He had never been abroad before-had never seen Rome, nor even the pictures that Paris had to shew. Before his return he was elected, on the death of West, president of the Royal Academy. After his return he went on portrait-painting to the time of his death. His service to art was in idealising portraits. He had that bonhommie of genius which shewed to him at once not only the best side of whatever human phenomenon met his eye, but all that a face and figure were capable of being under the best influences; and that ideal he had power to present. His portraits of children are beautiful beyond parallel. His own face and manner were most attractive to children. They would hang upon his neck, and sit on his knee to be fed; and their antics in his painting-room were as free as in the fields; and not a trait of frolic or grace ever escaped him. We have a myriad such traits, caught at a glance, and fixed down for ever. At Christmas 1829, as we have seen, Sir Thomas Lawrence believed himself, as he then said, likely to attain a good old age. He declared his health to be perfect, except that at night his head and eyes were heated, so that he was glad to bathe them. On Saturday, January 2d, he dined, with Wilkie and others, at Mr Peel's. On Tuesday, though not feeling very well, he was busy at the new Athenæum Club-house, about whose interior decoration he was much interested. Wednesday, the 6th, he wrote a note to his sister, to say that he could not dine with her on Thursday, but would come on Friday-the day he meant to insure his life. On Thursday evening, being better than for some days before, he received two friends, with whom he conversed very cheerfully. Before they had left the house they heard a cry from his servant, which made them return to the room, where they found him dead in his chair. He had told his servant that he was very ill-that he must be dying. His disease was ascertained to be extensive ossification of the heart. He was sixty years of age.

On

One of Lawrence's famous portraits was of Miss Farren, the bewitching actress, of whom our grandfathers could not speak without enthusiasm. This lady, become Countess of Derby, died in April 1829. Among her captives she reckoned Charles James Fox, who spent evening after evening behind the scenes at Drury Lane; but there was no coquetry on the lady's part. She became the second wife of the Earl of Derby in 1797; was received at court; and, to the end of her days, was considered the most accomplished lady in the peerage. It may be a question whether, under the happiest domestic circumstances, it is wise to exchange the excitement of artistic life for the level dulness of aristocratic existence; but Miss Farren's case is a proof that it may be done without scandal, or open bad consequences; and all will agree that, supposing an opening to aristocratic life to be a good thing, artistic genius is a nobler avenue than the commoner one of wealth.

Before this time, and for some years afterwards, there was a good deal of disputation going forward as to the best method of learning a foreign language; whether in the old plodding way by grammar and dictionary, or by the new method of Mr Hamiltonby interlinear translations, in which each foreign

word was placed above or below the equivalent English one. The dispute at times ran high, the advocates of each method not seeing that both may be good in their way. If people found that they could, by Mr Hamilton's means, learn to read a foreign language more speedily and easily than by beginning with the grammar, they would certainly become Hamiltonians, whatever their opponents had to say to the contrary; and if parents wished to give their children a thorough grammatical knowledge of a foreign language, they would put the grammar and dictionary before them, as of old. A great number, too, would use both methods at once-the ancient, for a knowledge of the construction; the modern, for a knowledge of the idiom, and of its affinity with their mother-tongue. In the midst of the controversy,

and of great success, Mr James Hamilton, author of the Hamiltonian system, died, at the age of fifty-nine, in September 1829.

Of men of letters there died, during this period, William Gifford; Professor Jardine; Mitford, the historian; and Professor Dugald Stewart.-Gifford's career was a remarkable one. He worked his way upwards from the lowest condition of fortune and education; his spirit and his love of knowledge being indomitable. He became known, when cabinboy of a ship, to a surgeon of Ashburton, Mr Cookesley, who so exerted his interest and his own generosity as to send the aspiring boy to Oxford. Earl Grosvenor afterwards took him into his house, to be tutor to his son.. He was intimate with Canning, and became the editor of the Anti-Jacobin; and afterwards, for a long course of years, of the Quarterly Review, which he edited from its origin in 1809 till within two years of his death. His learning, his industry, his literary taste, his unscrupulousness as a partisan, and his intense bigotry, all favoured him in making the Quarterly Review what it was; worthy of immortality for its literary articles, and sure of an undesirable immortality as a monument of the extreme Toryism of its day-with all its insolence, all its selfishness, unscrupulousness, and destitution of philosophy. Cold and cruel as Gifford was in his political and satirical writings, he had a warm heart for gratitude and for friendship. He was generous in his transactions, and courteous in his manners; and he thus won a cordial affection from his friends, while he provoked a feeling of an adverse kind from the public at large. He left a considerable portion of his property to a member of Mr Cookesley's family; and died on the last day of the year 1826, at the age of seventy.-Professor Jardine, who taught logic at Glasgow College, and won to himself the respect and affection of a wide circle of eminent men, once his pupils, died, at the age of eighty-four, on the 28th of January 1827.-Mitford, the historian of Greece, reached the age of eighty-three, and died in February of the same year. His history was universally read, and celebrated accordingly, in its early days; but this was mainly because it was uncontroverted and left unrivalled. Since the great recent expansion of the philosophy of history, Mitford's work has fallen into discredit, from which it is not likely to recover. - -Professor Dugald Stewart is never spoken of by those who knew him

it, if they had not been enticed by the graces of his desultory learning into a wilderness where he indicated no path at all. No comprehensive principle is to be found amidst the whole mass of his works; no firm ground under his speculations; no substance beneath his illustrations. Nothing that he wrote under the name of philosophy could cohere for a moment under the test of science. And the science was already abroad-the strong breeze which was to drive before it the mists of mere speculation. Prince Metternich-who, whatever had been his political sins, understood and appreciated as well as any man the nature and benefits of true science-had before this time, when Austrian ambassador at the French court, guaranteed to Dr Gall the expenses of the publication of his work on the functions of the brain; a work which has already begun to change the aspect of both medical science and mental philosophy throughout the civilised world. Dr Gall's work had been prohibited-as first-rate scientific achievements

are apt to be everywhere-by the government at Vienna in 1802. In 1810, Prince Metternich himself had secured its presentation to the world. Before the close of the war, it had begun to modify the views of physicians and philosophers abroad; and soon after the war, when continental ideas began to reach Great Britain, the scientific discoveries of Dr Gall were heard of in England; and they received in Scotland, before the death of Dugald Stewart, that primary homage of outrageous abuse from partisans of old systems, which invariably precedes an ultimate general reception. The noise reached the placid man; but it did not disturb him. He had lived a long and tranquil life-amused with speculation, undisturbed by difficulties which were not apparent to him, unspoiled by adulation, unabashed by the excess of his popularity, cherished by family and friends, and undoubting about the permanence of his works. Those works it is impossible to characterise in any philosophical sense; for no basis is assigned

in the mere undertaking of such subjects, but are in the writings of Dugald Stewart nowhere to be found. He reached the age of seventy-four, and died in June 1828-two months before the great German physician and philosopher who was to extinguish the Will-o'the-wisps which, in the name of the Scotch philosophy, had beguiled multitudes while the continent and its science was closed to us. Dr Gall died in the neighbourhood of Paris, aged seventy-one, on the 22d of August 1828.

A young man died during this period, whose name should perhaps be mentioned on account of the popularity of a poem which he published; such popularity, won by such a poem, being a curious sign of the times. The Rev. Robert Pollok, who had been educated at Glasgow, issued a long poem called The Course of Time, which immediately went through many editions, in spite of faults so offensive, and such an extraordinary absence of merits, as completely perplexed all the authoritative literary critics of the day. The truth seems to be that Mr Pollok's readers and admirers were the

whole of that great and opulent body called, in common conversation, the religious world-the great body which has a conscientious objection to the cultivation of taste by familiarity with the best models in art and literature; with whom music is objectionable, as 'exciting the passions,' painting as frivolous,' and Shakspeare and our other classics as 'profane.' When a novel-Hannah More's Calebs-came in the way of this portion of the public, a novel which they might read, they carried it through a succession of editions presently; and now that a poem had come in their way, a poem that they might read, they devoured it so ravenously as to set the world and the reviews of the day wondering how it might be. The young author left the world before his brief fame reached its height. He was on his way to Italy, consumptive, when he died, in September 1827.

In the days of the first French Revolution, when the excitement of the occasion brought out all existing enthusiasms in one form or another, many women found a voice, and listeners to their voice,

have them; but they are a small benefit in comparison with the other services of such men. Their true service is in their general furtherance of science; their pioneering in new regions, or opening out new methods of procedure, whose importance cannot be at once communicated to, or appreciated by, the multitude of men. It is a good thing to invent a useful instrument, for the service or safety of society and men; but it is a much greater thing to evolve a new element, to discover a new substance, to exhibit a new combination of matter, and add confirmation to a general law. Wollaston did much in both ways to serve the world. He died of a disease of the brain which, however, left his mind clear to the last. He employed his latter days in dictating to an amanuensis an account of the results of his labours. When he was speechless and dying, one of his friends observed aloud that he was in a state of unconsciousness; whereupon, he made signs for paper and pencil, wrote down figures, cast them up, and returned the paper, and the sum was right. He was in the sixty-third year of his age.

Dr Thomas Young went next. He was the son of Quaker parents, whom he astonished not a little by his ability to read at two years old. He appears to have been able to learn and to do whatever he chose; and that, with such versatility, he had any soundness of science at all seems surprising. His first passion was for languages, even for the Oriental; and to this we owe the vast benefit of an introduction to the interpretation of the hieroglyphics of Egypt. It was Dr Young who was the first to read the proper names in the hieroglyphic and enchorial inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, by a comparison of them with the third-the Greek inscription; and it was on this hint that Champollion proceeded in his elaborate researches. It is by this service, and his reinvention or revival of the theory of the undulatory character of light, that Young is chiefly known; though there is hardly a department of natural science on which he did not cast some wondrous illumination. It is a common mistake of superficial readers to suppose that there must have been three or four Dr Youngs at work in different regions of the world of science. He was the last secretary of the Board of Longitude; and then sole conductor of the Nautical Almanac. His writings are too numerous for citation. He was a physician by profession; but the greatest service he rendered in that province was by his testimony to the empirical character of medical treatment, and the absence of all real science in that department of pursuit. He was himself too scientific to be a good practical physician, or to make his patients think him one. Where he saw no guiding principle, he could not pretend to a decision that he did not feel; and he was open in his complaints of the darkness which involves the laws of the human frame. When he said this in his lectures at St George's Hospital, and avowed that his idea of the advantage of skill in medical practice was the advantage of holding a larger number of tickets in a lottery over a smaller, the students were offended, as this was, as Arago observes, a doctrine which students of medicine do not like to hear. From this cause of unpopularity,

and from his instructions being too high and deep for the comprehension of his class, his lectures were not well attended, nor was his practice large; as the least scientific and therefore most confident practitioners must have, with the anxious and trusting sick, the advantage over those who are more aware of consequences while more doubtful about causes, till the laws of the human frame are less obscure

than they as yet are. From these disappointments, and other causes of irritation, Dr Young was not a happy man; and the controversies in which he was engaged are painful records of the aberrations from the serenity of science induced by those selfregards which the love of science should cast out. He was hardly and insultingly treated; but he might not have been so, if his temper had been worthy of his vocation. He and his enemies are gone down to that common resting-place where there is no more strife; and the testimony remains, of which Arago was the utterer, that among philosophers he must always be held to be one of the greatest whom England has produced in modern times.

The man who, of this group, presented the most strongly to the popular observation the attributes of genius, was Davy. In his case, there was no occasion to offer, upon trust, assertions of his greatness, or assurances that a future generation would become aware that he was a transcendent man in his way. People all knew it during his life, whether they understood anything of his services to science or not. His ardour, his eloquence, his poetical faculty, the nature of his intense egotism, his countenance, his manners-before he was spoiled-and his pleasures, all spoke the man of genius, from moment to moment. He brought the poet's mind into philosophical research, and the results were as brilliant as might be expected from such a concentration of such faculties as his. The world will for ever be the better for them. Those who know nothing else about him have heard of the Davy-lamp, and know what a service he rendered by tracking death through the foul caverns of the earth, to bind and disarm him. This was only one of many immediate practical services which he rendered to society before the eyes of all men-the wise and ignorant together; but the wise know that there is a host more behind, which the multitude must as yet take upon trust. The genius of the Cornish boy made itself felt by society before he had reached mature years; and when he lectured in London at the beginning of the century, he was probably the most popular man of his time-so clear were his expositions, so beautiful his experiments, and so bewitching his ardent eloquence. When we call him perhaps the most popular man of his time, we mean with the listening public; for he was not popular in private life. Besides the degree of wildness which appears in all the evidence of his life and writings, there was an excessive egotism, a lack of magnanimity, an insufferable pride and vanity united, which destroyed all pleasure on both sides in his intercourses with others than his flatterers. His visit to Paris ended badly, hearty as was the welcome accorded to himself and his discoveries by the French philosophers. The serenity of a life of scientific research was not