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this style without matter is better than that fearful negation of both that so many modern writers exhibit. The facility of Johnson's composition may be gathered from the fact, that he composed fortyeight printed pages of the life of Savage in one night. On these matters of facility of composition, persons must necessarily rely on the testimony of personal friends of one another. The following remarks on Johnson, who was a stiff and uncompromising Tory and a Jacobite, may not, however, be far from truth.

his way to the conclusion lay in a straight line, | the weight of a style like Dr. Johnson's is somethe shortest between any two points; and though what cppressive, and that little meaning is at times he would not deviate from it so as to lose himself, concealed under pompous expression: still, even he was well disposed to look on either side, that he might gather food for his contemptuous and somewhat sarcastic disposition, laughing at those whom he saw bewildered, rather than pitying their errors. To the desire of short and easy proof, and the love of accuracy when it could be obtained, and to which he sometimes sacrificed truth by striving after exact reasoning on subjects that admit not of it, we may ascribe this great fondness for common arithmetic, one of the very few sciences with which he was acquainted. With the vices of such an understanding and such a disposition he was sufficiently imbued, as well as with its excellencies. He was very dogmatical -very confident, even presumptuous; not very tolerant. He was also apt to deal in truisms, and often inclined, when he saw through them himself, to break down an argument, sometimes overwhelming it with the might of loud assertion, sometimes cutting it short by the edge of a sneer. Seeing very clearly within somewhat narrow limits, he easily believed there was nothing beyond them to see; and fond of reducing each argument to its simplest terms and shortest statement, he frequently applied a kind of reasoning wholly unsuited to the subject matter, pronounced decisions of which the dispute was not susceptible, and fell into errors which more knowing inquirers and calmer disputants, without his perspicacity or his powers of combining, would easily and surely have avoided."

The remarks on the style, the well-known Roman, of our great lexicographer, we should scarcely have been led to anticipate from a writer so close to the model of Addison and Robertson as Lord Brougham.

"Yet he so greatly loved established things, so deeply venerated whatever had the sanction of time, that he both shut his eyes to many defects in his view consecrated by age, and unreasonably transferred to mere duration the respect which reason itself freely allows to whatever has the testimony of experience in its favor.

"The established church, the established government, the established order of things in general, found in him an unflinching supporter, because a sincere and warm admirer; and giving his confidence entirely, he either was content to suspend his reason in a great majority of instances, or, at least, to use it only for the purpose of attaining the conclusion in favor of existing institutions, and excluding all farther argument touching their foundations."

His prejudices were certainly strong, both with respect to the French and Americans. His horror of infidels we like, and wish only that the feeling were more general. Johnson did not possess any knowledge of the exact sciences; hence in his criticism on Newton, whom he undertook to review, he only indicated his own ignorance. His Dictionary, however faulty, and it is most remarkably so in etymons, and faulty where we should least have anticipated it, even in Latin and Greek derivations, is-notwithstanding the AngloSaxon deficiencies, which are still greater-a work of wonderful merit.

"The peculiarities of his style may be traced to the same source-the characteristic features of his understanding and disposition. What he perceived clearly, he clearly expressed. His diction was distinct; it was never involved; it kept ideas in their separate and proper places; it did not We have stated our high opinion of the "Lives abound in synonymes and repetition; it was of the Poets." The omission of Goldsmith is manly, and it was measured, despising meretri- certainly singular; and we quite agree with the cious and trivial ornament, avoiding all slovenli- noble lord before us in assigning very high merit ness, rejecting mere surplusage, generally through- to that of Pope, of Dryden, and of Cowley. He out very concise, often needlessly full, and almost is also, all things considered, wonderfully impartial always elaborate; the art of the workman being in his judgment on Milton. With regard to permade manifest in the plainly artificial workman-sonal character and habits, we think there is minship. A love of hard and learned words prevailed gled matter of praise and censure. Dogmatic he throughout; and a fondness for balanced periods most assuredly was, and often dogmatically wrong; was its special characteristic. But there was often great felicity in the expression, occasionally a pleasing cadence in the rhythm, generally an epigrammatic turn in the language as well as in the idea. Even where the workmanship seemed most to bias the material, and the word craft to be exercised needlessly, and the diction to run to waste, there was never any feebleness to complain of, and always something of skill and effect to admire. The charm of nature was ever wanting, but the presence of great art was undeniable. Nothing was of the careless aspect which the highest of artists ever give their master-pieces-the produce of elaborate but concealed pains; yet the strong hand of an able workman was always marked; and it was observed, too, that he disdained to hide from us the far less labor which he had much more easily bestowed."

We perfectly agree with Lord Brougham that

as often insufferably right, repeatedly judicious, firm, and strenuous in opinions. Benevolence he possessed in a remarkable degree; and though his morals exhibited much to regret, from that feverish knowledge he ever appeared to possess, to investigate the feelings at heart of even the most depraved, and which often led him into that society, still was he sound at heart, and regretted that, knowing his duty well, his knowledge and practice were not equal. Lord Brougham to us does not appear, in the main, to have liked Johnson, who was certainly a hearty hater; but the concluding paragraph of his life is as generous as it is just.

"He was friendly, and actively so, in the greatest degree; he was charitable beyond what even prudential considerations might justify; as firmly as he believed the Gospel, so constantly did he practise its divine maxim, that it is more blessed

to give than to receive.' His sense of justice was strict and constant; his love of truth was steady and unbroken in all matters, as well little as great; nor did any man ever more peremptorily deny the existence of white lies: for he justly thought that when a habit of being careless of the truth in trifling things once has been formed, it will become easily, nay, certainly applicable to things of moment. His habitual piety, his sense of his own imperfections, his generally blameless conduct in the various relations of life, has been already sufficiently described, and has been illustrated in the preceding narrative. He was a good man as he was a great man; and he had so firm a regard for virtue, that he wisely set much greater store by his worth than by his fame." (p. 85.)

The next life before us is Adam Smith. After a brief summary on economical science, commencing with Antonio Bandini, of Sienna, who in the year 1737 recommended to the Grand Duke of Tuscany a free trade in corn, and reviewing De Gournay, De Quesnay, and others, we have Adam Smith introduced: he was born in 1723. Smith, having received the rudiments of education in Scotland, entered Baliol College, Oxford. He remained at that university seven years. Oxford did not, however, rise higher in his estimation by residence, and probably, as Lord Brougham remarks, inhibiting him from reading Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature" did not much mend his dislike. In 1748 he removed to Edinburgh, and then became acquainted with most of the celebrated men of the day. Glasgow offered him the Professorship of Logic; but he soon exchanged it for that of Moral Philosophy. He taught moral philosophy for twelve years; but of these discoveries we have no remains. He was a contributor to the Edinburgh Review in 1755. His "Theory of Moral Sentiments" made its appearance in 1759, and to this was appended a "Dissertation on the Origin of Languages." He resigned his professorship in 1763, to attend the Duke of Buccleuch upon his travels. On this tour he made the acquaintance of various learned continental scholars; and among others, one whose pursuits were analogous to his own, Quesnay. He returned to England; and in 1766 his celebrated work, "The Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," made its appearance. Hume lived to see it, and to approve it. He became shortly after a Commissioner of Customs-an appointment certainly by no means suited to him, and ill chosen. In 1788 he was elected Rector of the University of Glasgow. That university conferred on him, in 1762, the degree of LL.D. The duties of his office in the Customs were extremely laborious; and no doubt the influence of these dull details affected the powers of a mind that might otherwise have produced a work to rival his "Opus MagHe died in 1790, and the account given in Hutton of his last interview with his friends is highly interesting. Great men mislike to see their immature productions outlive them, and Adam Smith made his friends promise that his should not survive their author; and consequently all his other writing, comprising eighteen folio volumes of MS., were destroyed, excepting his "Speculative History of Astronomy."

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Lord Brougham's general summary of his character and acquirements is extremely fair.

"The true picture of the great author's intellectual character is presented by his writings; and of the depth, the comprehensiveness, the general

accuracy of his views on the various subjects to which his mind was bent, there can be but one opinion. His understanding was enlarged, and it was versatile; his sagacity, when he applied himself deliberately to inquiry or to discussion, was unerring; his information was extensive and correct; his fancy was rich and various; his taste, formed upon the purest models of antiquity, was simple and chaste. His integrity was unimpeachable, and the warmth of his affections knew no chill, even when the languor of age and the weight of ill-health was upon him; his nature was kindly in the greatest degree, and his benevolence was extensive, leading him to indulge in acts of private charity, pushed beyond his means, and concealed with the most scrupulous delicacy towards its objects. Stern votaries of religion have complained of his deficiencies in piety, chiefly because of his letter upon the death of his old and intimate friend, Mr. Hume; but no one can read the frequent and warm allusions, with which his works abound, to the moral government of the world, to reliance upon the All-wise Disposer, to the hopes of a future state, and not be convinced that his mind was deeply sensible to devout impressions. Nay, even as to his estimate of Mr. Hume's character, we are clearly entitled to conclude that he regarded his friend as an exception to the rule that religion has a powerful and salutary influence on morals, because he has most forcibly stated his opinion, that whenever the principles of religion which are natural to it are not perverted or corrupted, the world justly places a double confidence in the rectitude of the religious man's behavior.'" (p. 120 )

Few persons were more opposite than Johnson and Smith. Johnson loved argument-engrossed conversation. Smith sat and watched. He was one of the most absent men conceivable; few more abstracted from common objects.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments" contains much beautiful writing; and Lord Brougham has selected some of the choicest morceaux. We own the notice which we subjoin rather amused us, when we read it.

"How well has he painted the man of system, and how many features of this portrait have we recognized in Mr. Bentham, and others of our day! He is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely, in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces on a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion beside that which the hand impresses upon them; but that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of action of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If these principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.' For a man to insist upon establishing, and upon establishing all at once and in spite of all

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We know well that Bentham looked on Brougham as his neophyte; and great indeed was his astonishment when he discovered that his lordship's truly great and original mind was not one to be merged in his own Crambo-system, or to be deceived in the conclusions from it. We know the aged man had the vanity to imagine that the Chancellor of England would exhibit Benthamism even in the courts of highest jurisdiction; we know also he was disappointed to find the chains broken, and the intellectual giant enlarged to his full dimension; and we further know, that the whole of that school and tribe has never ceased to abuse and vilify him whom they could not pen down in their Cimmerian Owlet cavern. He broke from them, for he was not of them.

Many passages of this work of Lord Brougham contain curious confessions. His lordship freely owns they hit his former party hard. We give the following:

opposition, anything which his own idea of policy | work upon; we answer, that unless those other and law may seem to require, must often be the classes worked upon the raw materials, and suphighest degree of arrogance. It is to erect his own plied the farmer's necessities, he would be forced judgment into the supreme standard of right and to allot part of his labor to this employment, while wrong. It is to fancy himself the only wise and he forced others to assist in raising the rude proworthy man in the commonwealth, that his fellow-duce. In such a complicated system, it is clear creatures should accommodate themselves to him, that all labor has the same effect, and equally inand not to them." (p. 129.) creases the whole mass of wealth. Nor can any attempt be more vain than theirs who would define the particular parts of the machine that produce the motion, which is necessarily the result of the whole powers combined, and depends on each one of the mutually connected members. Yet so wedded have those theorists been to the notion, that certain necessary kinds of employment are absolutely unproductive, that a writer of no less name than Dr. Smith, has not scrupled to rank the capital sunk in the public debt, or spent in warfare, in the same class with the property consumed by fire, and the labor destroyed by pestilence. He ought surely to have reflected, that the debts of a country are always contracted, and its wars entered into, for some purpose, either of security or aggrandizement; and that stock thus employed must have produced an equivalent, which cannot be asserted of property or population absolutely destroyed. This equivalent may have been greater or less; that is, the money spent for useful purposes may have been applied with more or less prudence and frugality. Those purposes, too, may have been more or less useful; and a certain degree of waste and extravagance always attends the operations of funding and of war. But this must only be looked upon as an addition to the necessary price at which the benefits in view are to be bought. The food of a country, in like manner, may be used with different degrees of economy; and the necessity of eating may be supplied at more or less cost. So long as the love of war is a necessary evil in human nature, it is absurd to denominate the expenses unproductive that are incurred by defending a country; or, which is also the same thing, preventing an invasion, by a judicious attack of an enemy; or which is also the same thing, avoiding the necessity of war by a prudent system of foreign policy. And he who holds the labor of soldiers and sailors and diplomatic agents to be unproductive, commits precisely the same error as he who should maintain that the labor of the hedger is unproductive because he only protects and does not rear the crop. All those kinds of labor and employments of stock are parts of the system, and all are equally productive of wealth." (p. 212.)

"The leaders of the discontented party seldom fail to hold out some plausible plan of reformation, which they predict will not only remove the inconveniences and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent in all coming time any return of the like inconveniences and distresses. They often propose on this account to remodel the constitution, and to alter in some of its most essential parts that system of government under which the subjects of a great empire have enjoyed perhaps peace, security, and even glory, during the course of several centuries. The great body of the party are commonly intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been presented to them in all the most dazzling colors in which the eloquence of their leader could display it. The leaders themselves, though they may originally have meant nothing but their own aggrandizement, become many of them in time the dupes of their own sophistry, and are as eager for this great reformation as the weakest and foolishest of their followers. Even though the leaders should have preserved their own heads, as indeed they commonly do, free from this fanaticism, yet they dare not always disappoint the expectations of their followers; but are often obliged, though contrary to their principles and their conscience, to act as if they were under the common delusion." (p. 131.) The mighty work, however, of Adam Smith is. This eminent chemist and philosopher was born as we have mentioned, the " Wealth of Nations." at Paris in 1743. He was of opulent parents, and Of this we have a complete analysis placed before being placed in the Collège Mazarin, attained a us. On this work political economy may be said high classical proficiency. His taste, however, to depend as a science. Dr. Smith's great deduc- conducted him to science, and to its severer forms tion and distinction between productive and unpro-in mathematics and astronomy. Botany soon obductive labor we always thought questionable; and tained his attention. He then extended his view Lord Brougham impeaches his conclusion. Com- to other subjects, and attained such proficiency in mon sense will completely confirm the reasoning so ably set forth by his lordship in the appendix to this life.

"All the branches of useful industry work together to the common end, as all the parts of each branch cooperate to its particular object. If you say that the farmer feeds the community, and produces all the raw materials which the other classes

A variety of curious and original letters follow: but we shall not extract from them, as this would be scarcely fair in an unpublished work, and we pass to the next life, the celebrated Lavoisier.

various points of scientific investigation, that he was enabled to enter the academy at twenty-five years of age. Geology, then in its infancy, (what is it now ?) occupied his attention. He published his earliest paper on the "Analysis of Gypsur Chemistry soon began to command his sole attention. In 1758 and 1759 he experimented largely with a view to ascertain that water may, by e

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peated distillations, be converted into earth; and shall show. His paper was to have been read at he endeavored to determine whether or not there Martinmas, 1774, and was "rémis" to the 10th was any foundation for the opinion that water can, by repeated distillations, become so elastic and aeriform as to escape through the pores of vessels.

of May, 1777. He says, that he had a letter from Beccaria, 12th of November, 1774, but that his own memoir was then drawn up, and that an extract only was read at the November session. He The former opinion had been held by Bonde, does not say that the important point of the gases and Margraaf and others; the latter by Stahl. He was then inserted, nor how long before 1777 it negatived both propositions; so that to this phi- was added. He also omits to state a remarkable losopher belongs the triumph of separating the communication that Priestley made to him in component parts of earth and water, and proving October, 1774, of his great discovery of oxygen. that they are not mutually convertible; and the Nor does he mention that Priestley received, in elasticity of water was equally determined by him. 1771-3, the Copley medal from the Royal Society, The young students of chemistry in England for the discovery of azote in 1772. The printed ought to bear in mind, that Lavoisier was occupied paper of Priestley is extant in the Philosophical for one hundred and one days on one of these ex- Transactions. Lavoisier's experiments on tin in periments. For a short period at this time of his 1770, and on minium and calcination of metals in life the attempt to supply Paris with water occu- 1771, could not have given it to him. It is therepied much of his attention. He soon resumed his fore perfectly clear, that the experiments of our chemical pursuits. Black, Cavendish, and Priest-countryman led him to the inference on the atmosley had made numerous discoveries on the nature pheric gases. He says, in the "Elémens de of gases; and Lavoisier was at this period direct- Chimie," "Cet air (oxygen gas) nous avons ing his attention to the calcination of metals. He découvert presqu' en même temps, Dr. Priestley, drew from his experiments the inference, that cal- M. Scheele, et moi." The precise time of Dr. cination is caused by the union of air with the Priestley's discovery is quite apparent. Scheele, metal, and not by the loss of any body, as phlogis- ignorant of the doctor's discovery, made the same ton combined with it. He, by this course, nega- in 1775. Priestley and Scheele then did not distived again the Stahlian theory. Lavoisier stood cover it, "presqu' en même temps," far less on the verge of two important discoveries, Lord Lavoisier. In eight separate papers, printed beBrougham justly remarks, at this period-the com- tween 1772 and 1780, not a hint of Lavoisier's position of the atmosphere and oxygen; both, claim to this discovery is apparent. It was only however, were reserved for Priestley. Equally in 1782 he claimed to be a co-discoverer with near was he to the discovery that the diamond is Priestley; but even then he admits the experidentical with pure carbon. The destruction of ments that led to it were performed in February, the diamond by fire, as Lavoisier expressed it, or 1775, and Priestley had announced it in 1774. He the action of heat upon it, he knew well. New also added in that paper, at first, the remarkable ton, from an opposite process of reasoning, had point that Priestley had discovered oxygen at inferred the combustibility of the diamond; and nearly the same time as himself, and he believes a Macquer had proved that it could be converted into little earlier: "et je crois même avant moi." But charcoal. Lavoisier arrived at the inference, that he ungenerously omits, after a lapse of many the air produced during the combustion of the years, to give Priestley the benefit of his own prediamond was fixed air. How close he was on the vious confession, not inserting in the "Elémens de great discovery that the diamond is pure carbon, Chimie," the words previously given in his paper will appear from the following words: "We read to the academy in 1782. Priestley's own should never have expected," he says, "to find account of the discovery of oxygen is as folany relation between charcoal and diamond, and it lows. It is extracted from his work on Phlogiswould be unreasonable to push this analogy too ton:far; it only exists, because both substances seem to be properly ranged in the class of combustible bodies; and because they are of all these bodies the most fixed, when kept from the contact of air." He adds: "It is far from being impossible, that the blackest matter should come from surrounding bodies, and not from the diamond itself."

One step would have shown him that the diamond and the pure carbonaceous matter were identical, and he had before him the discovery of Black, that fixed air was produced by the combustion of charcoal. In 1773 he made some very accurate experiments on calcination, and he proved from them that the whole mass of air and metal after calcination weighed exactly the same as before the operation, and that the metal had gained what the air had lost-a most important discovery; but an inference appended to it is very remarkable for various reasons. He adds, that the atmosphere is composed of two gases, one, in the words of Lord Brougham, " capable of supporting life and flame, and of combining with metals in their calcination; the other incapable of supporting either life or flame, or of combining with metals." This was not just to others, as we

"The case was this. Having made the discovery of oxygen some time before I was in Paris in the year 1774, I mentioned it at the table of M. Lavoisier, when most of the philosophical people of the city were present, saying that it was a kind of air in which a candle burnt much better than in common air, but I had not then given it any name. At this all the company, and Mr. and Mrs. Lavoisier as much as any, expressed great surprise. I told them I had gotten it from precipitate per se, and also from red lead. Speaking French very imperfectly, and being little acquainted with the terms of chemistry, I said plombe rouge, which was not understood till Mr. Macquer said I must mean minium. M. Scheele's discovery was certainly independent of mine, though, I believe, not made quite so early."

We believe Lord Brougham's inference to be irrefutable; and it is only fair to his lordship to say, that the above reasoning is borrowed from the facts elicited by himself, and published in the work before us, viz., that Priestley discovered oxygen in 1774; Scheele in 1775; Lavoisier neither in 1774 nor 1775. It was to this discovery, however, that his theory of combustion is due. Having learnt from the discoverer of oxygen its exist

LORD BROUGHAM'S LITERARY CHARACTERS.

LIBRAR
P.CLfW.

would make him obnoxious, and when sentenced,
simply asked for a few days' respite to witness the
result of some experiments which he had con-
ducted in his confinement; but the tribunal, by the
mouth of one of their body, replied, that "the
republic had no need of philosophers," and he was
executed in May, 1794, with one hundred and
twenty-three others. Carnot might and ought to
have saved him; Fourcroy was bound to do so:
one only citizen, M. Hallé, had the courage to
read a detailed account of the discoveries of La-
voisier and his services to his country. Carnot
and Fourcroy said nothing, and the latter always
labored, as Cuvier says in his memoir of him,
"under the torment of the imputation of pro-
moting the death of his rival, Lavoisier." If any-
thing could read the nations a lesson on the advan-
tages of fixed government, the horrors enacted by
the French revolution in the case of Lavoisier and
others would impart it. Learning, science, nobility,
art, order, government, age, sex, all lost sight of
in the pell-mell of anarchy. This was a power on
the Carlyle system certainly, but it was a demon
power. Lavoisier left behind him a remarkable
person in his wife, who took upon herself the
engraving of the plates to the Elements." She
survived him, and late in life married Count Rum-
ford, whom she also outlived. We regret ex-
tremely that our limits will not permit us to give
the analysis of Lavoisier's discoveries appended to
his life. This paper will be found well worthy
of deep consideration. We simply extract Lord
Brougham's opinion of his merit in the closing
paragraph.

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ence, he arrived at the important generalization that it is the acidifying principle, and he named his great rival's discovery oxygen in consequence. At this period, while Lavoisier was occupied on generalizing, as Lord Brougham felicitously observes, the phenomena of other discoverers, but not materially adding to the store of facts from his own, two important points were determined in England, the composition of water and of the nitrous acid. Mr. Cavendish is the undisputed discoverer of the latter; of the former, Cavendish made the great experiment upon which it rests; but Mr. Watt, from less elaborate processes, had drawn out before him the inference that water was not a simple element, but a combination of oxygen with hydrogen gas. A passage in the New Quarterly, vol. v., p. 451, may possibly not convey a sufficiently balanced judgment on this question, leaving it a divided point between these great men; but the merit of drawing out the inference first, is assuredly Mr. Watt's. Here again, we regret to say, Lavoisier claimed to himself the disBut when Lavoisier and covery of other men. Laplace, before several academicians, performed the experiment on which the French claim to this discovery is made, Sir C. Blagden, who was present, told them that Mr. Cavendish had already performed the experiment, and obtained water from the combustion of the two gases. In the summer of 1783 he communicated this discovery to Lavoisier, but he found him incredulous of the fact until he had ascertained it by experiment. This wish of the French chemist is perfectly natural to claim to himself something of the light of the numerous discoveries in his art made in England and elsewhere; but still it is hardly fair, when but at the best reflecting, like a satellite, light from more luminous bodies, to claim to be the source of that light himself. Nay, he was even so ungenerous as not to mention Black in his excellent paper, "On the Combination of Fire with evaporable Fluids, and on the formation of The author of the Elastic aeriform Fluids." "Theory of Latent Heat" is not even named, and every student to whom the papers were read would necessarily infer that the theory was the invention of Lavoisier. He was also well acWe now proceed to the last life we shall be quainted, we repeat, with the illustrious discoverer of "latent heat," which adds to the offence. enabled to treat-Gibbon. This great historian After 1784 Lavoisier's labors were principally con- was descended from an ancient Kentish family. fined to forming the new nomenclature, and, in His grandfather was a man of large fortune, but From this, however, he recovered, conjunction with Seguin, to investigations on the it was confiscated from his share in the South Sea nature of respiration and transpiration. In 1776 he Company. had materially aided Turgot, who had requested and obtained again a large fortune before his death, him to superintend the manufacture of gunpowder, in 1736. He left behind him the historian's father, by increasing the explosive force of the compound his son, and two daughters. One of these married one fourth. In 1791 the national assembly con- Mr. Elliot, of Cornwall, afterwards Lord Elliot. sulted him, and he drew up his treatise on the Edward was born April 27, 1737. His father sat Being ap- for Southampton, and continued in Parliament "Richesse Territoriale de France." pointed a commissioner of the treasury, he intro- until 1747. Gibbon's childhood was sickly; but duced some admirable arrangements. His house at he went to Oxford, notwithstanding, before he was Paris and all his costly apparatus were open twice fifteen. His early taste for history had already a week to scientific men, and he was a generous developed itself. He arrived at Oxford, he says, patron of youthful merit. Surely, from public" with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a services, for the national honor simply, such a man of science ought to have been saved amid any com- school-boy ought to have been ashamed." Here, The Triumvirate of singular to say, the historian of the "Decline and motions; but it was not so. 1794 seized him with twenty-seven others, whose Fall" embraced Romanism, but it is quite evident real crimes were their possessions, and imprisoned on much such imperfect grounds as many graduthem. Lavoisier had escaped; but learning that ates there have lately done, for he was not in a M. Paulzé, his father-in-law, had been arrested, state from his acquirements to form a sound conhe gave himself up, and was confined with the clusion. He was accordingly compelled to quit rest. He had long foreseen that his property | Oxford, and his father sent him to Lausanne. The

"After all the deductions, however, which can fairly be made from his merits, these stand high indeed, and leave his renown as brilliant as that of any one who has ever cultivated physical science. The overthrow of the phlogistic theory, and the happy generalizations upon the combinations of bodies, which we owe to his genius for philosophical research, are sufficient to place him among the first, perhaps to make him be regarded as the first reformer of chemical science, the principal founder of that magnificent fabric which now fills so ample a space in the eye of every student of nature.

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