Mr

Roman Catholic body in our islands, when a member of the body was, for the first time after their long depression, called to the rank of king's counsel. The first who was so called was the distinguished Charles Butler, author of a whole library of books, the dread of bishops and other clergy for his religious writings, and the supporter of O'Connell in claiming his seat in parliament for Clare without re-election. Butler was in his eightieth year at that time, and he lived three years longer.-An aged man died in the next year, 1833, who was not less beloved by the Catholics, and not less a friend to them, while himself a good Protestant-the venerable Earl Fitzwilliam, who, in the harsh times at the close of the last century, was recalled from Ireland after a viceroyalty of two months, on account of his countenance of the Catholic claims. On the day of his departure from Dublin, all the shops were closed, and the inhabitants appeared in mourning. He was a member of the Grenville administration for a year before its fall; and his only public connection with politics afterwards was one as honourable to him as his Irish failure. He took part in a public meeting convened to discuss and rebuke the conduct of the Manchester Yeomanry in 1819; and for this he was dismissed from the lieutenancy of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Earl Fitzwilliam died in February 1833, in his eighty-fifth year. He was soon followed, within a few months, by his old friend, Lord Grenville-another stanch champion of Catholic rights, and one who had a long course of years in which to advocate all causes that seemed to him good. Lord Grenville had been speaker of the Commons, and found himself secretary of state at thirty years of age; and this appeared nothing remarkable to him-his friend William Pitt having held place and power when ten years younger still. In our days, a politician of thirty is regarded as a youth of promise. But whenever a great political genius arises, it is probable that rules and customs about age, as about everything else, will give way. Lord Grenville reached the age of seventy-four, and died childless, so that the barony became extinct.Another aged minister of state died in the same year-Earl Bathurst, who was esteemed by his party as a good man of business, and one of their soundest members.-Lord Spencer, who also died in the same year, aged seventy-six, had not been a stable politician; having entered life as a Whig, afterwards become a supporter of Mr Pitt, holding office at the admiralty during the period of Nelson's victories, and going into power with Grenville and Fox, in 1806. His tastes were more literary than political, and he was the collector of the finest private library in England, the bulk of which was deposited in a suite of ground-floor rooms at Althorp, nearly 250 feet in length. The political influence of Lord Spencer's death was greater than that of his life, in his decease being the occasion of the dismissal of the Whig government, and the return of the Conservatives to power.

Another nobleman, who died in the same year, was more fond of literature than of statesmanship; yet his name must have honourable mention among statesmen. Lord Teignmouth began life as John

He

Shore, son of a plain country-gentleman. entered the civil service of the India Company, and rose to the office of governor-general of India. Lord Cornwallis's settlement, and other great measures of that ruler, were mainly attributable to Lord Teignmouth. Yet his heart was more in literature than in statesmanship. He was the bosom-friend of Sir William Jones, whose life he wrote, and whose works he edited. In his old age, he was the president of the Bible Society, and died in his eightythird year. Another statesman, who cared more for philosophy and literature than politics, was lost to the world in 1833, mourned by all with compassionate grief-Earl Dudley. He was only fifty-two, and his powers had died before him; for his brain gave way, after many threatenings and much suffering from a morbid temperament, two or three years before his death. He was an intimate of Horne Tooke, the friend of Canning, and a cabinet minister in 1827; a man of fine tastes and accomplishments, and of independent thought. After much repugnance, he had determined to support the Reform Bill, as a better alternative than withstanding the will of the nation; but when the time came, he was too ill to take his place in the legislature, and he never knew how the great question had issued.-Sir John Leach, master of the rolls, and a privy-councillor, died in 1834. He began his studies as an engineer; but a discerning friend perceived in time. his aptitudes for the legal profession, and induced him to follow it; and England thus obtained one of the best judges of modern times. His defence of the Duke of York, in 1809, obtained for him the good-will and confidence of the prince-regent; and his way was then clear to the eminence which he reached. He opposed the creation of the Vicechancellor's Court; but yet became vice-chancellor after Sir Thomas Plomer, and master of the rolls after Sir J. Copley (now Lord Lyndhurst). His clearness of apprehension in the reception of evidence, and his decision of judgment in determining and delivering the results, were his most remarkable professional characteristics; and in private life he won respect by a singular calmness and simplicity in the endurance of a long course of bodily suffering of great intensity. Most men would have died untimely under such pain as he endured; but his indomitable mind bore him up, and he reached the age of seventyfour. The interest of the whole political world of Europe was engaged by one death which took place at this period. The young son of Napoleon, the Duke de Reichstadt, died at Vienna in 1832, at the age of twenty-one. The birth of the little King of Rome, as he was called in his cradle, had been regarded, in the short-sightedness of men, as a mighty event; and the eyes of the world were fixed upon the child. But before he was old enough to be conscious of human destiny, his rights were gone, his father was borne away over the sea, and he became a landless German prince, under the care of his grandfather, the Emperor of Austria. His attendants adored him for his personal qualities; and from a distance many hopes waited upon him; but he was withdrawn from any possible struggle for thrones and dominations by early sickness and death.

CHAP. XIV.]

By the age of sixteen, he had outgrown his strength; and consumptive tendencies encroached upon him, till he sank thus in early manhood. As he lay in state in the palace, those who passed by the bier received the most affecting lesson of the time as to the deceitfulness of worldly hopes.

In science, one of the most interesting names of the times is that of Sir John Leslie, born of an humble farmer and miller in Fifeshire, who died professor of natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He was a sickly child, averse to books and lessons, but always delighting himself in calculations, and following out mathematical inquiries. This peculiarity fixed the attention of the parochial minister, and was the occasion of his being sent to St Andrews, to study for the church. He and Ivory went to Edinburgh together, neither of them probably anticipating the eminence to which both were to raise themselves. Leslie was aware that the church was not his true destination; and he declined it, becoming tutor to a nephew of Adam Smith's, and to two of the Randolphs of Virginia, with whom he went to the United States. On his return, he intended to lecture on natural philosophy, but found, to use his own words, that rational lectures would not succeed.' A disgraceful controversy took place between the magistrates and clergy of Edinburgh respecting his nomination to the mathematical chair in their university, in 1805; the clergy objecting to him on the ground of his having irreligiously declared Hume's Theory of Causation a model of clear and accurate reasoning.' The magistrates appointed Leslie, in disregard of the clerical opposition; and the clergy brought the affair before the General Assembly. After a discussion of two days, the assembly decided not to subordinate science and liberty of opinion to dogma propounded on an occasion of mere inference, and dismissed the appeal of the clerical objectors as 'vexatious.' Mr Leslie filled that chair till he was called to succeed Playfair in the professorship of natural philosophy, which he held till his death, in November 1832. He invented or revived the differential thermometer, and aided science in many ways by a vigorous exercise of his bold inventive and conjectural faculty, which was more remarkable in him, mathematician as he was, than his powers of reasoning and research. His pupils complained of a want of simplicity in his style, and of clearness in his arrangement; while more advanced students believed that the difficulty lay also in his overrating the powers and experience of those to whom he addressed himself. The highest order of his hearers were continually charmed with the life and vigour of his views, and the rich illustration he cast over his scientific subjects from the stores of his general reading. His experimental processes were exquisite from their ingenuity and refinements. His last production is to be found prefixed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica-a discourse on the history of mathematical and physical science during the eighteenth century. He died in his sixty-seventh year.

In the next year, died a mathematician who put his science to a practical use which all could understand. William Morgan, who was for fifty-six years

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actuary to the Equitable Assurance Society, was a nephew of Dr Price; and it was Dr Price who withdrew him from the medical profession to which he was destined, and caused him to be fitted to the function in which he did so much for the practical application of the science of probabilities, and for the elucidation of national finance. He published much that was useful; but it was as a standing authority, always ready for reference, that he rendered his most important services; and all the while, the Equitable office was rising, under his management, from being a small society, with a capital of a few thousands, into an institution of national importance.

The hurricane at the Mauritius, in 1834, killed a man whose name is destined to live in connection with nautical science-Captain David Thompsonwhose computation and production of the lunar and horary tables, and invention of the longitude scale, were emphatically acknowledged by the Board of Longitude. He did much to fence in with safety the broad highway of nations; and thus his services so lie on the verge between science and the arts as to lead us to consider him as a comrade of the great man who opened so many roads to us on the firm land, and whose engineering achievements come under the head of the arts.-Thomas Telford was president of the Society of Civil Engineers at the time of his death, which happened in the autumn of 1834, when he was seventy-seven years of age. Telford was a poet in his youth; and surely we may say that he was a poet in action in after-life; for where are lofty ideas and a stimulus to the imagination to be found, if not in such spectacles as the Menai Bridge, and the Caledonian Canal, and his great Welsh aqueduct, and St Katherine's Docks, and the water-communication that he made through the pine-hills of Sweden, from the North Sea to the Baltic? It was thus that he regarded his works, and in this spirit that he wrought them; for he had the loftiness of mind, the bright integrity, and benign candour, which are the characteristics of genius that has found its element. There is hardly a county in England, Wales, or Scotland, which is not strewn with monuments of him, in the best form of monument-beneficent works. There is no day of any year in which thousands are not the better for the labours of this man.-Two years before his own death, Telford had been called to mourn that of a pupil and a friend whom he had introduced into a career which promised success something like his own. Alexander Nimmo was, when very young, recommended by Telford to the parliamentary commissioners for fixing the boundaries of the Scottish counties; and again to the commissioners for reclaiming the Irish bogs. All round the coast of Ireland his works are found-harbours, docks, piers, and fishing-stations; and his chart of the whole coast is held to be a guide of great value. He died at Dublin in 1832, aged forty-nine.

During the same period, we lost Richard Hall Gower, the author of various improvements in naval architecture, which were gradually, though slowly, brought into practice before his death in 1833; and Henry Bell, who, so early as the 2d of August 1812,

was ninety-two when he died, in 1834.-Some now living remember the introduction of the Camellia japonica into this country. We owe the luxury to Archibald Thomson, a kinsman of the poet of the Seasons, and chief-gardener at the Marquis of Bute's estate in Bedfordshire. The superb Magnolia Thomsonia was raised from seed by Archibald Thomson; and he saw the plant reach a height of eighteen feet, and a circumference of twenty-four. Like most of the hardy and well-employed race of Scotch gardeners, he attained a great age, dying in his eighty-first year, in 1832.-The eccentric Abernethy died in 1831, after having made himself so talked about for his oddities as hardly to have justice done him for his important services. He raised the reputation of English surgery all over Europe by indicating and performing an operation, in certain cases of aneurism, which was before supposed impracticable; and, by its connection with him, St Bartholomew's Hospital rose to be the first in London. Mr Abernethy did

was

not at all approve our following, in any degree, the ancient Egyptian practice of parting off the human body among dozens of classes of doctors-so that one was to have charge of the limbs, and another of the lungs, and another of the stomach, and others of the eye, the ear, the mouth, and so on. Mr Abernethy did not like to hear of oculists and aurists, but insisted upon it that no man fit to undertake the charge of any member without being fit for the charge of the whole, as no function of the frame is isolated. In this, the sense of society went with him; the only wonder being that, since the days of the old Egyptians, there should have been any doubt about it. Mr Abernethy did not know where he was born, but only that his parents removed to London in his early infancy. He was sixty-six years old when he died.

Among the rovers of their time, we find two names of great interest in the list of the deaths of the period. Two midshipmen, it will be remembered,

CHAP. XIV.]

remained with the mutineers of the Bounty, in 1788, when the other officers were set adrift in an open boat on the Pacific. One of these midshipmen, Peter Heywood, died in 1831; and Mr Purcell, who was one of those in the open boat, followed in 1834. Peter Heywood was only fifteen at the time of the mutiny; and before he was much older, he led a party of sixteen of the mutineers to settle in Otaheite, in order to meet the vessel which it was certain would be sent after them from England. The Bounty was given up to Christian and his eight comrades, who had no wish to stir from where they were, or to meet any English vessel. When the Pandora arrived in Otaheite, the two youths rowed out to her, and made themselves known, when they were put in irons, and treated with extreme rigour. After a most disastrous voyage home, young Heywood met his trial-shewed that his case was one for pity rather than punishment—was found guilty, but freely pardoned by the king. He afterwards became

an able and trusted officer. One of his last services was with Lord Exmouth in the Mediterranean, in 1815 and 1816.-And Lord Exmouth died soon after him-in February 1833. As Lord Exmouth lay on his painful death bed, we may hope it cheered him to think of the Christian captives whom he had released from their Algerine slavery. He reached his seventy-sixth year.--Captain Sir Murray Maxwell, who commanded the unfortunate Alceste at the time of her loss, died in 1831. He passed, with spirit, fortitude, and in the finest temper, as dreary a period as can well occur in any man's life-the fortnight which elapsed between Lord Amherst and his forty-six companions leaving the captain and crew on their desert island, and the arrival of the cruiser from Batavia which relieved them. During this fortnight, the little party of British seamen were besieged by Malay pirates, in fifty or sixty boats, who burned the Alceste to the water's edge, and allowed her crew no rest from self-defence, while they had no alternative before them but starvation. Captain Maxwell's command, under these circumstances, and the discipline of his crew, have obtained a world-wide fame, as they truly deserve.-One other rover, Richard Lander, in whose discoveries the nation took an unwonted interest, was cut off untimely, by an attack of the pirates of the Niger in 1834. Lander had attended Captain Clapperton into the interior of Africa, and had witnessed and reported the discoveries made in Clapperton's final expedition; and he had afterwards, when accompanied by his brother, solved the great problem of the termination of the Niger, by following it down from Boussa to the sea. His ears had drunk in the sound of the surf upon the beach, and his eyes had seen the sea-line, dressed all in the more than tropical light of triumph, and of solemn achievement; and this wonderful happiness-as much as is yielded by the whole life of some men-was to be enough for him; for in three years afterwards he was dead, at the age of thirty. He had bought an island off Attah, and meant to establish a trading-station there; but the piratical natives attacked him at a disadvantageous moment, and shot him in the hip, and he died of the wound.

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In the department of art there were great losses during this period. In 1831 died Mrs Siddons, in her seventy-sixth year. There are few living now who remember her in the fulness of her power; but there are few who have not witnessed the enthusiasm of their fathers and grand-parents at the mention of her name, and who are not aware that the enthusiasm was justified as much by the purity of her character as by the glory of the genius which derived its exaltation from that purity. A yet more ancient favourite, the favourite of George III., Quick, the actor, died in the same year, aged eighty-three; and also the monarchical Elliston-and in a few months after, the comic Munden; and in 1833, Edmund Kean, the last of the stars of the first magnitude. Kean was a study as interesting to the mental philosopher as to the playgoer, so extraordinary was his possession of his 'single gift.' It would appear beforehand that to be such an actor as Kean must require a large variety, as well as a high degree, of intellectual ability; yet he never manifested any power of mind at all above the average-hardly indeed up to the average-anywhere but on the stage. His mode of life was not such as to husband his powers; and he died at the age of forty-five, worn out by excess and exhaustion of body and mind. His first appearance was at four years of age, riding the elephant in Bluebeard; when his beauty, and especially the grandeur of his eyes, fixed the attention of some who afterwards saw him at the summit of his fame. His last appearance was in March 1833, in the character of Othello, when his performance, begun languidly, was broken off in the third act by the utter failure of his strength; and in the ensuing May, he was carried to his grave. The prospects of the stage were further darkened by Mr Young having retired in the preceding year, during which an attempt was made to retrieve the failing fortunes of the drama, by the appointment of a parliamentary committee on dramatic representations, for the purpose of ascertaining what changes could be made in the licensing laws, which could relax the monopoly of the two great theatres, and afford a better opening for authors, actors, and the playgoing public. Amidst all the reasons alleged for the decline of the drama-such as the late dinners of the aristocracy, the absence of royal patronage, and the spreading objection of certain religious bodies to dramatic representationsit was clear that the main cause of that decline was the decay of the public taste for this kind of amusement, without which the other causes alleged would not have been operative. The committee, however, recommended a large invasion of the existing monopoly of the two great theatres, for their own sake, as well as justice to others; a revision of the system of fees to the censor of plays; and an extension of the same protection to dramatic authors as was enjoyed by authors in other departments of literature. The rising passion for the Italian Opera afforded, at the same time, a hint to parties concerned to try whether the popular taste for the spoken drama was or was not merging into that for the musical drama; and the New English Opera-house was opened in the summer of 1834.

Two eminent pianists died during 1832-one at the

`end of a very long career, the other at the beginning of one which promised great marvels Clementi, who reached his eighty-first year, and George Aspull, who died in his nineteenth.-Augustus Pugin, a Frenchman, spent the last forty years of his life among us, and revived in England the study of ecclesiastical architecture, which has since spread and flourished under the favouring influences of the Tractarian party in the church. He died in 1832, in his sixty-fourth year. In the department of vertù, we lost Christie, who, being intended for the church, became an auctioneer; but such an auctioneer as was never dreamed of before. He raised his business to the rank of a profession, and lived in a world of artistical and philosophical ideas which the poet might covet. He explored the nature of the Greek game invented by Palamedes before the siege of Troy, and believed that he had traced it down, through old ages and countries, to our own firesides, where it bears the name of chess. He wrought among the old idolatries and their symbols, till he penetrated into some curious secrets of art. He was the first authority in the kingdom in pictures, sculptures, and vertù. He made the world understand the value of Mr Hope's collection of vases; and these friends, after having solaced themselves with the delights of art and antiquarianism, left the world together. Mr Christie died on the 2d, and Mr Hope on the 3d of February 1831. Mr Hope's name is distinguished on so many grounds, that it is rather difficult to assign his place among our benefactors. From our insular position, and our being kept at home by the long war, and also from our English habit of ridiculing what we do not understand, we were at first guilty of treating Mr Hope with contempt when he endeavoured to improve our taste in decorative art; and an article in the Edinburgh Review, on his folio volume on Household Furniture and Decorations, stands as a monument of our shame. But Mr Hope triumphed; and we have gained, among other things, a lesson in modesty. It was he who first sustained Thorwaldsen, and brought the young Chantrey to light, and stimulated the mature genius of Flaxman. His town and country houses were a paradise of delights to lovers of antiquities and art. He is perhaps most generally known as the author of Anastasius, a romance in which the author gives evidence of, among other things, the thoughtful Ispirit in which he went through his early travels in the east. To another hunter after antiquities we find ourselves more deeply indebted now than any one was aware of during his life; for John Thomas Smith, keeper of the prints and drawings at the British Museum, died the year before the burning of the houses of parliament. Mr Smith had published in the closing years of the last century, Antiquities of London; and when, in 1800, the accession of members on account of the Irish Union compelled the enlargement of the House of Commons, and the wainscotting of St Stephen's Chapel was taken down, revealing the old paintings that were behind, Mr Smith determined on following up his former work with the Antiquities of Westminster. He made haste, as the workmen were always at his heels; and in the August mornings he was at work as soon as there

was light enough, and painted diligently till the workmen arrived at nine o'clock, when he sometimes saw them destroy the very paintings he had just been copying. He made memoranda, matched the tints carefully, and took all pains to perfect his work, both with regard to the paintings which were disappearing, and others which it was supposed might last for centuries. Many of the prints, coloured and gilt by his wife and himself, were lost by a fire at the printing-office where they lay; and the loss was severe; but the place given him at the British Museum provided comfortably for his latter days. He is remembered chiefly as the preserver of the antiquities of Westminster; but this was not one of the seven great things by which he used to tell that his life had been distinguished. He delighted to say: 'I received a kiss when a boy from the beautiful Mrs Robinson-was patted on the head by Dr Johnson-have frequently held Sir Joshua Reynolds's spectacles-partook of a pot of porter with an elephant-saved Lady Hamilton from falling, when the melancholy news arrived of Lord Nelson's death-three times conversed with George III.-and was shut up in a room with Mr Kean's lion.' It seems a pity that he did not live a few months longer, to see the flames swallowing up the houses of parliament, and exult in the thought of what he had saved from their ravages.-Cooke, the engraver, who presented such a world of scenery to stayers at home, died in 1834, from brain fever, at the age of fifty-three; and a few weeks after him the aged Thomas Stothard, who began life as the apprentice of a pattern-designer for brocaded silks. Brocaded silks went out of fashion; and Stothard had, as the fruits of his apprenticeship, his nicety of eye and hand, and elegance of taste in designing small embellishments; and he used them in illustrating, with exquisite little designs, Bell's British Poets, and the Novelists' Magazine. These caught Flaxman's eye, and brought him that good man's friendship. He passed easily from such small works as these to painting figures seven feet high, on the staircase at Burghley House. His latest designs are seen among the illustrations of Rogers's Poems, bearing date 1833-some months before his death.-Peter Nasmyth, called 'the English Hobbima,' died in middle life, in 1831, with the love of his art so strong upon him, that when he was dying, and a thunderstorm was sweeping by, he asked his sisters to draw aside the curtain, and lift him up, that he might watch the effects of the stormy lights.-And then went the young Liversedge, just when his fame was rapidly rising, and before he had reached his thirtieth year. He lived in the world of Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Scott; and it was his picture of Adam Woodcock that was kindling his fame when the cold hand of death was laid on his life.-Jackson, the portrait-painter-not so strong as Raeburn, nor so graceful as Lawrence, but with a clear style of his own, distinguished by its fine colouring-died in 1831; and in 1833 we lost, by a sad accident, Robson, whose landscapes were amongst the most eagerly looked for at the Water-colour Exhibition every year. The cause of his death was the bursting of a blood-vessel in sea-sickness. His life was