Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839), author of 'We met 'twas in a Crowd,' and hundreds of other popular songs, was the son of a wealthy Bath lawyer, had earls and baronets for cousins, and, as his biographer expressly says, 'was nurtured in the lap of luxury.' From Winchester he passed into his father's office, then spent three years at Oxford with a vague view to the Church, but in 1826 married a pretty Irish wife and became a popular poet. Unhappily his own fortune and his wife's were sunk in unprofitable speculations: he had to live by literature, and wrote too much, sometimes manifestly against the grain; and spite of his popularity, misfortune and ill-health dogged his steps in his later years. 'I'd be a Butterfly' was one of his first successes; The Aylmers and A Legend of Killarney were his principal stories in prose. Of his thirty-six dramatic pieces, a few may yet be read with a little patience, but even Perfection, produced by Madame Vestris, is forgotten-still more The Proof of the Pudding and Tom Noddy's Secret. But most people familiar with collections of Standard English Songs' carry in their heads a small anthology of his lyrics-'The Soldier's Tear, She wore a Wreath of Roses,' 'O no, we never mention her,' 'We met 'twas in a Crowd,' *Gaily the Troubadour touched his Guitar,’Shades of Evening, close not o'er us,' 'I'm saddest when I sing,' Lilla's a Lady,' 'I'll hang my Harp on a Willow Tree,' and 'The Misletoe Bough.' He was probably the most successful song-writer of the age next to Moore his songs and short poems count by hundreds ; for some of his songs he composed the tunes (notably 'The Troubadour' and 'We met'). But Sir Henry Bishop set about a hundred and twenty of them to music, and other distinguished and popular composers-Balfe, Sir John Stevenson, Callcott, Barnett, J. P. Knight, C. E. Horn, T. Cooke-were glad to associate their melodies with his verse. Some of his best were translated into Latin (by Archdeacon Wrangham), French, German, Spanish, and Italian. Yet the bulk of his songs are now unsung and unread, and there are well-appointed modern libraries that have no copy of the poems of one whom a contemporary French critic pronounced the English Anacreon. In many, doubtless, spite of unmistakable deftness, metrical ease, and sprightliness, the sentiment was too sentimental, the ecstasy of joy and grief a shade conventional even when it was the expression of a real and sincere feeling. Of his innumerable society verses, the titles and subjects show that the interest was trifling, the wit forced or commonplace-This is my eldest Daughter, sir,' My Wife is very musical,' 'Not at Home,' 'I must come out next Spring, Mamma,' 'The Black-ball'd Man,' 'The Old Bachelor;' and the persiflage about rouging, false teeth, elegant shoes and corns, the effect of dances and of seasickness on ladies' complexions, is a little tire

some, and at times not quite impeccable on the score of good taste. Prayers, elegies, verses, and other like solemnities are rarely but oddly mixed on the same page with jingles about county balls, picnics, Lord and Lady Hogsnorton, and other frivolities. But there is a vein of real and stern satire in 'The Absentee,' written against heartless Irish landlords in the time of the Famine :

And own that Erin is too fair for thee,
Deserter! Renegade! and Absentee !

and the pathos, tenderness, sad and serious reflection, are often, but not always, quite genuine, spontaneous, and natural, though seldom able to stir other hearts.

Old Age sits bent on his Iron-gray Steed. Old age sits bent on his iron-gray steed,

Youth rides erect on his courser black; And little he thinks, in his reckless speed,

Old age comes on in the very same track ! Though one seems strong as the forest tree,

The other infirm and wanting breath;
If ever youth baffles old age, 'twill be
By rushing into the arms of death.

And youth will quaff, and youth will feast,
His lagging foe he'll still deride;
Until, when he expects him least,

Old age and he stand side by side.
He then looks into his toilet-glass,
And sees old age reflected there;
He cries, Alas! how quickly pass
Bright eyes, and bloom, and raven hair!'

Of what is the Old Man thinking? Of what is the old man thinking,

As he leans on his oaken staff? From the midday pastime shrinking, He shares not the merry laugh. But the tears of the old man flow,

As he looks on the young and gay: And his gray head, moving slow,

Keeps time to the air they play : The elder around are drinking,

But not one cup will he quaff,
Oh of what is the old man thinking,
As he leans on his oaken staff?
'Tis not with a vain repining

That the old man sheds a tear;
'Tis not for his strength declining,
He sighs not to linger here.
There's a spell in the air they play,

And the old man's eyes are dim,
For it calls up a past May-day,

And the dear friends lost to him. From the scene before him shrinking, From the dance and the merry laugh, Of their calm repose he is thinking, As he leans on his oaken staff.

Lord Harry has written a Novel.
Lord Harry has written a Novel,

A story of elegant life;
No stuff about love in a hovel,

No sketch of a commoner's wife:

No trash such as pathos and passion, Fine feelings, expression, and wit; But all about people of fashion.

Come look at his caps, how they fit.

Oh Radcliffe! thou once wert the charmer
Of girls who sat reading all night;
Thy heroes were striplings in armour,
Thy heroines damsels in white.
But past are thy terrible touches,
Our lips in derision we curl,
Unless we are told how a Duchess
Convers'd with her cousin the Earl.
We now have each dialogue quite full
Of titles- I give you my word,
My Lady, you're looking delightful ;'

'Oh dear! do you think so, my Lord?'
'You've heard of the Marquis's marriage,
The bride with her jewels new set,
Four horses, new travelling-carriage,
And déjeûné à la fourchette.

Haut Ton finds her privacy broken,

We trace all her inns and her outs;
The very small talk that is spoken

By very great people at routs.
At Tenby Miss Jinks asks the loan of
The book from the Innkeeper's wife,
And reads till she dreams she is one of
The leaders of elegant life.

Bayly's works were edited by his widow, with a Memoir (2 vols. 1844); and see Andrew Lang's Essays in Little (1891).

John Abercrombie (1780-1844), after Dr Gregory's death the chief consulting physician in Scotland, secured extraordinary credit as an author by two works on The Intellectual Powers (1830) and The Moral Feelings (1833), without psychological value or philosophical insight, but substantially 'sound' and enlivened by illustrations from pathological mental cases. The son of one of the ministers of Aberdeen, he studied there and at Edinburgh, where from 1804 onwards he rose to eminence in his profession. He wrote also books on the pathology of the brain and of the stomach, and a volume of Essays and Tracts.

Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), born at Jedburgh, was educated for the Church of Scotland at the University of Edinburgh; but his nervousness disqualifying him for a clerical career, he became editor in 1802 of the Edinburgh Magazine, and in 1808 of the Edinburgh Encyclopædia. He was already deep in optics; the kaleidoscope was invented by him in 1816, and in 1843 and 1844 he improved Wheatstone's cumbrous stereoscope by means of refracting lenses. One of the chief originators of the British Association (1831), in 1815 he was elected F.R.S. and Copley medallist; in 1818 the Rumford medal was awarded him for his discoveries on the polarisation of light; in 1832 he was knighted, and had a pension conferred upon him; in 1838 he was appointed Principal at St Andrews; in 1849

he was elected a foreign associate of the French Institute; and he was Principal of Edinburgh University from 1859 till the last year of his life Among his works were an edition of Legendre's Geometry, translated by Thomas Carlyle (1822)) the standard Life of Newton (1828; enlarged ed 1855); Letters on Natural Magic, addressed to Sir Walter Scott (1831); Martyrs of Science (1841); More Worlds than One (1854); and treatises on the kaleidoscope and various subjects in optics. The Home Life of Brewster, by his daughter, Mrs Gordon (1869; 3rd ed. 1881), is a worthy monument to him.

By

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was born, a blacksmith's son, at Newington Butts near London, and at thirteen was apprenticed to a bookbinder. He began early to make experiments in chemistry and electricity, and, attending Sir Humphry Davy's lectures, took notes which he transmitted to Sir Humphry, desiring his assistance to escape from trade and enter into the service of science.' Davy he was appointed chemical assistant in the Royal Institution in 1813; in 1827 he succeeded to Davy's chair of Chemistry there; and he was made F.R.S. in 1824, D.C.L. in 1832. In 1831 the first series of his Experimental Researches in Electricity and Physics was read before the Royal Society—a work which was continued to 1856. For many years he gave lectures at the Royal Institution, eminently popular from the happy simplicity of his style and his successful illustrations, in spite of the fact that the subjects were far from simple or at first sight attractive. He was not merely one of the greatest of discoverers in the realm of physics, but one of the most successful popularisers of science, and well deserved the pension granted in 1835. He was a simple, gentle, cheerful man of genius, a Sandemanian of strong religious feeling and unassuming manners. Tyndall pronounced Faraday the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen, and classified his principal discoveries under four heads-magno-electric induction, the chemical phenomena of the current, the magnetisation of light (which,' said Tyndall, I should liken to the Weisshorn among mountains--high, beautiful, and alone'), and diamagnetism. Other physicists credit him with at least a dozen discoveries of the first importance in these departments of research. In Faraday's opinion, it required twenty years of work to make a man in physical science, the previous period being one of infancy. While lecturing before a private society on the element chlorine, Faraday made a memorable remark: 'Before leaving this subject I will point out the history of this substance, as an answer to those who are in the habit of saying to every new fact, "What is its use?" Dr Franklin says to such, "What is the use of an infant?" The answer of the experimentalist is, "Endeavour to make it useful." Among his famous works were his lectures on The Non-metallic Elements and The

Chemical History of a Candle, and the profound treatise on The Various Forces in Nature.

From The Chemical History of a Candle.' What is all this process going on within us which we cannot do without, either day or night, which is so provided for by the Author of all things that He has arranged that it shall be independent of all will? If we restrain our respiration, as we can to a certain extent, we should destroy ourselves. When we are asleep, the organs of respiration, and the parts that are associated with them, still go on with their action, so necessary is this process of respiration to us, this contact of air with the lungs. I must tell you, in the briefest possible manner, what this process is. We consume food: the food goes through that strange set of vessels and organs within us, and is brought into various parts of the system, nto the digestive parts especially; and alternately the portion which is so changed is carried through our lungs by one set of vessels, while the air that we inhale and exhale is drawn into and thrown out of the lungs by another set of vessels, so that the air and the food come Cose together, separated only by an exceedingly thin sarface: the air can thus act upon the blood by this process, producing precisely the same results in kind as we have seen in the case of the candle. The candle combines with parts of the air, forming carbonic acid, and evolves heat; so in the lungs there is this curious, wonderful change taking place. The air entering, combines with the carbon (not carbon in a free state, but, 2s in this case, placed ready for action at the moment), and makes carbonic acid, and is so thrown out into the atmosphere, and thus this singular result takes place: we may thus look upon the food as fuel. Let me take hat piece of sugar, which will serve my purpose. a compound of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, similar to a candle, as containing the same elements, though not in the same proportion. [The figures were shown in a table.] This is indeed a very curious thing, which you can well remember, for the oxygen and hydrogen are in exactly the proportions which form water, so that sugar may be said to be compounded of 72 parts of sarbon and 99 parts of water; and it is the carbon in the sugar that combines with the oxygen carried in ty the air in the process of respiration, so making us The candles; producing these actions, warmth, and far more wonderful results besides, for the sustenance of the system, by a most beautiful and simple process. To Lake this still more striking, I will take a little sugar; or to hasten the experiment I will use some syrup, which ntains about three-fourths of sugar and a little water. If I put a little oil of vitriol on it, it takes away the water, and leaves the carbon in a black mass. You see bow the carbon is coming out, and before long we shall have a solid mass of charcoal, all of which has come out of sugar. Sugar, as you know, is food, and here we have absolutely a solid lump of carbon where you would not have expected it. And if I make arrangements so as to oxidise the carbon of sugar, we shall have a much cre striking result. Here is sugar, and I have here an oxidiser-a quicker one than the atmosphere; and so we shall oxidise this fuel by a process different from respiration in its form, though not different in its kind. It is the combustion of the carbon by the contact of Oxygen which the body has supplied to it. If I set this nto action at once, you will see combustion produced.

It is

Just what occurs in my lungs-taking in oxygen from another source, namely, the atmosphere-takes place here by a more rapid process.

tell you what this A candle will burn What, then, must

You will be astonished when I curious play of carbon amounts to. some four, five, six, or seven hours. be the daily amount of carbon going up into the air in the way of carbonic acid! What a quantity of carbon must go from each of us in respiration! What a wonderful change of carbon must take place under these circumstances of combustion or respiration! A man in twenty-four hours converts as much as seven ounces of carbon into carbonic acid; a milch cow will convert seventy ounces, and a horse seventy-nine ounces, solely That is, the horse in twentyby the act of respiration. four hours burns seventy-nine ounces of charcoal, or carbon, in his organs of respiration, to supply his natural warmth in that time. All the warm-blooded animals get their warmth in this way, by the conversion of carbon, not in a free state, but in a state of combination. And what an extraordinary notion this gives us of the alterations going on in our atmosphere! As much as five million pounds, or 548 tons, of carbonic acid is formed by respiration in London alone in twenty-four hours. And where does all this go? Up into the air. If the carbon had been like the lead which I showed you, or the iron which, in burning, produces a solid substance, what would happen? Combustion could not go on. As charcoal burns it becomes a vapour, and passes off into the atmosphere, which is the great vehicle, the great carrier for conveying it away to other places. Then what becomes of it? Wonderful is it to find that the change produced by respiration, which seems so injurious to us (for we cannot breathe air twice over), is the very life and support of plants and vegetables that grow upon the surface of the earth. It is the same also under the surface, in the great bodies of water; for fishes and other animals respire upon the same principle, though not exactly by contact with the air.

open

The standard Life was that by Dr Bence Jones (2 vols. 1870); Professor Tyndall had already issued Faraday as a Discoverer (1868; 5th ed. 1894); Dr J. H. Gladstone produced a monograph in 1872; and there is a more recent one-volume Life of Faraday by Professor Sylvanus P. Thompson (1899).

Sir John Herschel in full, Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871)—was the son of that Sir William Herschel who, born in Hanover, came to England as oboist in the band of the Hanoverian Guards, and settling at Bath as organist and music teacher, became a very distinguished astronomer, was made astronomer to George III., discovered Uranus and the satellites of Saturn, and added greatly to our knowledge of the nebulæ and the double stars. Sir William was assisted in his work with his monster telescope at Slough, and in his great catalogue of stars, by his sister Caroline Lucretia (1750-1848), a most remarkable woman. Sir John, born at

Slough, was educated at Eton and St John's, Cambridge, where in 1813 he was senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman. In 1822 he applied himself especially to astronomy, and helped to re-examine the nebulæ and clusters of stars in his father's catalogues; reporting to the Royal Society observations on 525 nebulæ, clusters of

stars, and double stars not noticed by his father. His treatises on Sound and Light appeared in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana (1830-31); his Astronomy (1831) and Natural Philosophy in Lardner's Cyclopædia. The Astronomy was the most successful attempt that had till then been made to simplify and popularise the study of the science, and was long the standard college manual. In 1834 he visited the Cape to examine the southern celestial hemisphere; the results (1847) completed a survey of the heavens begun in 1825. Made successively a knight, a baronet, and a D.C.L. of Oxford, he was Master of the Mint in 1850-55, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His articles on

ISAAC TAYLOR.

From the Drawing by Josiah Gilbert in the National Portrait Gallery.

Meteorology, Physical Geography, and the Telescope, contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica, were published separately; and his Popular Lectures and Collected Addresses made him well known to the 'general reader.' A distinguished chemist, he attained important results in photography and made valuable researches on the undulatory theory of light. He had a lively interest in poetry, and he translated from Schiller and from the Iliad. See Miss Clarke's The Herschels (1896).

Isaac Taylor (1787-1865), a copious and popular author on religious philosophy and other subjects, was the son of Isaac of Ongar (see page 174), and assisted him while he was yet an engraver. His bent, however, was literary; he read largely in patristic theology and in philosophy, by 1818 was on the staff of the Eclectic Review, and in 1822 published a small work on The Elements of Thought. He lived to be a valued contributor to Good Words in the second

half of the nineteenth century, and published over a score of works, of which the first really successful one was The Natural History of Enthusiasm, published anonymously in 1829. It dealt with a variety of contemporary problems in religion, social conditions, and politics, reached a tenth edition in 1845, and was followed by The Natural History of Fanaticism (1833), Spiritual Despotism, The Physical Theory of Another Life, Ultimate Civilisation, and books against the Tractarian position, against the Essays and Reviews, on Jesuitism, on Methodism, and on The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. Jane Taylor and Ann were his sisters (see page 174); and his son, Canon Isaac Taylor (1829-1901), was also an industrious writer, on such subjects especially as Words and Places (1864), The Alphabet (1883), The Origin of the Aryans (1890), as well as on the Memorials of the Taylor Family of Ongar (1867).

Monkery.

The ancient monkery was a system of the most deliberate selfishness. That solicitude for the preservation of individual interests which forms the basis of the human constitution is so broken up and counteracted by the claims and pleasures of domestic life that, though the principle remains, its manifestations are suppressed and its predominance effectually prevented, except in some few tempers peculiarly unsocial. But the anchoret is a selfist by his very profession; and like the sensualist, though his taste is of another kind, he pursues his personal gratification, reckless of the welfare of others. His own advantage or delight, or-to use his favourite phrase the good of his soul, is the sovereign object of his cares. His meditations, even if they embrace the compass of heaven, come round ever and again to find their ultimate issue in his own bosom; but can that be true wisdom which just ends at the point whence it started? True wisdom is a progressive principle. In abjuring the use of the active faculties, in reducing himself by the spell of vows to a condition of physical and moral annihilation, the insulated says to his fellows, concerning whatever might otherwise have been converted to their benefit, 'It is corban;' thus making void the law of love to our neighbour by a pretended intensity of love to God. That so monstrous an immorality should have dared to call itself by the name of Sanctity, and should have done so, too, in front of Christianity, is indeed amazing, and could never have happened if Christianity had not first been shorn of its life-giving warmth, as the sun is deprived of its power of heat when we ascend into the rarity of upper space. The tendency of a taste for imaginative indulgences to petrify the heart has been already adverted to, and it receives a signal illustration in the monkish life, especially in its more perfect form of absolute separation from the society of man. The anchoret was a disjoined particle, frozen deep into the mass of his own selfishness, and there embedded, below the touch of every human sympathy. This sort of meditative insulation is the ultimate and natural issue of all enthusiastic piety, and may be met with even in our own times, among those who have no inclination to run away from the comforts of common life. (From The Natural History of Enthusiasm.)

sense.

Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856), Scottish philosopher, was born at Glasgow, where his father and grandfather held the chairs of Anatomy and Botany; in 1816 he made good his hereditary claim to the old baronetcy which Sir Robert Hamilton of Preston, the commander of the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge, had abandoned in 1688, rather than take the oath of allegiance to William III. After gaining high distinction at Glasgow University, he went in 1809 to Balliol College as Snell exhibitioner, and graduated in 1810. He was called to the Scottish Bar in 1813, but had almost no practice; in 1820 he stood unsuccessfully for the chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, being defeated by Professor Wilson (see below); next year he became Professor of History. In 1829 he published in the Edinburgh Review a famous critique of Cousin's doctrine of the Infinite; this and other articles were collected in 1852 as Discussions in Philosophy and Literature. In 1836 he was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Isaac Taylor being an unsuccessful candidate; and on these subjects he lectured in alternate years till the end of his life, gathering around him enthusiastic disciples. His lectures were published in 1859-61 by Mansel and Veitch ; his principal work was his edition of Reid (1846; with notes 1862), defending what he believed to be Reid's sound philosophical doctrine of commonIll-health diminished his power of work ; but he edited Dugald Stewart's works in 1854-55, and was generally able with an assistant to perform the duties of his class till his death. With Hamilton began, as Veitch said, the spring-time of a new life in Scottish philosophical thought. Vastly more learned than his predecessors, Hamilton studied with equal zeal ancient Greek and Roman, mediæval and modern German, thought and speculation. He made it his business to maintain and, as he thought, complete the traditional Scottish doctrines, derived from Reid and Dugald Stewart, with the help of the limiting or negative results of the Kantian critique of knowledge. Whether this eclectic method was capable of developing a self-consistent system may be disputed; but Hamilton gave a great impulse to philosophical thought in Britain. He made some contributions to psychology and logic-‘the quantification of the predicate' one of them; but in Essentials his philosophy is a strenuous assertion of the relativity of human knowledge and the impossibility of reaching a coherent metaphysical view of the universe. Scottish philosophy has never produced anything like a real or complete metaphysical system-so far is it from being the case that Scotsmen are naturally metaphysicians. In Scotland theological dogma- predestination, teleology, and the like-largely took the place of metaphysics, and philosophy remained mainly inductive, attaining many valuable results both in psychology and morals. In its recoil from the 'ideal system of Berkeley as extended by Hume

to sceptical issues, Scottish philosophy was too well content to appeal in all difficulties to 'the testimony of consciousness'-a short and easy method which neither convinced opponents nor secured continuity and completeness for the rational element in mental activity. The Scottish 'natural dualism' which rightly maintains, against subjective idealism, that the non-ego or object is given in knowledge, is apt to degenerate, and does usually 'degenerate into a crude metaphysical dualism of mind and matter as two heterogeneous substances: Hamilton cannot be regarded as having harmonised the discrepancies of Reid or his other predecessors of the Scottish School. Dean Mansel carried Hamilton's doctrine of relativity into the theological sphere by denying the possibility of knowing God; and M'Cosh and others tried to rescue the time-honoured doctrines of the Scottish School from patent agnosticism. But Hamilton, greeted in his time as a great and original thinker, is now without a following, though he remains the most accomplished and the last notable representative of the Scotch philosophy.'

See Hamilton's Life by Veitch (1869); short Monographs by Veitch (1882) and Monck (1881); J. S. Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865); M'Cosh's Scottish Philosophy (1874); A. Seth's (Pringle Pattison's) Scottish Philosophy (1885; 3rd ed. 1899).

John Wilson, better known as Christopher North and chief of the Blackwood group' than as Professor of Moral Philosophy or poet, was born on the 18th of May 1785, in Paisley, where his father was a wealthy manufacturer. At thirteen the boy was entered of Glasgow University, whence, in 1803, he was transferred to Magdalen College, Oxford. Here he was distinguished for his varied intellectual gifts, but even more for his magnificent physique and unparalleled athletic accomplishments. After four years' residence at Oxford, having in 1797, on the death of his father, become master of £50,000, he purchased the estate of Elleray, overlooking Windermere, where he went to live. He married, built a house, kept a yacht and boats, enjoyed himself among the magnificent scenery of the lakes, wrote poetry, wrestled and jumped with the dalesmen, and cultivated the society of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and De Quincey. With youth, robust health, fortune, and an exhaustless imagination, Wilson must, in such a spot, have been blest even up to the dreams of a poet. But reverses came; his fortune melted away under unjust stewardship; and, after entering himself of the Scottish Bar, he sought and obtained the Moral Philosophy chair-on the strength rather of his multifarious accomplishments and his Tory politics than for his philosophic temper or profundity (Sir William Hamilton being a defeated candidate). By far his most characteristic work was done for Blackwood's Magazine. He was a notable contributor from the beginning in 1817;