the country. If you must drink wine, said he, let it be home-made. It is well known, that Dr. Darwin's influence and example have sobered the county of Derby; that intemperance in fermented fluid of every species is almost unknown amongst its gentlemen.

Professional generosity distinguished Dr. Darwin's medical practice. While resident in Lichfield, to the priest and lay-vicars of its cathedral, and their families, he always cheerfully gave his advice, but never took fees from any of them. Diligently, also, did he attend to the health of the poor in that city, and afterwards at Derby, and supplied their necessities by food, and all sort of charitable assistance. In each of those towns, his was the cheerful board of almost open-housed hospitality, without extravagance or parade; deeming ever the first unjust, the latter unmanly. Generosity, wit, and science, were his household gods.

To those many rich presents, which Nature bestowed on the mind of Dr. Darwin, she added the seducing, and often dangerous gift of a highly poetic imagination; but he remembered how fatal that gift professionally became to the young physicians, Akenside and Armstrong. Concerning them, the public could not be persuaded, that so much excellence in an ornamental science was

compatible with intense application to a severer study; with such application as it held necessary to a responsibility, towards which it might look for the source of disease, on which it might lean for the struggle with mortality. Thus, through the first twenty-three years of his practice as a physician, Dr. Darwin, with the wisdom of Ulysses, bound himself to the medical mast, that he might not follow those delusive syrens, the muses, or be considered as their avowed votary. Occasional little pieces, however, stole at seldom occurring periods from his pen; though he cautiously precluded their passing the press, before his latent genius for poetry became unveiled to the public eye in its copious and dazzling splendour. Most of these minute gems have stolen into newspapers and magazines, since the impragnable rock, on which his medicinal and philosophical reputation were placed, induced him to contend for that species of fame, which should entwine the Parnassian laurel with the balm of Pharmacy.

After this sketch of Dr. Darwin's character and manners, let us return to the dawn of his professional establishment. A few weeks after his arrival at Lichfield, in the latter end of the year 1756, the intuitive discernment, the skill, spirit and decision, which marked the long course of his

successful practice, were first called into action, and brilliantly opened his career of fame. The late Mr. Inge of Thorpe, in Staffordshire, a young gentleman of family, fortune, and consequence, lay sick of a dangerous fever. The justly celebrated Dr. Wilks of Willenhal, who had many years possessed, in wide extent, the business and confidence of the Lichfield neighbourhood, attended Mr. Inge, and had unsuccessfully combated his disease. At length he pronounced it hopeless; that speedy death must ensue, and took his leave. It was then that a fond mother, wild with terror for the life of an only son, as drowning wretches catch at twigs, sent to Lichfield for the young, and yet inexperienced physician, of recent arrival there. By a reverse and entirely novel course of treatment, Dr. Darwin gave his dying patient back to existence, to health, prosperity, and all that high reputation, which Mr. Inge afterwards possessed as a public magistrate.

The far-spreading report of this judiciously daring and fortunate exertion brought Dr. Darwin into immediate and extensive employment, and soon eclipsed the hopes of an ingenious rival, who resigned the contest; nor, afterwards, did any other competitor bring his certainly ineffectual lamp into that sphere, in which so bright a luminary shone.

Equal success, as in the case of Mr. Inge, continued to result from the powers of Dr. Darwin's genius, his frequent and intense meditation, and the avidity with which he, through life, devoted his leisure to scientific acquirement, and the investigation of disease. Ignorance and timidity, superstition, prejudice, and envy, sedulously strove to attach to his practice the terms, rash, experimental, theoretic; not considering, that without experimental theory, the restoring science could have made no progress; that neither time, nor all its accumulation of premature death, could have enlarged the circle, in which the merely practical physician condemns himself to walk. Strength of mind, fortitude unappalled, and the perpetual success which attended this great man's deviations from the beaten track, enabled him to shake those mists from his reputation, as the lion shakes to air the dewdrops on his

mane.

In 1757, he married Miss Howard, of the Close of Lichfield, a blooming and lovely young lady of eighteen. A mind, which had native strength; an awakened taste for the works of imagination; ingenuous sweetness; delicacy animated by sprightliness, and sustained by fortitude, made her a capable, as well as fascinating companion, even to a man of talents so illustrious....To her he could,

with confidence, commit the important task of rendering his childrens' minds a soil fit to receive, and bring to fruit, the stamina of wisdom and science.

Mrs. Darwin's own mind, by nature so well endowed, strengthened and expanded in the friendship, conversation, and confidence of so beloved, so revered a preceptor. But alas! upon her early youth, and a too delicate constitution, the frequency of her maternal situation during the first five years of her marriage, had probably a baneful effect. The potent skill, and assiduous cares of him, before whom disease daily vanished from the frame of others, could not expel it radically from that of her he loved. It was however kept at bay thirteen years.

Upon the distinguished happiness of those years, she spoke with fervour to two intimate female friends in the last week of her existence, which closed at the latter end of the summer of 1770. "Do not weep for my impending fate,” said the dying angel, with a smile of unaffected cheerfulness. "In the short term of my life, a great deal

of happiness has been comprised. The maladies "of my frame were peculiar; the pains in my head "and stomach, which no medicine could eradicate, "were spasmodic and violent; and required stron