Читать книгу Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 368, June 1846 - Various - Страница 1

Lord Brougham has resumed his memoirs of the eminent writers of England; and every lover of literature will feel gratified by this employment of his active research and of his vigorous pen.

One of the most striking distinctions of English public life from that of the Continent, is in the condition of statesmen after their casual retirement from power. The Foreign statesman seems to exist only in office. The moment that sees him "out of place," sees him extinguished. He is lost as suddenly to the public eye, as if he were carried to the tomb of his ancestors. He retires to his country-seat, and there subsides into the garrulous complainant against the caprices of fortune, or buries his calamities in the quiet indulgence of his appetites; smokes away his term of years, subsides into the lean and slippered pantaloon, occupies his studies with the Court Gazette, and his faculties with cards; and is finally deposited in the family vault, to continue the process of mouldering which had been begun in his arm-chair, to be remembered only in an epitaph. France, at the present day, alone seems to form an exception. Her legislature affords a new element in which statesmanship in abeyance can still float: the little vessel is there at least kept in view of mankind; if it makes no progress, it at least keeps above water; and, however incapable of reaching the port by its own means, the fluctuations of the national surge, sometimes so powerful, and always so contemptuous of calculation, may at some time or other carry the craziest craft into harbour. But the general order of continental ministers, even of the highest rank, when abandoned by the monarch, are like men consigned to the dungeon. They go to their place of sentence at once. The man who to-day figured in the highest robe of power, to-morrow wears the prison costume. His rise was the work of the royal will – his fall is equally the work of the royal will. Having no connexion with the national mind, he has no resource in the national sympathies. He has been a royal instrument: when his edge becomes dull, or the royal artificer finds a tool whose fashion he likes better, the old tool is flung by to rust, and no man asks where or why, his use is at an end, and the world and the workman, alike, "knoweth it no more."

But, in England, the condition of public life is wholly different. The statesman is the creation of the national will, and neither in office, nor in opposition, does the nation forget the product of its will. The minister is no offspring of slavery, no official negro, made to be sold, and, when sold, separated from his parentage once and for ever. If he sins in power, he is at worst but the Prodigal Son, watched in his career, and willingly welcomed when he has abjured his wanderings. Instead of being extinguished by the loss of power, he often more than compensates the change, by the revival of popularity. Disencumbered of the laced and embroidered drapery of office, he often exhibits the natural vigour and proportion of his faculties to higher advantage; cultivates his intellectual distinctions with more palpable success; refreshes his strength for nobler purposes than even those of ambition; and, if he should not exert his renewed popularity for a new conquest of power, only substitutes for place the more generous and exalted determination of deserving those tributes which men naturally offer to great abilities exerted for the good of present and future generations.

We must allude, for the national honour, to this characteristic of English feeling, in the changes of public men. On the Continent, the hour which deprived a statesman of office, at once deprived him of every thing. All the world ran away from him, as they would from a falling house. The crowded antechamber of yesterday, exhibited nothing to-day but utter solitude. The fallen minister was a leper; men shrank from his touch; the contagion of ill-luck was upon him; and every one dreaded to catch the disease. It was sometimes even worse. The loss of power was the ruin of fortune. The Dives had been suddenly transformed into the Lazarus; the purple and fine linen were "shreds and patches," and not even the dogs came to administer to his malady. But, among us, the breaking up of a cabinet often only gives rise to a bold and brilliant opposition. It is not like the breaking up of a ship, where the wreck is irreparable, and the timbers are shattered and scattered, and good for nothing; it is often more like the breaking up of a regiment in one of our colonies, where the once compact mass of force, which knew nothing but the command of its colonel, now takes, each man his own way, exhibits his own style of cleverness; instead of the one manual exercise of musket and bayonet, each individual takes the axe or the spade, the tool or the ploughshare, and works a new fertility out of the soil, according to his own "thews and sinews."

The moral of all this is, that the distinguished author of these Memoirs is now devoting himself to a career of literature, to which even his political services may have been of inferior utility. He is recalling the public memory to those eminent achievements, which have so powerfully advanced the mental grandeur of our era; and, while he thus gives due honour to the labours of the past, he is at once encouraging and illustrating the nobleness of the course which opens to posterity. But Lord Brougham's influence cannot be contented, we should hope, with merely speculative benefits; it is for him, and for men like him, to look with interest on the struggles of literary existence at the hour; to call the attention of government and the nation to the neglects, the narrowness, and the caprices of national patronage; to demand protection for genius depressed by the worldliness of the crowd; to point out to men of rank and wealth a path of service infinitely more honourable to their own taste, and infinitely more productive to their country, than ribands and stars; than the tinkling of a name, than pompous palaces, or picture galleries of royal price; to excite our nobles to constitute themselves the true patrons of the living genius of the land, and disdain to be content with either the offering of weak regrets or the tribute of worthless honours to the slumberers in the grave. A tenth part of the sums employed in raising obelisks to Burns, would have rescued one half of his life from poverty, and the other half from despair. The single sum which raised the monument to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh, would have saved him from the final pressure which broke his heart, elastic as it was, and dimmed his intellect, capable as he still was of throwing a splendour over his native soil.

This neglect is known and suffered in no other province of public service. The soldier, the sailor, the architect, the painter, are all within sight of the most lavish prizes of public liberality. Parliament has just given titles and superb pensions to the conquerors of the Sikhs. The India Company has followed its example. We applaud this munificent liberality in both instances. Two general officers have thus obtained the peerage, with £7000 and £5000 a-year. They deserved those rewards. But the whole literary encouragement of the British empire, with a revenue of fifty-two millions sterling, is £1200, little more than the tenth part of the pensions allotted to those two gallant men. £1200 for the whole literary encouragement of England! There can be no greater scandal to the intellectual honour of the country. The pettiest German principality scarcely limits its literary encouragement to this sum. We doubt whether Weimar, between literary offices and pensions, did not give twice the sum annually. But named in competition with the liberality of the leading sovereigns, it is utterly mean. Louis XIV., two hundred years ago, allotted 80,000 francs a-year to his forty members of the Academy, a sum equivalent in that day, and in France, to little less than £5000 a-year in our day, and in England. Frederic II. gave pensions and appointments to a whole corps of literary men. At this moment, there is scarcely a man of any literary distinction in Paris, who has not a share in the liberal and wise patronage of government, either in office or public pension.

But if we are to be answered by a class, plethoric with wealth and rank; that literature ought to be content with living on its own means; must not the obvious answer be – Is the author to be an author, down to his grave? Is there to be no relaxation of his toil? is there to be no allowance for the exhaustion of his overworked faculties? for the natural infirmities of years? for the vexations of a noble spirit compelled to submit to the caprices of public change? and with its full share of the common calamities of life, increasing their pressure at once by an inevitable sense of wrong, and by a feeling that the delight of his youth must be the drudgery of his age? When the great Dryden, in his seventieth year, was forced, in the bitterness of his heart, to exclaim, "Must I die in the harness!" his language was a brand on the common sense, as well as on the just generosity, of his country. We now abandon the topic with one remark. This want of the higher liberality of the nation has already produced the most injurious effects on our literature.

All the great works of our ancestral literature were the works of leisure and comparative competence. All the great dramatic poetry of France was the work of comparative competence. Its writers were not compelled to hurry after the popular tastes; they followed their own, and impressed its character upon the mind of the nation. The plays of Racine, Corneille, Molière, and Voltaire, are nobler trophies to the greatness of France than all the victories of Louis the XIV., than Versailles, than all the pomps of his splendid reign. Louis Philippe has adopted the same munificent policy, and it will be followed by the same honour with posterity. But, in England, the keeping of a stud of racehorses, the building of a dog-kennel, or the purchase of a foreign picture, is ignominiously and selfishly suffered to absorb a larger sum than the whole literary patronage of the most opulent empire that the sun ever shone upon. We recommend these considerations to Lord Brougham: they are nobler than politics; they are fitter for his combined character of statesman and philosopher; they will also combine with that character another which alone can give permanency to the fame of any public man – that of the philanthropist. His ability, his knowledge of human nature, and his passion for public service – qualities in which his merits are known to Europe – designate him as the founder of a great system of public liberality to the enterprise of genius. And when party is forgotten, and cabinets have perished; when, perhaps, even the boundaries of empire may have been changed, and new nations rise to claim the supremacy of arts and arms; the services of the protector of literature will stand out before the eye with increased honour, and his name be rescued from the common ruin which envelopes the memory of ostentatious conquerors and idle kings.

The present volume contains biographies of Johnson, Adam Smith, Lavoisier, Gibbon, Sir Joseph Banks, D'Alembert. We shall commence with the lives less known to the generality of readers than those of our great moralist and great political economist, reserving ourselves for sketches of their career, as our space may allow.

Lord Brougham commences his life of Sir Joseph Banks by a species of apology, for placing in the ranks of philosophers a man who had never written a book. But no one has ever doubted that a man may be a philosopher, without being an author. Some of the greatest inventions of philosophy, of science, and of practical power, have been the work of men who never wrote a book. In fact, the inventor is generally a man of few words; his disciples, or rivals, or imitators, are the men of description. The inventor gives the idea, the follower gives the treatise; but the inventor is the philosopher after all. The question, however, with Sir Joseph Banks is, whether he was any more an inventor than a writer. It does not appear that he was either. Of course, he has no right to rank among men of science. But he had merits of his own, and on those his distinctions ought to have been placed. He was a zealous, active, and influential friend of philosophers. He gave them his time, he received them in his house, and he assisted their progress. He volunteered to be the protector of their class; he sympathised with their pursuits; and, while adding little or nothing to their discoveries, he assisted in bringing those discoveries before the world. He loved to be thought the patriarch of British science; and, like the patriarch, he retained his authority even when he was past his labour. If he filled the throne of science feebly, none could deny that he filled it zealously. The true definition of him was, an English gentleman occupying his leisure with philosophical pursuits, and encouraging others of more powerful understanding to do the same.

Sir Joseph Banks was of an old and wealthy family, dating so far back as Edward III.; first settled in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and afterwards in the county of Lincoln. He was born in London in January 1743. At the age of nine he was sent to Harrow, and at thirteen to Eton, where the tutors observed, as has happened in many other instances, that he was fonder of play than of books. In about a twelvemonth, however, he became studious, though not to the taste of his schoolmasters. The origin of this change was described by himself, in a letter to Sir Everard Home, as accidental. One afternoon he had been bathing with some of the Eton boys, and, on returning to dress himself, found that they had left him alone. Walking down a green lane, whose sides exhibited the wild-flowers of the season, the thought occurred to him, how much more natural and useful would be the knowledge of plants, than of Greek and Latin. From this time he devoted himself to the study of botany, though still continuing that of the classics. On returning to his father's house, he found a copy of Gerard's Herbal, which fixed his taste. He now added to his collecting of plants that of butterflies and other insects. Lord Brougham mentions that his father was one of Banks's associates at this period, and that they employed themselves together in natural history.

Natural history has been so frequently the pursuit of studious triflers, that it is difficult to exempt it from the charge of trifling. To gather plants which have been gathered a thousand times before, to ascertain their names from an herbal, and classify them according to its list, seems to be little more than a grave apology for playing the fool. A determination to gather all the butterflies and blue-bottles within the limits of the realm, certainly has nothing that can dignify it with the name of scientific pursuit. The collecting of pebbles and shells, or even the arranging of animals in the cases of a museum, are accomplishments of so easy an order, and of so little actual use, that they serve for little else than to wile away the time. But this trifling assumes a more important shape when it rises to the acquisition of actual knowledge; when, instead of classifying plants, it develops their medicinal virtues, and, instead of embalming animals, it examines their structure, as throwing light on the conformation or diseases of man.

But Sir Joseph Banks was fortunately relieved from subsiding into this foppery, by circumstances which forced him into vigorous and useful exertion. An approaching transit of Venus had been long looked to, as giving an opportunity for ascertaining the distance of the sun from the earth. It was recommended, that observations on this phenomenon should be made from different stations on the globe. Accordingly, in 1761, the British government sent out two observers, one to the Cape and the other to St Helena. The French government at the same time sent out three – to Pondicherry, Siberia, and the Mauritius. But the weather was unfavourable, and the observations were to be regarded as a failure. But there was a second transit in 1769, and the leading powers of Europe sent out observers; England sending a vessel to the South Seas, an observer to India, and two to Hudson's Bay. Captain Wallace having lately made several discoveries in the Pacific, public attention had been strongly drawn to that hitherto scarcely known portion of the globe. The celebrated Captain Cook was appointed commander, and Sir Joseph Banks, stimulated by an honourable zeal and a rational desire of knowledge, obtained leave from his friend, Lord Sandwich, to join the expedition. He took with him Dr Solander the botanist, and two draughtsmen.

On the 25th of August 1768, Cook's vessel, the Endeavour, sailed from Plymouth Sound, and the first point of land at which they touched was the Terra del Fuego, the southern extremity of the American continent. There they encountered such severity of cold, that, although it was the summer of those regions, Banks and Solander, in one of their botanical excursions, had nearly shared the fate of three of their attendants, who perished from the intensity of the cold. The effect of this excess of low temperature has been often felt and often described. It was a general torpor of the frame, producing an almost irresistible propensity to sleep. Every exertion was painful, and the strongest desire was to lie down in the snow and give way to slumber. Solander, who had acquired his experience in botanizing among the Swedish mountains, warned the party of their danger. "Whoever," said he, "sits down, will sleep; whoever sleeps, will wake no more." Yet he himself was one of the first to yield; he insisted on lying down, fell asleep before he could be brought to the fire which Banks had kindled, and was restored with difficulty. His companion had felt a similar inclination, but resisted it, by the greater energy of youth, and probably of a more vigorous mind.

Cook then sailed for Otaheite, which he reached in April. The contrast of the luxurious climate with the inclement region which they had left behind them, was doubly striking to men who, for upwards of half a year, had seen nothing but the ocean or the deserts of Cape Horn. They now proceeded vigorously to the chief purposes of their voyage. The captain and his officers prepared their instruments to observe the transit, while Banks and his botanical attendants ranged the island, made themselves acquainted with its natural productions, and conciliated the natives. The effect of his intelligence and intrepidity was conspicuous on an occasion which might have involved the scientific fate of the expedition. The quadrant, though under charge of a sentinel, had been stolen by the adroitness of some of the natives. But without it no observation could be taken. Banks volunteered to go in search of it into the woods, made himself master of it, and conveyed it in safety to the observatory; though followed by parties of the natives, and occasionally compelled to keep them at bay by exhibiting his pistols.

The transit was successfully observed, but it took six hours for the operation. As the period approached, even the crew had felt the strongest anxiety for its success. The state of the sky was reported every half hour during the night before, and their spirits rose and fell as the report gave its answer, clear or cloudy. But at dawn the sky was brilliant, and the day passed without a cloud. Four other observations had been simultaneously made, in Siberia, Lapland, Hudson's Bay, and California. The general result gave the sun's distance at nearly ninety-four millions of miles.

The next object of the voyage was a search for the great southern continent, which the philosophers of the day had conceived to exist, as a "necessary balance" to the mass of land in the northern hemisphere. But conjectural philosophy is often at fault, and necessary as this terrestrial balance was asserted to be, no "great" southern continent has yet been found. For a while, even Cook's sagacity seems to have been deceived by the mountains of New Zealand, which had been discovered, in 1620, by Tasman. Cook sailed round it, and explored its shores for six months. He then, on his homeward voyage, examined the east coast of New Holland. Of course, it is not the intention of this paper to trace a career so well known as that of the celebrated navigator. We refer to its incidents, merely as connected with Sir Joseph Banks. They had run about thirteen hundred miles of the coast, when, after having received some alarm from the neighbourhood of coral reefs, the vessel suddenly struck. It was Cook's sagacious habit, nightly, to give all his orders and precautions before he went to rest; and thus, after having done all that prudence could do, he undressed, went to bed, and such was the composure of his mind that he instantly fell asleep. But immediately on the vessel's striking, the captain was on deck, and giving his orders with his characteristic coolness. The light of the moon showed the sheathing boards of the ship floating all round, and at last her false keel. Their fate appeared imminent, but it was only when the day broke, that they became fully sensible of their forlorn condition. The land was at eight leagues' distance. There were no intermediate islets on which the crew might be saved, and the boats were wholly insufficient to take them all at once. To lighten the ship was their first object. Guns, ballast, stores, every thing was thrown over. After two tides they were enabled to get the ship afloat. To their great relief, the leak did not seem to gain upon them, though to keep it down required the labour of the men night and day. At length a midshipman fortunately suggested an expedient which he had once seen adopted at sea. This was to draw under the ship's bottom a sail, to which were fastened oakum, flax, and other light substances. The sail thus covered the leak, and enabled the ship to swim. On pursuing their voyage, and reaching a river, in which they attempted to repair the ship, they found that her preservation, in the first instance, was owing to the extraordinary circumstance of a large fragment of rock which had stuck into the vessel, and thus partially stopped up the leak. In this most anxious emergency Sir Joseph Banks and his party exhibited all the coolness and intrepidity which were required; and in the subsequent account of the voyage, received from Cook himself well-merited praises.

Another peril likely to be attended with still more certain ruin, now assailed the crew. The scurvy began to make its appearance. The devastations of this dreadful disease, in the early history of our navigation, fortunately now appear almost fabulous. It was a real plague; it seemed almost to dissolve the whole frame; teeth fell out, limbs dropped off, and the sufferer sank into a rapid, and, as it was once thought, an inevitable grave. It is a remarkable instance of the powers which man possesses to counteract the most formidable evils, that this terrible disease is now scarcely known. It has been overpowered solely by such simple means as fresh meat and vegetables, and a drink medicated with lemon-juice. Simple as those expedients are, they have saved the lives of thousands and tens of thousands of the sea-going population of England.

But new hazards, arising alike from the imperfect condition of the vessel and their ignorance of the coast, continued to pursue them. Never was a voyage attempted with greater difficulties to surmount, or achieved with more triumphant success; after having explored two thousand miles of this perilous coast, Cook took possession of it in the name of his king, giving it the title of New South Wales.

At length he arrived at Batavia, where, on laying up his ship to repair, it was discovered that their preservation throughout this long voyage had been little less than miraculous, her planks having been in many instances worn "as thin as the sole of a shoe." But their trials were not yet over: the marsh fever quickly laid up the crew; the captain, Banks, and Solander, were taken seriously ill. They set sail from this pestilential island as soon as possible; but before they reached the Cape, three-and-twenty had died, including Green the astronomer, and the midshipman whose suggestion had saved the ship. At length, on the 12th of July 1771, they cast anchor in the Downs, and Cook and his companions were received with national acclamation.

The triumph of the navigation was naturally due to Cook, but the most important part of the knowledge which had been communicated to the empire was due to the labours of Banks. It was from his journals, that the chief details of the habits, manners, and resources of the natives were derived. The vegetable, mineral, and animal products of the Society Islands, and of New Holland, New Zealand, and New Guinea, had been explored, and a vast quantity of general intelligence was obtained relative to countries, which now form an essential portion of the British empire. The novelty of those possessions has now worn off, their value has made them familiar. We are fully acquainted with their products, however we may be still ignorant of their powers. But, at the period of this memorable voyage, the Southern Hemisphere was scarcely more known than the hemisphere of the moon. Every league of the coasts of New Holland, and the islands of the Great Southern Ocean, abounded with natural perils, heightened by the necessary ignorance of the navigator. Even to this day, many a fearful catastrophe attests the difficulties of the navigation; the coral rocks were a phenomenon wholly new to nautical experience; and, in all the modern improvements of nautical science, full room is left for wonder, at the skill, the intelligence, and the daring, which carried Cook and his companions safe through the perils of this gigantic navigation.

A new expedition was soon demanded at once by the curiosity of the people and the interests of science. The dream of a great southern continent was still the favourite topic of all who regarded themselves as philosophers in England, although Cook had sailed over an unfathomable ocean, in the very tract where he ought, according to this adventurous theory, to have found a continent. Sir Joseph Banks again gallantly volunteered to join the expedition which was equipped for the discovery. His large fortune enabled him to make unusual preparations; but such was his zeal, that he even raised a loan for the purpose. He engaged Zoffani, the painter, with three assistant draughtsmen. He selected two secretaries and nine attendants, instructed in the art of preserving plants and animals; he also provided books, drawings, and instruments. But his natural ambition was suddenly thwarted by the opposition of Sir Hugh Palliser, controller of the navy. For whatever reason – and it is now difficult to imagine any, except some jealousy too contemptible to name – so many obstructions were thrown in the way, that Banks relinquished the pursuit, and turned his attention to a voyage to Iceland. His suite, seamen and all, amounting to forty persons, reached the island in 1772, examined its chief natural phenomena, Hecla and its hot springs, and furnished its historian, Von Troil, with the materials for the most accurate history of this outpost of the northern world.

On his return to England, he commenced the career, natural to an opulent man of a cultivated mind, but yet so seldom followed in England by individuals of even higher means than his own. He fitted up a large house in Soho Square with all the preparatives for a life of literary association – a copious library, collections of natural history, and philosophical instruments. He held frequent conversaziones, gave dinners, and easily and naturally constituted himself the leader of the men of science in London. In Lincolnshire, where his chief property lay, he performed the part of the liberal and hospitable country gentleman on a large scale; while in London, he was the first person to whom scientific foreigners were introduced, and the principal patron and protector of ingenious men.

On the resignation of Sir John Pringle as President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks was placed in the chair, in 1778, almost by acclamation. He had some obvious qualifications for the office, but he as obviously wanted others. His opulence, his hospitality, and his zeal for science, were valuable, and are nearly indispensable in the president of a body which concentrates the chief intellectual force of the community. But his favourite pursuit, botany, has never deserved the name of a science, and inevitably bears a character of triviality in the eyes of the mathematician and the philosopher. The distinction given to a comparatively young man, known to the world only as a voyager, and a collector of plants and animals, not unnaturally tended to breed scoffing among the professors of the severe sciences. The feeling spread, and the opportunity for its expression was soon found. Dr Hutton, the mathematical professor at Woolwich, happened to be secretary for foreign correspondence. His residence at Woolwich was said to produce some inconvenience in his intercourse with the president; and the council passed a resolution, in 1783, recommending that "the foreign secretary should reside in London." The secret history of this transaction is, that Hutton was one of the mathematical party; though we cannot distinctly ascertain whether he had actually gone so far as to sneer at the president. Upon this Hutton resigned the office; to accept which, the emolument could not have been his object, the salary being but L.20 a-year – a sum that cannot be mentioned without a sense of disgrace to a society reckoning among its members some of the wealthiest men of England.

Hutton's resignation, or rather dismissal, produced an open war in the society. The mathematicians ranged themselves on the Huttonian side; the cultivators of natural history, and the cultivators of nothing, ranged themselves on the side of the president. The mathematicians were headed by Horsley, afterwards the bishop – a man whom Lord Brougham characterizes as extremely arrogant, of violent temper, and intoxicated with an extravagant sense of his own scientific merits, which his noble biographer pronounces to be altogether insignificant, heading this charge with the unkindest cut of all, namely, that he was "a priest." Horsley was certainly no great mathematician, as his publication of the Principia unluckily shows; but the picture is high coloured, which represents him as a hot-tempered, loud-tongued, bustling personage – a sort of bravo of science and theology, who took up the first opinion which occurred to him, scorned to rectify it by any after-thought, and plunged from one absurdity into another, for the sake of consistency. The eloquence of his attacks upon the chair, of whose possession he was supposed to be foolishly ambitious, was vaunted a good deal by his partisans. But, as the only evidence of his rhetoric in these squabbles ever quoted, is one sentence, it is like the pretension to wit on the strength of a single pun, and may be easily cast aside. This boasted sentence was uttered, in threatening the secession of the mathematical party. "The president will then be left with his train of feeble amateurs, and that toy (the mace) upon the table – the ghost of the Society in which Philosophy once reigned, and Newton officiated as her minister."

Horsley's theology was too nearly on a par with his mathematics – he was harsh and headlong. The fortunate folly of Priestley in challenging the English clergy to a trial of strength in the old arena of Unitarianism, gained him an opportunity of crushing an antagonist whose presumption was in proportion to his ignorance. Accordingly, the Unitarian was speedily put hors-de-combat, and Horsley was rewarded with a mitre.

The president had long felt that the purpose of this violent lover of parallelograms was, to unseat him. The question was therefore brought to a decision, in the shape of a resolution "approving of Sir Joseph Banks as president, and resolving to support him in his office." This resolution was carried by 119 to 43.

Honours began now to gather upon him. In 1788 he had been made a baronet. In 1795 he received the order of the Bath, then generally restricted to soldiers and diplomatists. In two years after, he was called to the Privy Council. On the death of the Duke of Ancaster he was chosen recorder of Boston; but, though often solicited to stand an election, he was never a member of Parliament. Though professing himself a Tory, he seems never to have taken any active part in politics, preserving a curious practical neutrality in Lincolnshire, and giving his interest to Mr Pelham, a Whig, and Mr Chaplin, a Tory. This, which his noble biographer curiously seems to consider as a happy proof of the absence of all party feelings, we should be apt to look upon as a proof of a degenerate wish to consult his own ease, and of a sluggish neutrality discreditable to the character of an Englishman.

However, he had more honourable distinctions. In the furious Revolutionary war – a war of principles and passions, not less than of public interests, the president of the Royal Society largely exerted his interest with both governments, to alleviate the sufferings of scientific men who happened to fall into the hands of the belligerents, and to effect the restoration of scientific property captured by our ships of war. In 1802 he was chosen one of the foreign members of the Institute of France; and his letter of thanks, a little too ardent in its gratitude, was said to have involved the baronet in some vexations peculiarly felt by his courtly temperament. He was instantly attacked for his Gallican panegyric, by a portion of the Royal Society. Cobbett, who was then looking out for a victim, and whose loyalty was at that period peculiarly glowing, flew at him like a tiger-cat; and, last and most dreaded of all, he was said to have received at Windsor some of those frowns, which to a courtier are a total eclipse of the sun. But the nation soon had higher things to think of than a slip of the President's pen, or a little betrayal of his vanity. Napoleon ascended the throne; and, when the thunderbolts began to fall, the squibs and crackers flung from hand to hand of little men are of necessity forgotten.

His latter years were signalized by acts of unequivocal public service. He is designated by Lord Brougham, and no one can have a better right to be informed of the fact, as the real founder of the African Association. – His lordship also regards him as the real founder of the colony of Botany Bay. – He was the first to suggest the transfer of the tropical fruits to the West India islands. – British horticulture owed him great services. – And the British Museum, during forty-two years of his trusteeship, was the object of his peculiar care, and finally received the bequest of his excellent library and of all his collections.

His career, however, was now, by the course of nature, drawing to its close. Yet, he had lived seventy-eight years in this anxious and disappointing world, in opulence, in peace, and in public estimation. But his lot had been singularly fortunate. Few men are without their share of those troubles which characterize the general condition of human nature. Sir Joseph Banks had his trial, in physical suffering. In the first portion of his life he had been remarkable for robust health and activity; but, from about his fortieth year, he suffered severely from attacks of gout, which increased so much, that for his last fourteen years he was scarcely able to walk. His robust mind, however, enabled him to encounter his disease by increased and extreme temperance. He gave up all fermented liquors and animal food. He seems to have derived considerable benefit from D'Huisson's medicine. But his hour was come; and on the 19th of June 1820, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, he died – just one year after his honoured and royal friend, George III.

Thus passed through the world one of those men who are among the most useful in their generation. It would be idle to pronounce him a genius, a discoverer, or a profound philosopher. But he served an important purpose in society; he suggested philosophical enterprise, he protected the honourable ambition of men whose career, without that protection, might have closed in obscure suffering: he gave the philosophy and literature of his time a leader, and formed it into a substantial shape. In this spirit he employed his life; and he accomplished his purpose with the constancy and determination of a sagacious and systematic mind. He might not be a pillar of the philosophical temple of his country, nor its architrave; but he performed the office of the clamp – he bound together the materials of both pillar and architrave, and sustained the edifice alike in its stateliness and in its security.

Lord Brougham's biography of D'Alembert commences with a brief dissertation on the interest which the mind takes in the study of mathematics. This study he regards as superior in gratification to every other, from its independence of external circumstances. In all other studies, he observes truly, that a large portion of the researches must depend upon facts imperfectly ascertained from the reports of others, and upon knowledge impeded by the capricious chances of things; while in pure science, the principles, the premises, and the conclusions, are wholly within our own power.

In a passage exhibiting the affluence of the noble lord's language, he says, "The life of a geometrician may well be supposed an uninterrupted calm, and the gratification which is derived from its researches, is of a pure and also of a lively kind – whether he contemplates the truths discovered by others, with the demonstrative evidence on which they rest, or carries the science further, and himself adds to the number of the interesting truths before known. He may be often stopt in his researches by the difficulties that beset his path; he may be frustrated in his attempts to discover relations, depending on complicated data, which he cannot unravel or reconcile; but his study is wholly independent of accident, his reliance is on his own powers. Contestation and uncertainty he never can know; a stranger to all controversy, above all mystery, he possesses his mind in unruffled peace. Bound by no authority, regardless of all consequences as of all opposition, he is entire master of his conclusions as of his operations, and feels even perfect indifference to the acceptance or objection of his doctrines, because he confidently looks forward to their universal and immediate admission the moment they are comprehended."

All this is strikingly expressed, yet it is after all but a showy hypothesis. That pure mathematics have nothing to do with external existence, may be easily granted; but that mathematicians are exempt from controversy, is no more a matter of experience than that all mathematical assertions are self-evident. The history of science is a direct contradiction of this halcyon hypothesis. The bitterest controversies, and the most ridiculous too, have been raised on mathematical opinions. Universal experience tends strongly to the proof, that no exclusive exertion of the mind is more fatal to its general vigour, more apt to narrow its range of conception; more distinctly operative, by its very exclusiveness, and by its making minute truths the especial object of the mind, in rendering it incapable of those loftier and broader truths on which depend all the great concerns of society, all the efficient progress of civilisation, and all the nobler growth of human powers – than the mere study of mathematics. A spider drawing his web out of his own fibres, and constructing his little lines and circles in his dusty corner, is the fittest emblem of the mere mathematician. In this language, we acknowledge the use of the science; we protest only against its pretence of superiority. Every man's experience of college studies may supply him with examples; but we have room but for one, and that of a sufficiently high order.

When Napoleon assumed the French throne, in his ambition of being regarded as the universal patron of science he appointed the author of the Méchanique Céleste a member of his privy council. But La Place, then and since, the first scientific name of France, was found utterly inadequate to even the almost sinecure duties of his office. Napoleon soon found that he could make no use of him. He accordingly consulted him no longer. "I found his mind," said he, "like his book, full of infiniments petits." Or if we look for further illustration among the French geometers – the only men among whom the trial can be made, from their opportunities of power in the Revolution – there was not one of them who exhibited any qualification for the higher duties of public life. Bailly, Condorcet, and their tribe, proved themselves utterly feeble, helpless, and trifling, where manliness, activity, and intelligence of mind were required. The Savans were swept away like a swarm of mice, or crushed like musquitoes, when they dared to buzz in the presence of the public. That they were first-rate mathematicians there can be no question; that they quarrelled about their mathematical theories with the bitterness, and not a little in the style of village gossips, is equally certain; and that, though the Encyclopedists had chiefly died off before the Revolution, their successors and imitators were extinguished by their preposterous combination of an avarice of power, and of an inadequacy to exertion, is a fact written unanswerably in the history of their trifling career, and of their early scaffolds. The ridiculous figure made in politics by the first astronomer of France, at this moment, only strengthens the conclusion.

The life of D'Alembert is, however, one of the happiest illustrations of the use to which science may be applied, in raising an obscure individual into public fame. Yet, it is not to be forgotten, that D'Alembert's European celebrity commenced only when he had laid aside the exclusive study of mathematics, and devoted himself to general literature, and, shaking off the dust of his closet, he became a man of the world.

Jean le Rond d'Alembert was born in November 1717, and was exposed as a foundling near the church of St Jean le Rond in Paris, and thus called by the name of the parish. The commissary of the district, taking pity upon the infant's apparently dying condition, instead of sending it to the hospital, where it would have inevitably died, gave it to be nursed by the wife of a poor glazier. In a few days, however, a person named D'Estouches, a commissary of artillery, came forward, acknowledged the child, and made provision for its support. The habits of foreign life are generally so scandalous, that they can scarcely be alluded to without offending our sense of delicacy. The mother of this infant was an unmarried woman, living in the very highest circles of Paris, the sister of Cardinal Tencin, archbishop of Lyons. This woman thus added to her vice the cruelty of exposing her unfortunate offspring to die of cold and hunger in the streets. It does not appear that her profligacy, though notorious, ever affected her position in society. Her coteries were as gay, her circle was as complete, and her rank as high, as ever. In the Paris of those days, "throwing the first stone" was unheard of; its reaction would have been an avalanche; there was no scandal where there was no concealment; there was no crime where there was no conscience; and thus danced the world away, until the scourge of a higher power swept the whole noblesse of France into beggary and exile.

D'Alembert seems to have taken his surname from that of his nurse, and was sent, when twelve years old, to the College of La Nation, then in the possession of the Jansenists. There he learned mathematics. On leaving the college, he returned to the glazier's house, there had one room for his bedroom and study, lived on the family fare, supported himself on a pension of £50 a-year left to him by his father, and in that house lived for forty years. He once made an abortive attempt to study the law and medicine, but soon grew weary of both, and returned to mathematics, for which he had a decided predilection. His application to this study, however, by no means pleased the homely sense of his old nurse. "You will never be any thing better than a philosopher," was her usual saying. "And what's a philosopher? – a fool, who wears out his life, to be spoken of after he is dead."

But D'Alembert had evidently a passion for science; and in his twenty-third year he sent to the Academy of Sciences an analytical paper, which attracted general notice. This was followed by his admission into the society, at the unusually early age of twenty-four. From this period, he proceeded for eighteen years, constantly furnishing the Academy with papers, which added greatly to its reputation and his own. In a note on the presumed discovery of Taylor's Theorem by D'Alembert, the noble biographer alludes to what he regards as a similar event, the discovery of the "Binomial Theorem" by himself. We must acknowledge, that we cannot easily comprehend how any student, within the last hundred years, could have had this "discovery" to make – the Binomial Theorem being one of the very first which meets the eye of the algebraist, in Newton's, and every other treatise on analysis. It seems to us very like an English reader's "discovery" of the alphabet, or, at least, of the recondite art of spelling words of two syllables. But D'Alembert was at length to find, that if he was to obtain either fame or fortune, he must seek them in some other road. At this period, infidelity had become the distinction of all who arrogated to themselves intellectual accomplishment. The power of the crown, and the power of the clergy, had hitherto made its expression dangerous; but the new liberalism of the throne having enfeebled its power, the reign of the libeller, the rebel, and the sceptic openly commenced. The opulence of the clergy increased the bitterness of their enemies; and the blow which was intended to lay the throne in the dust, was nominally aimed at religion. Voltaire had commenced this crusade half a century before; but the arch-infidel lived beyond the dominion of France, possessed an independent income, had acquired the reputation of the wittiest man in Europe, and had established a species of impunity by the pungency of his perpetual sneers. During this period, French infidelity had been silent through fear, but it was not the less virulent, active, and general. It appeared in the result, that almost the whole of the French higher orders were either deists or total unbelievers. All the literary men of France followed the example of Voltaire, and a scoff at religion was always accepted as an evidence of wit. France loves extremes; and, as the poplar literature of Paris is now plunged in impurity, fifty years ago it was characterized by outrageous blasphemy. The only religion which France knew, was certainly not calculated to repress the evil. Its fantastic exhibitions and grim formalities, were equally obnoxious to the human understanding. Its persecuting spirit insulted the growing passion of the people for liberty; while its fierce dogmas, contrasting with its ridiculous traditions, supplied the largest materials at once for horror and ridicule.

At length the storm broke forth. The infidelity which had danced and smiled, and made calembourgs and scoffed, in the full-dress circles of the nobles; made its appearance in the streets and highways, in rags and riot, with the axe for the pen, and blood for the ink, and trampled the whole polished race of scoffers in the mire of Revolution.

The Encyclopédie was the great text-book of the literary faction, and Diderot and D'Alembert were the editors of its first seven volumes – D'Alembert writing the preliminary discourse upon the progress of the sciences. But the latter mixed caution with his courage; for on the issue of the government prohibition of the work, he abandoned the editorship and left it to Diderot.

At length, in 1752, the King of Prussia, who, with all his fame, had the weakness of being emulous of French flattery, offered him an appointment at Berlin, with an allowance of five hundred pounds a-year, and the reversionary office of president of the academy. But this royal offer he refused, on the ground of his reluctance to quit Paris, and the fear that the employment would be inconsistent with his freedom. At this period his fixed income seemed to be about seventy pounds a-year; yet, when we suffer ourselves to be astonished at the apparent magnanimity of the refusal, we are to remember that this sum, a hundred years ago, and in Paris, would be about equivalent to two hundred pounds a-year in England at the present day; that, like all Frenchmen, he hated Germany; that Frederic's dealings with Voltaire gave by no means a favourable specimen of his friendships; and that, to a Frenchman of that day, Paris was all the world. But, ten years after, the Empress Catharine made him the much more tempting offer of the tutorship of her son, afterwards the unfortunate Emperor Paul. The salary was to be magnificent, no less than four thousand pounds a-year; still he refused the offer, and preferred remaining in Paris.

Whether we are to applaud his magnanimity, or blame his habits, on this occasion, may fairly be a question. The possession of the four thousand pounds a-year, even if it were limited to the period of tuition, would have made him opulent; and his opulence would undoubtedly have given him the means of extensive benevolence, of relieving private distress, of assisting his less fortunate literary brethren, of promoting public objects, and ultimately, perhaps, of founding some valuable institution which might last for ages. But D'Alembert, and men like him, seem to live only for themselves. It would have cost him an absence from Paris for a certain period to have obtained this power of public good; and he preferred living without it, and haunting, night after night, the coteries of the old blue-stockings who kept open house for the evening gossipry of the capital.

Nothing can form a stronger contrast to the general passion of the French character for change, than its devotion to the same coterie for half a century together. In the middle of the eighteenth century two houses in Paris were especially the rendezvous of the talkers, idlers, and philosophers of Paris. That some of those visitants were men of remarkable ability, there can be no doubt. But this perpetual haunting of the same coffee-cups, this regularity of trifling, this wretched inability to remain at home for a single evening, is so wholly irreconcilable with our English sense of domestic duties, of the attachment of parents to their families, and of the exercise of the natural affections, that we find it utterly impossible to attach any degree of respect to the perpetual lounger at another's fire-side. Madame Geoffrin had now succeeded to Madame de Tencin, as the receiver of the coterie. Madame du Deffand held a kind of rival, but inferior, coterie. The former had a house, the latter had only a lodging; the former was good-humoured, amiable, and kind – the latter satirical and cold; but both were clever, and, at all events, both received the gossips, wise and foolish, of Paris. At the lodging of Madame du Deffand, D'Alembert met Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, a species of companion to Madame. She was the illegitimate daughter of a woman of fashion, as D'Alembert was the son. The circumstance was too common in Parisian high life, to involve any censure on the parents, or any disgrace on the children; but it may have produced a degree of sympathy, which suddenly rose to its height by their taking a lodging together! Those things, too, were so frequent in France, that, except the laugh of the moment, no one seems to have taken notice of the connexion; and they continued to carry it on, as well received as ever, and holding their evening coterie with undiminished applause.

"No one," observes the noble biographer, "whispered a syllable of suspicion, respecting a connexion which all were fully convinced could be only of the most innocent kind." This French credulity is too simple for our credence. That a he and she philosophic pair should have lived in the same apartments for a dozen years with perfect innocency, may have been the case in Paris; but the story would not be believed in any less immaculate region on the face of the earth. The plain truth seems to be, that the general looseness of Parisian society saw nothing gross in the grossest connexion. Even where they affected virtue, they palpably preferred their having an evening lounge open to them, to any consideration grounded on common propriety and a sense of shame.

But the philosopher was a dirty fellow after all, and it only does credit to his noble biographer's sense of propriety to admit, that "his conduct must seem strange to all men of right and honourable feelings." In fact, the philosopher seems to have lent his aid very zealously to a correspondence carried on by his sensitive fellow-lodger! with a view to a marriage with a Spanish Marquis Mora. Among other proofs, he went every morning to the post-office to receive the Spaniard's letters for the lady. "I confess," says Lord Brougham, "I am driven, how reluctantly soever, to the painful conclusion, that he lent himself to the plan of her inveigling the Spaniard into a marriage." And this was not the only instance of his by-play. Mademoiselle professed also to have fallen in love with a M. Guibert, known as a military writer. Guibert exhibited his best tactics, in keeping clear of the lady. "All this time, she continued," says his lordship, "to make D'Alembert believe, that she had no real passion for any one but himself." No one can easily suppose that they were not connected in a plan of obtaining for her a settlement in life by marriage. But, if this marriage-intrigue was in every sense, and on all sides, contemptible; what are we to think of the nature of the connexion existing between this sensitive lady and D'Alembert, living for years under the same roof? The whole matter would be too repulsive for the decorums of biography, if it were not among the evidences of that utter corruption of morals, and callousness of feeling, which were finally avenged in the havoc of the Revolution.

D'Alembert's income had been increased by his appointment to the office of secretary to the Academy, in 1772. Unfortunately for his literary fame, it became a part of his duty to write the éloges of the deceased members, an office which he fulfilled with equal diligence and unproductiveness; for, of those unfortunate performances he wrote no less than eighty-three. But the French are fond of fooleries of this kind; a few sounding sentences with them are biography; a few rambling sketches fill up the outline to their taste; and the whole forms a specimen of that eloquence which men are content to admire on the other side of the Channel.

At length his career drew to a close. Towards his sixty-fourth year, his health began to decline. It had never been robust, though his habits had been temperate; but feebleness of stomach, and an organic disease, predicted the approach of his dissolution. He died on the 29th of October 1783, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. Notwithstanding his feebleness of body, his intellectual vigour remained – thus adding one to the many proofs of the distinct natures of mind and body. In his intervals of ease, he continued to occupy himself with mathematical investigations. With a deplorable want of feeling, he talked with levity of his approaching departure – an event awful to the best, and, to the wisest, solemn in proportion to their wisdom. He died in the fulness of that scientific reputation which he deserved, and of that literary reputation which he did not deserve; but, by the combination of both, ranking as the most distinguished intellectual name of Europe in his day.

The life of a later philosopher, the unfortunate Lavoisier, gives Lord Brougham an opportunity of rendering justice to an eminent foreigner, and of vindicating the claims of his own still more memorable countrymen, Black and Watt. Chemistry is especially the science of the eighteenth century, as geometry was of the seventeenth. It is a characteristic of that great, however slow, change, which is now evidently in progress through Europe, that those sciences which most promote the comforts, the powers, and the progress of the multitude, obviously occupy the largest share of mental illustration. Of all the sciences, chemistry is that one which contributes most largely to the dominion of man over nature. It is the very handmaid of Wisdom, instructing us in the properties of things, and continually developing more and more the secrets of those vast and beneficent processes by which the physical frame of creation is rendered productive to man. It must thus be regarded as the most essential instrument of our physical well-being. It takes a part in all that administers to our wants and enjoyments. Our clothing, our medicine, our food; the cultivation of the ground, the salubrity of the atmosphere; the very blood, bone, and muscle of man, all depend on chemical evolutions. But it has its still loftier secrets; and the experimental philosopher is constantly stimulated and delighted by his approach to at least the borders of discoveries which promise to give a nobler insight into the laws of matter; to exhibit more fully the mechanism formed and moved by the Divine hand; and to develop the glories of the universe on a scale continually enlarging, and continually more luminous.

A matchless source of interest in this most effective and essential of all the sciences, is, that it seems capable of an infinite progress. The chemical philosopher cannot even conceive any limit to its variety, multitude, or utility of purpose. The more he discovers, the more he finds is still to be discovered. Every new property awakens him to the existence of some other property, more capacious and more profound. Every difficulty mastered, only leads him towards some deeper and more tempting problem. And, in addition to the ardour derived from this triumph of our intellectual ambition – as if all the incentives that can act upon man were expressly accumulated upon this pursuit – there is no science in which the actual triumphs are more directly connected with personal opulence. The invention of a new acid or alkali might create unbounded wealth. The discovery of a new principle of the most vulgar use – for tanning leather, for extracting oils, for strengthening soap, for purifying tallow, might place the discoverer in possession of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. But a loftier ambition may still find its field in this science. A chemical discovery might change the face of the world. Gunpowder had already changed the whole form of European society. A chemical discovery might give us the power of managing at our will the storm and the lightning, of averting the pestilence, or of ensuring the fertility of the soil, and the regularity of the seasons. The Divine intention in placing us here, was evidently the perpetual exercise of the human understanding. For that purpose were given the wants, and the remedies of the wants, of man; for that purpose all sciences are perhaps inexhaustible; but of all, the most palpably inexhaustible, the most teeming with immediate results, and the most remedial as to human necessities, is Chemistry – fitted by its extent to supply the largest proportion of human objects, by its power to excite the most eager inquiry, and by its richness to reward the intelligent labour of man, to the last ages of the world.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier was born in Paris in 1743, the son of one of the "farmers-general." As the office was nearly hereditary, and was proverbially connected with great opulence, the son of the rich functionary was highly educated. But science soon attracted all his study, and, devoting himself especially to chemistry, he made himself conspicuous among the leading philosophers of his time.

At the age of twenty-two, he presented to the Academy of Sciences an analysis of gypsum. At twenty-five he was admitted a member of the Academy, an unusually early age. In his next year he succeeded his father in his lucrative office. He then married the daughter of another farmer-general, and having made this provision for a life of luxury or public employment, with all that political ambition might offer in the old régime of France, he collected his books about him, shut himself up in his study, and gave up his time, fortune, and energy to the advancement of science.

After occupying himself for a brief period with geology, he commenced his chemical career by refuting the theories alike of Margraff and Stahl on the conversion of water into earth. The chemistry of the gases had made rapid progress in England; and the names of Black, Priestley, and Cavendish, had already attracted the attention of scientific Europe. Lavoisier followed in their track by a series of experiments in the calcination of metals, pursued with remarkable intelligence and industry. The biographer observes that he was now on the verge of two dazzling discoveries – the composition of the atmosphere, and the identity of the diamond with carbon. But he stopped short, and left the glory to more fortunate investigators.

We hasten from the controversies to which the claim of priority in those distinguished discoveries gave rise, and come to the more authentic services of Lavoisier. He was appointed by the minister to superintend the royal manufacture of gunpowder, which his chemical knowledge enabled him greatly to improve. He next, by appointment of the National Assembly, drew up his laborious and valuable memoir on the Territorial Wealth of France. He was now appointed one of the commissioners of the treasury, and introduced an unexampled regularity into the public accounts. He aided the formation of the metrical system, the security of the assignats against forgery, and seems to have borne an active part in every public matter in which practical science was concerned. In the mean time he employed himself in scientific agriculture, and set apart a tract of land on his estate for experimental farming. His style of living in Paris was at once rational and splendid. His house was open twice a-week for the reception of distinguished persons, both foreigners and natives, and especially if they brought with them the recommendation of scientific ability. With the finest philosophical apparatus in the possession of any individual in France, he was constantly carrying on experiments on his own account, or performing them for others whose means could not meet their expense. This conduct, united to remarkable amiability of manners, made him popular, and placed him at the head of French science in his day. But the evil time had come when opulence was to be a crime, and virtue was to be no longer a safe-guard. The democratic triumvirate of 1794 issued an order for the seizure of twenty-seven individuals who had been farmers-general before the Revolution. The true charge was the crime of being opulent. The popular and ridiculous charge was, their having mixed deleterious ingredients with the tobacco. Lavoisier having received information that the order was about to be executed, fled, and remained for some days in concealment. On understanding that his flight might injure the other prisoners, and as his father-in-law was among them, he, with a rash reliance on the public justice, yet with manly generosity, returned to Paris, and gave himself up to his oppressors. The course of the Revolution had been so palpably that of general plunder, that he had long expected the loss of fortune, and proposed, in case of ruin, to begin the world again, and live by the profession of medicine.

But, by a furious act of violence, he was condemned to die. He asked only a few days to complete some experiments which were going on during his imprisonment. The scoffing answer of this merciless tribunal was, that the Republic had no need of philosophers; and on the day after this sentence, the 8th of May 1794, he was hurried to the guillotine with no less than one hundred and twenty-three other victims, who all died within a few hours.

On this melancholy and desperate atrocity of republicanism, Lord Brougham makes the following remark, which, though natural in the lips of any human being, has double force as coming from one who has seen the operation of the revolutionary spirit on so large a scale, and during so extended a portion of his public career.

"The lustre," he observes, "which the labours of Lavoisier had shed over the scientific renown of France, the valuable services which he had rendered her in so many important departments of her affairs, the virtues which adorned his character and made his philosophy beloved as well as revered, were all destined to meet the reward with which the tyranny of vulgar faction is sure to recompense the good and the wise, as often as the base unlettered multitude are permitted to bear sway, and to place in the seat of dominion their idols, who dupe to betray, and finally punish them."

Lord Brougham justly reprobates the suspicious silence of the celebrated Carnot on this occasion, and the still more scandalous apathy of Fourcroix, who had been the pupil and panegyrist of the great chemist during many years. He acquits him of the deadly imputation, that he had even been instrumental in sending his master to the guillotine. But he praises, in contradistinction, M. Hallé, who had the honest courage to proclaim Lavoisier's public services before the dreadful tribunal, while he consigns the pupil to perpetual scorn. He was murdered in his fifty-first year.

Lord Brougham's French predilections do credit to his sense of cosmopolitism; but he appears to us somewhat more disposed to conciliate the jealousy of his very irritable French confrères, than to deal rigorous justice. No man deserves the reputation of science but a discoverer. To know all that has been hitherto known on a subject, deserves the character of diligence; to promote the progress of a science by largeness of expenditure, or steadiness of exertion, deserves the praise of liberality and labour; but the man who adds to the science by original invention, who enlarges its boundaries, and detects new principles, is the man alone to whom the name of genius can be applied. Lavoisier was, unquestionably, an important minister of science; he possessed singular assiduity, unwearied zeal, and remarkable sagacity. What these could do, he did; what knowledge could accomplish, he performed; but the inventors were of another country, and of a higher order, and he must be content with the honours due to imitation. Yet he had considerable happiness in the difficult art of communicating his knowledge. His Treatise on Chemistry, though now superseded by subsequent arrangements, is singularly clear; and no great teacher of chemistry has hitherto given the world a more striking example of exactness in detail, and clearness in conception.

His cruel death, too, may be almost said to have continued his services to society. It proved, with irresistible force, the true character of Infidel Revolution. It showed a noble-minded and benevolent man the victim of revolutionary rage; an intelligent, studious, and retired man, obnoxious to the rabble love of ruin; a mild, generous, and patriotic man, the instant prey of revolutionary government, which boasted of its superiority to the vices of kings, of its homage to intellect, and of its supreme value for the virtues of private life. Yet it murdered Lavoisier without a moment's hesitation, or a moment's remorse, and flung the first philosopher of France into a felon's grave.

The biography of Adam Smith gives Lord Brougham an opportunity of pouring out, at the distance of nearly half a century, that knowledge of Political Economy which first brought him into notice. His Colonial Policy, a remarkable performance for a student of eighteen, exhibited in miniature the principles and propensities which his long career has been expended in maturing and moulding. Adam Smith was the idol of all Scottish worship in the last century; and his originality of conception, the weight of his subject, and the clearness of his judgment, made him worthy of the elevation.

Adam Smith's birth was of a higher order than is often to be found in the instance of men destined to literary eminence. He was the son of a comptroller of the customs, who had been private secretary to Lord Loudoun, secretary of state, and keeper of the great seal.

An accident in infancy had nearly deprived the age of its first philosopher, even if it had not trained him to be hanged. At three years of age he was stolen by travelling tinkers, a race resembling the gipsies, and which in that day formed a numerous population in Scotland. But a pursuit being speedily set on foot, he was fortunately recovered. He was well educated, and, after the routine of school, was sent to Glasgow for three years, where he obtained an Exhibition to Baliol College. At Oxford he remained for seven years, chiefly addicted to mathematics – a study, however, which he subsequently wholly abandoned. He had been intended for the Church of England; but whether from dislike of its discipline, or from disappointment in his views, he retired to Scotland, to take his chance of employment in its colleges. In 1748 he settled in Edinburgh, and, for three years, read a course of lectures on rhetoric. His contemporaries, then obscure, became, in some instances, conspicuous; for among them were Hume, Robertson, and Wedderburne. In 1751, Smith was elected to the professorship of Logic in the University of Glasgow, which he soon after exchanged for that of Moral Philosophy.

Thus far we run on smoothly with Lord Brougham; but when he comes to discuss religion, we must occasionally doubt his guidance. For example, in speaking of Smith's lectures on Natural Theology, he denounces the jealousy of those who regard it as other than "the very foundation essential to support its fabric." From this opinion we totally dissent. It is perfectly true that natural religion and revelation are consistent with each other, as must be presumed from their being the work of the same Divine wisdom. But their foundations are wholly distinct. Why did the Jew believe the Mosaic revelation? Simply and solely, because it was delivered to him with such evidences of supernatural origin, in the thunders of Sinai, and substantiated at subsequent periods by miracle and prophecy, that he must receive it as divine. Why did the early converts receive Christianity? Simply on the same direct evidence supplied to their senses. No apostle sent them to examine their notions of the Godhead, or left them to inculcate the doctrines of the gospel by their reason. But he declared his doctrine as a new truth, and gave proof of its truth being divine, by working wonders palpably beyond the power of man. Of course, unless man knew what was meant by the power of the Deity, he could not have comprehended the simplest communication of the apostle. But we are speaking of the foundation of a belief – not the intelligibility of a language. We are entitled to go further still, and say, that the first idea of the being of a God was itself a revelation – a much plainer solution of the extraordinary circumstance, that so lofty and recondite a conception should have existed in the earliest and rudest ages of society; than to suppose that the antediluvian shepherd, or the postdiluvian hunter, should have ever thought of tracing effects and causes up to that extreme elevation, where a pure and supreme Spirit creates and governs the whole. We are entitled even to doubt whether the idea of Spirit was ever naturally conceived in the mind of any human being, difficult as is the conception to a creature surrounded with materiality, with every thought derived from his senses, and with the total incapacity of defining to this hour, or even imagining, the nature of Spirit. It will be fully admitted, that when the idea was once communicated, its reality was substantiated by the frame of nature, by the regularity, the extent, and the beneficence of the great physical system. But the origin was revelation. Lord Brougham quotes Tillotson; but the archbishop had earned his mitre by other means than the vigour of his understanding, and often trifles like other men.

In 1759, Smith published his Theory of Moral Sentiments– a work of skill and invention, but which has long since fallen into disuse with the intelligent world. It, however, had the rare good fortune of attracting the notice of an individual, possessed at once of the taste to honour, and the will to befriend, a man of original ability. This volume fell into the hands of the celebrated Charles Townsend, who proposed that the author should take charge of the young Duke of Buccleuch, whose mother, the dowager-duchess, he had married. Nothing in the life of Townsend was more honourable to him than this choice, not only for its judgment but for its rarity. The generality of men in possession of affluence think only of themselves, and would value the most common-place gratification more highly than the encouragement of the obscure genius, which wanted only that encouragement to shed a new lustre on its generation. The man of power in general feels its possession the primary object of his patronage, and sees no purpose in the immense opportunity given to him by his rank, but to obtain adherents, and make his power impregnable. Though there may be exceptions, such is the rule; and with this recollection of the established course of things, we give all honour to the memory of the man, without whose patronage the world would probably have lost the ablest work of its century, the immortal Wealth of Nations.

In 1763, Smith was appointed tutor to the young nobleman, resigned his professorship, and went with his pupil to France. After a residence of a year and a half at Toulouse, he travelled in Switzerland, and then, returning to Paris, spent ten months there. His French residence was peculiarly fortunate. It rubbed off the rust of his seclusion; it introduced him to the best society of courtly life; and it brought him into direct intercourse with that whole circle of active intellect and novel philosophy, which made the Parisian coteries at once the most bustling and brilliant of Europe. However the horrid profligacy of the court, and the contemptuous infidelity of high life, might have either disgusted the morals, or startled even the scepticism of the stranger, there can be no doubt of the interest which he felt in the society of such men as Turgot, Necker, D'Alembert, and Quesnay. Smith, some fifteen or twenty years before, had drawn up a sketch of the principles which he afterwards developed in his Wealth of Nations. Political economy was then beginning to take a form in French science. Whether it ever deserved the name of science, or will ever deserve it, may be a grave question. It depends upon such a multitude of facts, and the facts themselves vary so perpetually, the "principles" derived from those facts are so feeble and fluctuating, and common experience so provokingly contradicts, from day to day, the most laboured conclusions, that every new professor has a new theory, and every new theory turns the former into ridicule, itself to be burlesqued by the next that follows. This at least is known, that Fox declared his suspicion of the whole, saying, that it was at once too daring to be intelligible, and too indefinite to be reducible to practice. Even in our day, no two authors on the subject agree; all the successful measures of revenue and finance have been adopted in utter defiance of its dogmas; while all the modern attempts to act upon what are called its principles, have only convulsed commerce, shaken public credit, and substituted fantastic visions of prosperity for the old substantial wealth of England. No occupation could have been fitter for the half-frivolous, half-factious spirit of France. A revolution in revenue was openly regarded as the first step to revolution in power; the political economists indulged themselves in a philosophic conspiracy, and vented their sneers against the government, under pretext of recognising the rights of trade. It took but a little more than twenty years to mature this dexterous contrivance, and the meek friends of free trade had the happiness of seeing France in a blaze.

Smith, on his return, shut himself up in his study in Kirkcaldy for ten years. His friends in vain attempted to draw him from his solitude to Edinburgh: he steadily, we may almost say magnanimously, refused; and at the end of the tenth year, in 1776, he explained the mystery, by the publication of the two quarto volumes of his Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The work was received with general congratulation; it was regarded as a new science, although it is well-known, as stated in the introduction to the biography, that many others had previously discussed the same subjects. Smith's views, however, were so much more comprehensive, his division so much more distinct, and his remarks so much more practical, that he deserved all the credit of the architect who combines in beauty and utility the beams and pillars which he finds scattered on the ground. And here we advert to the obvious benefit of that patronage which had been extended to this very able man by Townsend. The annuity which had been settled on him as tutor, had enabled Smith to give up the whole of his time, and the whole powers of his mind, during those ten years, to this great work. During nearly twenty years of lecturing, on the other hand, in which his pen was necessarily employed without ceasing, he seems to have published but one work, The Theory of Moral Sentiment. That he constantly formed ingenious conceptions, may be easily admitted; but that he wanted either time or inclination to complete them, is evident from the fact, that he never suffered them to appear in print, and that one of his dying directions was, that they should be destroyed by his executors.

He was now a man of fame, and to enjoy it came up to London, where he resided for two years in the midst of the best society, political and literary, to be found in England. He was now to be a man of fortune as well as of fame; he was appointed a commissioner of the customs in Scotland. He returned to Edinburgh, and commenced the agreeable life of a man at once distinguished, and opulent to the full extent of his simple desires, in a society whose names are still regarded as the lights of Scotland. He lived hospitably, and entertained good society, but he wrote no more; he was growing old, and Lord Brougham evidently thinks that the duties of his office exhausted his spirits and occupied his time. But those duties always partook largely of the nature of a sinecure; and there is every reason to doubt whether they could have worn down a man of regular habits, and who had been trained to the routine of daily business by an apprenticeship of a quarter of a century. The greater probability is, that Smith felt that he had done enough for fame; that, knowing the world, he was unwilling to expose himself to the caprices of critical applause; and that he even felt how inadequate the early theories which found admirers in the lecture-room, might be to sustain a character already brought into full publicity by his own volumes. The fact is certain, that he produced nothing more. In July 1790, he died, at the age of sixty-seven. It was his custom to give a supper on the Sunday evening to a numerous circle of friends. How far this entertainment, which was more consistent with the latitude of his Paris recollections, was reconcilable with the decorums of Scotland, we cannot say. But on one evening, after having destroyed his manuscripts, finding himself not so well as usual, he retired to bed before supper, and as he went, said to his friends, "I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place." He died in a very few days afterwards.

Lord Brougham has obviously expended his chief labour on the life of this favourite philosopher, of whom, fifty years ago, every Scottish economist was a devoted pupil. Times are changed, yet this intelligent biographer has given a very ample and accurate, so far as we can judge, analysis of the Enquiry. But he would have greatly increased the obligations of the reader, by giving some portion of his treatise to the questions which modern artifice has devised, and modern infatuation has adopted.

An interesting "memoir" of Johnson commences the volume; but the topic would lead us too far. The biographer gives that literary Samson full applause for the strength of his understanding, the boldness of his morality, and the pungency of his wit. Rather to our surprise, he pours out an eloquent panegyric on Boswell. That we are indebted to this versatile personage for one of the most amusing and instructive collections of reminiscences in the history of authorship, will be readily conceded. But this is the first time of our hearing a demand that we should pay him any more peculiar homage. But Lord Brougham is himself the head of a school: his ipse dixit demands acquiescence, and none can doubt that, if he is singular in his dogmas, he deserves attention for the vigour of his advocacy.