circumstanced, but honour and glory in the gifts that remain, and let the losses go. Davy was born at Penzance, in December 1778. He arrived in London in 1801; was knighted in 1812; and was afterwards, in 1818, made a baronet; but, his marriage being childless, his title died with him. He became president of the Royal Society in 1820; went abroad in ill health in 1825, and again, and finally, in the early part of 1828, dying at Geneva on the 29th of May 1829. The authorities of Geneva decreed a public funeral; and there was wide-spread mourning in England when the news arrived that her great philosopher had sunk into the grave at the age of fifty-one. Davy and Wollaston never crossed each other's path, the character of their minds and their methods of pursuing science being essentially unlike. Wollaston was the elder by twelve years; and on some occasions he was called the Mentor of the younger and more brilliant genius; but they generally worked apart, and certainly without mutual hinderance, if

without co-operation. While Wollaston was busy with his thimble, and a shaving of metal, and a pinch of earth, using the most delicate manipulation and refined observation, Davy was rushing about in his laboratory, among heaps of apparatus and masses of material, holding to his work for days and nights together, or half-killing himself by respiring fatal gases. Wollaston never declared a fact or a doctrine, even to his own mind, till the verification of every step of the evidence was complete; while Davy intrepidly published the proofs of the error of his own former published opinions. Wollaston was seldom or never wrong; Davy was often miraculously right. Both had sagacity not to be surpassed; but the sagacity of the one was clear insight, and of the other excited prevision. Both men were too great to be confined within the limits of their own science. Wollaston was a man of various reading and open intellect; and he was capable of genuine intercourse with minds of various character. Davy had not that

liberality; but his own pursuits were diversified. He loved sport-fishing and fowling-with all the intensity of his nature. He was fond of what he thought to be mental and moral philosophy, and attached an unaccountable value to his writings on such subjects. That estimate, however, must be regarded as one of his wildnesses, and as another instance of that opposition which is so common between great men and everybody else as to what they can do best and worst. The inspiration of Davy's genius could not but leave some traces in his miscellaneous writings, and we find accordingly a passage of beauty here and there; but if there is philosophy in them, it is such as may be dropped through the dreams of the night. Amidst his mass of achievements, we may well throw out without slight what there was of mistake and transient; but Wollaston left as little as it is possible for fallible and tentative man to leave for rejection, and much, very much, for which the world will ever be the better. They were two wonderful and truly great men; and at the date under our notice, and for long after, the scientific world felt blank and dreary without them.

Major Rennell is considered the first Englishman who ever attained a high and permanent reputation as a geographer. He began life in the navy, and early shewed what he was capable of in surveying. After being in India, he was induced to leave the navy for the army; and he went out to Bengal as an officer of engineers. His Bengal atlas, and some charts of great value, appeared before long. His greatest work is The Geographical System of Herodotus; a work of the highest interest and importance to untravelled scholars, and a marvel in its way, from the fact that Major Rennell could not read Greek, had no better translation of Herodotus than Beloe's, and was actually able to detect the errors of the translation, by his sagacity and his geographical knowledge together. He assisted Dr Vincent in making out the track of Nearchus for his Commentary on Arrian's account of that voyage; he assisted Sir William Jones in his Oriental collections; and it was he who made out Mungo Park's track, from his journals and descriptions; and by comparing Park's account with prior discoveries, formed the map which accompanies the Travels, with an approach to correctness since proved to be truly surprising. One of his most remarkable and interesting works is his Observations on the Topography of the Plain of Troy, which the lovers of Homer rushed to read, and have studied ever since. As a practical boon, none of his labours are more important than his account of the currents in the oceans navigated by European ships. This excellent man and eminent public benefactor lived to the age of eighty-eight, being born near Chudleigh, in Devonshire, in 1742, and dying on the 29th of March 1830. Though he never reached a higher rank than that of major in the army, and surveyor-general of Bengal, he had abundance of honours in the scientific world, being a member of the chief learned societies in Europe. His must have been an eminently happy life-full of diversity and interest, full of innocence and uprightness, and of achievements of the most

unquestionable value to the whole society of the civilised world.

Among the philanthropists whose lives and labours closed during this period, the name of Pestalozzi ought not to be omitted; for, though a foreigner, he was a benefactor to our country and people. One of the most remarkable results of the peace was the improvement in methods of education in countries which had for many years been shut up within themselves, but could now freely communicate with each other. Pestalozzi was the principal medium of this benefit to England. He was a Swiss, born at Zurich, in 1746; and his benevolence led him to surrender all the ordinary views of young men entering upon the profession of the law, and to devote himself to the service of the ignorant and poor. As director of an orphan institution at Stanz, he obtained experience, and the opportunity of testing the value of some of his ideas on the training of the human mind. Here he was seen at work by various English travellers, or his pupils were encountered here and there; and his popular works were made known among us, and the rage for the Pestalozzian method of education which ensued can never be forgotten by those who witnessed it. This Pestalozzian method was in fact the Socratic, but applied to little children, with whom Socrates himself would probably not have used it. Hitherto, common-place and unreflecting parents and teachers had gone on in the old method -putting everything into a child, and not thinking of bringing anything out; while reflecting and able teachers had of course done both. Now, everything was to be done by the interrogative method, and nothing was to be received by the memory which could in any way be made otherwise accessible. The suffering of a multitude of children was at first very great, as under every new fashion in education; and there are many who rue the prevalence of that fashion to this day. But this was no fault of Pestalozzi's. It was not his way to tease a little child with questions that it could not see the drift of, till every fibre in its frame was quivering with irritation. It was not his way to work a child's reasoning faculties before they ought to have been appealed to at all; or to forbid the natural and pleasant exercise of the flourishing memory of childhood, till a little creature might be seen clutching a vocabulary or chronological table, as most children lay hands on a fairy tale. He interrogated his pupils only on subjects which they were able and ready to understand, and on which they had ideas which they could produce on easy solicitation. But the truth was, his procedure was more a peculiar talent than a system, and it was impossible that it could be extensively imitated without serious abuse, for which he was, all the while, in noway responsible. Serious as were the abuses at first in England, as no doubt elsewhere, the benefits given us by Pestalozzi unquestionably and immeasurably surpassed them. The mischief was one which was certain to work its own cure; while all that was noble and true must live and grow. Pestalozzi's respect for the human mind, wherever he found it his sense of its equal and infinite rights, under all circumstances-his recognition of the diversity of its faculties-his skill in enlarging its scope

CHAP. XI.]

—and substantiating its knowledge; all this was like a new idea to a nation of parents who had been too long shut up alone with old methods, and debarred from intercourse with thinkers abroad. Since that time, English children have had a better chance in education-those of them who are educated at all; a better chance of a natural and timely development of their various faculties, physical, intellectual, and moral. Therefore it is that we may fairly class Pestalozzi among our national benefactors, and record his death among the national losses. He died at the age of eighty-two, on the 17th of February 1827.

Another educator died during this period, whose name should not be ungratefully passed over- -Dr Watson, of the Deaf and Dumb Institution in the Kent Road, London. Without going into any general account of the education of the deaf and dumb, we may note, in explanation of Dr Watson's services, that the most fatal oversight in that branch of education has been that of supposing that a full communication of mind and reception of ideas can be obtained by written language and gesture. Written words and gesture are but the signs of language, after all; and without oral communication, the mind cannot possibly be fully exercised and cultivated. This difficulty is, to all appearance, insuperable; but men have risen up, from time to time, who saw that though the deaf and dumb can never be brought to an equality of cultivation with those who have the full use of speech, much is gained by giving them spoken as well as written language; and Dr Watson was the man who gave the deaf and dumb more power in this direction than any preceding teacher. Bulwer, the chirosophist, opened up the track in England in the seventeenth century; and his work, dated 1648, plainly shews that he taught articulate speech, as well as the written and hand language. Wallis followed, being a contemporary of Bulwer, and anxious to engross the merit which belonged truly to him. Dr Wallis had great merit; but he is proved not to have been a discoverer. Articulate speech had been found attainable for the born deaf previously in Spain, and subsequently in Holland,

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where Dr Amman published his method in full; and during the eighteenth century, Germany and France followed. Henry Baker taught various deaf and dumb persons to speak; but he bound them over not to reveal his method; and, though he half promised Dr Johnson to make it known, he never did so. Thomas Braidwood began his career in 1760, at Edinburgh, and carried to some extent the practice of articulate speech among his pupils. When he removed to London, in 1783, Dr Watson studied and worked at his institution, and made up his mind to devote himself to the education of that unfortunate class, of whom there are not fewer than 13,000 in our islands; and in his eyes the practice of articulate speech was indispensable to the attainment of such cultivation as could be afforded. For five-and-forty years he laboured at his benevolent task, and he carried the capability of speech much higher than any predecessor. In regard to the general run of his pupils, an authority declares: 'Some of the pupils articulate not unpleasantly; their reading is monotonous, but their animation in ordinary conversations, especially on subjects of interest to them, gives a species of natural tone and emphasis to what they say. This, great as it is, is not all. A few days before Dr Watson's death, one of his private pupils was called to the bar by the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. Here were tidings for a good man to receive on his death-bed! The days of miracles will never be over while human benevolence is unexhausted; and here we have, for a sign of our own times, a good man soothed to his rest by the blessings of the dumb. Dr Watson died on the 23d of November 1829, in the sixty-fifth year of his age.

It is not a purely melancholy task to make up this account of our national losses. In the presence of great deeds, the doers fade into shadows even during their life, except to the few to whom they are dear for other reasons than their deeds. The shadowy form is dissolved by death, and we strain our eyes to catch the last trace, and sigh when it is gone; but the substance remains in the deeds done, and yet more in the immortal ideal of the man.

CHAPTER I.

HE

valetudinarian king was gone, with his moods and caprices; and with him went all the considerations of expediency which had determined the political conduct of the year, on every side. It was not now necessary to have the most peremptory man in the empire to hold its first office, for the purpose of keeping its sovereign in order. There was no longer an incessant appeal to the generosity of the three bodies in opposition to abstain from joining to throw out the ministry. There need no longer be a mere show of transacting business, while in reality nothing was done-through the mechanical character of the administration on the one hand, and the

desultory forbearance of the opposition on the other. It was no longer necessary that the country should be without a government in fact, while the nation was kindling and stirring under the news from France, which became more interesting every day. There was now a king who did not shut himself up with his discontents and his flatterers, but who I walked in London streets with his umbrella under his arm, and gave a frank and sailor-like greeting to all old acquaintances, whoever they might be. There was no longer a king who regarded every contravention of his prejudices as a personal injury; but one who sincerely and kindly desired the welfare of his people, without any regard to his personal feelings. He gave an immediate and strong proof of this by continuing the Duke of Wellington and his colleagues in power, notwithstanding a well-understood personal disinclination, and from the pure desire not to unsettle public affairs till the national will should have shewn itself in the elections. He had not been many days on the throne, when he took the opportunity, at some public collation, of proposing the Duke of Wellington's health, and declaring, in a manner more well-meant than dignified, that it was a mistake to suppose that he had any ill-feeling