and his views on education and sanitary reform have waited almost until our own time to be carried into practice. He was distinguished, not only by his general benevolence, but by his considerate kindness to his dependents, and on this subject Charles Darwin tells a story which may be introduced here because it has some local interest. Writing to his son at Shrewsbury, with reference to a small debt, Erasmus asks him to use the money in buying a goose pie, for which, it seems, Shrewsbury was then famous, and to send it at Christmas to an old woman at Birmingham; " for she, as you may remember, was your nurse, which is the greatest obligation, if well performed, that can be received from an inferior."

In Josiah Wedgwood (Charles Darwin's maternal grandfather), says Miss Meteyard, "the ability of generations culminated in genius ;" and it is a very attractive picture which she draws of the great potter, and his family, and friends, amongst the most intimate of whom were the Darwins. The Wedgwoods, coming from Weggewode, near Newcastle-under-Lyne, appear to have settled in the neighbourhood of Burslem early in the middle ages, and one of the family, named John, "resided at Dunwood, near Leek, towards the close of the fifteenth century." In course of time the Wedgwoods married and intermarried with the Burslems of Burslem, and had many children; and the landed property, at first considerable, was much divided, so that, towards the end of the seventeenth century, several members of the family took up the trade of the district and handed it down to their descendants. Thomas Wedgwood the potter, born in 1687, married the daughter of Mr. Stringer, a Dissenting minister, who is supposed to have been connected with Shropshire by birth or descent. He was "a man of superior attainments and high moral worth," and his noble character, as Miss Meteyard justly says, certainly did not die with him. The youngest child of this marriage, Josiah Wedgwood, was born at the Churchyard House,

Burslem, in 1730, and became the grandfather of one who only passed from amongst us a little more than two years ago.

The large family of which Josiah Wedgwood was the youngest were brought up by a mother of "unusual quickness, sensibility, and kindness of heart," and a father who is described as "acute, kindly, independent, patriotic." While he was still young Josiah began to learn the potter's handicraft, and soon showed signs of the talent that made his name famous. His patience was the patience of genius, afterwards so conspicuous in his grandson; to whom indeed the words which Miss Meteyard uses of Josiah Wedgwood could be applied exactly as they stand-"Patient, steadfast, humble, simple, unconscious of half his own greatness, and yet by this very simplicity, patience, and steadfastness, displaying the high quality of his moral and intellectual characteristics, even whilst insuring that each step was in the right direction and firmly planted." Experiment after experiment would fail, but Wedgwood persevered until his end was accomplished, and a fresh process of manufacture was discovered, or some new thing of beauty was produced. In January, 1764, he married his distant cousin, Sarah Wedgwood, of Spen Green in Cheshire, a woman beautiful both in character and in outward form; and at their happy home, the Brick House, Burslem, their eldest daughter, Susannah, the mother of Charles Darwin, was born at the end of the year.

Six years afterwards Mr. Wedgwood removed to Etruria Hall, where most of his eldest daughter's life was spent until she came to her new home at Shrewsbury. Her father was brought into friendly relations with persons of all ranks, and was still more fortunate in enjoying the intimacy of mer. of genius, who often visited Etruria. The hall, we are told, must have borne the appearance of an hotel; "guests were coming and going, foreigners from every country were casionally there, and distinguished Englishmen formed

a large proportion" of the company. "Each day the dinner-table was laid for unexpected as well as expected guests, for it was never known who might arrive before or after the meal was served." In the midst of the most generous hospitality there was great simplicity of life. Writing to his partner Bentley in 1778 Wedgwood says "Sukey is now very well and is pretty strong, which I attribute to riding on horseback. We sally forth, half-a-dozen of us, by five or six o'clock in the morning, and return with appetites scarcely to be appeased. Then we are very busy in our hay, and have just made a new garden. Sometimes we try experiments, then read and draw a little, that altogether we are very busy folks, and the holidays will be over much sooner than we could expect them to be." Gardening was a favourite occupation of Mr. Wedgwood's, with his daughters as his constant companions, and Susannah, as we shall see, carried her love for it into her new life at Shrewsbury. Mr. Wedgwood's high and honourable character must have influenced all his family; and in the fireside talk at Etruria Hall the children often heard of other t ings besides literature and art; of the efforts that were being made to abolish the slave trade, for example, and the part which was played in the movement by Wedgwood's well-known intaglio, a kneeling slave in chains, surrounded by the now famous motto, "Am I not a man and a brother.

Early in Wedgwood's life he was friendly with the Darwins, and the friendship grew as time went on. How intimate it became at last we learn from the correspondence between Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, who in one of his letters writes-" Mrs. Darwin says she hears your whole family are going to town in a body, like a caravan going to Mecca; and we therefore hope you will make Derby a resting-place, and recruit yourselves and your camels for a few days, after having travell'd over the burning sands of Cheadle and Uttoxeter." The sons and daughters of the two

families were much together from their childhood. At one time Robert Darwin was staying with the Wedgwoods to study chemistry; Susannah was often at Derby; and so the intimacy grew between two of the young playmates which ended at last in marriage. Miss Wedgwood spent part of her early life in London with the Bentleys, and went to school there, laying "the foundation of that excellent scholarship which was so useful to her busy husband in after years," and was also employed, we believe, in directing Charles Darwin's earliest studies. In 1777 we hear of her spending the Christmas holidays as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Edgeworth, who formed a high opinion of her character, and wherever she went Miss Wedgwood seemed to win a new store of affection. Dr. Darwin, with whom she was a great favourite, lived to see her his daughter-in-law, but her own father died in 1795, the year before she was married.

Charles Darwin says of his father, that "he did not inherit any aptitude for poetry or mechanics, nor did he possess, as I think, a scientific mind. I cannot tell why my father's mind did not appear to me fitted for advancing science; for he was fond of theorizing, and was incomparably the most acute observer whom I ever knew. But his powers in this direction were exercised almost wholly in the practice of medicine, and in the observation of human character." His memory for the dates of certain events was so extraordinary, that "he knew the day of the birth, marriage, and death of most of the gentlemen of Shropshire"; but this remarkable power distressed him, because it brought back painful occurrences and prolonged his grief for the loss of friends. A golden rule of Dr. Darwin's was "never to become the friend of anyone whom you could not thoroughly respect, and I think (says Charles Darwin), he always acted on it. But of all his characteristic qualities, his sympathy was pre-eminent, and I believe it was this which made him for a time hate his profession, as it constantly brought suffering before his eyes. SymVOL. VIII.

B

pathy with the joy of others is a much rarer endowment than sympathy with their pains, and it is no exaggeration to say that to give pleasure to others was to my father an intense pleasure." There is something peculiarly interesting in this picture of the father's character drawn by his son, who inherited so abundantly the habit of observation as well as the sympathetic nature which he describes.

Dr. Darwin had studied at Edinburgh, where he took high honours, and at Leyden, and travelled in Germany, before he settled down to his life-long practice in 1786. The young doctor had many rivals at Shrewsbury, but his learning and his talents soon won for him a leading position. Amongst the Shrewsbury apothecaries was William Clement (father of the late member for the borough), whose career was coincident with Darwin's.1 The county town "was still in a great measure what it had long been, the metropolis of the adjacent country," and the resort of the county

Miss Meteyard gives an interesting description of some of the Shrewsbury doctors :-" Nowhere was Dr. Darwin seen to such advantage as in the invariable yellow chaise. This, and his burly form and countenance within, were known to every man, woman, and child over a wide extent of country. Like old Samuel Butler, the mighty schoolmaster who always receipted his bills with thanks,' Dr. Darwin was as much a feature of the town as the river, the abbey, and the schools; and many was the stranger who lingered to see them both. At length, when that long day's work was done-and it was a very long and hard one-his portly form vanished from the streets, and he, too, departed to that quiet resting-place beside his favourite Severn. He died on the 13th day of November, 1848, aged 82 years. Dr. Darwin survived two of his more eminent medical contemporaries in the town, Mr. Sutton and Dr. Dugard. The latter, a pale, portly little man, unlike farmer-looking Dr. Darwin, had the air and appearance of a court physician. He wore powder, orthodox black, highly polished Hessian boots with big tassels, ponderous seals, an important frill of snowy lawn, and he carried the professional cane. The elder Clement, who had been the pupil and friend of the great Jenner, known Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Hazlitt, Thelwall, and Horne Tooke, and stood forth as the unflinching advocate for Parliamentary Reform and civil and religious liberty in this most aristocratic borough in the kingdom, died at the age of 90, in January, 1858. He had the countenance of a philosopher."