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love, astonishment, and despair, she fell on her face. He raised her up, but she was of a death-like chill and whiteness the blue veins of her neck seemed as if starting from her skin; he called immediately for assistance, and in another moment she was covered with a crimson dye. Her father rushed in, and calling for his child was just in time to see the last ebb of life departing she had broken a blood vessel. For a moment her eyes beamed a brilliancy almost super-human; she moved her lips, and at length feebly uttered, "Your forgiveness, dearest

lady-one kiss, 'tis the first and the last. I have not wronged you." The agonized wife parted the clustering ringlets from the forehead of the dying girl; and as her lips pressed the chilly surface, she shrieked aloud. The father rushed forward, but the spirit of the injured one had fled to that home where the selfishness and insensibility of this cold earth cannot enter, and where purity of thought and goodness of heart will bloom, free from the withering blights of deceit and disappointed hope!

OF

EDWARD DANIEL CLARKE, THE TRAVELLER.*

F all popular writers, perhaps a writer of travels is the most popular. He is at once the historian and the hero he addresses us with the frankness of an intimate correspondent, and appeals directly to our sympathy with the air of one who knows that it will not be withheld. We give up our faith to him on easy terms. It is the least return we can make for the obligations under which we are laid by one who enables us without stirring a step from our chminey corner to minealize in Siberia and botanize in Kamchatcha.

He travels and I too: I tread his deck:
Ascend his top-mast; through his peering eyes
Discover countries; with a kindred heart
Suffer his woes and share in his escapes;
While fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circle, and is still at home.

If poor Barry were alive, he would undoubtedly introduce Dr. Clarke in his picture of the Thames, floating among the Naiads behind Dr. Burney, with three goodly quartos under each arm. Have the phrenologists examined his brows? If they have not laid their finger on the organ of space, we predicate the downfal and the deathblow of the system. He was marked out from infancy as an explorer of earth's surface, her cities, her ruins, and her deserts, and a discoverer of her hidden treasures. The learned augured

ill of him, and even nowstand helpless and astounded at the fallacy of their prognostications and the miracle of their pupil's fame. He had real learning, and such as they wot not of. He kept aloof from the spell of "Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, virorum :" he tarried not in amorous dalliance with the triangles: lines equilateral and figures curvilinear sought in vain to entangle him in their embracements. His heart was with the products of the mine: with the "cedar of Lebanon and the hyssop on the wall :" among medals blue with the rust of centuries, and marbles, which the finger of past generations had traced with barbaric characters. His destination coincided with the bent of his nature. He seems a personification of the loco-motive energies inherent in man: he puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes:" we see him in Italy; he is off the Hebrides and Highlands: turns up in Lapland: looks in at Moscow: baits at Constantinople: is seen again on the plain of old Troy: we catch a glimpse of him in the holy sepulchre: he dodges us again at the great Pyra mid: we seek him at Cairo, but " he starts a thousand steps are lost :" he is already at Vienna,and lights on Montmartre credulity itself is staggered when we find him at last settled down into a Benedict and living “in a cock

ere

* The Life and Remains of the Rev. Edward Daniel Clarke, LLD. Professor of Mineralogy in the Uni'versity of Cambridge. London, Cowie, 1824.

chafer box, close packed up with his wife and children.

Bodily activity and animal spirits were not all that he carried with him. The mind was busy, the fancy alive, the heart warm, the pen eloquent. He describes with the graphic stroke of a master artist: he notes down his traits of men and their manners with the humour of a Smollett: we do not mean his ill-humour. The travels in Russia were thought not civil enough: not reverential enough, we should rather say; there was a great stock of admiration then in the country as respected the character and customs of the. Muscovites. To find fault with their clothes or their cookery was to give room for a shrewd suspicion of a man's loyalty. Perhaps we have a little recovered out of this warm fancy: if we have not, the time will come. There was confessedly a tendency to the satirical in Dr. Clarke. We remember we thought him rather hard on the table-manners of the Greeks: their mode of washing after dinner : the fine airs of their ladies in displaying their well-rounded arms during the ceremony, &c. "They who have glass windows," the proverb is somewhat musty but there was scarcely a circumstance-nay, there was positively not a single one, which in the hands of a smart French traveller might not have been paralleled, with a very slight shade of difference, in the manners of a London table; and this has actually taken place.* From a personage who so nearly arrived at the secret of ubiquity as Dr. Clarke, we should naturally have looked for a tolerant indulgence of the customs of foreigners, or even barbarians. His heart, however, was in the right place he would not have hurt a hair of a Greek's head. These sarcastic details were prompted by a talent for biting humour, not always indicative of a narrow benevolence, and by that keen perception of the ludicrous, which is found to reside with a volatile imagination. All doubt of Dr. Clarke's loyalty, arising out of his want of fond

ness for Russians, must, we think, be wholly removed by his sturdy denial of any good being effected, either in posse or in esse, by "those demons the democrats;" as well as by the passage containing an eulogium on the character of the English clergy and the religious qualities of our late sovereign, to which we cheerfully subscribe; but which the editor, for some unaccountable reason, has chosen to place in staring capitals, as if it were a discovery dragged up by means of a pully from the bottom of that well, in which they say truth resides. Were we to indulge a poetic flight, we might calculate on Clarke's spirit being soothed by the check now so happily given to the fiendish officiousness of republican innovators, particularly in Italy: the blood of St. Januarius, the God of Naples, continues to be liquefied without interruption, and the royal pig-hunt proceeds in peace.

Vicesimus Knox, the popular essayist and the master of Tunbridge school, was Clarke's tutor; he was one of those who, as may be seen from one of his essays, prodigiously over-rated the value of classical attainments. It is not surprising that he shook his head at the discouraging progress of a boy, whose abilities were yet sufficiently great to puzzle his prognostics and interest his concern. That the report

of his deficient application should, as the editor thinks, appear extraordinary to "many of those who have witnessed the laborious habits of his latter days," is very probable; it will not appear so to those who recollect that Samuel Johnson was an idle lounger in the sunshine, with ragged shoes and a circle of truant hearers. We do not quote such instances as safe examples: but it is in science and learning as in war: success is the test. All à priori reasoning is invalid when we can argue from facts and place our foot on the terra firma of experience. The biographer talks indeed of the "precious years of boyhood and of youth," which are usually dedicated to the acquisition of fundamental truths and to

* Compare with Dr. Clarke's description of a Greek dining-room the dinner of Mr. D. in "Qinze jours a Londres."

an

the establishment of method and order in the mind, being "by him wasted in unseasonable pursuits:" but how is it proved from the results that they were unseasonable? That Clarke himself "felt sensibly, and regretted most forcibly the disadvantages accruing to him in after life from the neglect in his earlier years of the ordinary school studies," are mere formal words of course that prove nothing: no man is the best judge of that educational process which would best have suited him. Of the alleged "defective knowledge of principles" we can say nothing, for we do not know what is meant: still less can we comprehend how such a deficiency should be “ error singularly aggravated by the analytical process he usually adopted in all the acquisitions both in language and science" the process, in short, by which, and by which alone we can arrive at truth. Notwithstanding the continued uneasiness of the editor of Clarke's Remains at "his little pro.gress in the appropriate studies of the place," we can see much that is " sonable," because adapted to the sphere in which nature had destined him to move, in the studies to which he voluntarily applied himself, and which embraced history, ancient and modern, medals, antiquities, and natural philosophy, especially the mineralogical branch. One of his recreations at Cambridge was the constructing and sending up a splendid balloon to the admiration of his brother collegians and his own delight. Sad fellow! the truth was, he was always agile and earnest in the pursuit of science, and left the word-conners to their "As in præsenti." It may be difficult to conjecture with the editor "what might have been the effect of a different training upon such a mind;" we may, perhaps hazard a guess, that instead of looking out on the sea of Azoff, he would have pored himself half-blind in an ingenious re-construction of the Greek choral metres.

sea

Let us see how nature set to work with him.

"Having upon some occasion accompanied his mother on a visit to a relation's house in Surrey, he contri

ved before the hour of their return, so completely to stuff every part of the carriage with stones, weeds, and other natural productions of that country, then entirely new to him, that his mother, upon entering, found herself embarrassed how to move; and, though the most indulgent creature alive to her children, she was constrained, in spite of the remonstrances of the boy, to eject them one by one from the window. For one package, however, carefully wrapped up in many a fold of brown paper, he pleaded so hard, that he at last succeeded in retaining it: and when she opened it at night, after he had gone to sleep, it was found to contain several greasy pieces of half-burnt reeds, such as were used at that time in the farmers' kitchens in Surrey, instead of candles; which he said, upon inquiry, were specimens of an invention, that could not fail of being of service to some poor old woman of the parish, to whom he could easily communicate how they were prepared."

Another childish circumstance, which occurred about the same time, is worthy of recital; not only because it indicates strongly the early prevalence of the spirit to which we have alluded, but because it accounts in some measure for the extraordinary interest he took throughout his life in the manners and the fortunes of gypsies. At this period, his eldest brother was residing with his relations at Chichester; and, as his father's infirm state of health prevented him from seeing many persons at his house, Edward was permitted frequently to wander alone in the neighbourhood, guarded only by a favourite dog, called Keeper. One day, when he had stayed out longer than usual, an alarm was given that he was missing search was made in every direction, and hour after hour elapsed without uny tidings of the child. At last, his old nurse, who was better acquainted with his haunts, succeeded in discovering him in a remote and rocky valley, above a mile from his father's house, surrounded by a group of gypsies, and deeply intent upon a story which one of them was relating to him.

"What those attractive objects were, which thus engrossed the attention of Edward Clarke, to the manifest injury of his classical progress, it is difficult for us to know: but that some of them at least referred to popular experiments in chemistry and electricity may be clearly inferred from several humorous exhibitions, which he used to make in his father's house, during the holidays; to the entertainment, and sometimes to the dismay, of the neighbours and servants, who were always called in, upon those occasions, to witness the wonders of his art. In the pursuit of these experiments, it is remembered that he used, in spite of the remonstrances of the cook, to seize upon tubs, pots, and other utensils from his father's kitchen, which were often seriously damaged in his hands; and that, on one occasion, he surprised his audience with a thick and nauseous cloud of fuming sulphureous acid; insomuch that, alarmed and halfsuffocated, they were glad to make their escape in a body, as fast as they could. It does not appear, however, that his attachment to these sedentary pursuits prevented him from partaking in the active pleasures and amusements which were suited to his age, and in which his light and compact figure, uniting great agility with considerable strength, was calculated to make him excel. Every sort of game or sport, which required manliness of spirit and exertion, he was ever foremost to set on foot, and ever ready to join; but in running, jumping, and swimming, he was particularly expert."

Such was his education. The results are the volumes of his Travels and the invention of the Gas Blow Pipe.

We shall not draw up a dry biographical memoir. The reader is referred to the book itself for dates and genealogies. One curious fact we shall mention, that as it was said of a noble house, "all the sons were brave and all the daughters virtuous," it may be affirmed of Clarke's ancestry that they were all eminent for letters. His great grandfather was Wotton, the author of the Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning. Dr. Clarke was born in

1769, at Willingdon in Sussex, and died in 1822. He may be said to have "felt the ruling passion strong in death;" for his dissolution seems to have been accelerated by the chemical experiments in which he employed himself preparatory to a course of lectures in mineralogy. A bust of him was executed by Chantry, and prefixed to this volume there is a spirited etching from a painting by Opie.

The facilities which Dr. Clarke enjoyed, in visiting Scotland and the Continent, were opened to him, as is well known, by his filling the situation of private tutor to the honourable Berkely Paget, and subsequently to Mr. Cripps. He had, however, previously visited Italy as a companion to Lord Berwick. The present work traces his several tours by his own notes and letters, which, as containing many incidents and descriptions not included in the published travels, are properly supplementary to them. Some of the extracts are not at all inferior to his best and liveliest sketches. We are tempted to give one; it is in a letter to his mother, dated from Enontakis, in Lapland, July 29, 1799.

"We have found the cottage of a priest, in this remote corner of the world, and have been snug with him, a few days. Yesterday I launched a balloon, eighteen feet in height, which I had made to attract the natives. You may guess their astonishment, when they saw it rise from the earth.

"Is it not famous to be here, within the frigid zone? More than two degrees within the arctic, and nearer to the pole than the most northern shores of Iceland? For a long time darkness has been a stranger to us. as yet, passes not below the horizon; but he dips his crimson visage behind a mountain to the north. This moun

The sun,

tain we ascended, and had the satisfaction to see him make his curtsey, without setting. At midnight the priest of the place lights his pipe, during three weeks in the year, by means of a burningglass, from the sun's rays.

"We have been driving rein-deer in sledges. Our intention is to penetrate, if possible, into Finmark, as far as the source of the Alten, which falls into

the icy sea. We are now at the source of the Muonio in Tornea Lapmark. I I doubt whether any map you can procure will show you the spot. Perhaps you may find the name of the place, Enontakis. Well, what idea have you of it? Is it not a fine town? -sashed windows, and streets paved and lighted-French theatres-shops -and public buildings? I'll draw up the curtain-now see what it is! A single hut, constructed of the trunks of fir-trees, rudely hewn, with the bark half on, and placed horizontally, one above another; here and there a hole to admit light and this inhabited by an old priest, and his young wife and his wife's mother, and a dozen children and half a dozen dogs and four pigs, and John, and Cripps, and the two interpreters, and Lazarus, covered with sores, bit by mosquitoes, and as black as a negro. We sleep on rein-deer skins, which are the only beds we have had since Tornea.

"We have collected minerals,plants, drawings, and, what is of more importance, manuscript maps of countries unknown, not only to the inhabitants of Sweden, but to all the geographers of Europe. The best maps afford no accurate idea of Lapland. The geography of the north of Europe, and particularly of the countries lying to the north of the Gulf of Bothnia, is entirely undetermined. I am now employed in tracing the topography of the source of the Muonio. We are

enabled to confirm the observations of Maupertius, and the French missionaries, respecting the elevation of the pole, and the arctic circle. I shall bring a piece of it home to you, which stuck in my boot, as I stepped into the frigid zone. It will serve as excellent leaven and be of great use in brewing; a pound of it being sufficient to ferment all the beer in the cellar, merely by being placed in my cabinet.

"The wolves have made such dreadful havock here, that the rich Laplanders are flying to Norway. One of them, out of a thousand rein-deer, which he possessed a few years ago, has only forty remaining. Our progress from Tornea has been entirely in canoes, or on foot, three hundred and thirty miles. There are no less than one hundred and seven cataracts between this place and Tornea. We live on rein-deer flesh, and the arctic strawberry: which is the only vegetable that has comforted our parched lips and palates for some time. It grows in such abundance, near all the rivers, that John gathers a pailfol whenever we want them. I am making all possible exertion to preserve some for you. Wheat is almost unknown here. The food of the natives is raw fish, ditto rein-deer, and sour milk, called pijma. Eggs, that great resource of travellers, we have not. Poultry are Had I but an English cabbage I should feast like an alderman."

never seen.

CHILDHOOD.

OH! there are green spots on the path of time
The reckless wanderer, passing gaily by,
Views with irreverent and careless eye.
'Till with reverted gaze, when doomed to climb
Of hoarse adversity the steep sublime,

Illumined far by memory's moonlight sky,
He makes them in the distant valley lie,
Clad in the gorgeous colours of the clime!
Scenes of my Childhood! now belov'd in vain !
The grave-bound Pilgrim never can return!
And all too soon the sad and weary learn,
Urged o'er the Future's desolate domain,
That in the weariness of life's sojourn
Fate will not hearken to the voice of Pain!

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