and to Mr. Allen of Prior Park, who gave him his niece in marriage, obtained a bishopric for him, and left him his whole estate. In the meantime, he published his Divine Legation of Moses, the most learned, most arrogant, and most absurd work which had been produced in England for a century,—and his editions of Pope and of Shakespeare, in which he was scarcely less outrageous and fantastical. He replied to some of his answerers in a style full of insolence and brutal scurrility; and not only poured out the most tremendous abuse on the infidelities of Bolingbroke and Hume, but found occasion also to quarrel with Drs. Middleton, Lowth, Jortin, Leland, and indeed almost every name distinguished for piety and learning in England. At the same time he indited the most highflown adulation to Lord Chesterfield, and contrived to keep himself in the good graces of Lord Mansfield and Lord Hardwicke ; while in the midst of affluence and honours he was continually exclaiming against the barbarity of the age in rewarding genius so frugally, and in not calling in the civil magistrate to put down fanaticism and infidelity. The public, however, at last grew weary of these blustering novelties. The bishop, as old age stole upon him, began to doze in his mitre; and though Dr. Richard Hurd, with the true spirit of an underling, persisted in keeping up the petty traffic of reciprocal encomiums, yet Warburton was lost to the public long before he sunk into dotage, and lay dead as an author for many years of his natural existence.

(From the Same.)

SIR HUMPHRY DAVY

[Sir Humphry Davy was born at Penzance, on 17th December 1778. There was a strong literary and scientific spirit abroad in this neighbourhood at the time, as at Norwich, Lichfield, and other centres of country life, and Davy, apprenticed to a surgeon, read a good deal and studied chemistry a little. When he was twenty he was taken by Dr. Beddoes (father of the poet and brother-in-law of Miss Edgeworth) as an inmate of his house and an assistant in scientific labours at Clifton. There Davy made the acquaintance of Southey and Coleridge, and distinguished himself by his researches into laughing-gas. The repute of these established him, at the beginning of the present century, as chemical lecturer at the new Royal Institution, where his lectures became a fashion with London society. In 1812 he was made a knight, and married Mrs. Apreece, a lady of means and other attractions. Six years later, after his memorable work on the safety lamp, he was made a baronet; and shortly afterwards became President of the Royal Society. His later years were much troubled with ill health, and he died at Geneva on 29th May 1829. The bulk of his works, which appeared in nine vols. ten years after his death, is composed of lectures and papers, the Elements of Chemistry and Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry being the chief single items. His Salmonia (1828), and Consolations in Travel (1830), of a more literary character, were written partly to beguile his illness.]

IN the remarkable succession of chemical lecturers at the Royal Institution the second, the pupil and assistant of the first, the third, the pupil and assistant of the second-who have covered in unbroken chain nearly the whole of the nineteenth century, Sir Humphry Davy stands as a man of letters (in which capacity alone we are here concerned with him) above Faraday and below Tyndall. Early as he was introduced to the society of pure men of letters, and various as his own early attempts are said to have been, the spoken rather than the written word appears to have been his forte. His destiny and vocation, however, led him to the former, and it is not easy to judge what might have been the case if things had been different. Most of his scientific work does not lend itself to excerpt here, but the first two passages given below

(the one from the Elements of Chemistry, the other the separately preserved fragment of a lecture) will show that he had a more than respectable command of the more formal and mannered style with which, during his day, scientific writers were still wont to diversify and adorn the record of their observations and discoveries. In the mere importance and value of these last (they chiefly concerned electricity), great authorities have pronounced him to be inferior to no one.

Of his non-scientific work Salmonia was, at the date of its appearance and for some time afterwards, warmly praised; though Wilson, in Blackwood, attacked its sportsmanship as cockney and its general tone as valetudinarian and milksop. The limitation of the claret at the fishermen's dinner to half-a-pint a man seems to have had an undue effect on Christopher's criticism; but the praise was certainly in some cases overstrained. Salmonia is a pleasant book and interesting in literary history, less as an imitation of Walton than because in many passages it shows an important advance in the literature descriptive of Nature, and reminds us that Mr. Ruskin was already born. Sir Walter Scott, who was a sort of connection of Lady Davy's, reviewed it very favourably in the Quarterly, and indeed Davy was as much at home with the Scottish literary circle as with that of the Lakes (where his early Bristol friends had settled, and where he was a companion of Wordsworth and of Scott himself in a famous walk on Helvellyn) and with that of London. The Consolations, more ambitious and philosophical in tone, are rather less successful. On the whole, however, Davy is most interesting as a member of the school of scientific writers who came between those of the eighteenth century proper, and those wholly of the nineteenth the former, men of letters whose subject was "natural philosophy," the latter, men of science who only in rare instances pay deliberate attention to literary cultivation and form. His own attention to and achievement in these were more than respectable, and he added to these good taste, and a pleasant, if rather thin, humour. GEORGE SAINTSBURY,

ALCHEMY

AMONGST a people of conquerors, disposed to sensuality and luxury even from the spirit of their religion, and romantic and magnificent in their views of power, it was not to be expected that any new knowledge should be followed in a rational and philosophic manner; and the early chemical discoveries led to the pursuit of alchemy, the objects of which were to produce a substance capable of converting all other metals into gold; and an universal remedy calculated indefinitely to prolong the period of human life.

Reasonings upon the nature of metals, and the composition of the philosopher's stone, form a principal part of the treatises ascribed to Gebar; and the disciples of the school of Bagdat seem to have been the first professed alchemists.

It required strong motives to induce men to pursue the tedious and disgusting processes of the furnace; but labourers could hardly be wanting, when prospects so brilliant and magnificent were offered to them; the means of procuring unbounded wealth ; of forming a paradise on earth; and of enjoying an immortality depending on their own powers.

The processes supposed to relate to the transmutation of metals, and the elixir of life, were probably first made known to the Europeans during the time of the crusades; and many of the warriors who, animated with visionary plans of conquest, fought the battles of their religion on the plains of Palestine, seemed to have returned to their native countries under the influence of a new delusion.

The public spirit of the west was calculated to assist the progress of all pursuits that carried with them an air of mysticism. Warm with the ardour of an extending and exalted religion, men were much more disposed to believe than to reason: the love of knowledge and power is instinctive in the human mind; in dark

ness it desires light, and follows it with enthusiasm even when appearing merely in delusive glimmerings.

The records of the middle ages contain a great variety of anecdotes relating to the transmutation of metals, and the views or pretensions of persons considered as adepts in alchemy; these early periods constitute what may be regarded as the heroic or fabulous ages of chemistry. Some of the alchemists were low imposters, whose object was to delude the credulous and the ignorant; others seemed to have deceived themselves with vain hopes; but all followed the pursuit as a secret and mysterious study. The processes were communicated only to chosen disciples, and being veiled in the most enigmatic and obscure language, their importance was enhanced by the concealment. In all times men are governed more by what they desire or fear, than by what they know; and in this age it was peculiarly easy to deceive, but difficult to enlighten the public mind; truths were discovered, but they were blended with the false and marvellous, and another era was required to separate them from absurdities, and to demonstrate their importance and uses.

(From Works.)

PARALLELS BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE

THE characters of the poet and painter have been often compared; and the analogy between their objects and their methods is so striking, as to have been generally felt and acknowledged. Visible images constitute the great charm of poetry, and they are the elements of painting; and the end of both arts is to represent the admirable in nature, and to awaken pleasurable, useful, or noble feelings. Painting, however, appeals to the eye by immediate characters; it possesses a stronger chain of association with passion; it is a more distinct and energetic language, and acts first by awakening sensation and then ideas. Poetry is less forcible, for it operates only by imagination and memory, and not by immediate impression; unless indeed in the performances of the drama, or in impassioned recitation. A representation by words is inferior in strength to representation by images; but it has the advantage in being more varied, and capable of a more extensive application. It speaks of sentiments and thoughts and