His last oration before the Royal Society was delivered on St. Andrew's day in 1826, with painful exertion, as if he were about to be stricken down by apoplexy. The skill of his friend Dr. Babington did little for him; but he rallied, and early in 1827 he was able to withdraw to the Continent from the toils and

annoyances of office. It was an inclement season; but he arrived at Ravenna by the 20th of February, where an accomplished young vice-legate did all he could have done for a brother.' I have chosen this spot of the declining empire of Rome,' he wrote, as one of solitude and repose...I ride in the pine forest, which is the most magnificent in Europe... The pine wood partly covers the spot where the Roman fleet once rode. Such is the change of time! Here his brother, who had attended, left him. He was as diligent as his strength would permit in taking exercise on horseback, among the avenues of Pineta and the marshes of La Classe, with his gun and his dogs; amused himself by reading; penned Hints and Experiments in Physical Science,' for he experimented to the very last; wrote reflections on life, full of experience, both in verse and prose; and engaged his powerful mind with contemplations of a higher order still.

We cannot follow him closely in the weary track that eventually led this conqueror of the elements out of nature; the subject and the sphere of all his victories. It was a sore struggle. Throughout his journals there are scattered exclamations of valde miserabilis. Poor Davy! with none but servile hands to tend him; no one to lean upon in the hour of weakness ; homeless and alone; he wandered bravely on in voluntary pilgrimage to shrine of sequestered beauty after shrine, avoiding the interference of physicians, taking counsel of his own heart, and sporting like a naturalist when he could, from April to October: when he returned to London, the arena of his glory, for the last time, 'neither decidedly better nor worse.' Unfit for the excitements and the cares of society, as well as for the active labours of research, he wished to buy some warm-lying, beautiful estate, happily situated for the rural sports he followed with unabated zeal. There, gazing with a fond proprietary sense upon the landscape, watching the weather and the varying year with the eye of a genuine naturalist, deceiving the finny people with the quaint solicitude of another Walton, and looking back with triumphant sighs upon his exulting life; his life would have oozed away. It was not to be so. His wishes were not met; his health would not improve; and he longed for his South Austrian solitudes again. Bidding farewell to London at the end of March the following spring, he spent the summer as he had spent the last; and then withdrew from the sublime Styrian haunts, which he loved so truly, to reside once more in Rome.

sary

In this premature winter of the year of his life the Discoverer turned, with the trusting love of a child, for solace in the summery bosom of nature. 'Nature never deceives us'...is his plaint... The rocks, the mountains, the streams, always speak the same language... Her fruits are all balmy, bright and sweet; she affords none of these blighted ones so common in the life of man, and so like the fabled apples of the Dead Sea, fresh and beautiful to the sight, but, when tasted, full of bitterness and ashes.' Davy too, the brilliant and successful, had been encountered by disappointment, the entailed inheritance of human nature. His whole life was calculated to work him up to an exorbitant pitch of expectation. He was never very well fitted by nature, and totally unfitted by experience, for misfortunes. It is well for the world that his early path was easy and open, for success and applause were the necesstimulus of so sanguine and sympathetic a being. Accordingly, when, after all that he had done and enjoyed, they endeavoured to rob him of the dearer honour of his invention of the Safety-Lamp by a base and ignorant cabal, fomented by men whom, now that the question is for ever put contemptuously at rest, it were too much honour ever to name again, there is no wonder that he was deeply wounded by the insult. Then the impediments that were thrown in the way of the thorough investigation of the copper-sheathing question by certain underlings of office, for the weightiest and most selfish of purposes, and the taunts that were invidiously bandied about concerning the apparent failure of his admirable plan for protection, vexed and filled him with just indignation. We men are cruel usurers; for if a man, making himself over to us for better for worse, half-accomplish a difficult discovery in our behoof, we immediately hoot him for his unneighbourly bravery in attacking so impregnable a stronghold, and persecute him into solitude, because his victory is not complete and so we abandon him to complete it by himself! Not that this of Davy's, vexatious though it was, is an instance very strongly in point; yet it serves for illustration, while it must have stung a man of his unfailing resources and invariable success to the very quick. Nor was Sir Humphry happy in his elevation to the chair of the Royal Society; except in the profaned consideration that it was once the Chair of NEWTON, profaned by the unavoidable remembrance of the intermediate nonentities that had occupied the sacred seat. We are incompetent to the discussion of this question; but it is clear that his administration was far from giving satisfaction. The responsibility of every disagreeable thing that transpired in the private transactions of the Society was thrown on him. He was annoyed by a hundred impertinent trifles. Above all, he was disappointed in his life-long foolish hope, of one day moving the Government of

Britain to patronize the cause of science. Things did not go so sweetly with him as they did in the rising and ascent of his climbing sun. Other sorrows he may have suffered; others he did, although we cannot well say what. But to a spirit of such inexhaustible activity, it was sorrow enough to feel that cold, slimy and relentless clutch of palsy, creeping slowly over him; the palm upon his heart, and the chilly fingers over his limbs, to squeeze him leisurely to death.

It was at Rome on the 20th of February, when he was finishing the Last days of a Philosopher, that he received the final warning to prepare. By dictation he wrote to his brother, who was at Malta with the British troops, 'I am dying from a severe attack of palsy, which has seized the whole of the body, with the exception of the intellectual organ...I shall leave my bones in the Eternal City. But he was to die neither then nor there. Within three weeks his brother was by his bed-side; and found him as much interested in the anatomy and electricity of the torpedo as ever, though he bade Dr. Davy 'not be grieved' by his approaching dissolution. Yet after a day of 150 pulse-beats, and only five breathings, in a minute, and of the most distressing particular symptoms, he again revived. Shortly after this Lady Davy arrived at Rome from England, with a copy of the second edition of Salmonia, which he received with peculiar pleasure. After some weeks of melancholy dalliance with the balmy spring air of the Campagna, the Albula Lake, the hills of Tivoli and the banks of the Tiber, they travelled quietly round by Florence, Genoa, Turin, slowly threading the flowery sweet-scented alpine valleys, to Geneva: WHERE HE SUDDENLY EXPIRED. three hours beyond midnight: his servant called his brother: his brother was in time to close his eyes. It was the 29th of May in 1829.

It was

They buried him at Geneva. In truth Geneva buried him herself, with serious and respectful ceremonial. A simple monument stands at the head of the hospitable grave. There is a tablet to his memory on the walls of Westminster Abbey. There is a monument at Penzance. His public services of plate, his imperial vases, his foreign prizes, his royal medals, shall be handed down with triumph to his collateral posterity, as trophies won from the deeps of nescience. But his WORK; designed by his own genius; executed by his own hand, tracery and all; and every single stone signalized by his own private mark, indelible, characteristic and inimitable; HIS WORK is the only adequate record of his name. How deeply are its foundations rooted in space, and how lasting its materials for time! It is solid, yet its substantial utility is almost everywhere flowered into beauty. It is mingled in its style, but it is unique. It is the tomb, not of the palsy-stricken body, which has returned to the dust as it

was, but of the empyreal soul that is with God who gave it, so that the erection knows no place, and can be assimilated to our conceptions only by the figures of fancy and imagination. The monumental fane, then, which this great investigator has raised in honour of nature, for the benefit of man and to his own glory, is not a camera-obscura, like the Work without a Parallel of old Beccher, or the Foundations of Chemistry by STAHL; in which the figures are but dim and upside-down, though lying luminous and beautiful in the midst of the surrounding darkness: nor yet a camera-lucida, like the faultless work of his cotemporary Wollaston; where the images are almost painfully distinct, minute and suffused with the light of day. It is not a crystal edifice, like the palace of ice upon the Neva, as is the system of LAVOISIER; not yet dissolved by the glowing and ascending year: nor a mosque, like the heretical but prophetic Chemical Statics of the metaphysical Berthollet; in which it will erelong be manifest that more is meant than meets the eye.' It is not a European museum, like the substantial fabric which the long day's work of Berzelius has slowly builded over his future bed of rest, and filled with all that is rich and rare from Icelandic cauldrons, Ural mines, Tropical woods, and the heights of Andes and the Himmaleh, for the useful instruction of mankind : nor a half-lit, unfinished but magnificent orrery, like the New Philosophy of DALTON, in which, when the undiscovered planets and the unexpected comets shall have been found, and when the central idea shall have been kindled into a blaze of light and force by the Prometheus of another day, the movements and the sheen of all the stars shall be held up to the astonished eye as one completed microcosm of creation. Yet there is something of all these together in the work of the London Discoverer. There are the neighbouring shadows of STAHL, and, as it appears from the researches of Faraday, something also like the inverted representation of the truth. There is the brightness of Wollaston, in the great facts he has won from their enchanted holds. There is the sound logic, if not the translucent conception, of LAVOISIER. There is the breadth, if not the subtlety, of Berthollet. There is the wealth, both of matter and resources, without the infallible accuracy of Berzelius. And, last of all, there is the independence, and the essential vitality of glorious promise for posterity, of our own immortal DALTON: but over the great proportions of the fabric there is shed that brilliancy which is all his own, a lustre partly derived from the accidental character of his particular discoveries, and partly from the original endowment of his mind, by that only Potentate, whose 'minister he was.' Such is the elaborate and richly laden mausoleum of HUMPHRY DAVY.

ART. III.-Lectures delivered at Broadmead Chapel, Bristol. BY JOHN FOSTER. London, 1844. 8vo, pp. 419.

ALTHOUGH the editor of this volume does not announce a Memoir of the late John Foster, we assume it as probable that something of the sort is in preparation. His correspondence was, we believe, at one time extensive, and his letters were often, if not in the usual sense of the word, elaborate, yet of that leisurely and copious sort which unfolds the mind-the soul of the writer, and supplies a most desirable commentary upon his published works. These letters are, no doubt, accessible; for who of Foster's correspondents has not carefully preserved such letters? or who would not be prompt to grant them to an authorized editor? and, whatever subjects they may bear upon, they will furnish such a "memoir of himself," by a man's own pen, as does not appear twice in long periods of time.

In the prospect and full confidence of the appearing of such a volume, we shall, in this instance, hold ourselves back from the themes which would naturally present themselves in taking up a posthumous work of the author of the "Essays." Besides, these Lectures would not afford the requisite text and illustration for an essay on the mind and writings of this distinguished man: not indeed that they do not indicate its characteristic powers, or well consist with the reputation which these have obtained for him; nevertheless, they are not precisely of the same quality as his elaborated productions; and they rather show what the man might do when he pleased, than exhibit him in the full play of his great powers of mind.

The editor is judiciously careful to preclude any misconception as to the literary value of the "Lectures ;" and it may be well to cite what he says on this subject.

"The Lectures," he tells us, "contained in this volume, were not prepared for the press by the author. In the year 1822, Mr. Foster, in compliance with the earnest request of some intimate friends, commenced the delivery of the lectures, from which the following are selected, once every fortnight, (the months of July and August excepted,) and continued them, though latterly at longer intervals, till the close of 1825. His auditory consisted of persons belonging to various religious communities in Bristol, most of whom had long known and appreciated his writings. With such a class of hearers, Mr. Foster felt himself warranted to take a wider range of subjects, and to adopt a more varied and elaborate style of illustration than in addressing a promiscuous congregation. All the leading ideas of each