jects which continued to occupy him, in spite of his often-expressed determination to devote himself to his profession.

In the summer of the same year Dr. Young married Miss Eliza Maxwell, a lady who, to other attractions and good qualities, added that of a full appreciation of her husband's attainments, and a deep and intelligent interest in the success of his pursuits. It appears to have been a thoroughly congenial union. To the unreserved and lively correspondence which Young kept up with his three sisters-in-law we owe some of the most striking and entertaining passages in his memoirs.

Meanwhile his professional practice advanced; but probably not with much rapidity or general success. Every summer he adjourned to Worthing, and there practised as well as in London. In 1807 he gave medical lectures at the Middlesex Hospital, which we are left to infer were not more popular than his former course; though, we doubt not, as solid and excellent. The preparation of these lectures, and the examination of candidates, he somewhat characteristically describes as "amusements, which, besides the more serious employments of parties, concerts, and dances, really give me very little more spare time than is necessary for visiting my patients." Notwithstanding, he was in 1811 elected one of the physicians to St. George's Hospital-a situation which he retained to the end of his life. The students' verdict was, "Dr. Young is a great philosopher, but a bad physician:" an impression which his biographer takes some pains to combat, but not, we think, very successfully.

In 1814 he produced an elaborate report, the result of the inquiries of a commission issued by the Admiralty, on Sepping's improvements in ship-building. The reply of an official is characteristic: "Though science is much respected by their lordships, and your paper is much esteemed by them, it is too learned."

In 1816 he was named secretary to a commission for ascertaining the length of the seconds' pendulum, as the basis of a system of measures. To the labours of this, and another commission on the alleged dangers of gas, he added those of superintendent of the Nautical Almanac, and secretary to the Board of Longitude, to which he was appointed in 1818. The entire management of that publication, and of the Board itself, became shortly after the subject of much acrimonious controversy, into the merits of which our limits forbid our entering; but the details constitute one of the most interesting portions of Dr. Peacock's work. We anticipate the order of time to observe, that when the Board was abolished in 1828, Dr. Young was retained by the Admiralty in the capacity of superintendent of the Almanac, and continued unhappily engaged in an irritating controversy respecting its management to the period of his death.

In 1821 he made a tour on the Continent, and was honourably and warmly received by the savans at Paris.

In 1824 he was appointed by the Palladium Insurance Company to the office of physician and inspector of calculations, with a salary of 400l. a year, he having declined what would probably have been a far more lucrative offer of shares. This led him to extensive investigations on the subject of the value of life, published in several essays and reports. Besides these, numerous articles on a variety of subjects concerning hydraulics, mechanics, and engineering, were about this period composed for different journals and encyclopædias. The most remarkable of these, perhaps, is his article on the Tides, in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica.

In 1826, on some accession of fortune, he removed to a larger house in Park Square, and in the same year received the very distinguished honour of being elected one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences. On the retirement of Sir H. Davy from the chair of the Royal Society, he was talked of as his successor, but evinced no wish for the situation, which was, as is well known, conferred on Mr. Davies Gilbert. Dr. Young's great attainments as a classical scholar and general philologist were conspicuously displayed in his various researches, partly of a classical, partly of an antiquarian character, on various ancient inscriptions, especially some from Pompeii, and in deciphering the Herculaneum Mss.: many of these researches were communicated to various societies and journals, others appeared as articles in the Quarterly Review. It would be impossible, within our limits, to go into any examination of them. In fact, during the later period of his life, there was hardly any topic of high literary interest which did not more or less engage his attention. But the subject which most especially occupied him was the interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to which we shall revert in the sequel.

The account of the last few months of his life is supplied from a memoir by his intimate friend, Mr. Hudson Gurney. For some years he had suffered much from asthma, and in February 1829 the attacks became so violent as to cause great alarm, and reduced him to a state of extreme weakness. He, however, continued to amuse himself, as he termed it, by literary avocations, especially the completion of his Egyptian Dictionary. He was perfectly aware of his danger, but evinced the utmost calmness and self-possession. He observed, "that he had taken the sacraments of the church" on the day preceding, and could patiently await the issue of his disorder. He gradually sank, and died on May 10, 1829.

Ample and varied as are the illustrations afforded by these

memoirs of the intellectual endowments of this remarkable man, they are very defective in affording any direct elucidation of the higher question of his moral and religious character and sentiments. As to the former, we easily collect from the tenor of the narrative that he was a person of a naturally imperturbable temper; even amid neglect and disappointment, disparagement and controversial attacks, he always maintained the same calm tone in his manner towards his opponents; if ever temporarily irritated, he never knew a feeling of lasting enmity or ill-will. He was on all occasions actuated by the most strict and conscientious principles of rectitude and honour. He felt no temptation to excess or intemperance,-so commonly indulged in in his younger days, and he was a person of irreproachable moral purity. But, without any disparagement, we may be permitted to surmise, that his virtue was rather of that negative cast which is associated with a passionless constitution.

He delighted in the society of lively and accomplished women; but there is not an indication of his having experienced a warmer impulse. His gallantry was, indeed, displayed on one occasion, when a young lady had inscribed some lines in a summer-house (throwing out a delicate hint of the writer's unhappiness), by placing under them, not an impassioned reply, but—a translation of them into Greek elegiacs! His marriage is expressly described by his biographer as one "of mutual affection and esteem;" but at the same time we are told, "he attached himself to the members of his wife's family with more than the ordinary affection of son and brother-in-law, more especially to her three sisters." He had no children.

As to his religious views, though we would be the last to indulge in a prying curiosity into what a man may wish to conceal in the inmost recesses of his soul in precise proportion to the depth and sincerity of his convictions, yet we cannot forbear the wish to know how the most important of all questions was viewed by a mind of such high powers. On this subject almost nothing is made known in the course of these extended memoirs. Two disclosures only, of the most brief kind, afford a foundation for conjecture. The somewhat cynical Cambridge tutor before quoted says, "He never spoke of morals, of metaphysics, or of religion. Of the last I never heard him say a word,-nothing in favour of any sect, or in opposition to any doctrine; at the same time, no sceptical doubt, no loose assertion, no idle scoff ever escaped him."* The other intimation we have already cited in his own words, just before his death, "I have taken the sacraments of the church, and can patiently abide the issue." These are absolutely the only indications of his religious ideas which we can *Life, p. 119.

discover. The inference we should be disposed to draw would be only that which the analogy of his general character would supply.

The whole cast of his mind was of a positive, matter-of-fact character. He had no taste or capacity for abstract inquiry, especially on metaphysical or moral subjects, where demonstrative certainty is unattainable; hence speculative theology could not interest him; he could have no intimate feeling or concern about points of belief; and, in a practical point of view, a correct morality he uniformly acknowledged and consistently practised. All religious principles beyond these he regarded rather at a distance, yet with the utmost respect and reverence. Any sectarian peculiarities were, of course, as such repulsive to him; and he cast them off as soon as he was independent. He was fully satisfied to acquiesce without question in the conventional requisitions of the established creed and worship, such as they might be. His remark in his last moments, just quoted, is eminently characteristic, even to the very phrase.

Having thus sketched the personal history of Dr. Young, and given some general notion of the almost incredible amount and variety of his literary and scientific labours, we shall proceed to a more particular yet condensed view of the two grand subjects which are prominently conspicuous among them, and with which his name will always be more pre-eminently associated,―his researches on the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and his discoveries in physical optics, leading to the first establishment of a connected mathematical theory of light.

The celebrated inscription on a block of stone found at Rosetta during the expedition to Egypt, and now deposited in the British Museum, is probably well known to most of our readers, even the least curious in these matters, as containing three inscriptions: the first in hieroglyphics, the second in what is termed the "enchorial" or ordinary characters of ancient Egypt, the third in Greek, which states them to be all to the same purport. Hence the antiquary at once sees open to him the prospect, not only of deciphering the unknown contents of the hieroglyphic and Egyptian records from the known Greek, but of establishing at least some general principles of the interpretation of the enigma of hieroglyphics, so tempting even to popular imagination, and of the hardly less enigmatical and doubtful mode of writing practised by the ancient Egyptians. The stone, as is well known, is considerably mutilated, especially at the beginning of the hieroglyphics and at the end of the Greek; so that only a portion could be expected to receive such elucidation. Yet the eminent scholars Heyne and Porson gave conjectural restorations of the lost parts of the Greek.

G

The investigation of the hieroglyphics and the enchorial parts soon began to occupy the attention of the eminent orientalist Silvestre de Sacy,-of Akerblad, a Swedish antiquarian and scholar, and afterwards of Champollion and others. Dr. Young was among the first who gave attention to the subject, and by diligent comparison, within the course of the year 1814, was enabled to give a conjectural translation. This, however, must be understood as referring generally to the substance; for the main difficulty, of course, was to decipher the verbal construction or solution into individual characters, and the correspondence of those words or letters with the hieroglyphic symbols. It was in this more delicate inquiry that the whole difficulty and the source of all the subsequent controversies was found. His translation was printed anonymously; and a revised version of it appeared in the Cambridge Museum Criticum, in 1816.

The attempt to identify the enchorial characters with the corresponding hieroglyphics proceeded more slowly, and, sanguine as were the expectations entertained at first, both Young and the other inquirers soon found the wisdom and necessity of concentrating their attention on the perfect verification of a very few forms in the first instance, as a clue to the rest.

With reference to the conflicting claims set up to the elucidation of these remarkable inscriptions, those of Dr. Young are thus maintained by his biographer:

"It was Dr. Young who first determined, and by no easy process, that the 'rings'* on the Rosetta stone contained the name of Ptolemy; it was Dr. Young who determined that the semicircle and oval found at the end of the second ring in connection with the former were expressive of the feminine gender; and it was Dr. Young who had not only first suggested that the characters in the ring of Ptolemy were phonetic, but had determined, with one very unimportant inaccuracy, the values of four of those which were common to the name of Cleopatra, which was required to be analysed. All the principles involved in the discovery of an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphics were not only distinctly laid down, but fully exemplified by him; and it only required the further identification of one or two royal names with the rings, which expressed them in hieroglyphics, to extend the alphabet already known sufficiently to bring even names which were not already identified under its operation."

There can be no doubt (as Dr. Peacock justly observes) that one of the principal objects of Young's researches as to the correspondence between the different characters used in the several forms of Egyptian writing, was to identify, if possible, the corresponding hieroglyphical and enchorial characters, sufficiently to

* Certain portions of the hieroglyphical characters are found surrounded by a ring or enclosure, called by the French cartouches.