imagination over organized matter, and the effects of animal magnetism or enthusiasm, and rejected altogether the notion of supernatural influences." Greatrakes was himself under the firm, and we believe sincere, persuasion, that his power of healing was a supernatural gift. Some attacked him as an impostor, while others endeavoured to account for his cures, by the theory of a "sanative contagion in the body, which has an antipathy to some particular diseases and not to others." Among other opponents, St Evremond assailed him in a satirical novel. In the main, however, the most respectable physicians and philosophers of the time supported him with testimonies, which we should now find it hard to reject. Among these were Mr Boyle, Bishop Rust, the celebrated Cudworth, Dr Wilkins, Dr Patrick, &c. The writer of a brief, but full memoir of Greatrakes in the Dublin Penny Journal, cites a long letter from lord Conway to Sir George Rawdon, in which he gives an account of a cure to which he was an eyewitness. The subject was a leper who had for ten years been considered incurable. He was the son of a person of high respectability, and brought forward by the bishop of Gloucester, which makes fraudulent conclusion improbable the cure was immediate. The case is, therefore, as strong and as well attested as any such case is likely to be. The celebrity thus attained by Greatrakes in England was very great. And Charles II. who invited him to London, recommended him very strongly. There is, however, no record of the latter part of his life. He is traced in Dublin, in 1681, when he was about fifty-three years of age. WENTWORTH DILLON, EARL OF ROSCOMMON. BORN A.D. 1633.-DIED A.D. 1684. among these THE ancestry of this nobleman has been already noticed memoirs. He was son to the third earl of Roscommon, and by his mother, nephew to the illustrious earl of Strafford. His father had been in the communion of the church of Rome, but was converted by Usher-so that he was educated as a protestant. His early years were wholly past in Ireland, and he first visited England when his uncle, the earl of Strafford, returned thither from his government, and carried him over to his seat in Yorkshire, where he placed him under the care of a Mr Hall, an eminent scholar. It is mentioned that, from this gentleman, he learned Latin without any previous instruction in grammar, of which it was found impossible to make him recollect the rules. The difficulty is, indeed, one of such frequent occurrence, that it is satisfactory to learn that his lordship was distinguished for the ease and purity of his Latin-in which he maintained a considerable correspondence. The beginning of the civil wars made it unsafe to remain under the protection of the earl of Strafford, and, by the advice of archbishop Usher, he was sent to France. There was a Protestant university in Caen-here he studied for some time under the tuition of Bochart. Having completed his course of study, he travelled through Italy, where he attained considerable skill in medals, and a perfect mastery of the language. He did not return to England till the restoration he was favourably received by king Charles II., and made captain of the band of pensioners. His intercourse with the dissolute court of Charles was productive of a hurtful effect upon his morals, and he abandoned himself for a time to excesses from which not many recover. He injured his estate by gambling, and is said to have fought many duels. Some questions having arisen about a part of his property, he was compelled to visit Ireland, and resigned his post at court. The duke of Ormonde, soon after his arrival, made him captain of the guards. This post he soon resigned under the following circumstances,— -as he was one night returning home from a gaming-house, he was suddenly set upon by three men, who, it is said, were hired for the purpose. He slew one of them, and a gentleman who was passing at the instant came to his assistance and disarmed another, on which the third ran away. The gentleman who thus seasonably had come to his aid, was a disbanded officer of excellent reputation, but in a condition of utter want. The earl, entertaining a strong sense of the important service to which he probably owed his life, determined to resign his own post in his favour, and solicited the duke for his permission. The duke consented, and the gentleman was appointed captain in his place. He returned to England as soon as the arrangement of his affairs permitted. There he was appointed master of the horse to the duchess of York. He soon after married a daughter of lord Burlington. From the time of his marriage he gave himself to literature, and became, as the reader is probably aware, one of the distinguished poets of that time. He was associated with all that was gifted and brilliant among the wits and poets of the town and court, and was joined with Dryden in a project for fixing the standard of the English tongue. The growing interruption of those ecclesiastical disturbances which had begun to disturb the peace of the kingdom, and, doubtless, brought serious alarm to a generation which yet retained the memory of the preaching soldiers of Cromwell-damped the ardour of literary projects, and made his lordship doubt the safety of England. He resolved to pass the remainder of his life in Rome, and told his friends, that "it would be best to sit next to the chimney when it smoked." Dr Johnson has observed that the meaning of the sentence is obscure. We do not think many of our readers will join in this opinion: if any one should, he has but to call to mind the religious opinions of the king and his brother, and the projects which the duke was then well known to entertain for the restoration of the pope's supremacy in England and Ireland. The earl's departure was obstructed by a fit of the gout. In his anxiety to travel, he employed some quack, who drove the disorder into some vital part; and his lordship died in January, 1684. He was interred in Westminster Abbey. The poetry of the earl of Roscommon is no longer known. He seems, however, to have been the first who conceived any idea of that correct versification, and that precise and neatly turned line which was brought afterwards to a state of perfection by Pope and his followers. As Johnson has justly said, "He is elegant, but not great; he never labours after exquisite beauties; and he seldom falls into gross faults. His versification is smooth, but rarely vigorous; and his rhymes are remarkably exact. He improved taste, if he did not enlarge knowledge, and may be remembered among the benefactors to English literature." He is also said, by the same great authority, to have been "the only correct writer of verse before Addison;" and cites a couplet from Pope, which pays him the higher tribute of having been the only moral writer in the licentious court of Charles. His great work was a Metrical Essay on Translated Verse. He also translated the Arte Poetica, from Horace. His translation of Dies Iræ is among the happiest attempts which have been made upon that untranslatable hymn. Many of his lesser productions have been mentioned with applause. HENRY DODWELL. BORN A.D. 1642. DIED A.D. 1711. HENRY DODWELL was born in Dublin in 1642. His father, who had been in the army, possessed some property in Ireland, but having lost it in the rebellion, he brought over his family to England, and settled in York in 1648. Young Dodwell was sent to the York Free School, where he remained five years. In the meantime both his father and mother had died, and he was reduced to great distress from the want of all pecuniary means, till, in 1654, he was taken under the protection of a brother of his mother, at whose expense he was sent, in 1656, to Trinity College. Dublin. There he eventually obtained a fellowship, which, however, he relinquished in 1666, owing to some conscientious scruples against taking holy orders. In 1672, on his return to Ireland, after having resided some years at Oxford, he made his first appearance as an author by a learned preface, with which he introduced to the public a theological tract of the late Dr. Hearn, who had been his college tutor. It was entitled "De obsidatione," and published at Dublin. Dodwell's next publication was a volume entitled "Two Letters of Advice-1. For the supception of Holy Orders; 2. For Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational." It appeared in a second edition in 1681, accompanied with a "Discourse of the Phonician Theology of Sanconeathon," the fragments of which, found in Porphyry and Eusebius, he contends to be spurious. Meanwhile, in 1674, Dodwell had settled in London, and from this time till his death he led a life of busy authorship. Many of his publications were on the Popish and Nonconformist controversies; they have the reputation of showing, like everything else he wrote, extensive and minute learning, and great skill in the application of his scholarship, but little judgment of a larger kind. Few, if any, of the champions of the Church of England have showed the pretensions of that Establishment so far as Dodwell seems to have done; but his whole life attests the perfect conscientiousness and disregard of personal consequences under which he wrote and acted. In 1688 he was elected Camden Professor of Theology in the University of Oxford, but he was deprived of his office after he had held it about five years, for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. He then retired to the village of Cobham, in Berkshire, and soon after to Shottesbrook, in the same neighbourhood, where he spent the rest of his days. He possessed, it appears, an estate in Ireland, but he allowed a relation to enjoy the principal part of the rent, only receiving such a moderate maintenance for himself as sufficed for his simple and inexpensive habits of life. It is said, however, that his relation at length began to grumble at the subtraction even of this pittance, and on that Dodwell resumed his property and married. He took this step in 1694, in his fifty-third year, and he lived to see himself the father of ten children. The works for which he is now chiefly remembered were also all produced in the latter part of his life. SIR WILLIAM BROUNKER, VISCOUNT CASTLELYONS. BORN A.D. 1620.-DIED A.D. 1684. THIS eminent mathematician should have appeared at a somewhat earlier period of our labours. The particulars of his life, on record, are few. He was born in 1620-of his education we can only ascertain that it was irregular, but that, following the bent of his genius, he applied himself with zeal to mathematical science, and early obtained a high reputation among the most eminent philosophers of his day. On the incorporation of the Royal Society, he was elected pro tempore, the first president, and continued, by successive election, to fill this exalted station for fifteen years. During this period he contributed some important papers to the Transactions. To him is due the honour of the first idea of continued fractions. He also first solved some ingenious problems in the Indeterminate Analysis. Among his papers, in the "Transactions," the most remarkable are "Experiments concerning the recoiling of Guns; and a series for the quadrature of the Hyperbola." He was appointed chancellor to the queen, and keeper of her sealwas one of the commissioners for executing the duties of lord high admiral. In 1681, he obtained the mastership of St Katherine's Hospital, near the Tower. He died at his house, in St James' Street, April 5, 1684, and was buried in a vault which he had built for himself in the choir of the hospital. II. 2 x Ir. WILLIAM MOLYNEUX. BORN A.D. 1656-DIED A.D. 1698. WILLIAM MOLYNEUX was descended from a line distinguished by literary and scientific talent. His grandfather was Ulster king-at-arms, and is mentioned by Sir James Ware with eulogy, as "venerandæ antiquitatis cultor." He wrote a continuation of Hanmer's Chronicle of Ireland, which was not however published entire. His father, Samuel, was Master Gunner of Ireland, and wrote a practical treatise on Projectiles; he held a lucrative office also in the Court of Exchequer, and was much respected by the better classes of society in Dublin. William was born in Dublin, April 17th, 1656. His health was weak; and, as he grew up, he appeared to have so tender a frame, that it was judged inexpedient to send him to a public school. A private tutor was therefore retained, and he was educated at his father's house till his 15th year, when he entered the university of Dublin, under the tuition of Mr Palliser, then a fellow, and afterwards Archbishop of Cashel. In the university, he obtained all the distinction then to be acquired by proficiency in the branches of learning then taught; and, having taken his Bachelor's degree, he proceeded to London, where he entered his name in the Middle Temple in 1675. At the Temple he continued for three years in the diligent study of the law. He did not, however, neglect his academic acquirements; and the mathematical and physical sciences, which were at that time beginning to advance, and had received a mighty impulse from the discoveries of the day, and the labours of several members of the Royal Society, among whom Newton, then in the commencement of his illustrious career, so won upon his philosophical and inquiring temper, that he was led to a andon his first selection of a profession, which, however attractive the intellectual taste, is yet unfavourable to scientific pursuit. W this view, he returned to live in his native city in 1678, and soon aer married Miss Lucy Domville, daughter of Sir William Domville, the attorney-general for Ireland. He quickly entered upon a course of scientific inquiry; and, feeling the strong attraction of astronomy, in which the most important branches yet remained as questions to exercise the ingenuity and anxious research of the ablest heads in Europe, he devoted himself for a time to this attractive science with the whole ardour of his mind. On this subject, in 1681, he commenced a correspondence with Flamsted, which was kept up for many years. In 1683, he exerted himself for the establishment in Dublin of a Philosophical Society, on the plan of the Royal Society, of which he had witnessed the admirable effects in London. This society had been created in 1645, by the influence and efforts of Wren, Wallis, and other |