assistance.

In each of those towns, his was the cheerful board of almost open-housed hospitality, without extravagance or pride; deeming ever the first unjust, the latter unmanly. Generosity, wit and science, were his household gods."* She again states that when he removed from Lich

It was at this period of his residence at Lichfield, that the present writer heard him strongly enforce the cultivation of papaver somniferum. What he may have also enforced to others, may possibly have given rise to some of those ingenious papers on its cultivation, which are inserted not only in the Transactions of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce; in other publications, but in the first and fifth volumes of the Memoirs of the Caledonian Horticultural Society. The papers of Mr. Ball and Mr. Jones, on its cultivation, in the former of these transactions, are particularly diffuse and valuable. They are fully noticed in Dr. Thornton's "Family Herbal." The subjoined plate is a copy of that in the title page to " Opiologia, ou traicté concernant le naturel proprietés, vraye preparation, et seur vsage de l'opium," a favourite volume with Dr. Darwin, printed at la Haye, 1614, 12mo. Dr. Darwin, in his Botanical Garden, thus speaks of opium: "the finest opium is procured by wounding the heads of large poppies with a three-edged knife, and tying muscle-shells to them, to catch the drops. In small quantities it exhilirates the mind, raises the passions, and invigorates the body; in large ones, it is succeeded by intoxication, languor, stupor, and death.”

field to Derby, "his renown, as a physician, still increased as time rolled on, and his mortal life declined from its noon. Patients resorted to him more and more, from every part of the kingdom, and often from the continent. All ranks, all orders of society, all religions, leaned upon his power to ameliorate disease, and to prolong existence. The rigid and sternly pious, who had attempted to renounce his aid, from a superstition that no blessing would attend the prescriptions of a sceptic, sacrificed, after a time, their superstitious scruples to their involuntary consciousness of his mighty skill." Mr. Mathias, though he severely criticizes some of Dr. Darwin's works, yet he justly calls him "this very ingenious man, and most excellent physician, for such he undoubtedly

From scattered passages in Miss Seward's Life of him, one can easily trace the delight he took (notwithstanding his immense professional engagements,) in the scenery of nature and gardens ;-witness his frequent admiration of the tangled glen and luxuriant landscape at Belmont, its sombre and pathless woods, impressing us with a sense of solemn seclusion, like the solitudes of Tinian, or Juan Fernandes, with its "silent and unsullied stream," which the admirable lines he addresses to the youthful owner of that spot so purely and temperately allude to :

O, friend to peace and virtue, ever flows
For thee my silent and unsullied stream,
Pure and untainted as thy blameless life!
Let no gay converse lead thy steps astray,
To mix my chaste wave with immodest wine,
Nor with the poisonous cup, which Chemia's hand
Deals (fell enchantress!) to the sons of folly!
So shall young Health thy daily walks attend,
Weave for thy hoary brow the vernal flower

Of cheerfulness, and with his nervous arm
Arrest th' inexorable scythe of Time.

Z

So early, and indeed throughout his whole life, did Dr. Darwin enforce the happy consequences of temperance and sobriety; from his conviction of the pernicious effects of all kinds of intemperance on the youthful constitution. He had an absolute horror of spirits of all sorts, however diluted. Pure water was, throughout the greater part of his temperate life, his favourite beverage. He has been severely cenfor some of his religious

sured (no doubt very justly so), prejudices. Old Walter Mapes, the jovial canon of Salisbury, precentor of Lincoln, and arch-deacon of Oxford, in the eleventh century, considered water as fit only for here

tics.

One may again trace his fondness for the rich scenery of nature, when he in 1777 purchased a wild umbrageous valley near Lichfield, with its mossy fountain of the purest water. This spot he fondly cultivated. The botanic skill displayed by him on this spot, did not escape the searching eye of Mr. Loudon, for in p. 807 of his Encyclop. of Gardening, he pays a deserved compliment to him.* Miss

* Sterne mentions a traveller who always set out with the spleen and jaundice,‚—" without one generous connection, or pleasurable anecdote to tell of,-travelling straight on, looking neither to his right hand or his left, lest love or pity should seduce him out of the road." Mr. Loudon seems to be a very different kind of a traveller: for his horticultural spirit and benevolent views, pervade almost every page of his late tour through Bavaria. One envies his feelings, too, in another rural excursion, through the romantic scenery of Bury, at Mr. Barclay's, and of Mr. Hope's at Deepdene; and particularly when he paints his own emotions on viewing the room of sculpture there. He even could not, in October last, take his rural ride from Edgware to St. Alban's without thus awakening in each traveller a love of gardens, and giving this gentle hint to an honest landlord :—“ A new inn, in the outskirts of St. Alban's, in the Dunstable road, has an ample garden, not made the most of. Such a piece of ground, and a gardener of taste, would give an inn, so situated, so great a superiority, that every one would be tempted to stop there; but the garden of this Boniface, exhibits but the

Seward wrote some lines on this favoured valley, and these are part of them:

O! may no ruder step these bowers profane,
No midnight wassailers deface the plain;
And when the tempests of the wintry day
Blow golden autumn's varied leaves away,
Winds of the north, restrain your icy gales,
Nor chill the bosom of these hallow'd vales.

His attachment to gardens, induced him to honour the memory of Mr. Mason, by lines once intended for his monument; and he was suggesting improvements at the priory at Derby (and which he had just described the last morning of

beginning of a good idea." When travelling along our English roads, his mind no doubt frequently reverts to those road-side gardens in the Netherlands, which he thus happily adverts to in p. 32 of his Encyclopædia : "The gardens of the cottagers in these countries, are undoubtedly better managed and more productive than those of any other country; no man who has a cottage is without a garden attached; often small, but rendered useful to a poor family, by the high degree of culture given to it." Linnæus, in his eloquent oration at Upsal, enforces the pleasure of travelling in one's own country, through its fields and roads. Mr. Heath, the zealous and affectionate historian of Monmouth, in his account of that town and its romantic neighbourhood, (published in 1804,) omits no opportunity of noticing the many neat gardens, which add to the other rural charms of its rich scenery, thus mentions another Boniface :-"The late Thomas Moxley, who kept the public-house at Manson Cross, was a person that took great delight in fruit-trees, and had a large piece of ground let him, for the purpose of planting it with apple-trees; but his death (which followed soon after) prevented the plan from being carried to the extent he intended, though some of the land bears evidence of his zeal and labour." Mr. Heath cannot even travel on the turnpike road, from Monmouth to Hereford, without benevolently remarking, that "a number of laborious families have erected small tenements, with a garden to each, most of which are thickly planted with apple-trees, whose produce considerably adds to the owner's support."

his life in a sprightly letter to a friend), when the fatal signal was given, and a few hours after, on the 18th of April, 1802, and in his sixty-ninth year, he sunk into his chair and expired. Thus in one hour (says his affectionate biographer) was extinguished that vital light, which the preceding hour had shone in flattering brightness, promising duration; (such is often the cunning flattery of nature), that light, which through half a century, had diffused its radiance and its warmth so widely; that light in which penury had been cheered, in which science had expanded; to whose orb poetry had brought all her images; before whose influence disease had continually retreated, and death so often turned aside his levelled dart!"* That Dr. Darwin, as to his religious principles or prejudices, displayed great errors of judgment in his Zoonomia, there can be no doubt. An eminent champion of christianity, truly observed, that Dr. Darwin " was acquainted with more links in the chain of second causes, than had probably been known to any individual, who went before him; but that he dwelt so much, and so exclusively on second causes, that he too generally seems to have forgotten that there is a first." For

* Of this celebrated biographer of Dr. Darwin (whose Verses to the Memory of Mr. Garrick, and whose Monody on Captain Cook, will live as long as our language is spoken,) Sir W. Scott thus describes his first personal interview with :-" Miss Seward, when young, must have been exquisitely beautiful; for, in advanced age, the regularity of her features, the fire and expression of her countenance, gave her the appearance of beauty, and almost of youth. Her eyes were auburn, of the precise shade and hue of her hair, and possessed great expression. In reciting, or in speaking with animation, they appeared to become darker; and, as it were, to flash fire. I should have hesitated to state the impression which this peculiarity made upon me at the time, had not my observation been confirmed by that of the first actress of this or any other age, with whom I lately happened to converse on our deceased friend's expressive powers of countenance."