noted, when he knew him in Rome, for copying every leaf of a tree. The opposite style, which aimed at quantity and rapidity, was derived from the expert painters of galleries and ceilings, called “Machinisti,” and more immediately from Luca Giordano. Facility and despatch, at the expense of every solid quality of art, were the characteristics of the school which was represented in the earlier part of Reynolds’s career, principally by Sebastian Conca in Italy, and by Corrado Giaquinto in Spain.

The changes which took place in this state of things, towards the latter part of the century, may be traced partly to the renewed appreciation of the antique statues (a taste which, however beneficial to sculpture, had an unfortunate influence on the sister art), and subsequently to political circumstances. The fluctuations of taste, however deliberately estimated by retrospective criticism, are indeed generally the result of accident, and depend on causes but seldom derived from a just definition of the nature and object of art. It appears, however, that Reynolds, alone as he was, the founder rather than the follower of a school, enjoyed the rare privilege of making the taste of his time instead of being made by it; and although it would be absurd to suppose that he could be independent of the accidents with which he was brought in contact, it will not appear, upon a candid inquiry, that this great artist was in any respect directly influenced by the practice of his age.

Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton, near Plymouth, in Devonshire, July 16, 1723; he was the son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, who taught the grammar school of Plympton. The young artist’s fondness for drawing manifested itself early, and at eight years of age he had become so well acquainted with the “Jesuits’ Perspective,” as to apply its principles with some effect in a drawing of his father’s school, a building elevated on stone pillars. Among other books connected with art to which he had access, Richardson’s ‘Treatise on Painting’ had a powerful effect in exciting his ambition. The earliest known picture he attempted is a portrait of the Rev. Thomas Smart, who was the vicar of Maker, the parish in which Mount Edgecumbe is situated. Reynolds, then a schoolboy about twelve years of age, sketched the portrait of the vicar at church, and afterwards copied it on canvass. This picture is now in the possession of John Boger, Esq., of East Stonehouse near Plymouth. The taste of the young painter becoming every day more decided, his father, urged by the advice of some friends, placed him at the age of seventeen as a pupil with Hudson, who had at that time the chief business in portrait painting, although a very indifferent artist. In 1743 Reynolds returned to Devonshire, in consequence of a disagreement with his master, and set up as a portrait painter in the town of Plymouth Dock, since called Devonport. He here painted various portraits, chiefly of naval officers. One of these works, containing the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Eliot and family, is in the possession of the Earl of St. Germains. The composition of this picture, the artist’s first attempt at a group, approaches the pyramidal form, and Reynolds, after contemplating it when finished, observed, ‘I see I must have read something about a pyramid, for there it is.’ Six other pictures of the artist are preserved in the same collection, at Port Eliot in Cornwall. An admirable picture of a boy reading by a reflected light was also executed about this time. Many interesting works of Reynolds, some of them belonging to his earlier practice, are preserved in the immediate neighbourhood of Plymouth, in the collections of the Earl of Morley, Mr. Pole Carew of Antony, Mr. Rosdew of Beechwood, Mr. Lane of Coffleet, and others. The artist’s early works, although sometimes carelessly drawn, are distinguished by breadth of colour, by freedom of handling, and not unfrequently by great truth of expression: in short, he seems to have contracted none of the defects of Hudson, except, according to some of his biographers, a certain stiffness and sameness in the attitudes of his portraits; defects which he afterwards exchanged for such grace, spirit, and, above all, endless variety, that it was said “his inventions will be the future grammar of portrait painters.” The earliest portrait he painted of himself is in the collection of Mr. Gwatkin of Plymouth, who married a niece of Reynolds: the same gentleman also possesses the last portrait of the artist by himself, together with many other interesting specimens of his pencil. In 1747 Reynolds repaired again to London, and took lodgings in St. Martin’s Lane, then and long afterwards the favourite residence of artists. In 1749 he sailed to the Mediterranean, by the invitation, and in the company of Captain (afterwards Lord) Keppel. Reynolds spent two months in Minorca, where he painted several portraits of military and naval officers, and proceeded thence, by way of Leghorn, to Rome.

He was fully alive to the sources of inspiration which this city of the arts contained. In the midst of his enthusiasm, however, he was secretly humiliated by discovering in himself an absence of all relish for the grand works of Raffaelle in the Vatican. Richardson had inspired him with the most exalted admiration of Raffaelle; and whatever may be supposed, Reynolds could not be entirely unacquainted with the subjects and designs of the works alluded to. Indeed, in some notes of his own that have been preserved, he only confesses a feeling of disappointment, and afterwards says, “In justice to myself, however, I must add, that though disappointed and mortified at not finding myself enraptured with the works of this great master, I did not for a moment conceive or suppose that the name of Raffaelle, and these admirable paintings in particular, owed their reputation to the ignorance and prejudice of mankind: on the contrary, my not relishing them, as I was conscious I ought to have done, was one of the most humiliating circumstances that ever happened to me. I found myself in the midst of works executed upon principles with which I was unacquainted; I felt my ignorance, and stood abashed; all the indigested notions of painting which I had brought with me from England, where art was in the lowest state it had ever been in (indeed it could not be lower), were to be totally done away and eradicated from my mind.” The union of candour and docility with good sense, which the above account evinces, was the means of emancipating Reynolds from the taste or fashion of the day. Instead of enrolling himself among the scholars of Pompeo Battoni, as he was strongly recommended to do before his departure from England by his kind patron Lord Edgecumbe, he endeavoured during the practice of his art to penetrate the principles on which the great works around him, particularly those of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, were produced. His general theory will be found embodied in his writings, and if his principles sometimes appear to be pushed too far, we may perhaps attribute it to the wish to counteract certain prevailing errors among his contemporaries. It is a general notion that, considering the difference in style between the paintings of Reynolds and those of the great models he professes to admire (Michael Angelo received his more especial homage), he could not have been sincere in acknowledging so thorough a conviction of their excellence. To decide fairly on this difficult and often-discussed point, it is necessary to remember the state of the arts when Reynolds formed his style. The great vice of the age was a routine practice, seldom informed by any reference to the general nature of the art, and as little remarkable for a just discrimination of its various styles. In such a state of things it cannot excite surprise that a sagacious and unprejudiced mind, in endeavouring to retrace the leading principles of the art, should at the same time see the necessity of modifying them in their application to a particular, and in some respects a limited, department. As portrait painting, the imitation of individuals, was to be Reynolds’s chief occupation, it certainly did not occur to him that the abstract representations of Michael Angelo, or even of Raffaelle, could be fit models for him to follow, as far as execution was concerned. He saw however that these masters were probably right even in this respect, when the dignity and purity of their aim, and when subject, place, and dimensions are duly considered. His imitation of them therefore began when he endeavoured to define the end and object of the particular style of art which he himself professed; and although he soon concluded that it required a widely different treatment, he failed not to translate, if we may so say, the causes of the grandeur he admired into the language which belonged to his own department. What he considered the distinctive and desirable requisites of portrait painting to consist in, may be best learnt from his own works. In the first place, the more delicate refinements of colouring and chiaro-scuro, by no means essential in the grander and more abstract department of the art, are indispensable where the imitation is confined to a single and generally a defective person. It is thus that Rembrandt made up the sum of beauty by the fascinations of gradation and contrast, while the forms he had to deal with were often of the most ordinary description. The just imitation of the colour of flesh, the most beautiful and at the same time the most nameless hue in nature, has ever been considered the triumph of imitative art, and confers value and dignity on the work wherever it is fully accomplished. Again, it must be remembered that the domain of expression begins with the accidents of form; that it belongs to and often recommends individuality and redeems deformity; and that its vivid interest is to be sought less in the abstract personifications of Michael Angelo, far less in the higher region of beauty which the Greeks justly placed above the atmosphere of the passions, than in the varieties of accidental nature. Reynolds seized on the delicacies of expression as strictly harmonizing with the individual forms he had to copy: and, while thus adding a charm to his class of art, he became at the same time the abler portrait painter; for the character and expression of the individual are the chief points which are demanded. Lastly, the conduct and execution of his pictures were in strict conformity with the same principles, and may be said to have been dictated by the largest view of the nature and means of the art.

In his works the attention is always attracted by the important objects, or diverted from them, when diverted, only to conceal the artifice which thus commands the eye of the spectator. It is evident that the general degree of completeness will depend on that of the principal object; and assuming that Reynolds’s style of painting a head was sufficiently elaborate (it is generally less so than Vandyck’s), the unfinish of the accessories could hardly be otherwise than it is, consistently with due subordination. The truth of this consistency of style was ultimately acknowledged, and although so opposite from what had before been in fashion, and so different in many respects from what the vulgar admire, the pictures of Reynolds soon won the favour of the public. If the admiration of his works had any ill effect, it was that it tended to produce an imitation of the same mode rather than of the same consistency.

On his return to England in 1752, which has been somewhat anticipated in the foregoing remarks on his style, Reynolds repaired to his native county, and painted one or two pictures at Plymouth: perhaps the earliest of the fine portraits of Mr. Zachary Mudge, Vicar of St. Andrews, was one of these. He returned to London accompanied by his sister Frances. For a short time he again occupied lodgings in St. Martin’s Lane, and produced there the portrait of Giuseppe Marchi, an Italian whom he had brought home as an assistant. This picture, which was in the style of Rembrandt, attracted general admiration; and when his former master Hudson saw it, he exclaimed, stung with jealousy, “Reynolds, you don’t paint so well as when you left England!” Soon after this, in consequence of his increased fame and employment, Reynolds took a house in Great Newport Street, where he resided for some years. The whole length portrait of Admiral Keppel was the next work of importance which he produced: it exhibited such powers that it completely established the fame of the artist, and he was generally acknowledged to be the greatest painter England had seen since the time of Vandyck. From this period his career was one of uninterrupted success and improvement; for his reputation was never greater than at the close of his laborious life. The detraction which such extraordinary merit soon excited was compelled to vent itself in attempting to undervalue the department of art in which he excelled: in consequence of these insinuations, a defence of portrait painting, from the pen of Dr. Johnson, appeared in the forty-fifth number of the Idler. Johnson in that essay, after all, only proved that portrait painting is interesting to a few—that in the hands of Reynolds it was “employed in diffusing friendship, in renewing tenderness, in quickening the affections of the absent, and continuing the presence of the dead.” Reynolds himself, however, without forgetting these important prerogatives, evidently took a more extended view of the matter; he seems early to have felt that the chief difficulty of portrait painting (a difficulty perhaps greater than any in the other branches of art) is to make the representation generally interesting. It is quite obvious that this end can only be attained (especially as beauty of form is not always at command) by a high degree of perfection in all that constitutes the charm of art; for no interest that attaches itself to the individual pourtrayed, however celebrated, can be so universal or so independently intelligible as that which arises from a large and true imitation of nature, to which all are more or less alive. The perfection of art as applicable to portrait painting, was therefore Reynolds’s great object, and it was only in subservience to this that he ventured to introduce what in his hands might be considered a novelty in this department. That novelty was the historic air he often gave his portraits, by happy allusions to some important circumstance in the life of the individual. His consummate knowledge of effect enabled him to do this by means which never interfere with the mere portrait, a difficulty which had been in a great measure evaded by preceding painters. It will be remembered that in most of the portraits even of Titian and Vandyck the attention is literally confined to the individual pourtrayed (after all, the subject of the picture), and it was not lightly or inconsiderately that Reynolds occasionally departed from this judicious practice. If ever a painter could depend on the mere character and expression of his heads, to say nothing of the charm of their execution, Reynolds undoubtedly would have been secure of the public approbation on those grounds alone; and it was only where historic interest happened to coincide or to interfere but little with picturesque effect, that he ventured on the additions alluded to. A better instance perhaps cannot be given than the portrait of Lord Heathfield (celebrated for his defence of Gibraltar), in the National Gallery; in the background of which a cannon pointed downwards indicates, by its angle of depression, the elevation of the spot where the veteran stands, grasping the keys of the fortress which he defended so bravely. In his allegorical portraits, such as Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, &c., Reynolds encountered a much greater difficulty, and it may be questioned whether any painter who has yet appeared would have succeeded better. The mixture of real and imaginary beings, of individual and abstract personifications, the treatment of which would seem to require so different a style, was so managed by Reynolds as to satisfy, in this respect, the most fastidious taste. The secret of the greatness of his style in these subjects, and indeed in most of his portraits, is to be sought in his colouring, the idea of which is large and general; and under its dignified influence the individuality of forms and locality of dress are rendered with all sufficient fidelity without offending. It is thus we find in many Venetian, Flemish, and Dutch pictures, where the subject and forms are most homely, an air of refined taste, and even of grandeur, which seems unaccountable, till we discover that the colouring is true to the largest idea of nature; and thus, to a certain extent, the art is raised by raising its characteristic quality. In short, to return to the question of his imitation of Michael Angelo, we should find that, keeping the main requisites and attainable excellences of portrait painting in view, Reynolds contrived to infuse into it as much elevation as was calculated to improve it without injuring its character; and when we find that he applied this even to execution, and that his breadth of manner, his disdain of non-essentials, is evidently inspired by the same feeling, we shall no longer wonder at his admiration of the highest style of art, or doubt the sincerity of his recorded professions on the subject. The very indirectness of his imitation, in which the whole mystery lies, so sure a proof of his having penetrated the principle of the great master, establishes his claim to originality as well as to consummate judgment and taste.

In 1768 the Royal Academy was instituted, and Mr. Reynolds, holding unquestionably the first rank in his profession, was elected President. On his elevation to this office he received the honour of knighthood. As President he delivered to the students and professors those celebrated discourses, which have reflected so much lustre on his name. Their excellence in a theoretical point of view, the elegance of their composition, and on the other hand the apparent contradictions they sometimes contain, have been the theme of frequent observation and discussion. The other writings of Sir Joshua are the ‘Tour to Flanders and Holland,’ consisting of notes on the paintings seen by him in those countries in the year 1781; ‘Notes on Du Fresnoy’s Poem;’ and three papers in the Idler. Among the last, the Essay on Beauty was not so original as is generally supposed, the same theory having been previously promulgated by the Père Buffier in his ‘Cours des Sciences par des principes nouveaux. Paris, 1732.’ Among the historical and mythological pictures produced by Sir Joshua, that of the Infant Hercules strangling the Serpents, executed in 1786 for the Empress of Russia, is one of the most considerable: it is pretty closely copied, as to invention and composition, from a description of an antique painting of the same subject in Philostratus. This work, so different from the taste of the Russian painters and connoisseurs, was long treated with neglect; but in consequence of the enquiries of English travellers it has lately been cleaned, and placed in the gallery of the Hermitage. It is said to be in a fine state of preservation, and one of the best works of Reynolds. The celebrated picture of Ugolino was produced by an accidental circumstance. The subject was suggested to Sir Joshua by Goldsmith, or, according to others, by Burke, who was struck with the expression of an old emaciated head, among the unfinished studies of the painter, and observed that it corresponded exactly with Dante’s description of Count Ugolino. The head was inserted in a larger canvas, and the rest of the composition added. For the Shakspeare Gallery Sir Joshua painted three pictures,—the Death of Cardinal Beaufort, the Cauldron Scene in Macbeth, and Puck from Midsummer Night’s Dream. The designs for the window of the New College Chapel in Oxford are among the finest of his sacred compositions.

In 1789, finding his eyesight begin to fail, Sir Joshua was compelled to give up the practice of his art. In December, 1790, he pronounced his farewell Address at the Royal Academy, and on that occasion repeated and confirmed, as with his dying voice, his admiration of Michael Angelo. His infirmities confined him much during the short remaining portion of his life, and he died at his house in Leicester Fields, February 23, 1792. He was buried in the crypt of the cathedral of St. Paul, near the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren. The honours of his funeral, as may be imagined, corresponded with his justly-earned fame; and the day after his death a well-known eulogium by Burke appeared in the public papers, so characteristic both of the writer and the great artist to whose memory it was dedicated, that it was called the panegyric of Apelles, pronounced by Pericles. It concludes thus:—“His talents of every kind, powerful from nature, and not meanly cultivated by letters, his social virtues in all the relations and all the habitudes of life, rendered him the centre of a very great and unparalleled variety of agreeable societies, which will be dissipated by his death. He had too much merit not to excite some jealousy, too much innocence to provoke any enmity. The loss of no man of his time can be felt with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow.”

For a list of the pictures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and ample details of his life, the memoir of him by Northcote, who had been his scholar, may be consulted; as well as the accounts prefixed to the various editions of his literary works; and that by Allan Cunningham, in his Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

[Sketch for the picture of Mr. Eliot and his family.]

Engraved by B. Holl.
SWIFT.
From the Picture in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

SWIFT.

Jonathan Swift, by an account in his own handwriting, was the son of an attorney in the city of Dublin. He was born in 1667. Some doubt has been felt concerning his origin, in consequence of his own angry or capricious declaration, when out of humour with Ireland,—“I am not of this vile country; I am an Englishman;” and Sir William Temple has been said to be his real father. This piece of scandal, however, is disproved by circumstances of time and place. Swift was placed at Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of fourteen. Whether through idleness, or contempt of the prescribed studies, at the end of four years he could only obtain his Bachelor’s degree speciali gratiâ; a term denoting want of merit. This disgrace so affected him, that for the following seven years he studied eight hours a day. In 1688 Sir William Temple, whose lady was related to Swift’s mother, took him under his protection, and paid the expenses of his residence at Oxford for a Master’s degree. On quitting that University, Swift lived with Temple as his domestic companion. To a long illness contracted during this period in consequence of a surfeit he ascribed that frequently recurring giddiness which annoyed him through life, and sent him to the grave deprived of reason.

While under Sir William Temple’s roof, Swift rendered material assistance in the revision of his patron’s works, and corrected and improved his own ‘Tale of a Tub,’ which had been sketched out previously to his quitting Dublin. It was published in 1704. He never avowed himself its author; but he did not deny it when Archbishop Sharpe and the Duchess of Somerset, according to some accounts, showed it to Queen Anne, and thereby debarred him from a bishopric. From Temple’s conversation Swift much increased his political knowledge; and his early impressions were naturally in favour of the Whigs: but he suspected his patron of neglecting to provide for him, from a desire of retaining his services. This produced a quarrel, and the friends parted in 1694. Swift took orders, and obtained a prebend in the north of Ireland; but at Temple’s earnest request he soon resigned that preferment, and returned to England. A sincere reconciliation took place, and they lived together in the utmost harmony till Sir William’s death in 1699. Swift, in testimony of his esteem, wrote ‘The Battle of the Books,’ of which his friend is the hero; and Temple by his will left him a legacy in money, and the profit as well as care of his posthumous works. Swift had indulged hopes, not without good reason, of being well provided for in the English church, through Temple’s interest. Failing in these hopes, he accepted the post of private secretary and chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, on the appointment of that nobleman to be one of the Lords Justices of Ireland. By this new patron he seems to have been ill used. He was soon displaced from his post, on the plea of its unfitness for a clergyman. He was then promised the rich deanery of Derry; but that preferment was bestowed on another person, and Swift could only procure the livings of Laracor and Rathbeggin, which together did not amount to more than half the value of the deanery. During his residence at Laracor, he performed the duties of a parish priest with punctuality and devotion, notwithstanding some occasional sallies of no very decorous or well-timed humour, which coupled with the suspicions founded on the anonymous ‘Tale of a Tub,’ fixed on him an imputation of insincerity in his Christian profession, from which the opinion of posterity seems to have absolved him.

During his incumbency at Laracor, he invited to Ireland a lady with whom he became acquainted while with Sir William Temple. She was the daughter of Temple’s steward, whose name was Johnson. About the year 1701, at the age of eighteen, she went to Ireland, to reside near Swift, accompanied by Mrs. Dingley, a lady fifteen years older than herself. Miss Johnson was Swift’s celebrated Stella. Whether Swift’s first impulse in giving this invitation had a view to marriage, or the cultivation of friendship only, is uncertain. His whole conduct with respect to women was most mysterious: apparently highly capricious, and, whatever might be its secret motive, utterly unwarrantable. The reason assigned by the two ladies for transferring their residence to Ireland was, “that the interest of money was higher than in England, and provisions cheap.” Every possible precaution was taken to prevent scandal: Swift and Miss Johnson did not live together, nor were they ever known to meet except in presence of a third person. Owing to this scrupulous prudence, the lady’s fame, during fifteen years, was never questioned, nor was her society avoided by the most scrupulous. In 1716 they were privately married, but with no change in their mode of life: she never lodged in the Deanery, except during those fits of giddiness and approaching mental aberration, during which a woman, then of middle age, might venture without breach of decorum to nurse an elderly man.

In 1701 Swift had published his ‘Dissensions in Athens and Rome;’ his first political work, in behalf of King William and his ministers, against the violent proceedings of the House of Commons. According to Lord Orrery, from that year to 1708 he did not write any political pamphlet; but he made frequent journeys to England during the whole of Queen Anne’s reign. Between 1708 and 1710 he changed his politics, worked hard against the Whigs among whom he had been educated, and plunged into political controversy, with a view to open the road to power for the Tories. The year 1710 produced the ‘Examiner,’ of which he wrote thirty-three papers. In that year commenced his acquaintance with Harley, who introduced him to St. John and the rest of the ministers. At this period he dined every Saturday at Harley’s, with the Lord Keeper, Mr. Secretary St. John, and Lord Rivers, to the exclusion of all other persons. He may, therefore, be considered at this time as the confidential friend of the ministry, and almost a member of their cabinet. The company was afterwards enlarged to sixteen, including Swift; all men of the first class in society. He now put forth all his strength in support of the Tory party, in pamphlets, periodical papers, and political poems. Amidst all this political agitation, he wrote down the occurrences of every day, whether consisting of conferences with ministers, or quarrels with his own servant, in a regular journal to Stella.

In 1712, ten days before the meeting of parliament, he published a pamphlet, entitled ‘The Conduct of the Allies,’ to facilitate peace, on which the stability, almost the personal safety of the ministers, seemed to depend. He professes that this piece cost him much pains, and no writer was ever more successful. A sale of eleven thousand copies in two months was in those days unprecedented: the Tory members in both houses drew their arguments from it, and the resolutions of parliament were little more than a string of quotations. During that year and the next he continued to exert himself with unwearied diligence. In 1713 he carried to the then latest date the first sketch of the ‘History of the last four Years of Queen Anne.’ Lord Bolingbroke, when called on for his opinion, was sincere enough to speak of it as “a seasonable pamphlet for the administration, but a dishonour to just history.” Swift himself was proud of it, but professed his willingness to sacrifice it to his friend’s opinion. It was, however, published, but with no addition to the author’s fame.

The Queen is said to have intended to promote him to a bishopric; but the story is involved in obscurity. That Archbishop Sharpe had dissuaded her from so doing by representing his belief in Christianity as questionable, is not ascertained by any satisfactory evidence; but whether that were so or not, Johnson’s suggestion seems probable, that the difficulty arose from those clerical supporters of the ministry, “who were not yet reconciled to the author of the ‘Tale of a Tub,’ and would not, without much discontent and indignation, have borne to see him installed in an English cathedral.” The deanery of St. Patrick, in Dublin, was therefore offered to him, and he accepted it. With high pretensions to independent equality with the ministers, and a disinterested support of their measures, it cannot be doubted that he viewed this Irish preferment as a sentence of exile, and was bitterly disappointed. But his temper was too intractable to submit to play the part of a courtier; and it is probable that his English friends were not ill pleased to promote him to competence and dignity at a distance. His feelings are characteristically expressed in one of his letters: “I use the ministry like dogs, because I expect they will use me so. I never knew a ministry do anything for those whom they made companions of their pleasures; but I care not.”

He had indeed little reason to rejoice at first in the land where his lot had fallen: on his arrival in Ireland to take possession of his deanery, he found the country under the strongest excitement of party violence. The populace looked on him as a Jacobite, and threw stones at him as he walked the streets. His chapter received him with reluctance, and thwarted him in whatever he proposed. Ordinary talents and firmness must have sunk under such general hostility. But the revolutions of the Dean’s life were strange; and he, who began with the hatred of the Irish mob, lived to govern them with the authority of a despot.

He had not been in Ireland more than a fortnight when he returned to England for the purpose of attempting, but in vain, a reconciliation between the Lords Oxford and Bolingbroke. While in England, he wrote his ‘Free Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs.’ He was probably still watching the issues of time or chance; but the Queen’s death sealed his political and clerical doom, and he returned to Ireland. To the interval between 1714 and 1720 Lord Orrery ascribes ‘Gulliver’s Travels.’ His mind was at this time much engrossed by a remarkable circumstance. He had formed an intimacy in England with the family of a Dutch merchant, named Vanhomrigh. The eldest daughter, strangely enough, became enamoured of Swift’s mind, for it could not be of a most homely person, nearly fifty years of age. She proposed marriage: this he declined, and wrote his poem of ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’ on the occasion. On her mother’s death, the young lady and her sister followed him to Ireland; the intercourse was continued, and the proposal renewed on her part. This it was absolutely necessary to decline, as the Dean was already married; but he lived with Stella on the same distant footing as before, and was reluctant either to inflict pain, or to forego his own pleasure, by an avowal of the insuperable obstacle. Vanessa continued to receive his visits, but so guardedly as not absolutely to forfeit her good name. She became however more and more urgent; and peremptorily pressed him to accept or reject her as his wife. Failing to obtain a direct answer, she addressed a note to Miss Johnson, desiring to know whether she were married to him, or not. Stella sent this note to Swift, who in a paroxysm of anger rode to Vanessa’s house, threw a paper containing her own note on the table, and quitted her without a word. This blow she did not survive many weeks. She died in 1723, having first cancelled a will in the Dean’s favour.

Vanessa by will ordered her correspondence with Swift to be published, as well as ‘Cadenus and Vanessa,’ in which he had proclaimed her excellence and confessed his love. The letters were suppressed; the poem was published. This, whether meant as an apology for herself, or as a posthumous triumph over her more successful rival, occasioned a great shock and distress both to Stella and the Dean. It is said that at length, probably as a softening to the mortification incident to the public discovery of his passion for Vanessa, he desired that Stella might be publicly owned as his wife; but her health was rapidly declining. She said, perhaps petulantly, “It is too late,” and insisted that they should continue to live as before. To this the Dean consented, and allowed her to dispose of her fortune, by her own name, in public charity. She died in 1727.

By Stella’s death Swift’s happiness was deeply affected. He became by degrees more misanthropic, and ungovernable in temper; and more miserly in his personal habits, while at the same time he devoted to charity a large part, it is said one-third, of his income. In 1736 his deafness and giddiness became alarming, and his mental powers gradually declined. In 1741 his friends found it necessary that guardians should be appointed over his person and estate. In 1742 his reason was entirely overthrown; he became lethargic and, except at short intervals, speechless. On the 30th of November his housekeeper told him that the customary preparations were making to celebrate his birthday: he found words to answer, “It is all folly; they had better let it alone.” He died the latter end of October, 1745; in his seventy-eighth year. With the exception of some few legacies, he left his fortune, amounting to about twelve thousand pounds, to the building of an hospital for idiots and lunatics.

The extent and variety of Swift’s writings render it necessary to confine our notice to two or three of his most curious productions. Of the ‘Tale of a Tub,’ which, being regarded as an attack upon all religion, brought down a weight of censure on the author, against which he protested in the preface to a later edition, Dr. Johnson says that “it has little resemblance to his other pieces. It exhibits a vehemence and rapidity of mind, a copiousness of images, and vivacity of diction, such as he afterwards never possessed or never exerted. It is a mode so distinct and peculiar, that it must be considered by itself; what is true of that is not true of anything else which he has written. In his other works is found an equable tenor of easy language, which rather trickles than flows.”

‘Gulliver’s Travels’ are now probably better known to the public than any other of his productions. That work is a moral and political romance, exhibiting a wonderful specimen of irregular genius. Not only are human actions placed in the most unfavourable light, but human nature itself is libelled. His wayward temper and his ill-concealed disappointment had put him out of conceit with the world; misanthropy had made some inroad into his heart, and, with his pen in his hand, he indulged in the expression of it with affected exaggeration. But however offensive to good feeling the satire might be, the imagination and wit which pervade this extraordinary work will always attract some readers, while the simple, circumstantial air of truth with which such extravagant fictions are related is a source of amusement to less refined tastes.

Neither are the ‘Drapier’s Letters,’ written in 1724, less remarkable, although the temporary nature of the subject has divested them of all interest, except as samples of the powers of his mind and the character of his style. Lord Orrery calls them “those brazen monuments of his fame.” A patent had been taken out by one Wood for a copper coinage for Ireland, to the amount of one hundred and eighty thousand pounds in halfpence and farthings, by which the projector, at least as was alleged by the opponents of the ministry, would have gained exorbitant profit, and the nation would of course have incurred proportionate loss. The Dean, in the character of a Drapier, wrote a series of letters, exposing the folly and mischief of giving gold and silver for a debased coin probably not worth a third of its nominal value. He urged the people to refuse this copper money; and the nation acted on the Drapier’s advice. The government took the alarm at this seditious resistance to the King’s patent, and offered three hundred pounds reward for the discovery of the author of the fourth letter; but his precautions were so well taken, and his popularity so universal, that, though known to be the author, the proclamation failed to touch him. The popular indignation rose to such a height that Wood was compelled to withdraw his patent, and the base money was totally suppressed. From this time forward the Dean, who at his first arrival in Ireland had been most unpopular, possessed unlimited influence; he was consulted on all measures of domestic policy; persons of all ranks either courted or feared him; national gratitude was expressed by all ranks in their various ways; the Drapier was a toast at every convivial meeting, and the sign of his head insured custom to an ale-house.

His letters are remarkable for the pure English of their style: there is little of solid information to be derived from them; but the most trifling anecdotes of distinguished men find ready acceptation with a large class of readers.

As a poet, in the higher sense of the word, we rank Swift’s claims to honour very humbly. But he possessed uncommon power of correct, easy, and familiar versification; which, with his racy vein of humour, will secure him admirers among those who can pardon his offensive grossness.

Delany, an Irishman to the backbone, gives the following character of him: “No man ever deserved better of any country, than Swift did of his; a steady, persevering, inflexible friend; a wise, a watchful, and a faithful counsellor, under many severe trials and bitter persecutions, to the manifest hazard both of his liberty and fortune.” With respect to his conversation and private economy some particulars may be worth mentioning. His rule never to speak more than a minute at a time, and to wait for others to take up the conversation, it were well if professed talkers would adopt. He excelled in telling a story, but told the same too often; an infirmity which grew on him, as it does on others, in advancing life. He was churlish to his servants, but in the main a kind and generous master. He was unceremonious and overbearing, sometimes brutal; but in company which he respected, not coarse, although his politeness was in a form peculiar to himself. He considered wealth as the pledge of independence; but his frugality towards the close of his life amounted to avarice. As we have represented some features of his character in no very amiable light, we will conclude with an anecdote which shows the kindly portion of his nature to advantage. In the high tide of his influence, he was often rallied by the ministers for never coming to them without a Whig in his sleeve: whatever might have been his expectations from the unsolicited gratitude of his party, he never pressed his own claims personally; but he often solicited favours from Lord Oxford in behalf of Addison, Congreve, Rowe, and Steele. Personal merit rather than political principles directed his choice of friends. His intimacy with Addison was formed when they used to meet at the parties of Lord Halifax or Lord Somers, who were leaders of the Whigs; but it continued unabated when the Tories had gained the ascendency.

Swift’s works have gone through many editions in various forms. The latest and best is that of Sir Walter Scott. That man must be considered fortunate in his biographers, of whom memoirs have been handed down, with more or less detail, by Lord Orrery, Dr. Delany, Dr. Hawkesworth, Dr. Sheridan, Dr. Johnson, and Sir W. Scott.

[Gulliver in Lilliput, from a Design by Stothard.]

Engraved by J. Posselwhite.
LOCKE.
From the original Picture by Sir G. Kneller in the Hall of Christ Church, Oxford.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

LOCKE.

John Locke was born August 29, 1632, at Wrington, a village of Somersetshire, about eight miles from Bristol. He was the eldest of two sons of John Locke, a man of some property, who had been bred to the law, but became afterwards a captain under Cromwell. In those turbulent times he met with losses which diminished his fortune, and he left an inconsiderable inheritance to his son. Locke received his education at Westminster School, and Christ Church, Oxford. While an undergraduate he was chosen to write a welcome on the occasion of a visit which Cromwell paid to that University, just after the conclusion of his peace with the Dutch. This he did in a laudatory copy of verses in English and Latin, comparing the great Protector to Julius for warlike, and to Augustus for peaceful, accomplishments. This and some Latin verses, prefixed to a work of Sydenham’s, are Locke’s only poetical attempts. There is little merit in either. He was a great admirer of the meagre verse of Sir Richard Blackmore, which is no great evidence of his poetical taste. Between the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Arts he was elected Student of his college. From that time he applied himself diligently, for many years, to the study of medicine, without, however, practising it as a matter of gain. The weakness of his health probably gave this turn to his thoughts: his brother died of consumption; and he himself was apprehensive through life of falling a victim to the same disease. In 1664 he went abroad as secretary to Sir W. Swan, envoy to the court of Brandenburg; and on his return to Oxford the year following, he applied himself to the discovery of the effects of the air on the human frame. His first work, published in 1667, was a register of the variations in the atmosphere, determined between certain periods by the common instruments, as a supplement to a work by Boyle.

He was amusing himself with such enquiries, when one of the slight but important accidents of life brought him an acquaintance, whose influence determined his future course. A friend, being obliged to take a journey, desired Locke to make his excuses to Lord Ashley (afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury) for not having procured for him some mineral waters against his arrival in Oxford. When Lord Ashley did arrive, Locke carried this message to him. They were mutually pleased with each other, and this acquaintance speedily grew up into a strict friendship. Locke’s advice determined Lord Ashley to submit to a surgical operation, by which, it is said, the life of the patient was saved; and he was received into the house, and practised his profession in the family and amongst a few private friends of his noble patron. While living in this way, his thoughts were turned into the channel of politics by the advice of his new associates; and, taking up that study earnestly, he was soon able to advise and assist Ashley in all his plans of state, becoming at the same time the referee of his private affairs. This warm friendship is singular, considering the purity of Locke’s life, and the notoriously bad character, public and private, of his noble patron. But the latter was an eloquent orator, and an admirable talker; and it was probably this latter quality which attached Locke so much. He had so great an esteem for good conversation, as to give it a first place in the formation of a man’s mind, calling books the raw material, and social talk, with meditation, the true architects of our mental constructions. In 1668 Locke attended the Earl and Countess of Northumberland to France. But some accident caused him soon to return to his old residence with Shaftesbury, for whom he drew up the fundamental laws of Carolina, which had just been granted to him and other lords. Two of the articles of this settlement gave great offence to the clergy, and were expunged. They are remarkable, and should be mentioned. One was, “That no man that doth not acknowledge a God, and that God publicly worshipped, should be a freeman or inhabitant of Carolina.” The other was a proposition, that any seven persons agreeing in a form of worship should be esteemed a church, and be supported by the state. The Church of England, however, was alone established in that colony. In 1671 Locke began to form his great Essay on the Human Understanding; but his engagements with Shaftesbury prevented its immediate completion. The year following, his patron becoming Chancellor, Locke was made secretary of presentations, which office he speedily lost on the partial disgrace of the Earl, who, still remaining President of the Board of Trade, appointed him secretary to a commission of inquiry into the state of trade, and the colonial plantations. This office he also lost in the same manner, upon Lord Shaftesbury’s total disgrace in 1674.

Having retained his studentship, Locke then retired to Oxford, partly for his health’s sake, and partly to pursue his old medical studies. He took the degree of Bachelor of Medicine in this year. It appears that he continued to pay some attention to these studies until an advanced age: for in 1697 he communicated to the Royal Society the history of a curious case which he had seen at the great hospital of La Charité, during his residence in Paris. In 1675, in hope of obtaining relief from an asthmatical complaint, he went to Montpellier. There was also another reason for this journey. He had just published an anonymous pamphlet for Shaftesbury, blaming the conduct of the House of Lords in the matter of the Test Act, containing a vehement abuse of the bishops, and of what he called their favourite doctrine, “the divine right” of kings and priests. This pamphlet does not appear in the folio edition of his works; it was anonymous, like most of his other productions. The odium consequent upon it made his absence from England expedient, if not necessary. During his stay abroad Locke kept a journal of what he saw, did, and thought. In it we find the heads of many of his future works, which are very concise and valuable; but the narrative is dry, and the attempts at humour not very successful: he seems however to have been as observant of what relates to the external world, as he was of the intellectual. In 1679, Shaftesbury, on being made President of the Council, summoned Locke to England. But the old statesman’s favour was short lived: he was committed to the Tower in July, 1681, and soon after his release, retired to Holland, where he died in January, 1683. Locke accompanied him, and continued his faithful services until death. For seventeen years he had been Shaftesbury’s constant partizan and adviser; and the odium attached to that nobleman clung to himself, and prevented his return to England for many years. In 1683 he was reported by the English envoy at the Hague to be on terms of intimacy with the malcontents in Holland; upon which the secretary (Sunderland) wrote to Dr. Fell, the Dean of Christ Church, ordering his expulsion from college. This mandate was not immediately complied with: the Dean declared that for many years he had watched the conduct of Locke, and even tried to entrap him into an exposure of his political sentiments, but had always found him too wary. He allowed Locke time to come and defend himself, which he would not do, and then expelled him from his studentship.

On the accession of James II., William Penn, the quaker of Pennsylvania, being in some favour with the King, would have procured a pardon for Locke, but he refused the offer, through a friend, as having been guilty of no crime. In May, 1685, the English ambassador demanded him of the States-General, of the pretext that he was concerned in the unsuccessful expedition of the Duke of Monmouth. It is supposed that he owed this bad turn partly to the malice of the envoy himself, as his name did not appear in the list of those required which was sent from England. He neither liked the person nor the invasion of the duke, and was at Utrecht when the armament of that unfortunate nobleman sailed from the Texel. Locke was not given up, but was obliged to hide himself for about a year in the house of his friend M. Veen, at Amsterdam, receiving assurance from the local authorities that timely warning should be given him of pressing danger. He was obliged to conceal himself so closely as only to take his exercise during the night. It is probable that the real cause of this persecution was his first letter on Toleration, written in Latin about this time, and addressed to his friend Limborch, the sentiments of which were peculiarly offensive to the English court.

Locke had now time to attend to his own affairs, being no longer taken up with those of a patron. He busied himself in the completion of his Essay concerning Human Understanding, which was not, however, printed till 1689. The extracting of passages from various works for reviewal in Le Clerc’s literary journal, the Bibliothèque Universelle, the formation and continuation of a small society for the weekly discussion of all subjects, the members of which were his friends Le Clerc, Limborch, Guenelon, and others, and the abridgment of his Essay, served to fill up his time during the remainder of his stay in Holland. In 1689 he published a second letter on Toleration, and early in the same year returned to his native country in the fleet which conducted the Princess of Orange to the throne of England. The Revolution had completely changed the face of affairs in Locke’s favour; he was considered a martyr to its principles, and was esteemed accordingly by its authors. On his return he immediately petitioned William to cause him to be reinstated in his studentship; but the College refused to restore him, offering at the same time to make him a supernumerary student. This he would not accept; because he felt it not to be a full reparation of the injustice he had suffered. He allowed the matter to drop.

If Locke had been ambitious, his path to political advancement was now open. William offered him the ambassadorship to the Imperial Court, or to that of Brandenburg. He refused both these high appointments; but accepted a Commissionership of Appeals from his friend Lord Mordaunt, afterwards Earl of Peterborough. This office was worth only £200 a year. His friends Sir Francis and Lady Masham (a daughter of the celebrated Cudworth) prevailed on him to take apartments in their house at Oates in Essex; between which place and his office in London he spent the remainder of his life. In 1690 Locke published his Treatise on Civil Government. The folio edition of his Essay, and a Letter on Education, appeared in the latter part of the same year. In 1692 he produced a third Letter on Toleration. The state of the coinage being a subject of great importance at that time, he took it into consideration, and published ‘Certain Thoughts on the State of English Silver Money, &c.,’ in a letter to a member of parliament. This treatise was thought so good, that when the matter was inquired into by the government, Locke was consulted, and his advice taken with respect to the new coinage. In consequence of this important assistance, he received from William III. a Commissionership of Foreign Trade and Plantations, the value of which was £1000 a year. The King was exceedingly desirous of a comprehension with the dissenters, and to forward his views Locke wrote his ‘Reasonableness of Christianity.’ This book involved him in a religious controversy with Dr. Edwards, who attacked its opinions in his ‘Socinian Unmasked,’ to which Locke replied by two vindications, each of them longer than the original work. No sooner had he finished this labour than he was called upon to encounter a fresh and more able antagonist. Toland and some other Unitarians having turned to their own use some of the arguments in Locke’s Essay, Dr. Stillingfleet, the learned Bishop of Worcester, confounded Locke with that party. In his defence of the doctrine of the Trinity the Bishop severely censured various passages of Locke’s great work, as tending to subvert some of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity; Locke replied, and there was an alternation of answers between them till the Bishop’s death. That event took place soon after Locke’s third answer, which was the last thing he ever published. These replies of Locke are reputed to be most finished specimens of a grave and subtle irony, too refined perhaps to be generally perceived by the uninitiated eye.

In 1700 Locke’s weak state of health induced him to retire from public life. He resigned his situation in a personal interview with the King, giving no previous notice of his intention to the conductors of the government, and refusing the pension which his master wished him to accept. He took up his residence at Oates, where he passed the remainder of his life in reading and contemplating the Scriptures. He often regretted that he had not more occupied himself in this study. The piety of his latter years was without formality or ostentation, not arising from that sense of disappointment, or irksomeness for want of employment, which often leads men to seek refuge in a late devotion. Neither Locke’s mental nor bodily senses failed him to his last moments, though the year before his death was passed in extreme weakness. On taking the sacrament he declared “that he was in peace with all men, and in sincere union with the Church of Christ, by whatever name distinguished.” The affectionate attentions of Lady Masham softened the pain of his last illness, and he died gently in his chair while she was reading to him one of the Psalms of David, October 28, 1704, in his seventy-third year. He died, unmarried, from the natural decay of an originally weak constitution. He was buried in the churchyard at High Laver, near Oates, under a decent monument. His epitaph had been written some years before, by himself, in Latin[^[3]]. He left behind him many unpublished works, among which his ‘Conduct of the Understanding’ stands highest. ‘An Examination of Malebranche’s opinion of seeing all things in God; ‘A Discourse of Miracles;’ part of a fourth letter on the subject of Toleration; some imperfect memorial sketches of the life of the Earl of Shaftesbury; a new method for a commonplace-book; and paraphrases of several of the epistles of St. Paul, make up the list of his posthumous works, almost all of which were translated into French by Le Clerc and others, and appeared (together with those published by himself) in three folio volumes, not many years after his death. A great many of his letters to his friends Molyneux and Limborch are also published in this edition. There remain many more which have been given to the world by various hands, addressed to the Earl of Peterborough, Dr. Mapletoft, &c., and to Newton. In Lord King’s life of Locke his correspondence with the latter is given at full length, and is very curious,—chiefly relating to subjects they were both engaged in, the prophecies and miracles.

[3]. “Siste, viator; juxta situs est J. L. Si qualis fuerit rogas, mediocritate suâ contentum se vixisse respondet. Literis innutritus eousque tantum profecit ut veritati unicà studeret. Hoc ex scriptis illius disce; quæ, quod de eo reliquum est, majori fide tibi exhibebunt, quam epitaphii suspecta elogia. Virtutis si quas habuit, minores sane quam quas sibi laudi, tibi in exemplum proponeret. Vitia una sepeliantur. Morum exemplum si quæras, in evangelio habes (vitiorum utinam nusquam), mortalis certè quod prosit hic et ubique. Natum . . . . Mortuum . . . . Memorat hac tabula brevi et ipsa interitura.”

That which has assured to Locke imperishable fame is the ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding.’ This great work, however, met with considerable obloquy at first: the heads of colleges at Oxford even endeavoured to prevent its being read in their University. The Essay is in the hands of all; the writings of its opponents, comparatively speaking, are forgotten. It will be generally admitted, that in it Locke laid the foundation of modern metaphysical philosophy.

Two of Locke’s chief works, the ‘Treatise on Civil Government,’ and ‘Essay on Education,’ are more capable of a short analysis. The former may be taken as an expression of his own opinions in defence of the Revolution. It is divided into two parts. The first contains an exposure of the fallacies of Sir Robert Filmer’s ‘Patriarcha,’ arguing that Adam had not such natural or gifted right of dominion as Filmer pretends; that if he had, his heirs had not; that if they had, yet there is no general law, divine or human, which determines the right of succession, much less of bearing rule; lastly, that if such right had been determined, yet the eldest line from Adam being unknown, no man can pretend more than another to that right of inheritance; consequently, that some other source of political power must be found than “Adam’s private dominion and paternal jurisdiction.” Locke proceeds in the second part to declare his opinion as to what this other source may be. He argues, that originally the executive power was in the hands of each individual; but, by mutual consent, for mutual benefit, as men grew into societies, political power was created, and given to persons chosen from the whole body by the major part of such societies. He protests against absolute power, as not expressing the will of the majority; but defends prerogative, as a discretionary power lodged in the hands of the executive government. He maintains that this compact must be held sacred, but reverts to the society if its duration was declared temporary, or upon the misconduct of rulers or delegates. When forfeited, the will of the society may create new forms of government; or, under the old form, continue it in other hands.

The Essay on Education is expressly for the use of gentlemen, since “if that class be properly tended the rest will follow of course.” The child, he says, should have much air and exercise, should be accustomed to little sleep and early habits. That superstitious terrors, and the frequent use of the rod should be carefully avoided; that the boy should be used to suffer pain gradually, to harden him, but not as a punishment; that the parents’ authority should be perfect over the child, and be gradually taken off, till the relation between them becomes a confiding friendship; that particular attention be paid to his manners, so that his courage, learning, wit, plainness, and good-nature, do not turn to brutality, pedantry, buffoonery, rusticity, and fawning. He says, that the child’s curiosity should be encouraged; that he should learn by games, and his attainments never be forced; that he should not be left to flounder in difficulties, but helped through them. Locke prefers a careful tutor to a public school: he says that a boy stands a better chance of being both virtuous and well-bred under the care of the former. What he should know is Latin, Greek, a little mathematics, how to keep accounts; the less of logic the better; he should write a good hand; and a virtuous youth so bred, “one may turn loose into the world with great assurance that he will find employment and esteem everywhere.” He further recommends that the boy should travel between the ages of eight and sixteen, rather than between sixteen and twenty one; and that when he comes of age he had better not marry according to the usual custom, but wait some years, that his children “may not tread too closely on his heels.”

The habit of Locke’s mind was perhaps originally severe; but from constant social intercourse with men of all characters and opinions, was rendered mild and equable. Nothing seems to have provoked him into a loss of temper so much as being forced into argument with professed logicians. He calls the logical method taught at Oxford an ill, if not the worst way of acquiring knowledge and seeking truth. He was fond of the society of children, and would enter into the enjoyments of riper youth with facility. He was entrusted by his patron with the education and marriage of his son, who was the father of the author of the ‘Characteristics.’ The latter nobleman (the third Earl of Shaftesbury) owed much to Locke’s care, and was his eulogist.

Locke was of a cautious if not timid disposition. This appears from many of his letters, and may be inferred from the anonymous publication of most of his writings. His weak health, the political persecution to which he was exposed during great part of his life, and the discipline to which he was subjected in childhood, which was strict and severe, in some measure account for this failing. His friendships were very steady; witness his close adherence to his patron Shaftesbury. Sydenham’s contemporary and friendly character of Locke is remarkable: he says, in a prefatory letter to one of his works, that “if we consider his genius, his penetrating and exact judgment, and the strictness of his morals, he has scarcely any superior, and few equals now living.”

[Reverse of a French Medal of Locke.]

Engraved by Rob^t. Hart.
SELDEN.
From a Picture attributed to Sir Peter Lely in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

SELDEN.

John Selden was born at Salvington, a hamlet of Tarring, near Worthing, in the county of Sussex, December 16, 1584 (O.S.). His father, according to Wood, “was a sufficient plebeian,” who, through some skill in music, obtained as his wife Margaret Baker, a daughter of a knightly family of the county of Kent. The baptism of his eminent son, as well as his own musical talents, are noticed in an existing parish registry in these words: “1584.—Johnne, sonne of John Selden, the minstrell, was baptised the XXX^th day of December.” The house in which the family lived was called Lacies, and the estate of the father consisted, in 1606, of eighty-one acres, of the annual value of about twenty-three pounds. John Selden, the son, received his early education at the Free Grammar-School of Chichester. At the age of fourteen he entered at Hart Hall, Oxford. After residing four years at the University, he was admitted, in 1602, a member of Clifford’s Inn, one of the dependencies of the greater inns of court, in which students of law were formerly accustomed to commence their legal education. He removed in May, 1604, to the Inner Temple. His attention appears to have been early drawn to the study of civil and legal history, and antiquities; he did not court the more active business of his profession, and his employment at the bar was limited. In 1607, he prepared for the press his first work, entitled ‘Analectωn Anglo-Britannicωn,’ being a collection of civil and ecclesiastical matters relating to Britain, of a date anterior to the Norman conquest. This was soon followed by three other works of a similar character, and in 1614 he printed his ‘Treatise upon Titles of Honour.’ The last of these works has been considered in our courts of law to be of great authority, and has been usually spoken of with much commendation. Pursuing his legal inquiries, he edited, in 1616, two treatises, one of Sir John Fortescue, the other of Sir Ralph Hengham, and in the same year wrote a ‘Discourse on the Office of Lord Chancellor.’ In the next year he printed a work, ‘De Diis Syris,’ which added to his celebrity, but is not compiled with that attention to the value of the respective authorities cited, so essentially necessary to the accurate consideration of historical questions. His next work was a ‘History of Tithes,’ printed in 1618, which excited against him the bitter hostility of the clergy. The doctrine of divine right, as the foundation of many ecclesiastical claims, was at this time jealously maintained, and was considered to be peculiarly connected with the right of the clergy to tithes. Selden drew no direct conclusion against the divine nature of the right to tithes, but he had so arranged his authorities as to render such a conclusion inevitable. The nature only of the title was contested, and so far from the clergy having had any reason to look upon Selden as an enemy, he in fact strengthened their claim to tithes by placing it upon the same footing as any ordinary title to property. As soon as the ‘History’ appeared it was attacked. The High Commission Court summoned Selden before it, and to this tribunal he was compelled to apologise. The terms of his submission very accurately state the offence, and are expressive of regret that “he had offered any occasion of argument against any right of maintenance jure divino of the ministers of the gospel.” The work received several answers, but Selden was forbidden by James I., under a threat of imprisonment, to notice them. “All that will,” said he, “have liberty, and some use it, to write and preach what they will against me, to abuse my name, my person, my profession, with as many falsehoods as they please, and my hands are tied: I must not so much as answer their calumnies. I am so far from writing more, that I have scarce ventured for my own safety so much as to say they abuse me, though I know it.”

Hardly had this storm passed, when he became involved in the disputes between the Crown and the House of Commons. One of the earliest steps of that body, upon the convocation of Parliament in 1621, was to present a remonstrance on the state of public affairs. This was succeeded by the memorable protestation of December 18, in which the liberty of the subject was asserted, and the right of the Commons to offer advice to the Crown was insisted on. This protestation was erased from the journals of the House by the King’s own hands, and the parliament was dissolved. Selden, whose advice, though he was not then a member, had been requested by the House in this dispute, was in consequence imprisoned, and detained in confinement five weeks. His release was owing to the intercession of Bishop Williams, who represented him to be “a man who hath excellent parts, which might be diverted from an affectation of pleasing idle people to do some good and useful service to his Majesty.” On his release, he dedicated to Williams his edition of Eadmer’s contemporary ‘History of England, from the Norman Conquest to the death of Henry I.,’ which he had prepared for the press during his confinement.

When the next parliament assembled in 1624, Selden sat in it as member for the borough of Lancaster. Though nominated upon several committees, he took no active share in the general business of the House. About this time also he was appointed one of the readers of the Inner Temple; but he refused the office, and was in consequence for some time disabled to be advanced to the rank of a bencher of the inn. Upon the accession of Charles I. a new parliament was called, in which Selden sat for the borough of Great Bedwin. This parliament was almost immediately dissolved, and another summoned, to which Selden was again returned for the same borough as before. The Commons immediately entered upon a consideration of the conduct of the Duke of Buckingham, and his impeachment being resolved on, Selden was one of the members appointed to prepare the articles, and was named a manager for their prosecution. These proceedings were stopped by another dissolution of parliament in June, 1626. But the necessities of the Crown requiring those supplies which parliament refused without a redress of grievances, forced loans were resorted to in the exercise of certain pretended owners of the prerogative. In several instances these loans were refused; among others by Sir Edward Hampden, who was imprisoned in consequence: and the illegality of his commitment was very ably argued by Selden in the King’s Bench. In the third parliament, called by Charles I. in 1628, Selden sat for the borough of Ludgershall; and in the debates which immediately took place upon illegal commitments, the levy of tonnage and poundage, and the preparation of the Petition of Rights, he took a very active share. The attack upon the Duke of Buckingham was renewed, and it was proposed by Selden, that judgment should be demanded against him upon the impeachment of the former parliament. As affecting a great constitutional question, only finally determined in 1791, of the continuance of impeachments, notwithstanding a dissolution of parliament, the suggestion was remarkable. Further proceedings were, however, stopped by the assassination of the Duke.

During the prorogation of parliament, Selden again devoted himself to literary pursuits. The Earl of Arundel, a great lover and promoter of the arts, had received from the east many ancient marbles, having on them Greek inscriptions. At the request of Sir Robert Cotton, these inscriptions were transcribed under the superintendence of Selden, and were published under the title of ‘Marmora Arundeliana.’ In January, 1629, parliament again assembled, and the debates upon public grievances were renewed. The goods of several merchants, in the interval of the meeting of parliament, had been seized by the Crown, to satisfy a claim to the duty of tonnage and poundage. Among the sufferers was Rolls, a member of the House. It was moved, that the seizure of his goods was a breach of privilege. When the question was to be put, the Speaker said “he durst not, for that the King had commanded to the contrary.” Selden immediately rose, and vehemently complained of this conduct: “Dare you not, Mr. Speaker, to put the question when we command you. If you will not put it, we must sit still: thus, we shall never be able to do any thing. They that come after you may say, that they have the King’s commands not to do it. We sit here by the command of the King under the great seal, and you are, by his Majesty, sitting in his royal chair before both houses, appointed for our Speaker, and now refuse to do your office.” The House then adjourned in a state of great excitement. When it re-assembled, the Speaker was called upon to put the question, and again refused. On this Holles and Valentine thrust the Speaker into the chair, and held him down, while Sir Miles Hobart locked the door of the house and took possession of the key. A declaration was then produced by Sir John Elliot, which Colonel Stroud moved should be read, and himself put the question. The motion was declared to be carried; and the Speaker, refusing to act upon it, was charged by Sir P. Heyman with cutting up the liberty of the subject by the roots. Selden moved that the declaration should be read by the clerk, which was agreed to. The House then adjourned to a day, previous to which the King came to the House of Lords and dissolved the parliament, on account of “the undutiful and seditious carriage of the Lower House,” without the attendance of the Commons. Selden, and the other members concerned in the violence offered to the Speaker, were committed to prison. This was his last and most rigorous confinement. For some time he was denied the use of pens, ink, paper, and books. When, after many weeks had elapsed, he was brought up with the other prisoners before the King’s Bench upon a writ of habeas corpus, their discharge was offered upon condition of their finding bail for their good behaviour. “We demand,” said Selden, “to be bailed in point of right; and if it be not grantable of right, we do not demand it. But finding sureties for good behaviour is a point of discretion merely, and we cannot assent to it without great offence to the parliament where these matters, which are surmised by the return, were acted.” They were remanded, and remained for a long time in prison, where Elliot, one of the ablest members of the popular party, fell a victim to his confinement. In 1634, Selden was suffered to go at large upon bail, which was discontinued upon his petition to the Crown. During his imprisonment he wrote a treatise, ‘De Successionibus in Bona Defuncti ad Leges Ebræorum,’ and another, ‘De Successione in Pontificatum Ebræorum.’ Both those works he dedicated to Archbishop Laud; probably upon account of his being indebted to the Archbishop for the loan of books. Not long after the recovery of his liberty, Selden obtained the favour of Charles I., and dedicated to him his celebrated essay on the ‘Mare Clausum,’ an argument in favour of the dominion of the English over the four seas, copies of which were, by order of the Privy Council, directed to be placed in the council chest, the Court of Exchequer, and the Court of Admiralty.

To the Long Parliament, which commenced its sittings in 1640, Selden was unanimously returned by the University of Oxford; but neither this new connexion with the clergy, nor the favour of Charles, appears to have affected his opinions. Upon the first day of the sitting of parliament he was nominated a member of the committee to inquire into the abuses of the Earl Marshal’s Court, and was appointed with others to draw up a remonstrance upon the state of the nation. He also sat upon the committees which conducted the measures preparatory to the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford, but he was not one of the managers before the House of Lords; and his name was posted in Old Palace Yard as one of “the enemies of justice,” a title given to those who were regarded as favourable to the Earl. It is not very clear what his opinions upon the impeachment were. That he should have been satisfied with all the steps taken by his party is not possible, for his opinions were undoubtedly moderate, and his studious habits must have checked any disposition to violence. He was also nominated to frame the articles of impeachment against Laud, and was a party to the resolutions against the legislative powers of the bishops. The court, however, appears to have considered him favourable to its interests, until he spoke against the commission of array. Upon this question, Clarendon represents the influence of his opinion upon the public to have been very prejudicial to Charles I. About this time the great seal was offered to him. He declined it, according to Clarendon, on account of his love of ease, and “that he would not have made a journey to York or have been out of his own bed for any preferment.” The reason which he himself assigned for refusing it, was the impossibility of his rendering any service to the Crown. He sat as member of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, and took the covenant; yet he was not well affected to the Puritans, and declared that “he was neither mad enough nor fool enough to deserve the name of Puritan.” Upon the death of Dr. Eden, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in August, 1645, Selden was elected his successor, but declined to accept the office. About this time he appears to have gradually withdrawn from public business. His fondness of ease and his increasing age, and the silence he preserved upon many important events, all contribute to leave the inference of his approval or disapproval of much of the conduct of the parliamentary leaders open to adverse parties. He certainly never openly abandoned the popular side, nor does he appear to have forfeited its respect; and yet at the same time he continued to be esteemed by many of the leading Royalists.

The studies of Selden were continued to the latest period of his life, and he was near the age of seventy when his last work was published. The influence he possessed with the parliamentary leaders was frequently exerted in favour of letters. When Archbishop Laud’s endowment of the professorship of Arabic in the University of Oxford, was seized, on the attainder of that prelate, he procured its restitution. Archbishop Usher having preached against the divines of Westminster, and excited their anger, was punished by the confiscation of his library. Selden interfered, and saved it from sale and dispersion. When prelacy was abolished, the library attached to the see of Canterbury was by his efforts transferred to the University of Cambridge, where it remained until the Restoration. Through his entreaties, Whitelocke was induced to accept the charge of the medals and books at St. James’s, and thus secured their preservation. The services which he rendered to the University of Oxford were no less valuable, and were acknowledged in grateful terms by that learned body; and it was through his interference that the papers and instruments of Graves, the Professor of Mathematics, which had been seized by a party of soldiers, were restored.

Selden died November 30, 1654, and was buried in the Temple church. He left behind him no immediate relations, and he bequeathed nearly the whole of his fortune, amounting to nearly 40,000l., to his four executors, giving only one hundred pounds to each of the children of his sister, the wife of John Barnard, of Goring. His books and manuscripts he had originally given by his will to the University of Oxford; but that body having demanded of him a heavy bond for the restitution of a book which he desired to borrow from the public library, the bequest was struck out, and they were directed to be placed “in some convenient public library or college in one of the universities.” Sir M. Hale and his other executors, considering that they were the executors “of his will, and not of his passion,” transferred them to the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

To learned men Selden was liberal and generous; and there is a letter from Casaubon in Parr’s ‘Life of Archbishop Usher,’ in which that distinguished scholar with great feeling says, “I was with Mr. Selden after I had been with your Grace, whom, upon some intimation of my present condition and necessities, I found so noble, as that he did not only presently furnish me with a very considerable sum of money, but was so free and forward in his expressions, as that I could not find in my heart to tell him much (somewhat I did) of my intention of selling, lest it should sound as a farther pressing upon him of whom I had received so much.”

Milton terms Selden “the chief of learned men reputed in this land;” and Whitelocke states, “that his mind was as great as his learning, being very generous and hospitable.” Clarendon, who could not regard Selden with any political partiality, though he had in early life been on terms of intimacy with him, describes him to have been “a person whom no character can flatter or transmit in any expressions equal to his merit or virtue. He was of so stupendous learning in all kinds and in all languages (as may appear in his excellent and transcendent writings), that a man would have thought he had been entirely conversant among books, and had never spent an hour but in reading and writing; yet his humanity, courtesy, and affability were such, that he would have been thought to have been bred in the best courts, but that his good nature, charity, and delight in doing good, and in communicating all he knew, exceeded that breeding.”

The motto adopted by Selden was περὶ παντὸς τὴν ἐλευθερίαν (above all things, liberty), and it is to be found neatly written upon the first page of many of his MSS. Its spirit he extended to religious questions; and there are many bold and vigorous passages in his writings in which the necessity of freedom of inquiry upon all subjects is strongly insisted on. Noticing upon one occasion a certain class of ancient philosophers, he remarks, “He who takes to himself their liberty of inquiry, is in the only way that, in all kinds of studies, leads and lies open even to the sanctuary of truth; while others, that are servile to common opinion and vulgar suppositions, can rarely hope to be admitted nearer than into the base-court of her temple, which too speciously often counterfeits her innermost sanctuary.” His religious opinions have, with much impropriety, been the subject of dispute. They have been chiefly inferred from several passages of a work published after his death, entitled ‘Selden’s Table Talk.’ From the nature of his studies, his writings are far from being popular, and are, in consequence, now but little read. They obtained, however, for their author, during an age abounding with illustrious and learned men, an honourable reputation, among the most distinguished literary men of continental Europe, as well as among those of his own country. His works were edited by Dr. Wilkins, in 3 vols. folio, in 1726, to which a Latin ‘Life of the Author’ is prefixed.

[Gallery of the Arundel Marbles.]

Engraved by W. Holl.
A. PARÉ.
From the original Picture, in “L’École de Médecine,” at Paris.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

PARÉ.

Ambroise Paré, the father of French surgery, and one of the most useful as well as the earliest of the innovators upon that art as practised by the ancients, was born at Laval, in the district of Maine, in the year 1509. After going through the rudiments of education, he was placed at an early age under the tuition of the chaplain Orsoy, in his native town, to be instructed in the classics; but the means of his family appear to have been very narrow, or the economy with which they were supplied must have been strict; for we find that the worthy chaplain was obliged to make use of the services of his pupil in grooming his mule and other menial capacities, in order to eke out the scanty remuneration he received for his instructions. In truth, these do not appear to have been great; for Paré never achieved a knowledge of Greek, and was but superficially acquainted with the Latin language; and it is probable that even this small amount of classical acquirement was made at a late period of his life, when, being an author, he wished to quote.

On leaving his tutor, he was placed with a barber-surgeon at Laval, named Vialot, who is recorded to have taught him how to bleed. Not long after this change in his pursuits, the lithotomist, Laurent Colot, came to Laval to undertake the treatment of one of the chaplain’s ecclesiastical brethren: on this occasion, Paré was present, and zealously assisted at the operation. This accidental circumstance appears to have suggested to him the ambitious project of following the higher departments of surgery; and he contrived to leave the shop of his master in phlebotomy, and repaired to Paris, where he availed himself with so much diligence of the advantages afforded by that city, as a school of anatomy and medicine, that he was soon entrusted with the subordinate charge of the patients of Goupil, who then held the surgical chair in the college of France. From this discerning tutor he learned not only all the knowledge which could at that time be obtained from secondary sources, but the art of expressing himself well, and acquitting himself of his duties with neatness and grace. The talents thus acquired were of the greatest service to him in his after-life, which was chiefly passed among the great; and gave him that ease of manner and power of gaining confidence, which stood him so frequently in stead as court-surgeon to four successive monarchs, and, aiding the natural frankness of his character, carried him safely through many an intrigue and cabal, dangerous not only to his reputation and fortunes, but even to his life. He was never a member of the community of barber-surgeons, but derived his legal qualification to practise from a degree in surgery taken at the college of St. Edme, of which he was afterwards Provost.

Having passed upwards of three years as a student, residing actually within the walls of the Hotel Dieu at Paris, he was appointed Staff-surgeon, in 1536, when twenty-seven years old, to the Mareschal René de Monte-jean, who commanded the infantry under the Constable Montmorenci in the campaign of Piedmont. In this capacity, Paré was present at the siege and capture of Turin.

From this time is to be dated the commencement of his acquaintance with military surgery, for which he afterwards did so much. “I was then,” he says, “very raw and inexperienced, having never seen the treatment of gunshot wounds. It is true that I had read in the Treatise of Jean de Vigo on wounds in general, that those inflicted by fire-arms partake of a poisonous nature on account of the powder, and that they should be treated with hot oil of elder mixed with a little theriacum. Seeing, therefore, that such an application must needs put the patient to extreme pain, to assure myself before I should make use of this boiling oil, I desired to see how it was employed by the other surgeons. I found their method was to apply it, at the first dressing, as hot as possible, within the wound with tents and setons: and this I made bold to do likewise. At length my oil failed me, and I was fain to substitute a digestive, made of the yolks of eggs, rose-oil, and turpentine. At night I could not rest in my bed in peace, fearing that I should find the wounded, in whose cases I had been compelled to abstain from using this cautery, dead of poison: this apprehension made me rise very early in the morning to visit them; but beyond all my hopes, I found those to whom I had applied the digestive suffering little pain, and their wounds free from inflammation; and they had been refreshed by sleep in the night. On the contrary, I found those to whom the aforesaid oil had been applied, feverish, in great pain, and with swelling and inflammation round their wounds. I resolved, therefore, that I would never burn unfortunate sufferers from gunshot in that cruel manner again.”

Such was the casual origin of one of Paré’s greatest improvements in surgery,—the substitution of a mild treatment for the cautery in gunshot wounds; a principle which he afterwards successfully extended to other injuries at that time deemed poisonous. The improvement seems as obvious as it was important: yet the adherents of the old practice gave him much trouble, and even made it necessary for him to defend his wholesome innovation long afterwards before Charles IX. in person.

Yet with all his sound sense, Ambroise Paré was not by any means free from the credulity of his age. For instance, he relates, in his account of this siege, an amusing story of the court he paid to an Italian quack doctor, who lived at Turin, to wheedle him out of the secret of a dressing for fresh gunshot wounds, for which he had great fame. This was found to consist of a mixture of bruised worms, the grease of puppies boiled down alive, and other absurd ingredients, constituting the celebrated oleum catellorum, the only merit of which consists in its harmlessness. He is erroneously praised by Dr. Ballingall for having banished this unguent from practice, whereas, on the contrary, he introduced it; and he shows, by his frequent reference to it in his works, that he had no small faith in its virtues, and was exceedingly proud of having been the means of its publication.

The death of his patron, the Mareschal, soon after the fall of Turin, induced him to return to Paris, though tempted by large offers to remain in the camp.

In 1543, he accompanied the Duc de Rohan into Britanny, where Francis I. commanded in person against the English; and the next year he followed that monarch in his expedition to throw supplies into Landrecy. In 1545, he was with the camp at Boulogne, where he cured the general of the royal army, Francis Duke of Guise, of a very dangerous wound, which gained him great reputation.

In 1552, he attended the Duc de Rohan in his campaign in Germany. During this expedition occurred one of those instances of combined humanity and skill, which made Paré the favourite of the French army. He thus tells the story: “A party had gone out to attack a church, where the peasants of the country had fortified themselves, hoping to get some provisions, but they came back very soundly beaten; and one especially, a captain-lieutenant of the company of the Duke, returned with seven gashes in his head, the least of which had penetrated to the inner table of the skull, besides four sabre wounds in the arm, and one across the shoulder, which divided the shoulder-blade in half. When he was brought to quarters, the Duke judged him to be so desperately wounded, that he absolutely proposed, as they were to march by daylight, to dig a trench for him, and throw him into it, saying, that it was as well that the peasants should finish him. But being moved with pity, I told him (says Paré), that the captain might yet be cured: many gentlemen of the company joined with me in begging that he might be allowed to go with the baggage, since I was willing to dress and cure him. This was accordingly granted: I dressed him, and put him into a small well-covered bed in a cart drawn by one horse. I was at once physician, surgeon, apothecary, and cook to him; and, thank God, I did cure him in the end, to the admiration of all the troops: and out of their first booty, the men-at-arms gave me a crown a-piece, and the archers half-a-crown each.”

His reputation was now so high, that no expedition of importance, especially if generalled by a prince of the blood, or one of the higher nobility, was considered complete without his presence. This was accordingly solicited by the old King of Navarre, more commonly called the Duc de Vendôme, on an occasion of that kind. But being tired of a military life, and disgusted with its cruelties and horrors, he endeavoured to evade the proposal, alleging the illness of his wife, and other excuses: but the Duke would take no denial; and at last he consented to accompany him to the siege of Chateau le Comte. There he acquitted himself so well, that upon the warm encomiums of the Duke he was received into the service of Henry the Second, in 1552, being then but thirty-three years old. From this time he lived at the court, where, with other advantages, obtained not less by his behaviour and wit than his skill, he enjoyed, though a Huguenot, the especial favour of the Queen, Catherine de’ Medici, who was fond of conversing with him in her own language, with which Paré had become well acquainted in his Italian campaign. She served him powerfully on several important occasions.

Paré, however, still continued to frequent the camp, when any emergency seemed to demand his services. Such an occasion occurred at the renowned siege of Metz, in the winter of 1552, conducted by Charles V. in person, with the Duke of Alva and 120,000 men, against a garrison of 6000, which ended, after two months, in the disastrous retreat of the besiegers. The defence was most gallantly carried on by the flower of the French army, headed by many of the higher noblesse, and several of the princes of the blood, under the Duke of Guise. It has been already mentioned that gunshot wounds were at that time thought to have something poisonous about them; and the severe cold, and other circumstances of that siege, being such as unusually to depress and harass the garrison, their wounds proved almost uniformly fatal; and the idea arose and gained ground, that Charles had ordered his bullets to be actually poisoned. Paré alone was thought able to meet the necessity of the case in such an extremity; and the demand for his assistance became so pressing in the dispirited garrison, that at the instance of the Duke of Guise the King was induced to send him. He was stealthily introduced by the treachery of one of Charles’s captains, for a bribe of 1500 crowns, and his appearance on the ramparts was hailed by the troops with the most extravagant expressions of joy. “Now that Paré is with us,” they cried, “we shall not perish of our wounds.” Their spirits revived, and the successful issue of their arduous struggle is generally ascribed to the presence of Paré.

Upon the raising of the siege, of which, as is usual in his writings, he gives a most lively and humorous account, Paré returned to court. In 1553 he was sent on a like errand to the siege of Hesdin, which, after a vigorous defence, and against the faith of a capitulation, was pillaged by the troops of the Duke of Savoy. Paré was himself one of the prisoners, but escaped in disguise after various adventures, and returned to Paris; notwithstanding the tempting offers of the Duke of Savoy, who had witnessed his skill, though kept in ignorance of his name.

He was sent upon many other missions of the same kind; as to the fields of St. Quentin and Moncontour; to Rouen, where he attended the Duc de Vendôme on occasion of the wound of which he died; and to St. Denys, where he performed the same unwelcome duty for the Constable. The long intervals of these services he always passed at court, in the enjoyment of his well-earned reputation and favour.

On the death of Henry II. in 1559, occasioned by an accident at a tournament, Francis II., his eldest son by Catherine de’ Medici, succeeded to the crown. He immediately confirmed Paré in his situation of surgeon in ordinary and counsellor. It will not be supposed that he could enjoy this constant favour and good fortune without the usual drawback in the excited jealousy of his professional rivals. Their rancour was at length carried to such a pitch, that they gravely accused him of causing the premature death of Francis in 1560, by injecting poison into his ear under the pretext of treating him for an inflammation seated there, of which he died. Catherine, however, shielded him from this attack, expressing her complete reliance on his integrity as well as his skill, in words which the historians of the period have preserved. A similar accusation was brought against him as unsuccessfully in the case of Henry III., who was afflicted with the same disorder: on which occasion the Queen-Mother again stood forward in his behalf, and his innocence was fully attested by the physicians whom she had placed about her son, and who had witnessed every application he made.

On the death of Francis II. in 1560, Paré maintained his place in the household of Charles IX., to whom it was thought he had rendered essential service after an injury inflicted on one of the nerves of the arm by an unlucky phlebotomist. This misfortune of his humbler brother was of great use to Paré, who, though a courtier during the predominance of the Guises, openly professed the Protestant faith; for it was probably the means of procuring him in Charles the only protector powerful enough to save him from being included in the general massacre of the Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day. Brantôme and Sully each connect his name with that event. The words of the former are as follows: “Le Roi quand il fût jour, ayant mis la tête a la fenêtre de sa chambre, et qu’il voyait aucuns dans le fauxbourg St. Germain qui se remuoient, et se sauvoient, il prit une grande arquebuse de chasse qu’il avoit, et en tira tout plein de coups à eux; mais en vain, car l’arquebuse ne tiroit si loin; incessamment crioit, ‘Tuez, tuez,’ en n’en vouloit sauver aucun si non Maître Ambroise Paré, son premier chirurgien, et le premier de la Chrestienté, et l’envoya querir et venir le soir dans sa chambre et garde robbe, commandant de n’en bouger; et disoit qu’il n’etoit raisonnable qu’un qui pouvoit servir à tout un petit monde, fûst ainsi massacré.”

“De tous ceux,” says Sully, “qui approchoient ce prince (Charles IX.) il n’y avoit personne qui eut tant de part à sa confiance qu’ Ambroise Paré. Cet homme qui n’etoit que son chirurgien, avoit pris avec lui une si grande familiarité, quoiqu’il fût Huguenot, que ce prince lui ayant dit le jour du massacre que c’etoit à cette heure qu’il falloit que tout le monde se fît catholique, Paré lui répondit sans s’étonner, ‘Par la lumière de Dieu, Sire, je crois qu’il vous souvient m’avoir promis de ne me commander jamais quatre choses; sçavoir, de rentre dans le ventre de ma mère, de me trouver à un jour de bataille, de quitter votre service, et d’aller à la messe.’”

Paré still retained his situation after the accession of Henry III. in 1574; but he seems to have resigned the cares of active life about that time, and we hear little more of him. He died December 2, 1590, in the eighty-first year of his life, and was buried in the church of St. André des Arcs in Paris.

Paré appears to have been a man of quick and independent observation rather than of reflection or genius. His constitution was vigorous, and fitted no less for social enjoyments than active business: his person was manly and graceful, his spirits buoyant, and his disposition remarkably amiable and attractive; hence he was a universal favourite, particularly in a despotic court, of which the dullness was agreeably relieved by his frankness, and his powers of humour and repartee. The amusing and well-told anecdotes and lively descriptions that teem in all his writings, which, it may be observed, are equal in point of style to any of the time, sufficiently attest his possession of those qualities, even if the stories and bon-mots that are related of him be questioned. His ‘Apology,’ as he calls one of his later pieces, containing an account of his various campaigns and journeys, is full of humour, and well worth the perusal of the general reader. It was published by way of answer to an attack upon his treatment of contused wounds and hæmorrhages, made by an obscure Parisian lecturer, whose name he does not mention; and he diverts himself exceedingly at the expense of the critic, for his presumption in pretending to teach a surgeon whose experience had been gathered from twenty sieges and fields of battle, through an active professional life of forty years. The raillery he employs is often very keen and pointed, but never ill-natured, and indicates the infinite superiority he felt, and had a right to feel, over his merely book-learned adversary.

His conduct throughout life appears to have been remarkably upright and sincere, though tinctured by the adulation which, in that age of violence and despotism, was always exacted by the great from those who were more humbly born.

He was a bold and good operator, and his general skill and success in the practice of his profession is unquestionable; in that day it must have been wonderful. As a surgical writer, his fame principally rests upon his introduction of a soothing method of treating gunshot and other contused wounds, and his discovery or rather restoration of the method of arresting hæmorrhage, by the ligature of the bleeding vessel, instead of searing with hot iron, and other insufficient and painful means. But he made many other novel and useful remarks which only do not deserve the name of discoveries, because they relate to more trivial points, and do not involve important principles: and, upon the whole, much as surgery has been improved since his time, there have been few writers to whom it has owed so much as to him, especially in the military department. The whole body of his writings on that subject, though diffuse, merit the perusal of professional men. The same praise cannot be given without exception and reserve to those of his writings which were less the records of his personal experience, than compilations from other sources. His remarks upon the subjects of Physiology, Medical Diseases, the Composition of Remedies, Natural History, and Obstetrics, are not free from error, credulity, and even indelicacy. The latter charge was successfully urged against him by the contemporary Parisian physicians, who were jealous of his encroachments upon what they considered their own domain, and he was obliged to alter the original editions.

He was too much occupied by his practice to engage deeply in the study of anatomy: hence his knowledge of it was rather sufficient than accurate; and though he wrote upon it at some length, and even added new facts to that science, his success in advancing it can only be considered as a proof of the imperfect information of the time. He lived before the discovery of the circulation of the blood.

His first publication, on Gunshot Wounds, in 1545, was incorporated with his other writings, comprising altogether twenty-six treatises, and printed at Paris in one large folio volume in 1561. This, with some posthumous additions, has been often reprinted, and there are translations of it in Latin and other languages. The first English edition was by Thomas Johnson in 1634.

[Medal of Paré.]

Engraved by J. Mollison.
ADMIRAL BLAKE.
From the Picture in the Hall of Wadham College, Oxford.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

BLAKE.

Robert Blake is believed to have been born at Plansfield, in the parish of Spaxton, Somersetshire, near Bridgewater, in which town his father was a merchant; but the place is not so well ascertained as the date of his birth, which was August, 1598. He was educated in the Free School of Bridgewater, whence in due time he removed to Oxford, and became successively a member of St. Alban’s Hall and Wadham College. His character was studious, yet he was fond of field-sports and other violent exercises; and we may infer that he had at least a decent share of scholastic learning, from his having been a candidate, though unsuccessfully, for a studentship at Christchurch, and a fellowship at Merton College. He returned to Bridgewater when about twenty-five years old, and lived quietly on his paternal estate till 1640, with the character of a blunt, bold man, of ready humour and fearless expression of his sentiments, which, both in politics and religion, were adverse to the pretensions of the court. These qualities gained for him the confidence of the Presbyterian party in Bridgewater, by whom he was returned to the parliament of April, 1640. The speedy dissolution of that assembly gave him no opportunity of trying his powers as a debater; and in the next parliament he was not re-elected. But on the breaking out of the civil war, he displayed his principles by entering the Parliamentary army.

We have no certain information concerning the time or the capacity in which he began to serve; but in 1643 we find him intrusted with the command of a fort at Bristol, when the city was besieged by the Royalists. Here his impetuous temper had nearly brought him to an untimely death; for, having maintained his fort and killed some of the king’s soldiers after the garrison had surrendered, Prince Rupert was with difficulty induced to spare his life, which was held to have been forfeited by this violation of the laws of war. Blake served afterwards in the west of England with good repute, and in 1644 was appointed Governor of Taunton, a place of great consequence, being the only Parliamentary fortress in that quarter. In that capacity he distinguished himself by the skill, courage, and constancy with which, during two successive sieges, he maintained the town against the Royalists in 1645; an important service, for which the parliament voted £2000 to the garrison, and £500 to the governor. It is recorded that he disapproved of the extremity to which matters were pushed against Charles, and that he was frequently heard to say, that he would as freely venture his life to save the King’s, as he had ever done it in the service of the Parliament.

In February, 1649, Colonel Blake, in conjunction with two officers of the same rank, Deane and Popham, was appointed to command the fleet. It may be taken as a proof that, notwithstanding the fame of our early navigators, the King’s service at sea had never been treated with much attention, that, down to later times than those of which we now write, the chief command of a fleet seems never to have been given to a man of naval education and habits. It is probable that the sea service then held out no inducements strong enough to tempt men of high birth to submit to its inconveniences, and that the command of a fleet was esteemed too great a post to be conferred on a man of humble origin. For this new employment Blake soon showed signal capacity. When the embers of the war were stirred up after the King’s death, he was ordered to the Irish seas in pursuit of Prince Rupert, whom he blockaded in the harbour of Kinsale for several months. Despair of relief induced the Prince at last to make a daring effort to break through the Parliamentary squadron, in which he succeeded; but with the loss of three ships. Blake pursued him to the Tagus, where being denied liberty to attack his enemy by the King of Portugal, in revenge he captured and sent home a number of ships richly laden, on their way from Brazil. In January, 1651, he attacked and, with the exception of two ships, destroyed the Royalist fleet, in the neutral harbour of Malaga; a breach of national law, which can only be justified on the alleged ground that Rupert had destroyed British ships in the same harbour. These services were recompensed by the Parliament with the post of Warden of the Cinque Ports; and in March an act was passed constituting Blake, with his colleagues Deane and Popham, admirals and generals of the fleet for the year ensuing. In that capacity, he took Jersey, Guernsey, and the Scilly Islands from the Royalists; a service, for which he was again thanked by Parliament. In this year he was elected a member of the Council of State.

March 25, 1652, Blake was appointed sole admiral for nine months, in expectation of a war with the Dutch. The United States and England were at this time the two most powerful maritime countries in the world; and it is hard to find any better reason than national rivalry for the bloody war which broke out between them in the spring of this year; a war which seems to have been begun on a point of etiquette, at the discretion of the admirals, without orders for hostilities being known to be given by the governments on either side. On May 18, a fleet of forty-two Dutch ships, commanded by the celebrated Van Tromp, appeared off the Goodwin Sands. Being challenged by Major Bourne, who commanded a squadron in the Downs, they professed to have been driven from their anchorage off Dunkirk by stress of weather; but instead of drawing off the coast as they were required to do, they sailed to Dover and cast anchor, in a manner which showed the deliberate design of insulting the British flag. Blake lay some distance to the westward in Rye Bay. Intelligence was immediately sent to him, and on his approach the Dutch weighed anchor, and seemed about to retreat, but, changing their course, they sailed direct for the English fleet. When within musket shot, Blake ordered a single gun to be fired at the Dutch admiral’s flag, which was done thrice. Van Tromp returned a broadside, and a hot and well-contested action ensued, and was maintained till nightfall. Under cover of the darkness the Dutch retreated, losing two ships (one sunk, the other taken), and leaving the possession of the field and the honour of the victory in the hands of the English. The States appear neither to have authorised nor approved of the conduct of their admiral; for they left no means untried to satisfy the English government; and when they found the demands of the latter so high as to preclude accommodation, they dismissed Van Tromp, and intrusted the command of their fleet to De Ruyter and De Witt. Meanwhile, Blake’s activity was unremitting. He gained a rich harvest of prizes among the Dutch homeward-bound merchantmen, which were pursuing their way without suspicion of danger; and when he had sent home forty good prizes and effectually cleared the Channel, he sailed to the northward, dispersed the fleet engaged in the herring fishery, and captured a hundred of the vessels composing it, together with a squadron of twelve ships of war sent out to protect them. The hostile fleets again came to an engagement, September 28, in which the advantage was decidedly in favour of the English, the rear-admiral of the Dutch being taken, and three or four of their ships disabled. Night put an end to the action; and, though for two days the English maintained the pursuit, the lightness and uncertainty of the wind prevented them from closing with the enemy, who escaped into Goree. After this battle the drafting off of detachments on various services reduced the English fleet to forty sail, and those, it is said, in consequence of the negligence or jealousy of the executive government, were ill provided with men and ammunition, and other requisite supplies. Thus weakly furnished, Blake lay in the Downs, when Van Tromp again stood over to the English coast with eighty men-of-war. Of that undaunted spirit which usually prompts the British seaman to refuse no odds Blake had an ample share; indeed, he did much to infuse that spirit into the service. But there are odds for which no spirit can make up, and as he had a brave and skilful enemy, the result of his rashness was that he was well beaten. Not more than half the ships on either side were engaged; but out of this small number of English vessels two were taken, and four destroyed; the rest were so shattered that they were glad to run for shelter into the river Thames. The Dutch remained masters of the narrow seas; and Van Tromp, in an idle bravado, sailed through the Channel with a broom at his mast-head, as if he had swept it clear of English ships. However, neither the admiral nor the nation were of a temper to submit to this indignity; and great diligence having been used in refitting and recruiting the fleet, Blake put to sea again in February, 1653, with eighty ships. On the 18th he fell in with Van Tromp, with nearly equal force, conducting a large convoy of merchantmen up the Channel. A running battle ensued, which was continued during three consecutive days, until, on the 20th, the Dutch ships, which, to suit the nature of their coast, were built with a smaller draught of water than the English, obtained shelter in the shallow waters of Calais. In this long and obstinate fight, the Dutch lost only eleven men-of-war and thirty merchant vessels; but the number killed is said to have amounted to 1500 on either side; a loss of life of most unusual amount in naval engagements.

Another great battle took place on the 3rd and 4th of June, between Van Tromp and Generals Deane and Monk. On the first day the Dutch seem to have had somewhat the advantage: on the second Blake arrived with a reinforcement of eighteen sail, which turned the scale in favour of the English. Bad health obliged him then to quit the sea, so that he was not present at the last great victory of July 29, in which Van Tromp was killed. But out of respect for his services the Parliament presented him with a gold chain, as well as the admirals who had actually commanded in the battle. When Cromwell dissolved the Long Parliament, and assumed the office of Protector, Blake, though in his principles a republican, did not refuse to acknowledge the new administration. In conjunction with Deane and Monk he published a declaration of their resolution, “notwithstanding the late change, to proceed in the performance of their duties, and the trust reposed in them against the enemies of the Commonwealth.” He is reported to have said to his officers, “It is not our business to mind state-affairs, but to keep foreigners from fooling us.” He sat in the two first Parliaments summoned by the Protector, who always treated him with great respect. Nor was Cromwell’s acknowledged sagacity in the choice of men at fault, when he chose Blake to command a strong fleet, sent into the Mediterranean in November, 1654, to uphold the honour of the English flag, and to demand reparation for the slights and injuries done to the nation during that stormy period of civil war, when our own discord had made others daring against us. In better hands such a mission could not have been placed. Dutch, French, and Spaniards alike concurred in rendering unusual honours to his flag. The Duke of Tuscany and the Order of Malta made compensation for injuries done to the English commerce. The piratical states of Algiers and Tripoli were terrified into submission, and promised to abstain from further violence. The Dey of Tunis held out, confident in the strength of his fortifications. “Here,” he said, “are our castles of Goletta and Porto Ferino: do your worst; do you think we fear your fleet?” Blake took the same course as, in our own time, Lord Exmouth did against Algiers: he bore right into the bay of Porto Ferino; engaged the fortress within musket shot, and in less than two hours silenced or dismounted its guns; and sending a detachment of boats into the harbour, burnt the shipping which lay there. After this example he found no more difficulty in dealing with the African states.

War having been declared between Spain and England, in 1656, Blake took his station to blockade the bay of Cadiz. At this period his constitution was much broken, insomuch that, in the expectation of a speedy death, he sent home a request that some person proper to be his successor might be joined in commission with him. General Montague was accordingly sent out with a strong squadron. Being obliged to quit the coast of Spain in September to obtain water for his fleet, Blake left Captain Stayner with seven ships to watch the enemy. In this interval the Spanish Plate fleet appeared. Stayner captured four ships richly laden with bullion; the rest escaped. Montague conducted the prizes home, so that Blake was again left alone in the Mediterranean. In the ensuing spring, having learnt that another Plate fleet had put into the island of Teneriffe, he sailed thither, and arrived in the road of Santa Cruz, April 20. The bay was strongly fortified, with a formidable castle at the entrance, and a connected chain of minor forts all round it. The naval force collected there was also considerable, and strongly posted, the smaller vessels being placed under the guns of the forts, the galleons strongly moored with their broadsides to the sea; insomuch that the Spanish Governor, a man of courage and ability, felt perfectly at ease as to the security of his charge. The master of a Dutch ship, which was lying in the harbour, was less satisfied, and went to the Governor to request leave to quit the harbour; “For I am sure,” he said, “that Blake will presently be among you.” The Governor made a confident reply. “Begone if you will, and let Blake come if he dares.” Daring was the last thing wanting; nor did the Admiral hesitate, as a wise man might well have done, about the real difficulties of the enterprise in which he was about to engage. The wind blowing into the bay, he sent in Captain Stayner with a squadron to attack the shipping, placed others in such a manner as to take off, and, as far as possible, to silence the fire of the castle and the forts, and himself following, assisted Stayner in capturing the galleons, which, though inferior in number, were superior in size and force to the English ships. This was completed by two o’clock in the afternoon, the engagement having commenced at eight in the morning. Hopeless of being able to carry the prizes out of the bay against an adverse wind, and a still active enemy, Blake gave orders to burn them: and it is probable that he himself might have found some difficulty in beating out of the bay under the fire of the castle, which was still lively, when on a sudden, the wind which had blown strong into the bay, suddenly veered round to the south-west, and favoured his retreat, as it had favoured his daring approach. Of this, the most remarkable, as it was the last exploit of Blake’s life, Clarendon says, “The whole action was so incredible, that all men who knew the place wondered that any sober man, with what courage soever endowed, would ever have undertaken it; and they could hardly persuade themselves to believe what they had done: while the Spaniards comforted themselves with the belief, that they were devils and not men who had destroyed them in such a manner. So much a strong resolution of bold and courageous men can bring to pass, that no resistance or advantage of ground can disappoint them; and it can hardly be imagined how small a loss the English sustained in this unparalleled action, not one ship being left behind, and the killed and wounded not exceeding two hundred men; when the slaughter on board the Spanish ships and on shore was incredible.”

It will be recollected with interest that, on the same spot, Nelson lost his arm, in an unsuccessful night-attempt to capture Santa Cruz with an armed force in boats.

For this service the thanks of Parliament were voted to the officers and seamen engaged, with a diamond ring to the Admiral worth 500l. Blake returned to his old station off Cadiz; but the increase of his disorders, which were dropsy and scurvy, raised a desire in him to return to England, which, however, he did not live to fulfil. He died as he was entering Plymouth Sound, August 17, 1657. His body was transported to London, and buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, at the public expense. After the Revolution it was thought unworthy to remain in that treasure-house of England’s departed greatness; and with the bones of others who had found a resting-place there during the short period of the Commonwealth, it was transferred to St. Margaret’s churchyard. It has been disputed whether this was done with more or less of indecency; but the matter is little worth inquiry. The real indecency and folly lay in thinking that any ground, however sanctified by the reverent associations of centuries, could be polluted by the tomb of a man whose leading passion was the glory of his country, and who made the name and flag of that country respected wheresoever he carried it: a man of whom not one mean or interested action is recorded, and whose great qualities extorted praise even from the Royalists. Bate, in his ‘Elenchus Motuum,’ speaks of him as a man “blameable in this only, that he joined with the parricides;” and it may be remarked that Dr. Bate’s horror of a parricide did not prevent his being physician to Cromwell, as well as to Charles I. and II.

We conclude with Clarendon’s character of this great man. “He was of private extraction, yet had enough left him by his father to give him a good education, which his own inclination disposed him to receive in the University of Oxford, where he took the degree of a Master of Arts, and was enough versed in books for a man who intended not to be of any profession, having sufficient of his own to maintain him in the plenty he affected, and having then no appearance of ambition to be a greater man than he was. He was of a melancholic and sullen nature, and spent his time most with good fellows, who liked his moroseness, and a freedom he used in inveighing against the licence of the time and the power of the court. They who knew him inwardly, discovered that he had an anti-monarchical spirit, when few men thought the government in any danger.” After a short sketch of Blake’s actions in the civil war, the noble author continues, “He then betook himself wholly to the sea, and quickly made himself signal there. He was the first man that declined the old track, and made it manifest that the science might be attained in less time than was imagined, and despised those rules which had long been in practice, to keep his ship and his men out of danger; which had been held in former times a point of great ability and circumspection, as if the principal art requisite in the captain of a ship had been to be sure to come safe home again. He was the first man who brought the ships to contemn castles on shore, which had been thought ever very formidable, and were discovered by him to make a noise only, and to fright those who could be rarely hurt by them. He was the first who infused that proportion of courage into the seamen, by making them see by experience what mighty things they could do, if they were resolved, and taught them to fight in fire as well as upon water, and though he has been very well imitated and followed, he was the first that gave the example of that kind of naval courage, and bold and resolute achievements.”

The earliest life of Blake which we have seen is in the second volume of a collection entitled ‘Lives English and Foreign,’ published at the beginning of the last century. Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, Heath’s Chronicle of the Civil Wars, the Memoirs of Ludlow, Whitelock, and other contemporary authorities, will furnish minute accounts of the many battles of which we have here only made short mention.

Engraved by R. Woodman.
L’HÔPITAL.
From the original by Janet, in the Musée Royal, Paris.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

L’HÔPITAL.

Michel de l’Hôpital was born at Aigueperse in Auvergne. The date of his birth he himself declares, in his testament, to be uncertain, but at the same time he refers it to the year 1505. His father was the domestic physician, the faithful friend, and trusted counsellor of the Constable of Bourbon, and still followed his patron’s fortunes, when that ill-used and misguided prince took up arms against France in 1523. Michel de l’Hôpital, then a student at the University of Toulouse, was arrested as the son of one of Bourbon’s partizans; but after a short time he was set at liberty by the express order of Francis I., and after the lapse of two or three years was permitted to rejoin his father in Italy. He completed his education during a residence of six years at the celebrated University of Padua. Quitting that University with high credit for his acquirements both in polite literature and legal knowledge, he took up his abode at Rome with his father, and soon obtained the favourable notice both of the Emperor Charles V. and the French ambassador, Cardinal de Grammont. But preferring the hope of re-establishment in his native country to the prospects of advancement held out in a foreign land, he returned to France in the train of the Cardinal; was present at the espousal of Catherine de Medici with the Dauphin, afterwards Henry II., in 1583; and laid a stepping-stone towards his fortunes by attracting the notice of his future queen. The death of the Cardinal however in the following year overclouded his prospects. His father was unable to procure a reversal of the sentence of exile and confiscation passed on him for his adherence to Bourbon; and Michel de l’Hôpital, without means or friends, betook himself to the practice of the law in the courts of Paris. Fortunately, his merits procured a discerning friend in Jean Morin, a high legal functionary, who gave him his daughter in marriage in 1537, with the judicial office of Conseiller for her dowry.

L’Hôpital filled this office during nine years. It was one in which he found no pleasure; for though attached to the philosophical study of the law (and he mentions it as one of the evils of his situation that he had been obliged to abandon a project for collecting into one body the laws of France, both written and resting on judicial decisions), he found the daily routine of trying causes extremely irksome. His letters are full of complaints of this drudgery, as he esteemed it, and express in lively terms the pleasure which he felt in escaping during the vacations into the country, and renewing his literary pursuits. He numbered the most intellectual and learned men of France among his friends, nor was he backward in seeking to conciliate the great and powerful. It is worth noting, as indicative of the manners of the age, that his favourite method of addressing such persons was in Latin hexameters. Accounts of his way of life, statements of his wishes, petitions, &c., are conveyed in that form; and he composed with fluency, and with a competent share of elegance, without great attention to correctness. One of his frequent correspondents, to whose favour he owed in great measure his future rise, was Cardinal Lorraine. The Chancellor Olivier, a man of no common virtue, was another of his best friends, and to him L’Hôpital was indebted for being withdrawn from the hated bustle of the law, by his appointment as envoy to the Council of Bologna. This proved a sinecure; and he employed his time in wandering about the neighbourhood of that city, and writing letters to the Chancellor, full of poetical descriptions, and requests for a more permanent provision away from the tumult of the law courts.

Early in 1549 L’Hôpital was recalled, after remaining upwards of a year in Italy. He found the Chancellor in disgrace; but his acknowledged merit obtained the notice of Margaret of Valois, daughter of Francis I., a steady patroness of learning, herself devoted to literary as well as religious study. Being created Duchess of Berri, she appointed him her Chancellor, to manage the affairs of the province; and one of his first steps in that capacity was the establishment of a new law-school at Bourges, to which he endeavoured to attract the most eminent teachers. Her influence, added to that of Cardinal Lorraine, procured for him the high financial appointment of Superintendent of the Chamber of Accounts, in 1554. His conduct in that station was firm and honest. He laboured to put a stop to numberless abuses, which had prevailed both in the collection and disposition of the revenue; and his zeal is testified by the ill-will which it brought upon him, and which twice endangered the loss of his place. His independence in this respect is ill contrasted by his obsequiousness in supporting the edict known in French history by the name of the Semestre. This requires a few words of explanation. No legislative body was recognised by the French constitution. Even the States-General could not enact: the power of making laws resided solely in the sovereign. But by the practice of the land, the edicts of the monarch required to be registered by the body of lawyers called the Parliament of Paris, before they could possess validity as law: a wholesome practice, which often served as a check upon the court. It was probably with the intention of rendering that body more subject to control, that Henry II., or his ministers, introduced the above-mentioned edict, by which it was proposed to divide the Parliament into two bodies, to relieve each other every six months. Under this arrangement it would have been easy to collect the refractory spirits into one body, and then to bring measures forward for registration in whichever half year might best suit the views of the crown. L’Hôpital’s accession to this measure has been palliated by alleging, that, as the price of it, he stipulated for the abolition of a custom which prevailed, for suitors to offer fees to the judges before whom their causes were to be tried, under the name of spices (épices),—a ready means of corruption, for yielding to which, or something not much worse, Bacon, about half a century later, was removed with disgrace from the chancellorship of England. The whole tenor of L’Hôpital’s policy in after times tended to depress the Parliament; and this furnishes a presumption that his conduct in this particular instance was honest. But it is strange that he should not have perceived any inroad on the independence of the judicial body to be a still greater evil than even that from which he endeavoured to free it. After all, the scheme failed, and he was deeply mortified at the obloquy which his accession to it incurred.

The accession of Francis II., by bringing the house of Guise into power, proved the means of L’Hôpital’s advancement. One of the first acts of the new government was to restore to the office of chancellor Olivier, a man of tried integrity, and a friend to toleration. But while the princes of Guise availed themselves of his high character to court popularity, they had no thought of acting by his advice; and Olivier, compelled to be the unwilling instrument of a policy which he detested, and afraid or unable to resign, was hastened by vexation to his grave. L’Hôpital was selected to be his successor in June, 1560. The Guises and the Queen Mother are said to have been actuated by different views in agreeing upon this appointment. The former thought that from an old adherent and petitioner of Cardinal Lorraine they had no opposition to fear: the latter is said to have been influenced by the hope that L’Hôpital’s patriotism would lead him to be a check on the over-powerful house of Lorraine.

The circumstances under which he became Chancellor were such as might fairly breed suspicion of his honesty. None but a bold man could have hoped to do good after the example of Olivier; none but a dexterous man could have succeeded. And such dexterity is seldom joined with that sincerity and purity of purpose, which is one of the most valuable qualities of a statesman, or any man. There are sometimes seasons in which an honest man may take office, with the certainty not only that he will not be permitted to do much that he would wish, but also that he will be obliged to do a good deal that he disapproves. But such compromises are of bad example and evil influence, and can only be excused by the necessity of the times, and by the good results which ensue. By this test, L’Hôpital’s conduct is vindicated. He conferred a signal benefit on France at his first entrance upon office, by dexterously contriving to prevent the establishment of the Inquisition, which had been resolved on. He obtained the convocation of an Assembly of Notables at Fontainebleau, in which, through his influence, conciliatory measures were adopted towards the Protestants, and it was resolved to summon a meeting of the States-General. But the Guises, by working on the young king’s fears, turned that measure to their own advantage. Condé no sooner appeared than he was arrested, tried, and condemned to death. The King of Navarre was threatened with a similar fate; and but for the opportune death of Francis II., the kingdom probably would have been plunged at once into the utmost fury of a religious war. But the succession of Charles IX., a minor, in December 1560, threw the regency into the hands of Catherine; and she, encouraged by L’Hôpital, asserted her independence of the Guises, and, to conciliate the support of a powerful party, released Condé, and allied herself with the King of Navarre.

At first, the Chancellor’s liberal measures seemed to prosper. As if in compliance with the demands of the States, he published the celebrated Ordonnance of Orleans, which embodied most of his views for the reformation of the state, and introduced a variety of bold and important changes into the church, the courts of justice, and the financial system. One portion of it is expressly directed against the oppressive rights claimed and exercised by the nobility. But the spirit of the age was not ripe for such extensive reforms: they were too far in advance to produce a lasting influence. And in attempting to overcome an interested and prejudiced opposition, the Chancellor was led to an act unworthy of his real zeal for the welfare of his country. His legal improvements had not conciliated the good will of the lawyers; and, foreseeing that the Parliament of Paris might probably refuse to register his edicts, he took it on himself to dispatch them to the provinces, without ever having submitted them to that body. To justify such a step, it is not enough to say that his views were enlarged and noble, theirs bigoted and illiberal; for it is seldom or never that any object can be of importance enough to justify a constitutional statesman in breaking down a constitutional security. Nor had he even the bad excuse of success. The Parliament were justly incensed, and probably became still more hostile to the measures adopted in defiance of its authority; and the high Catholic party prevailed in obtaining a new Assembly of Notables, at which all was undone which the Chancellor had been labouring to do, and the persecuting edicts against the Protestants were re-established in full force.

This blow to his system of toleration the Chancellor contrived to obviate. He had no assembly, no body of recognised authority on which to lean for support. The Parliament of Paris was against him; the Assembly of Notables, composed of lawyers and nobility, was against him; the States-General were tedious to convoke, and were paralysed by their division into three orders. In this difficulty he bethought himself of calling an assembly of deputies from the provincial Parliaments of the kingdom; and fortified by their recommendation, he promulgated and obtained registration of the celebrated edict of January, 1562, which, under certain restrictions, permitted the open profession of the Protestant faith. Upon this the furious bigotry of the Duke of Guise broke into open violence, and kindled the first of those religious wars which long desolated France. Strengthened by the adhesion of the Constable Montmorenci, and by possession of the persons of the King, and Queen Regent, the brothers of Lorraine usurped the conduct of affairs, and excluded L’Hôpital from the council. It is remarkable, considering his resolute opposition to their policy, that they did not deprive him of his office; and this may be taken as an evidence either of the consummate prudence with which, without betraying his own principles, he avoided giving personal offence to his opponents; or that his character stood so high as to render his opponents unwilling to incur the odium of displacing him.

The assassination of the Duke of Guise, in February, 1563, restored to Catherine her own free-will, and L’Hôpital to power; and he immediately availed himself of it to lay the basis of peace by fresh edicts in favour of toleration, which as usual were opposed by the Parliament. In the following year, Charles IX. having reached the age of fourteen, the Chancellor revived an old law which fixed the majority of Kings of France at that age, and declared the King’s majority before the Parliament of Rouen. Soon after, he was engaged in a quarrel with his old patron, Cardinal Lorraine, relative to the privileges of the Gallican Church. The question was, whether or not the decrees of the Council of Trent should be admitted as authority in France. The Chancellor opposed this, and he carried his point.

To amuse Charles, and to avoid some of the evils which usually beset a court, the Chancellor conducted his young sovereign on a tour to the southern provinces of France. This was attended with unforeseen and evil consequences. At Bayonne Charles was met by his sister, the Queen of Spain, attended by the Duke of Alva and other Spanish noblemen. Alva acquired the confidence of Catherine, whom he persuaded that in the hands of L’Hôpital she really had no more freedom of action than under the control of the Guises; and as in her opposition to them she had been actuated by no love of toleration, she had little to unlearn under the tuition of that bigoted and able partizan of the papacy. L’Hôpital soon perceived that his power was shaken. He laboured to make up for the lost confidence of Catherine, by attaching himself more and more to Charles IX.; and for a time he succeeded in retaining influence over that prince, who, during the years 1565 and 1566, was kept in a state of vacillation between those who pleaded for peace and toleration, and those who would have exterminated Protestantism at all hazards and by all means. The religious war was renewed in 1567. Peace was concluded in 1568; but L’Hôpital was not employed to manage it. His only hold upon power was now in the reverence of the King; and this was shaken by the artful representations of Catherine. It shows, however, in a strong light, the ascendancy which L’Hôpital had acquired over Charles’s mind, that the joint influence of Catherine and the House of Guise could not induce him absolutely to dismiss his faithful minister. In 1568 he sent to request the Chancellor to give up the seals for a time, with a promise of returning them. L’Hôpital says in his Testament, that “he judged it better to yield to the necessity of the state, and to its new governors, than to contend with them.” He retired to his estate at Vignay, near Etampes, where he returned with avidity to his literary pursuits, and to the amusements and occupations of the country, to which his letters represent him as devotedly attached.

The Chancellor had not amassed wealth in his various high employments; but his pensions were continued by the King; and Catherine herself did not forget his former services. Even in the dreadful massacre of St. Bartholomew’s they interfered to protect him; though his family were Protestants, and he himself, though a Catholic by profession and in observances, was so suspected by the bigot party, who did not understand how sincerity and tolerance could go together, that it passed into a sort of proverb, ‘Lord deliver us from the Chancellor’s mass.’ A troop of horse was sent from court to preserve his mansion from insult. His domestics were alarmed, and proposed to shut the gates. “No,” said the Chancellor; “but if the small gate is not enough, open the great one.” His daughter, then in Paris, was in imminent danger, and escaped only through the intervention of the Duchess of Guise.

The Chancellor did not long survive this signal proof that his labours had been in vain. “I have lived too long,” he said, “since I have seen what has occurred in my last days,—a youth changed from a mild king into a merciless tyrant.” He died, March 13, 1573; and was buried in his parish church of Champmoteux. His monument is among those which have been collected at Paris, in the Musée des Petits-Augustins.

Brantôme has described the person of L’Hôpital. He wore a long white beard; his face was pale, his demeanor grave, and he resembled the pictures of St. Jerome, by which name he was known at court. He and the Constable Montmorenci were famous as rabroueurs, or reprimanders, and were joint terrors to the idle courtiers; and this harshness, if we may trust his own representations, was not natural, but assumed as a necessary qualification for his office. His private habits were very simple and frugal, and he regarded the increase of luxury as the bane of France. Brantôme says that once, when he paid the Chancellor a visit with Maréchal Strozzi, their host gave them for dinner a single dish of bouillie, and that his whole stock of plate consisted of one silver saltcellar. He adds an amusing account of the way in which the Chancellor rated two newly appointed functionaries, who came to present themselves, and who could not pass satisfactorily through a legal examination, which he bestowed upon them.

The leading objects of L’Hôpital’s political life were to obtain the reformation of abuses, to establish the independence of the Gallican church against the usurpations of Rome, and to procure toleration for the Protestants. He is, we believe, the first minister who laid down the principle of toleration, and proclaimed the impossibility and absurdity of making force the rule of reason; and he has thus gained an indefeasible title to the reverence, not only of his countrymen, but of mankind. “What laws,” he said, in his inaugurative speech to the Parliament of Paris, “have not been promulgated on this point of religion? What judgments and punishments, of which even the magistrates of the Parliament have been victims? To what purpose have served such continued armaments and combats in Germany, in England, and in Scotland? The ancient religion has been shaken by these combats, and the new confirmed. The mistake lies in treating the maladies of the mind as if they were those of the body. Experience teaches us that it is the force of reason, the gentle persuasion of words alone, which can win hearts, and cure diseased spirits.”

This great man has another claim to notice, as one of the most distinguished jurists and reformers of France. He has been classed with Charlemagne and St. Louis, as one of the three principal legislators of that country; and his eminent successor D’Aguesseau bore testimony to the merits of his edicts, as the foundation of the most useful laws which were afterwards enacted. His constitutional views were directed towards raising the royal authority, at the expense of the nobility and the Parliament. We have expressed our belief that in the latter instance his conduct was wrong. His views of reform are embodied in the Ordonnance of Orleans (January, 1561), and that of Moulins (February, 1566), which De Thou describes as being the complement of the former. Of the contents of the Ordonnance of Orleans we have already given such notice as our space allows; that of Moulins pertains rather to legal and judicial reforms; it limits and defines the powers of judicial officers, and determines the law on various points, relative to entails, arrests for debt, sales, &c. In short, these two edicts provide for the removal of most of those evils which, unredressed, produced the first Revolution.

It is much to be regretted that L’Hôpital’s essay towards a work on French law is lost. There is a volume extant of his Poetical Epistles, of which the best edition is that of Amsterdam, 1732. To these, and to his Testament, which is printed in the Bibliothèque Choisie of Colomiès, and in Brantôme (article of the Constable Montmorenci), we may refer for authentic details of his life; of which numerous particulars will be found in the history of De Thou, the Memoirs of Brantôme, the Letters of Pasquier, the Eloges of Thevet, and other contemporary writers. His speeches before the States of Orleans have been published; and a Collection of Memoirs, consisting of various State Papers, printed at Cologne, 1672, has been ascribed to him. The Eloge of L’Hôpital was proposed as a prize by the French Academy in 1777. Slight accounts of him will be found in the various biographical dictionaries; but no publication, so far as we know, has appeared either in French or English, which can dispense with the necessity of consulting the original authorities, on the part of those who wish to obtain more than a superficial acquaintance with the history of this illustrious statesman.

[The Conciergerie at Paris, from whence the Huguenot prisoners were liberated by L’Hôpital himself,—from a Print in the British Museum.]

MRS. SIDDONS.

The light esteem in which the theatrical profession has commonly been held renders it probable that the introduction of an actress among the few female names included in our Gallery may seem to some persons uncalled for and injudicious. That there are few players entitled to such admission we allow: but for one who studied acting as a branch of art, discarding every unworthy species of stage trickery; and who, by profound study, and a rare union of mental and bodily excellence, has inseparably connected her name and memory with the masterpieces of the British drama, we do claim a place (to which her eminent brother is almost equally entitled) among the master-minds of the fine arts.

Sarah Kemble came of a theatrical stock. Her father was manager of a provincial company of actors; her mother was the daughter of a provincial manager. Both parents maintained a high character for moral rectitude; and the latter is said to have been distinguished by a strength of mind, and stateliness of demeanour, which may have had some influence upon the character and manners of her celebrated children. Sarah, their eldest daughter, was born at Brecon, July 5, 1755. From an early period of childhood she was trained to the stage. She was scarcely more than seventeen when her affections were engaged by an actor of her father’s company, named Siddons, to whom, after some opposition on the part of her parents, she was married, November 26, 1773. Her early married life was beset with difficulties. Mr. Siddons possessed little merit as an actor; and during nine years, which elapsed before Mrs. Siddons established a metropolitan reputation, she had to endure hard work and low pay. The first encouragement which she received in her career was from the notice of the Hon. Miss Boyle, afterwards Lady O’Neil, a lady possessed of high mental qualities, as well as birth and beauty, who was so much struck

Engraved by W. Holl.
M^RS. SIDDONS.
After the Picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

by the young actress’s performance of Belvidera at Cheltenham in 1774, that she sought her out in her obscurity, and there commenced a warm and lasting friendship. Through this connection Mrs. Siddons seems to have been introduced to Garrick, by whom she was engaged at Drury Lane theatre. Her first appearance was in the character of Portia, December 29, 1775. She was received with indifference; and during the remainder of the season she did not establish herself in the favour of the London audiences, nor did she appear in any first-rate part. Garrick professed high admiration for her, and on quitting the stage, which he did towards the close of that season, promised to procure for her an advantageous engagement with his successors in the management. In this promise he failed, for during the summer of 1776 she received an abrupt dismissal from Drury Lane. Her failure to produce a sensation in the first instance does not seem to have weighed much on her mind. She knew her powers, but was conscious that they were immature; and she was deeply sensible through life how necessary, even to the greatest powers, are cultivation and study. But this dismissal affected her in a very different manner. In her own words, quoted from the autograph ‘Recollections’ intrusted to her friend and biographer, Mr. Campbell, “it was a stunning and cruel blow, overwhelming all my ambitious hopes, and involving peril, even to the very subsistence of my helpless babes.”

Her fears were soothed, and her mortification relieved by her success at several of the provincial theatres. She received her dismissal from Drury Lane while at Birmingham, where she was engaged during the summer to perform the highest characters; and where she laid the foundation of her fame, by acquiring the good opinion of the actor Henderson, who pronounced, within a year of her expulsion from Drury Lane, that she was an actress who never had an equal, nor would ever have a superior. Through his recommendation, in the following year she obtained a permanent engagement at Bath, where she was received with distinguished favour, and where she remained until her increasing reputation procured for her an invitation to return to Drury Lane. She chose the part of Isabella, in the ‘Fatal Marriage,’ for her debut, October 10, 1782. The anxiety with which she approached this second trial is described in an interesting manner in her own memoranda. On this occasion her hopes were fully gratified. She played Isabella eight times between October 10, and October 30, when she appeared in her second character, Euphrasia, in the ‘Grecian Daughter.’ Her other parts, during this first season, were Jane Shore, Calista, Belvidera, and Zara in the ‘Mourning Bride.’

We propose in this sketch of Mrs. Siddons’s theatrical life to notice only the most remarkable of her characters, reserving to the end a complete list of them, together with a few remarks on her style of acting. In November, 1783, she played Isabella in ‘Measure for Measure,’ with entire success; and thus solved the real or pretended doubts of a few persons, who questioned her courage or capacity to represent the masterpieces of Shakspeare to a London audience. No one could do more justice to the pure, uncompromising, clear-sighted virtue of Isabella, so consonant to her own honest and high-souled simplicity: nor was she at fault in attempting, during the same season, Constance, in ‘King John,’ a character of more varied emotion, and far greater demand on the resources of the player. Of this part she says, in an elaborate criticism, worthy of being read with attention by all persons, and especially by actors, “I cannot conceive in the whole range of dramatic character a greater difficulty than that of representing this grand creature.” Those who remember her performance of it in the meridian of her powers, bear testimony, with Mr. Campbell, to the depth of her maternal affection, her queen-like majesty, and her tremendous power of invective and sarcasm: when first revived for her the play seems to have been coldly received.

The celebrated portrait of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse was painted by Reynolds in 1783. The character was suggested by the painter: the attitude is that in which the sitter first placed herself, by which Reynolds was so struck that he at once adopted it.

An interesting anecdote relative to Mrs. Siddons’s first country performance of Lady Macbeth, is told in the Memoranda from which we have already quoted. “It was my custom to study my characters at night, when the domestic cares and business of the day were over. On the night preceding that in which I was to appear for the first time, I shut myself up, as usual, when all the family were retired, and commenced my study of Lady Macbeth. As the character is very short, I thought I should soon accomplish it. Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many do believe, that little more was necessary than to get the words into my head; for the necessity of discrimination, and the development of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my imagination. But, to proceed, I went on with tolerable composure in the silence of the night, (a night I can never forget,) till I came to the assassination scene, when the horrors of the scene rose to a degree that made it impossible for me to get farther. I snatched up my candle, and hurried out of the room, in a paroxysm of terror. My dress was of silk, and the rustling of it, as I ascended the stairs to go to bed, seemed to my panic-struck fancy like the movement of a spectre pursuing me. At last I reached my chamber, where I found my husband fast asleep. I clapt my candlestick down upon the table, without the power of putting the candle out; and I threw myself on my bed, without daring to stay even to take off my clothes. At peep of day I rose to resume my task; but so little did I know of my part when I appeared in it at night, that my shame and confusion cured me of procrastinating my business for the remainder of my life.”

“About six years afterwards I was called upon to act the same character in London. By this time I had perceived the difficulty of assuming a personage with whom no one feeling of common general nature was congenial or assistant. One’s own heart could prompt one to express with some degree of truth the sentiments of a mother, a daughter, a wife, a lover, a sister, &c.; but to adopt this character must be an effort of the judgment alone.”

In accordance with this, Mrs. Siddons has been known to say, that Lady Macbeth gave her more trouble than any other of her characters, both in settling her conception of the poet’s meaning, and determining the means of giving effect to it. Her success however in the eyes of the public was complete: in Mr. Campbell’s words, “the moment she seized the part she identified her image with it in the minds of the living generation.” She appeared in it for the first time in London, February 2, 1785. Smith played Macbeth. As in the case of Constance, Mrs. Siddons has left, in an elaborate essay on the character of Lady Macbeth, interesting evidence of the deep study which she bestowed on her profession; a point in which, as well as in general mental cultivation, the Kemble family have been advantageously distinguished from others even of our first-rate actors. It is scarcely possible to conceive ‘Macbeth’ so well performed as when the principal characters were filled by Mrs. Siddons and Kemble: the actors might have been thought born for the parts. The same may be said of ‘Coriolanus,’ in which they appeared together for the first time in February, 1789. But the season of 1785 is also memorable for Mrs. Siddons’s first appearance in Desdemona, a character as widely different from the Scottish Queen as can well be imagined. Yet it is recorded to have been one of the actress’s most exquisite performances; and this is one of the strongest proofs of her extraordinary talent. Unsuitable as her person, voice, and general demeanour may seem to those who knew her only in her later days, we have the undeniable testimony of competent judges to the grace, loveliness, and sweetness with which she personated the gentle Venetian. Her very stature, Mr. Boaden says, seemed to be lowered. Ophelia she performed once, and once only, for her benefit, May 15, 1786, to her brother’s Hamlet; and, though a poor singer, she rendered the part deeply affecting. Juliet she also performed, we believe once only, for her benefit in 1789. Cordelia and Imogen are to be added to the list of characters of the gentler cast. The former was not one of her most popular, probably not one of her most effective, performances, for Lear is said to have been almost the only play in which, when both were on the stage, the brother made a stronger impression than the sister. The pure, gentle dignity of Imogen must have found in her a most effective representative.

In the autumn of 1783, about a year before Dr. Johnson’s death, Mrs. Siddons, at his own request, paid him a visit, which was several times repeated. He expressed a strong desire to see her in Queen Katherine, his favourite character among Shakspeare’s females. He was not so gratified; for the play was not brought forward until November 28, 1788, after an absence from the stage of near half a century. This, like Lady Macbeth, we must regard as one of Mrs. Siddons’s peculiar characters. “It was an era,” Mr. Campbell says, “not only in Mrs. Siddons’s history, but in the fortune of the play as an acting piece; for certainly, in the history of all female performance on the British stage, there is no specific tradition of any excellence at all approaching to hers as Queen Katherine.” The two principal scenes belonging to the part are strikingly contrasted. The high mind and majestic deportment of the actress, and the sarcasm which she pours out on the Cardinal, render the Trial Scene one of the most effective on the stage; and it has fortunately been preserved from oblivion by the pencil of Harlowe. But the last scene, in the sick chamber, was among the strongest proofs of Mrs. Siddons’s close adherence to nature, and one of her greatest triumphs over the difficulties of her art, enhanced as they were by the extravagant dimensions of the modern theatres. It may be mentioned to show her confidence in her own judgment as to the truth of nature that, though the audience in the gallery sometimes asked her to speak louder, she never obeyed the call; but left the architect responsible for any failure of effect, rather than herself overstep the bounds of propriety in the most solemn event of human life.

Mrs. Siddons quitted Drury Lane for the season 1789–90, in consequence of the difficulty of obtaining her salary while the treasury was in the hands of Sheridan. She was induced by promises to return in the following season; but a weak state of health prevented her playing more than seven nights, and she appeared in no new character; nor, during the summer of 1791, did she act on any provincial stage. She returned to Drury Lane in 1794, after the rebuilding of the theatre, and remained there until 1802; when the impossibility of rescuing the reward of her labours from that “drowning gulf,” as she justly calls Sheridan in one of her letters, drove her away finally. The most remarkable of her new characters, during this period of eight years, were Millwood, in ‘George Barnwell,’ and Agnes, in ‘Fatal Curiosity,’ both plays of Lillo; Mrs. Haller; Elvira in ‘Pizarro,’ which, in spite of the demerits of the play, she rendered one of her most popular characters; and Hermione, in the ‘Winter’s Tale,’ her last new part, which she acted for the first time, March 25, 1802. The statue scene was one of her most extraordinary performances, both for its illusion while she remained motionless, and for the effect produced by her descent from the pedestal, and recognition of her daughter Perdita.

In one of her early performances of this character she met with an accident which might well have ended fatally. The muslin draperies in which she was enveloped caught fire from a lamp; fortunately, one of the scene-men saw and extinguished it before it spread. Her gratitude for his interposition is eloquently expressed in her correspondence; and her warmth of feeling was subsequently evinced in the pains which she took to procure for the man’s son, who had deserted from the army, remission from what she justly calls “the horrid torture and disgrace of the lash,” and in the lively pleasure which she expresses in the prospect of succeeding.

Upon her final departure from Drury Lane, Mrs. Siddons formed an engagement at Covent Garden, where she appeared for the first time, September 27, 1803. She continued there until June 29, 1812, on which day she bid farewell to the stage. During this time she performed in no new characters, nor is any circumstance which requires notice recorded of this part of her professional life. In her last season we find that, of her earlier characters, she performed Isabella, in ‘The Fatal Marriage,’ twice; Isabella, in ‘Measure for Measure,’ seven times; Euphrasia, twice; Belvidera, six times; and Mrs. Beverley, four times. It may perhaps be taken as an indication of that by which she wished chiefly to be remembered, that she played Lady Macbeth ten times, and chose it for her farewell. Queen Katherine she played six times; Constance and Volumnia, four times each; Elvira, five times; Mrs. Haller, twice; Hermione, four times. On her last appearance the house was crowded to excess, and the excitement of the occasion was testified by a general demand that the play should be stopped after Lady Macbeth’s appearance in the sleeping scene. Mrs. Siddons returned to the boards on various occasions, chiefly for her brother Charles’s benefit: her last performance was in the part of Lady Randolph, June 9, 1819.

In giving, in addition to what we have already said, a short general notice of the professional merits of Mrs. Siddons, we shall confine our remarks chiefly to those characters which better suited her maturer years, in which alone a large majority of our readers can have seen her. She was throughout the tragic department the unrivalled actress of her time; though in such parts as Belvidera, Desdemona, Cordelia, &c., the power of exciting the sympathy of an audience might have been shared with her by Mrs. Cibber and other of her predecessors, or by her successors, Miss O’Neil or Miss Kemble. But in one respect she stands alone in her profession: she was the most intellectual of actresses. She was a person of deep thought, and an habitual student of nature with a view to the perfection of her art; and that as much, or more, in advanced life, than when she had her reputation to make or to enjoy in the first years of her celebrity. Mrs. Siddons sat day after day in her study, looking at Shakspeare and whatever bore upon him, not as if he were the mere poet of the stage, furnishing an outline to be filled up by her peculiar powers, but as if he were the high priest and expositor of human nature, whose lessons it was the serious business of her life to learn, and having learned, to teach.

We shall not add to what we have already said of her Queen Katherine, or Lady Macbeth, except one circumstance, illustrative of the above position. Mrs. Siddons, who repeatedly read ‘Macbeth’ before the most competent judges, made a deeper and more lasting impression, not only in her own part, but in the other characters, than did the representation on the stage by her brother and herself, with all the advantages of dress and the illusion of scenery. The audience, at her readings, consisting of men and women of taste and literature, professed never to have understood Shakspeare so thoroughly before.

Her Isabella, in ‘Measure for Measure,’ claims a short notice. This play in Garrick’s reign was acted occasionally to empty benches in the dull part of the season; but neither the manager himself, nor his leading performers, condescended to appear in so grave and sermonizing a piece. Even when played by Kemble and his sister, it did not draw crowded houses; but it ensured a critical and enlightened audience. The theatre seldom contained so many men of the first reputation for taste and literature as when that play was performed. John Kemble’s mind was framed in the same mould with his sister’s; he gave to a sententious and philosophic part dignity and interest, where an ordinary actor would preach his audience to sleep. The scene between the Duke in the disguise of a Confessor, and Isabella, excited neither tears nor rapturous applause, but intense interest, and breathless attention. The Duke’s exposition of his project is long, her intervening speeches short, and not emphatic; so that such a scene bids fair to be called prosing. But the intense and intelligent expression in her eyes, and more perhaps in her mouth, the great seat of expression, filled up whatever was wanting: the gradually increasing, but as yet far from complete comprehension of the device, and of its consistency with her own purity, marked without words what was passing in her mind: but when she exclaims “The image of it gives me content already, and I trust it will grow to a most prosperous perfection,” the burst of perfect understanding, the lighting up of every feature, and the tones of sudden joy, produced a corresponding effect in the spectators, which scenes of intense pathos could scarcely surpass in effect. Mrs. Siddons’s power over the mind was as great as over the passions.

Another extraordinary performance was her Millwood, in ‘George Barnwell.’ She took that part, which had never been played by a first-rate actress, in hopes that she might be of service to her brother Charles, then a young actor, who was to be brought forward as Barnwell. In the early scenes the severity of her blandishments bordered on the ludicrous; she was more like Barnwell’s mother than his mistress: but in her scene of dissimulation with Thorowgood, and in her subsequent arrest and diabolically triumphant avowal of the motive of her conduct through life, the desire to revenge her wrongs on the opposite sex, she pourtrayed wickedness with grand and appalling force. Her thundering exclamation, “I know you, and I hate you all; I expect no mercy, and I ask for none,” was made with a withering effect. The scene in ‘Fatal Curiosity,’ in which Agnes suggests to her husband the murder of their unknown son, was another of her wonderful exhibitions: in Mr. Campbell’s words, “it made the flesh of the spectator creep.”

Mrs. Siddons is said to have thought well of her own talents for comedy; and her reading of Shakspeare’s characters of low humour was admirable. She played at different times Katherine, in ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ and Rosalind; as well as Mrs. Oakley, and a few other characters of the modern drama. There seems to have been nothing against her success in genteel comedy but a deficiency of animal spirits. Her delivery of the level conversation in tragedy was easy, graceful, and refined. Her representation of the early scenes in ‘The Gamester,’ where she had merely to personate an elegant and highbred woman, bearing up against present anxiety and impending misfortune, was as attractive and as finished as her deep tragedy in the sequel was pathetic and harrowing. And in the first scenes of Mrs. Haller, the charm of her manners and delivery imparted interest even to the dull detail of a housekeeper’s weekly routine.

We subjoin a list of the parts which Mrs. Siddons performed in London. The reader will be surprised to find how many of them are in plays all but forgotten, and utterly unworthy of her talents. In those marked (*) she made her first appearance for her own benefit: in those marked (†), for John Kemble’s.

Of Mrs. Siddons’s private life it is not necessary for us to speak at length. She had a full share of domestic troubles; and suffered the most poignant sorrow which could have befallen her affectionate temper, in the successive deaths of two lovely daughters in the prime of youth, and of her eldest son at a more advanced age. Nor was she exempted by her brilliant success and large gains from great anxiety upon pecuniary matters, and from the necessity of diligent labour at times when rest would have been most grateful to a distressed spirit, and a body weakened by frequent indisposition. And she made it her boast that she had never wilfully disappointed either a manager or the public; and that in point of punctuality, she had always been an honest actress. But Mr. Siddons lost money in some unfortunate speculations; and this, combined with the extreme difficulty of extracting from Sheridan her salary, or even the proceeds of her benefits, kept Mrs. Siddons poor for many years. It is however gratifying to know that the evening of her life was spent in affluence.

In social intercourse Mrs. Siddons commanded the respect of all, the admiration and love of those who knew her intimately. To a constitutional want of animal spirits, and to a fear of that presumptuous intrusion to which actresses are often exposed, we may attribute a gravity, not to say severity of manner, from which distant observers sometimes inferred a corresponding severity of character. That this was not the case, that she was benevolent, cheerful, and affectionately interested in the welfare of all who enjoyed her friendship, is shown by the testimony of many, and by the evidence of her own actions.

To be courted by the rich and noble is not the best proof or reward even of professional merit; and no one ever was less disposed than Mrs. Siddons to act the part of what is called a lion. But it should be mentioned that her acquaintance was eagerly cultivated among the highest of the land; and that she was personally esteemed by George III. and his queen, and often summoned to attend on their private circle. She possessed a still higher honour, and one which she is said to have esteemed more highly, in the admiration and friendship of Johnson, Reynolds, Burke, Fox, and other intellectual ornaments of the age.

After quitting the stage, Mrs. Siddons gave public readings of poetry at the Argyle Rooms, and also, by special invitation from the Universities, at Cambridge and Oxford. At home her readings of Shakspeare were the delight of large and frequent parties, till within a year or two of her death. The latter years of her life were spent, the winter months at her house in London, the summer months at some watering-place, and in visits to her numerous friends. Time laid his touch gently on her noble face and person; and to the end of life she looked some years younger than her age, and preserved her mental powers unimpaired. She died June 8, 1831, in her seventy-sixth year.

We need hardly refer to the Lives of Messrs. Boaden and Campbell. The interest of the latter is much increased by the critical and other writings of Mrs. Siddons, with which it is interspersed.

[Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, from Sir J. Reynolds.]

Engraved by E. Scriven.
SIR W. HERSCHELL.
From a Crayon Picture by the late J. Russell, Esq^re. R.A. in the possession of Sir John Herschell.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.

HERSCHEL.

William Herschel was born at Hanover, November 15, 1738. His father was a musician, and brought up his four sons to his own art, which in Germany gave him better means of educating his children, than would have fallen to the lot of a person holding the same station in England. The subject of our memoir is said to have had a master who instructed him in French, ethics, and metaphysics: but at the age of fourteen he was placed in the band of the Hanoverian regiment of guards, and in 1758 or 1759 he accompanied a detachment of the regiment to England. Another account states that he grew tired of his occupation, and came to England alone. Here, after struggling with poverty for some time, he was chosen by Lord Darlington to organize a band for the Durham militia; after which he passed several years in the West Riding of Yorkshire, employed in teaching music and studying languages. About 1765 he was elected organist at Halifax, and employed himself in the study of harmony and mathematics. Such at least is the statement of the ‘Obituary;’ but in that respectable work we find no references to the sources from which these minute particulars of Herschel’s early life are obtained. About this time he is said to have visited Italy; and, without professing to give credit to it, we may here insert a curious story which appears to have been copied into English works from the ‘Dictionnaire des Auteurs Vivans,’ &c., Paris, 1816. Being at Genoa, and not having wherewith to pay his passage home to England, he procured from a M. L’Anglé the use of some public rooms for a concert, at which he played a quartett, alone, upon a harp, and two horns, one fastened to each shoulder. Those who are in the least acquainted with wind instruments will hardly believe that a horn fastened to the shoulder would be of much more use than one growing out of the head, as a musical instrument; to say nothing of the difficulty of blowing two horns at once, or of playing a quartett upon three instruments. Remarkable characters are generally made the subject of wonderful stories, of which each is fashioned in accordance with the general habits of the inventor: the groom’s idea of a wit was “a gentleman who could ride three horses at once;” surely two horns and a harp are not too much to be played at once by a planetary discoverer.

About 1766, he is said to have been one of the Pump-room band at Bath, and was shortly afterwards organist of the Octagon Chapel there. He taught and read as before; and here he turned his attention to astronomy. He borrowed a small reflecting telescope of a friend; and at length, finding that the purchase of such an instrument was (“fortunately,” as it has been well expressed,) above his means, he endeavoured to construct one for himself. His first attempt was a five-feet Newtonian reflector. It was some time before he perfected himself in the method of forming mirrors: in one instance he is said to have spoiled 200 before he succeeded.

In 1781, he announced to the world the discovery of his new planet, of which we shall presently speak. He was immediately appointed private astronomer to the King, by George III., a post which, we believe, was created for him, and died with him, with a salary of £400, and removed, first to Datchet, afterwards to Slough, where he continued till his death, August 23, 1822. During this period he ran that career of patient and sagacious investigation, terminating in brilliant discovery, which has made his name so well known to the world. Little has been published concerning his private life; but the whole results of his mind are to be found in the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ between the years 1782 and 1818.

We have not been able to find the dates of his knighthood, or of his receiving the degree of Doctor of Civil Law from the University of Oxford. He married (we cannot find the date) Mrs. Mary Pitt, a widow; and his only son, Sir John Herschel, has selected from the many tasks to which he is competent, that of developing and adding to his father’s discoveries.

In the space which we can devote to the astronomical and optical labours of Herschel, we cannot attempt to furnish even the smallest detail of their end and objects, since the catalogue of titles alone would occupy more room than we have to give. We can do no more than address ourselves to the impression which generally exists upon the subject, and which supposes the inventor and the philosopher to be no more than an industrious man with good eyes, clever at grinding mirrors for reflecting telescopes, and lucky enough to point one at a new planet. Such being the common notion, it is not possible to make any mere description of Herschel’s papers an index of his merits. Nor have we here understated the scientific knowledge of the public in general. When Sir John Herschel lately set out for the Cape of Good Hope, the newspapers announced his approaching departure, accompanied by the information that “six waggon loads of telescopes” were on their way to the ship, which was all that was said, except in publications expressly scientific. That one principal object of the son’s voyage was to complete a great branch of astronomy, by doing in the southern hemisphere what the father had done in the northern, was not stated for a very simple reason—that this portion of the father’s labours is hardly known by name to any but astronomers. And it is to astronomers only that Herschel is truly known. The notion entertained of him by others often reminds us of the farmer, who came to him to know the proper time to cut his hay. The philosopher replied by pointing to his own crop, which happened to be rotting on the ground under a heavy rain.

The planet which Herschel called after George III. (but which now goes under the more appropriate name of Uranus) was discovered by him March 13, 1781; not accidentally, but as one of the fruits of a laborious investigation, with a distinct and useful object. He was examining every star with one telescope, that he might obtain a definite idea of relative phenomena, which should enable him to distinguish changes actually taking place, from differences of appearance caused by the use of different telescopes: the whole being in furtherance of the design of “throwing some new light upon the organization of the celestial bodies.” The last words, which are part of the title of one of his subsequent papers, aptly express the line of astronomy to which Herschel devoted his life; and the discovery of the planet Uranus was not the chance work of a moment, but the consequence of sagacity strengthened by habit, the latter being formed with a perfect knowledge of what was wanted, as well as of what would be useful in supplying it. Had he been merely registering the places of the stars, he would probably (as others did before him) have passed the planet, perhaps with some remark upon its apparent diskiness: for though the stars have no well-defined discs, yet some have so much more of the appearance of discs than others, that a faint planet, viewed with a low power, might easily be taken for a star. But being engaged upon the stars, expressly with a view to trying how much of such a circumstance would be telescopic, and how much real, he was thereby led to try higher powers, and, eventually, other telescopes. The existence of the planet was soon ascertained, and forms one of the two great features of Herschel’s reputation in the eyes of the world at large.

The celebrated forty-foot telescope, first described to the Royal Society by Herschel, June 2, 1795, was the result of a long series of experiments on the construction of mirrors, begun at Bath, on telescopes from two to twenty feet in length. And we may here remark, that “the bulk of his fortune arose from the sale of telescopes of his own construction, many of which were purchased for the chief observatories of Europe,” and not from the salary of £400 a year which he received as private astronomer to George III. See ‘Statement of Circumstances,’ &c., a pamphlet printed on the occasion of the last election of a President by the Royal Society. In 1785, George III. furnished Herschel with the means of undertaking an instrument larger than any he had yet made. The greatest difficulty (independent of the stand) was the obtaining a mirror of sufficient size, which should not crack in cooling, and should be strong enough not to bend under its own weight. This instrument has been so frequently described that we shall say no more of it, except that Herschel dates the completion of it from August 28, 1789, when he discovered the sixth satellite of Saturn, and obtained his best view of the spots on that planet. A month later, the seventh satellite was discovered by Herschel. This telescope is now never used. Sir J. Herschel prefers a twenty-foot reflector for his own observations.

The first discovery of the satellites of Uranus was also in a minor degree the work of thought. Such bodies were repeatedly looked for by Herschel, but none were seen. A small change in the instrument, by which the light was increased, suggested one more trial; and the result was the establishment of the existence of the two first satellites, in January, 1787. Two more were discovered by Herschel, in 1790, and two more in 1794. These satellites cannot be seen but with an instrument of first-rate power, and in a favourable position of the planet. No one has observed the four last satellites except Herschel himself, or the two first, except himself and Sir J. Herschel, who has confirmed his father’s determination of their periods. See Mem. Royal Astron. Soc. vol. viii. He found that their orbits were nearly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, and ascertained their retrograde motion, and some remarkable relations between their mean distances. It has a brilliant sound, but it is literally true as to the number of known bodies composing the solar system, that Herschel left it exactly half as large again as he found it. To the Sun, Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Moon, Mars, Jupiter and four satellites, Saturn and five satellites, and Halley’s Comet, eighteen in all, he added nine, namely, two satellites to Saturn, Uranus and six satellites.

But not content with augmenting our own, it is to Herschel we owe the discovery of other systems. That the fixed stars were each the centre of a number of planets was suspected, perhaps rather prematurely, before his observations were made known. But the first positive addition to our knowledge of systems, that is of bodies which move in any degree of connexion with each other, is to be found in his paper read to the Royal Society, June 9, 1803, announcing that Castor, γ Leonis, ε Bootis, ζ Herculis, δ Serpentis, γ Virginis, were most probably binary[^[4]] stars. The existence of such systems has been confirmed by Sir J. Herschel and Professor Struve, and the duration of the periods given by Herschel has been sufficiently confirmed to make the exactness of his observations remarkable. But to new planets, and new systems, Herschel added new universes; or, more properly speaking, showed that the universe consisted of portions, each conveying as large an idea of extent and number, as the whole of what was previously called the universe. His great telescope furnished sufficient facts, and his mind was not slow to draw a conjectural inference, which must be classed among the happiest efforts of reasoning speculation. The resolution of the milky way into stars proved that we are situated in a stratum of such bodies much thicker in some directions than others: this led to the inference that some or all of the nebulæ with which the sky is crowded might be similar enormous groups of stars; and the resolution of some of the nebulæ into detached portions was a first step towards the demonstration of the conjecture.

[4]. Double stars, those which are so near to each other as to appear one to the naked eye: binary systems, double stars which revolve round each other.

There is enough yet unmentioned,—in the discovery of the time of rotation of Saturn—that of Jupiter’s satellites—that of the refrangibility of heat—the experiments on colours—the enormous collection of nebulæ—the experimental determination of the magnitude of stars—the researches and conjectures on the physical constitution of the sun—those on the qualities of telescopes, &c. &c.,—to form by itself no ordinary title to the recollection of posterity. But we must refer to Sir J. Herschel’s Astronomy, in which will be found such an account of them as the plan of the work permitted, by one who has shown himself as indisposed to exaggerate, as interested to explain.

In the labours of his observatory Herschel was assisted by his sister, Miss Caroline Herschel, with whose help he published, in 1798, his catalogue of Flamsteed’s stars. This lady, whose exertions, both as an observer and calculator, are well known to astronomers, is still living, at a very advanced age, in Hanover.

We do not know of any very trustworthy account of Herschel. ‘The Obituary for 1822,’ the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ the ‘Annual Register,’ &c., do not state their authorities. We have followed the first-mentioned work as to facts and dates in most of the particulars here mentioned.

[View of the great telescope erected at Slough.]

Engraved by R. Woodman.
SIR S. ROMILLY.
From an Enamel after a Picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.