to the furtherance of what he believed to be the interests of what he thought the most important branches of Natural Knowledge, -Natural History, as cultivated by orderly and obedient persons being duly elected Fellows of the Royal Society-that is, chosen through his protection; his fine library and other collections were first open to men of letters during his life, and afterwards became public property by his bequest. With these grounds of favour from men of science, were joined claims of a higher order to celebrity; he had abandoned ambition, and pleasure, and ease, at an age, and in a station, which make those seductions the most irresistible to ordinary minds; and had exposed himself to all the hardships and all the perils of a long voyage of discovery; one of the greatest in its results that have illustrated the nautical history of his country. Such a man can well afford to have the plain truth spoken of him, as himself was wont to speak it bluntly of others; and to forego the praise of writing Academic Panegyricks; which, if they were delivered by him with success, must have been composed by others. He was, in fact, as little capable of such essays as any captain of a vessel that ever kept a log; and his habits of thinking, and his prejudices,-his bluntness, and his impatience of opposition; his plain homely sense, and his contempt for speculation-all his qualities, good and bad, were strongly redolent of the cabin and the quarter-deck-the confinement of the one, and the dominion of the other. He was a most distinguished and praiseworthy individual; a warm friend and a bitter enemy; clear-sighted and narrow-minded; and though equal to much better things, yet as fit to deliver fine discourses, upon state occasions, as an English Head of a House, or the Secretary of a French Academy, to command a ship in a battle, or a storm. But the misfortune of such discourses as we are sure he held cheap, and as his successor (a far more eminent man) has now published, is, that they sacrifice truth to courtesy, and degenerate into empty collections of fine, flowery, and smoothly rounded periods. Sir Humphry Davy has performed his task as well as it could be done, but it is the nature of such work that it cannot be done very well; he has abstained, as far as was possible, from the vices. incident to this kind of writing; but it is a kind of writing with which the greatest vices of composition are inseparably con

nected.

To praise often, whether there is ground for it or not; but, at any rate, to overpraise, and to suppress on all occasions the opposite side of the account, is the besetting sin of such discourses -whether pronounced upon the memory of the dead or the merits of the living. Our neighbours, the French, in their Aca

demies, have long been renowned for such displays, and though the severity of the Republican times interrupted them, the Restoration seems to have brought them back, and made them flourish with the luxuriance to be expected in so congenial a soil. So well, indeed, does this sort of oratory thrive in France, that we are apt to call it by a French name, and to speak of Eloges as if the thing were of French origin; whereas we ought rather to call them Panegyricks, in remembrance of their Attic origin; for the Greeks it must be confessed, with all their chasteness of taste, and all the perfection of their inimitable models of true eloquence, indulged in a species of composition the most foreign to all ideas of a practical kind, the most widely removed, indeed, from nature as well as from business, and which, being termed by them the Epideictic, may, without any exaggeration, be called by us the Showy, because it was wholly for the display of the speaker's art, without any regard to the subject-it was eloquence, and what on a fit occasion might have been eloquence, thrown away upon nothing, and for no purpose; it was intended to convince no one of anything; it was calculated to please no one of the least taste; it was a poor attempt of Rhetoric to imitate the inferior arts of Poetry and Music; she stooped from her lofty station among the high and difficult places of human affairs, to the stage of the theatre, and she only exposed herself to scorn; for the mimes surpassed her.

We confess ourselves jealous of all attempts to naturalize this foreign growth in this country. The taste, and genius, and sense of our people, is extremely alien from the cultivation of it. Whensoever it is tried, its failure is marked. Funeral sermons alone have been borne amongst us; and even these have had far less success here than everywhere else. A vicious practice had of late years crept into the House of Commons, of all places the least calculated for such gratuitous outrages upon sense, taste, and plain business-like habits. It never indeed went far; and the greatest English statesmen, Chatham, Fox, Burke, Pitt,* having departed without such honours, it is to be hoped that the custom may not be persevered in. But we have now to do with a place, if possible, less appropriate to such displays-the "Royal Society for the Advancement of Natural Knowledge.' Can anything be worse adapted to the cultivation of the severe

* The debate on Mr Pitt is no proof that the practice was applied in his case; it was a debate on a question, and followed by a division. To this there can be no objection; both sides were heard, and the discussion of his merits was necessary, because the proposal made was to pay his debts and raise a monument to his memory.

sciences, than an admixture of the epideictic kind of rhetoric, or blending of Isocrates with Archimedes? Can the gravity of men be more inhumanly taxed than in listening to a flowery panegyrical discourse, delivered upon the merits of a method for integrating a cramp fluxurial formula, and addressed, perhaps, to the man of number and quantity, who, having solved the problem in a few pages, consisting of hardly any words, but a good collection of signs and letters, is more puzzled to follow the demonstration* upon his method, than he was to invent and demonstrate the method itself.

It must be further remarked, that the panegyrics upon the dead, pronounced either in the French Academy or in the Pulpit, the two great scenes of this kind of oratory in modern times, are far less objectionable in some respects than discourses on living merit. Sermons are addressed to a very different audience from men of science. The subject, too, in both cases, is removed from the contentions of the world; in the former case, it may be allowed to soothe the grief of friends, or associates, or the public, for his loss. It may, for the same reason, be permitted to draw up only one side of the account, and to suppress the mention of what was unfavourable. No deception could thus be practised; for the whole was deemed, and was known to be, a tribute to friendship, or a way of indulging feelings of sorrow. Then the party praised was gone from among us, and could not turn the praise given, and the suppression suffered, to an improper account. But we lament to say, that in importing the French fashion, we have improved upon it. Our academy lauds living and dead; she eulogizes men in the prime of life; she addresses them while engaged in controversy upon the subject of dispute; she notices the dead, too, in a way to introduce unfair comparisons and undue preferences; her praising-matches, when the fit is on her, do not resolve themselves into a mere tedious account of some one's good qualities, with a fair enumeration of the acts and works he was known by; when she takes to it, there are half a dozen of the lately deceased passed in review, (some of them now first heard of,) and according to their nation, or their connexions, or some other accidental bias, their allowances of praise are doled out with no very nice attention to the turning of the scales in which those merits are weighed.

We must again observe, that in these remarks, and in the instances we are about to give for the purpose of illustrating them, our objections are confined entirely to the practice of Panegy

* The Romans rendered epideictick, by the word demonstrative.

men unknown to science-from the recesses, not of the study or laboratory, but of Chancery-not from the heights of the observatory, but from those of the Master's Office-(dira facies, inimicaque Troja Numina)—the Accountant-General leading the fight for the Naturalists, against the Natural Philosophers. The Court of St James's is thought not to have here preserved a strict neutrality, any more than the Court of Chancery: his late Majesty had, in early life, been unfortunate in his scientific speculations, for he espoused the side of the blunt conductors, and was defeated by the party of Franklin in Somerset House, a little before his greater defeat by the same party in America; he took much interest in Gardening and Farming, and their kindred Botany, and he found congenial principles as well as taste in Sir Joseph Banks. The aristocracy declared for him; Botany being more fashionable than Mathematics; and even the Church showed no proneness to support their brother, when he arrayed himself against the powers that be. Thus the fate of Mathematics was sealed; those who took delight in such pursuits seceded, and for years the Transactions contained none of their works. The same arbitrary spirit which had expelled the severer sciences prevailed more or less during Sir Joseph's long reign, though it was greatly mitigated during the latter half of it. But a worse contamination crept in towards the end of it, which still seems to pervade the body in full force, and must prove fatal if not speedily checked. The influence of mere rank, whether of the aristocracy or of place, has become unlimited in the Society's affairs. Persons are chosen on the Council whose literary attainments consist of reading and writing, and whose science may carry them as far as ciphering, merely because they are lords, or are in some station under government. A spirit of jobbing, and of dependence upon official patronage, seems to be rather cultivated than repressed. The influence of the Society has been employed in obtaining promotion to scientific offices for the private favourite, or the supple courtier, rather than the profound student of nature, friendless and ignorant of the ways of men, buried in his closet and outwatching the Bear.' Men of undoubted science have been refused admittance into the Society on various pretences-but in reality because they were unbending. And places in the Society have sometimes been given to the favourite and the flatterer, because he was not an eminent man. Far from marvelling at other bodies being formed for real business, and at other works being enriched at the expense of the Philosophical Transactions, we regard the superiority which the Society still enjoys, as an extraordinary proof of the indestructible nature of an ancient and once illustrious

I trust that with these new Societies we shall always preserve the same amicable relations, and that we shall mutually assist each other; and that they, recollecting our grand object, which is to establish principles on undoubted reasoning and experiments, and to make useful applications in science, will, should any discoveries be made by their members respecting general laws, or important facts observed, which seem to lead to purposes of direct utility,* do us the honour to communicate them to us,-they will have no dishonourable place in being published in those records, which remain monuments of all the country has possessed of profound in experimental research, or ingenious in discovery, or sublime in speculative science, from the time of Hooket and Newton, to that of Maskelyne and Cavendish.

I am sure there is no desire in this body to exert anything like patriarchal authority in relation to those institutions, or (and) indeed if there were such a desire, it could not be gratified. But I trust there may exist in the new Societies that feeling of respect and affection for the Royal Society which is due to the elder brother, to the first-born of the same family,-and that we shall co-operate in perfect harmony, for one great object, which, from its nature, ought to be a bond of union and of peace, not merely among the philosophers of the same country, but even amongst those of different nations.' Pp. 5, 6.

It would have been foreign, not to the subject, but to the purpose of this discourse, and certainly little befitting the occasion of its delivery, to recount the causes which have of late years lowered the illustrious body over which Newton once presided; and have, far more than any whimsical notions of subdividing the work of research, or even any vain desires of personal distinction, caused new associations of eminent men to spring up and to flourish, at the expense of the ancient stock. A severe blow was given to the institution, which began in the cultivation of the Mathematics, by the controversy between the Botanists and Mathematicians, and the defeat of the latter. The debate is yet remembered, whose unwonted jar broke the silence that had reigned in Somerset House for the first time since the workmen had quitted its vaulted halls-the debate in which Bishop Horsley, leading the Mathematical opposition, complained of Newton's chair being filled by a Botanist, surrounded 'by his groups of feeble amateurs;' and in which men were brought down as the Parliamentary phrase is) to answer him,

We should take leave to ask, what kind of discoveries those are which remain after the ones here enumerated?

+ When Hooke is compared with Newton, we have no right to start at Maskelyne and Cavendish being also brought together. Here, as in other passages, we find the quarrels of Hooke with the chair have been forgiven.