6

After touching upon various topics of conversation, such as the authorship of the Iliad' and 'Odyssey,' the Etruscan Tombs, Niebuhr and his Roman History-of which Lord Holland remarked that he never would give up the real existence of such men as Romulus and Numa, however much fable might be mixed up with them'-they came to Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise,' then just published. This led to a talk on new species, and that mystery of mysteries, the creation of man.' Lord Holland said that we were no further on that point than Lucretius, out of whom he could take mottoes that would have done for each of my volumes.' Then follows a characteristic portrait of Lady Holland, a remarkable personage whose memory is fast fading with the generation that is now dying out:

'I have said nothing of Lady Holland, who took her share in the talk. She asked me about the Danes and Swedes, knew the names, at least, of many of them distinguished in science, said how much energy and love of truth there was in the Northern men of letters, as compared to her favourites the French and Italians, yet the French could be deep and persevering. I spoke of La Place and Cuvier. She said that the latter once wished her to compliment him on his promotion to a higher political place, but she gave him fairly to understand how much she lamented his having abandoned the line in which he was so great, to meddle with politics, in which he played so inferior and, in her opinion, unworthy a part. It is impossible to say in a letter anything which will give an idea of the singularity of Lady Holland's way of questioning people, like a royal personage. It is impossible not to be sometimes amused, and sometimes a little indignant, with her. I cannot say I formed so high an estimate of her talent and power as to explain to me how she has righted herself to such an extent, and got on in society after all that happened more than thirty years ago. No doubt she has been in the interval prudent, and more strict in the choice of her society than others who had infinitely more right to be so. She had wealth and beauty, of which last there are still some remains yet, with an expression of temper. But then she had a husband who had not only talent, rank, and political station, but an infinite fund both of wit and good humour.'-Vol. ii. p. 39.

With Rogers he was particularly intimate, and these pages contain many additions to the 'Table Talk' of the veteran poet, which must still remain but imperfectly reported.

'Our party at Mr. Rogers' on Monday was brilliant, and no one engrossed too much. Mr. Empson, now editor of the "Edinburgh Review," and Mrs. Empson (Miss Jeffrey), Hallam, Babbage, Eastlake, and Mr. Luttrell; the latter, though oldish now, came in now and then with his witty sayings. Lord Campbell's "Chancellors," in which a letter of Lady Philip Francis, acknowledging her husband

to

to be Junius, is given, brought up that old controversy, and Rogers confessed the truth of the tale, that when he was set on at Holland House to ask Sir Philip Francis if he might put a question to him, Sir Philip replied "At your peril!" in so forbidding a tone, that Rogers retreated to the rest, and said "If he is Junius, it is Junius Brutus." On some one calling in question the great superiority of Junius, Rogers cited in support of it an able passage on the difference between injuries and insults; but Hallam said, "After all, there is nothing in Junius so powerful as the comment of Dr. Johnson on it, when he said that some people mistake the venom of the shaft for the vigour of the bow." When Luttrell complained of cold, Hallam said, "Don't let Rogers hear you, for his maxim is that no man can be cold except he be a fool or a beggar."-Vol. ii. p. 136.

In another letter he tells us :

'We had a pleasant call at Mr. Rogers', whose sister is recovering from her fall. We found on the old man's table a speech of Charles II. to his Parliament, printed in 1661, in bad English, which he observed could never have been shown to Clarendon. Alluding to Macaulay, he said, "he had found him once writing a review with five folios open, each on separate chairs, but unfortunately, though conscious that the article would be known to be his, he was writing with that confidence and rapidity which if he had had to sign his name at length to the pages, he would not have presumed to do. Such was the unfortunate tendency of anonymous historical literature." He then repeated, what I had often heard him declare, that Hallam wrote history as a judge and Macaulay as an advocate, and he blamed the latter for giving a set-down to Charles Fox's "Life of James II.," for which Samuel Rogers stood up manfully, taking the book down from his shelf, and, without spectacles, pointed to three or four of his favourite passages.'-Vol. ii. p. 123.

On one occasion, after a lively account of a dinner at the Milmans', Lyell adds:

'I was not sorry that Sydney Smith happened to be engaged, for though such a party would have drawn out some of his best fun, he would have overpowered Rogers with his boisterous laugh and sonorous voice, and it is a great pleasure to enjoy quietly some rays of Rogers' sunset; everything he says has a remarkably fine finish in it, but he is very mild and indulgent, and no remains of the epigrammatical sarcasm for which he seems to have been famous.' Vol. ii. p. 34.

The same experience with regard to the rival wits must have been observed by all who were well acquainted with them both; but we can hardly assent to the disappearance of sarcasm in Rogers's later days: subdued it was by age, but by no means extinct. To the last he could never resist the temptation to say

an

an ill-natured thing; though he was always ready to do a kind or good-natured one.

Of Sydney Smith less is reported; but one of his bons mots may be cited, which we believe will be new to many of our readers:

"The article on "Centralisation" in the "Edinburgh" is by John Austin; they tell me it is "good, but dry." I remember when Lord Melbourne was considering the best way of dispersing a mob which they were anticipating, Sydney Smith recommended him to get John Austin to go and read them a chapter out of his "Jurisprudence," then just published.'-Vol. ii. p. 122.

In another place we have a characteristic notice of Macaulay in one of his best moods :

'Macaulay was most entertaining at Milman's last dinner, giving and taking, and not overpowering. He is hard at work with his History of England." I asked him if he had read "Constantinople," in the last "Quarterly Review." He said, "No, but all about St. Chrysostom is got out of the edition of his works, which I read at Calcutta, and ended by liking the old saint, which is more than one can say of most of the old Fathers." Milman remarked, that at Oxford such high prices are no longer obtained for editions of the Fathers or Puseyite medieval books, but they are selling at Cambridge. A few days before, Herman Merivale told me he had heard the same, and that there was an extraordinary spread of scepticism and rationalism at Oxford. In large parties, men holding forth that as a high admiration of the beauty of form was the characteristic of the Greeks as a nation, so the Jews had the religious instinct very largely developed, and hence they developed Judaism, Christianity, &c. To get back to Dean's Yard, Milman was talking of the fortune he could have made if he had had the gift of prophecy for five years, as, when he came to Westminster, whole streets of houses were offered him for a fifth of what they let for, when railway companies were bidding for offices near the Houses of Parliament, &c. On which Macaulay, recurring to the former talk about Chrysostom said, "But think if one could have bought up the Fathers at their value in 1800 (when they were fairly appreciated), and sold them at the Oxford price of 1840!" Some one at the other end of the table, where there was a dish of larks, was talking of the destruction of life, such small birds, when Macaulay said, "On that principle you ought to feed on blubber." Would not old Dr. Johnson have just said that, if Boz had been sentimental?'-Vol. ii. p. 115.

Again he writes to his sister, in 1848, an animated account of a small dinner-party with Whately, the Archbishop, whom he describes as a strange compound of an Oxford Churchman grafted on Ireland, and full of information about all that is going

on

on there, which he views with interest more as a political economist than in any other light, as far as I could judge.' The party included De Beaumont, the celebrated French writer on America and Ireland.

"The Archbishop said, that if women ever became invested with political rights here, it might be well to have two Houses, and let the women speak in one and the men vote in the other, for since the Irish members have got in, he saw no other way of economising time. Dr. Whately is a great philologist. When on such subjects he said, "De Beaumont, you have no word for home.'" De Beaumont said,

66

"No, perhaps because we have less of the thing than you have. We have said of late 'mon chez moi,' 'son chez soi,' but that is very clumsy; and then you have another word, 'job,' which we cannot translate; it is a sublime word that God knows we have the thing." The Archbishop was philosophising on the cause of their not having the word "job," and said that their representative form of government was so new, and in a pure monarchy there were fewer true jobs. De Beaumont said, Certainly there are no jobs under an absolute despotism; because it is all one great job, and there is no room for small ones." . . . When De Beaumont asked how many grades there were in society, the Archbishop said, "I cannot say how low it goes, but the other day some chimney-sweepers presented a petition to the Lord Mayor against others who had intruded themselves into their privilege of dancing, &c., on May day, and in this petition they said, that certain dustmen and other low fellows, pretending to be chimneysweepers,' &c., so the degrees of rank probably descend even below the dustmen." -Vol. ii. p. 150.

An interesting discussion arose about the effect of the French law for the subdivision of property, on which subject Dr. Whately, in common with many Englishmen in those days, had very exaggerated ideas:

'The Archbishop brought out a pamphlet to prove that in one district near Paris the average property of eleven thousand landed proprietors was the quarter of an English acre each, and he began imagining, when the division had gone farther, a question of law arising as to whether a huntsman had committed a trespass by clearing his neighbour's estate at one leap.'-Vol. ii. p. 151.

Among the various notices of distinguished men scattered through the correspondence, there is perhaps none more characteristic than the following account of Sir Robert Peel, with whom Lyell dined at Drayton, during the meeting of the British Association at Birmingham in 1839:

'I sat on Sir Robert's right hand, and during a conversation of three hours we talked of a great variety of subjects; antiquities of Tamworth, railways, paintings, sculpture, chartists of Kirriemuir,

Birmingham,

Birmingham, &c., British Association, bearing of geology on Scripture, Wordsworth's Poems, Chantrey's busts. Some of the party said next day that Peel never gave an opinion for or against any point from extra caution, but I really thought that he expressed himself as freely, even on subjects bordering on the political, as a well-bred man could do when talking with another with whose opinions he was unacquainted. He was very curious to know what Vernon Harcourt had said on the connection of religion and science. I told him of it and my own ideas, and in the middle of my strictures on the Dean of York's pamphlet I exclaimed, "By-the-bye, I have only just remembered that he is your brother in-law." He said, "Yes, he is a clever man and a good writer, but if men will not read any one book written by scientific men on such a subject, they must take the consequences." After he had explained to me how railways were taxed, I pointed out to him Lord Carnegie's proof that such a method acted as a bonus towards the imposition of high fares. This he saw, and admitted as an evil. If I had not known Sir Robert's extensive acquirements, I should only have thought him an intelligent, wellinformed country gentleman, not slow, but without any quickness, free from that kind of party feeling which prevents men from fairly appreciating those who differ from them, taking pleasure in improvements, without enthusiasm, not capable of joining in a hearty laugh at a good joke, but cheerful, and not preventing Lord Northampton, Whewell, and others, from making merry. He is without a tincture of science, and interested in it only so far as knowing its importance in the arts and as a subject with which a large body of persons of talent are occupied. He told me he was one of the early members of the British Association, and that he was glad that we had persevered in holding our meeting at Birmingham under discouraging circumstances; yet I learnt afterwards from the Birmingham Committee of Management, that when some of them, being personal friends of Sir Robert, asked his opinion only three weeks before, he could not venture any opinion at all.'-Vol. ii. pp. 51-2.

We cannot attempt to follow in detail the subsequent investigations by which Lyell continued to strengthen and support the views of which he was now become the acknowledged exponent: or to notice the successive tours which he made to many various parts of Europe in the prosecution of his assiduous researches. But in 1841 a new field was opened for his observations. In the summer of that year he was invited to give a course of twelve lectures at the Lowell Institution in Boston, Massachusetts, for which he was offered the munificent sum of 2000 dollars; a striking contrast to the remuneration that he had any prospect of obtaining by similar services in this country. At the same time it afforded him an opportunity, which he embraced with avidity, of carrying his geological explorations into regions with which he was personally unacquainted, though much had been

already