Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin, chiefly during his Residence at Lichfield; with Anecdotes of his Friends, and Criticisms on his Writings. By Anna Seward. 8vo. pp. 430. Johnson.

THE genius and talents of Dr. Darwin, and the well-known literary powers of his biographer, had, previously to the publication of this volume, raised curiosity to so high a pitch, that we believe the public have rarely expected a work with more eagerness than the memoirs now before us.

Their fair authoress avows herself conscious of their defects, and candidly owns that they do not form a regular detail of biographical circumstances, even in that moiety of his professional existence formed by his residence at Lichfield. "My work," she observes, "consists of the following particulars: the person, the mind, the temper, of Dr. Darwin; his powers as a physician, philosopher, and poet; his excellencies and faults; the Petrarchan attachment of his middle life, more happy in its result than was that of the bard of Vaucluse; the beautiful poetic testimonies of its fervour while yet it remained hopeless; an investigation of the constituent excellencies and defects of his magnificent poem, the Botanic Garden; remarks upon his philosophic prose writings; the characters and talents of those who formed the circle of his friends while he resided in Lichfield; and the very singular and interesting history of one of them*, well known in the lettered world, whose domestic history, remarkable as it is, has been unaccountably omitted by the gentleman who wrote his life."

With a view rather to excite than to forestal curiosity, we shall present our readers with an abstract of the contents of this desultory and unconnected, but interesting volume.

Dr. Darwin was the son of a private gentleman near Newark, in Nottinghamshire, and came to Lichfield to practise physic in the autumn of the year 1756, at the age of twenty-four †. A fortunate achievement in the case of Mr. Inge, of Staffordshire, a few weeks after his arrival at Lichfield, brought him into immediate and extensive employment; and laid the foundation of that professional celebrity which Dr. Darwin, for so long a period of years, almost exclusively enjoyed.

* Mr. Day.

+ Such is Miss Seward's opening sentence. This, surely, is plunging us

"in medias res

Non secus ac notas."

In 1757, he married Miss Howard, of the Close of Lichfield, a lady of great beauty, sweetness of temper, and accomplishments *. The year after his marriage, Dr. Darwin purchased an old halftimbered house in the Cathedral Vicarage, which his taste was happily employed in embellishing, where resorted a knot of philosophic friends in early visitation. "The Rev. Mr. Michell, many years deceased; he was skilled in astronomic science, modest, and wise. The ingenious Mr. Keir, of West Bromick; then Captain Keir. Mr. Boulton, known and respected wherever mechanic philosophy is understood. Mr. Watt, the celebrated improver of the steam engine. And, above all others, in Dr. Darwin's personal regard, the accomplished Dr. Small, of Birmingham, who bore the blushing honours of his talents and virtues to an untimely grave."

The remaining pages of the first chapter are devoted to the singularly interesting memoirs of Mr. Day t, which are written with great taste and neatness, and which, although protracted to an unreasonable length, will doubtless be considered as forming by no means the least interesting part of the volume.

On resuming the recollected circumstances of Dr. Darwin's life in Chap. II. Miss Seward informs us of the accident of his breaking the patella of his right knee, by being thrown from a whimsical carriage of his own construction in 1768: retails a ridiculous anecdote which occurred in a journey by water to Nottingham, which might full as well have been omitted; and quotes some specimens of "Darwinian wit," which she must excuse us for thinking, are not calculated to give any very exalted idea of its powers or brilliancy. Anecdotes of Sir Brook Boothby, Mr. Munday, Mr. Seward, Mr. Archdeacon Vyse, &c. employ for the rest of the chapter this lady's excursive pen; together with a severe philippic on Johnson for his many hints of Lichfield's intellectual barrenness, and depreciating estimate of Lichfield talents.

Chap. III. is opened with a criticism on " that great work” the Zoonomia, commenced in 1771, and published in 1794; the gathered wisdom of three-and-twenty years. To the merits of the Zoonomia Miss Seward is "fervently just." Every young professor of medicine is required to devote his days and nights to studying it, and promised that it will teach him more than the pages of Galen and Hippocrates; than schools and universities know to impart. To the instructions which flow through the channel of its pages are attributed the

* She died in 1770.

See our miscellaneous department for this month.

powers which enabled Dr. Robert Darwin, of Shrewsbury, to attain instant eminence as a physician in the county of Salop; whose rising abilities, and their early eclat, recompensed to Dr. Darwin a severe deprivation in the death of his eldest and darling son Charles, who died at Edinburgh of a putrid fever, supposed to have been caught from dissecting, with a slightly wounded finger, a corpse in a state of dangerously advanced putridity.

The translation of the Linnæan system of vegetation into English from the Latin published in the name of the Lichfield Botanical Society, was the production of Dr. Darwin, Sir Brook Boothby, and a proctor in the cathedral jurisdiction, whose name was Jackson. This society had been established by Dr. Darwin a few years before he left Lichfield as a residence; but no recruits flocked to his botanical standard, and the original triumvirate received no augmentation. Jackson, who is represented as a "would-be philosopher," a turgid and solemn coxcomb," became, in this, their joint work, a useful drudge. His illustrious coadjutors exacted of him fidelity to the sense of their author, and they corrected Jackson's inelegant English, weeding it of its pompous coarseness.

In the spring of the year 1778, the children of Colonel and Mrs. Pole, of Radburn, in Derbyshire, had been injured by a dangerous quantity of the cicuta, injudiciously administered to them in the hooping-cough by a physician in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Pole brought them to the house of Dr. Darwin in Lichfield, remaining with them there a few weeks till their healths were re-established; and then commenced, what Miss Seward terms, the "Petrarcan attachment of his middle life." Some exquisite testimonies of its fervour, particularly a paraphrase of Petrarch's celebrated sonnet, narrating a dream whose prophecy was accomplished by the death of Laura, written, when called in to prescribe for Mrs. Pole, during a severe illness in the autumn of the same year; and an "Ode" to the Derwent," on her recovery, are truly said to be rich in poetic beauty.

"About the year 1777, Dr. Darwin purchased a little wild umbrageous valley, a mile from Lichfield, among the only rocks which neighbour that city so nearly. It was irriguous from various springs, and swampy from their plenitude. A mossy fountain of the purest and coldest water imaginable, had, near a century back, induced the inhabitants of Lichfield to build a cold bath in the bosom of the vale. That, till the Doctor took it into his possession, was the only mark of human industry which could be found in the tangled and sequestered

scene.

"One of its native features had long excited the attention of the curious. A rock, which, in the central depth of the glen, drops perpetually about three times in a minute. Aquatic plants border its top, and branch from its fissures. No length of summer drought abates, no rains increase its humidity, no frost congeals its droppings. The Doctor cultivated this spot,

"And paradise was open'd in the wild."

In some parts he widened the brook into small lakes that mirrored the valley; in others, he taught it to wind between shrubby inargins. Not only with trees of various growth did he adorn the borders of the fountain, the brook, and the lakes, but with various classes of plants, uniting the Linnæan science with the charm of landscape."

On her first visit to this luxuriant retreat, Miss Seward penned some beautiful complimentary lines to its genius, which the following narrative clearly proves suggested the idea of the "Botanic Garden."

"When Miss Seward gave this little poem to Dr. Darwin, he seemed pleased with i, and said, "I shall send it to the periodical publications; but it ought to form the exordium of a great work. The Linnæan system is unexplored poetic ground, and an happy subject for the muse. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed. Ovid made men and women into flowers, plants, and trees; you should make flowers, plants, and trees, into men and women. I," continued he, "will write the notes, which must be scientific, and you shall write the verse."

Miss S. observed, that beside her want of botanic knowledge, the plan was not strictly proper for a female pen; that she felt how eminently it was adapted to the efflorescence of his own fancy.

"He objected the professional danger of coming forward as an acknowledged poet. It was pleaded, that on his first commencing medical professor, there might have been danger; but that beneath the unbounded confidence his experienced skill in medicine had obtained from the public, all risks of injury by reputation flowing in upon him from a new source was precluded; especially since the subject of the poetry, and still more the notes, would be connected with pathology."

Dr. Darwin took his friend's advice, and very soon began his great poetic work; but, previously, a few weeks after they were composed, sent the verses Miss. S. wrote in his Botanic Garden to the Gentleman's Magazine, and în her name.

From thence [thence] they were copied into the Annual Register; but without consulting her, he had substituted for the last six lines eight of his own. He afterwards, and again without the knowledge of their author, made them the exordium to the first part of his poem, published for certain reasons some years after the second part appeared. No acknowledgment was made that these verses were the work of another pen. Such acknowledgment ought to have been made, especially since they passed the press in the name of their real author. They are somewhat altered in the exordium to Mr. Darwin's poem, and eighteen lines of his own are interwoven with them."

This anecdote is really curious, and the lady is, not without reason, angry at so extraordinary and unparallelled a plagiarism. On, the correspondence which closes the third chapter, as Miss Seward has condescended to apologize for its insertion, we forbear to com

ment.

The Petrarchan attachment of Dr. Darwin's middle life, it has been already hinted, was more fortunate in its close than that of the bard of Vaucluse. In the year 1780 Colonel Pole died, and the lady, in the year following, was persuaded to descend from her Laura-eminence, and accept the hand of her poetic lover. Mrs., Darwin, however, having taken a dislike to Lichfield, decidedly said, that nothing could induce her to live there, and the Doctor and his family removed directly to Derby. His reputation, and the unlimited confidence of the public, followed him thither, and would have followed him to the metropolis, or to any provincial town to which he might have chosen to remove,

From Dr. Darwin's marriage and removal to Derby, Miss Seward only aims at tracing the outline of his existence *. The Doctor once more became an happy husband, with a second family of children springing fast around him. To these children the Miss Poles, as themselves grew up to womanhood, were very meritoriously attentive and attached. The eldest Miss Pole married a Mr. Bromley, and the youngest " gave her lovely self" to Mr. John Gisborne, younger brother to the celebrated moralist and poet of that name. The mention of Mr. John Gisborne introduces a criticism on the "Vales of Weaver," a poem, published by that gentleman in 1797, which, although out of its place, is ingenious and interesting.

Dr. Darwin's "Tract on Female Education" was written about thirteen years after his second marriage, to promote the success of two ladies, his relations, on their opening a school at Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. The composition, even in the opinion of his biographer, was not worthy of his exalted abilities. With regard to Dr. Darwin's "stoical conduct" on the unfortunate exit of his son in 1799, as narrated in these pages, Miss S. has publicly acknowledged herself misinformed.

"Phylologia; or, the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening," was published early in 1800, in a large quarto volume. Miss Seward briefly sketches and states her opinion of its theory; but, taken

* The completion of Miss Seward's task is reserved for Dr. Darwin's friend and pupil, Mr. Dewhurst Bilsborrow, who is writing, or has written, his life at large. “Between us," Miss S. observes, “all will probably be known that can now with accuacy be traced of Dr. Darwin,"