SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 1889.

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LEIGH HUNT AND CHARLES LAMB NOTES FROM OXFORD; WATER-MARKS; MAJOR-GENERAL W. NASSAU LEES; COLERIDGE'S LECTURES IN 1818; THE SPRING PUBLISHING SEASON; AN UNDESCRIBED ADAPTATION FROM SPINOZA

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LITERARY GOSSIP
SCIENCE-CHAPMAN'S BIRD-LIFE OF THE BORDERS;
CHEMICAL NOTES; SOCIETIES; MEETINGS; GOSSIP

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348-351

The Life of James Thomson ("B. V."), with a Selection from his Letters and a Study of his Writings. By H. S. Salt. (Reeves & Turner.)

Our mental picture of James Thomson would have been more impressive if the story of his life had been left altogether unwritten. For so his voice should have come to us as

from the darkness, without a history and without a name; we should have watched him only in "passive agony of wild unrest" on the couch of his "Insomnia"; we should

have overheard him

Steal forth and haunt that builded desolation

in his City of Dreadful Night, and should only have guessed at the "woe and terrors and thick darkness" which shrouded his identity from men. Thus he might have been a figure of enduring mystery; and the reader might have pondered on the fate which had constrained that hopeless sorrow of his ever-varied, but ever-recurring refrain:

But I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.

The conditions of modern life, however, forbid this impressive anonymity. Several biographical sketches of Thomson had already appeared, and now a formal biography, executed with sympathy and care, has put together all that the reader can desire to know as to his life and history. Well, be it so! there is another and perhaps a truer pathos in the story as it stands before us in full detail. For we find no extraordinary mishap, no tragic destiny, but a life with ordinary sorrows, ordinary difficulties; nay, with more than ordinary fulness of recognition of whatever of genius or good-comrade-ship the poet's nature had to offer. There was one bereavement-the death of a girl of fourteen to whom James Thomson was attached in early youth; there was poverty, but almost always with chances of adequate work and pay; and there was a tendency to insomnia, which was at once the main material on which his genius worked and the main cause of his undoing. For it led first to the tragic intensity of his best poems, and afterwards to the fits of drinking which ultimately killed him in middle life.

The lesson of such a life as this, we repeat,

An interesting and typical exchange of letters between Thomson and George Eliot shows him proof against the most stirring summons to a courageous cheerfulness. It must be admitted that his reply hardly offers a loophole for further rejoinder. His estimate of life, no doubt, is a subjective one; it cannot be demonstrated to those who do not naturally share it; but then, unfortunately, neither does the more cheering view of "the sublimity of the social order" admit just at present of easy demonstration. "I trust," says the "Meliorist,"

"that an intellect informed by so much passionate energy as yours will soon give us more heroic strains, with a wider embrace of human fellowship in them-such as will be to the labourers of the world what the odes of Tyrtæus were to the Spartans, thrilling them with the sublimity of the social order and the courage

of resistance to all that would dissolve

accept life and write much fine poetry is to take a very large share in the quantum of human good, and seems to draw with it necessarily some recognition, affectionate and even joyful, of the manifold willing labours which have made such | a lot possible."

To this the Pessimist replies as follows:"I have no Byronic quarrel with my fellows, whom I find all alike crushed under the iron yoke of Fate, and few of whom I can deem worse than myself, while so many are far better; and I certainly have an affectionate and even joyful recognition of the willing labours of those who have striven to alleviate our lot, though I cannot see that all their efforts have availed much against the primal curse of our existence. Has the world been the better or the worse for the life of even such a man as Jesus? I cannot judge; but I fear on the whole considerably the worse. None the less I can love and revere his memory. A physician saves a life, he does well; yet perchance it were better for the patient him self and for others that he now died."

What reply is to be made to this? or what appeal can reach this sad conviction that to raise mankind is to raise them only into "heavier toil, superior pain," and that civilization, with its intensification of consciousness, brings first and chiefly an intensification of woe?

letters in which they are recorded, are such as are paralleled in thousands of lives every day. The story shows him as an amiable, sensible man, no gloomy poseur, but responding readily to affection and pleasure. But all this is external, and of the public day. The true history of Thomson was worked out at midnight and alone. The great event of his life was that he could not sleep; that night after night he patrolled for very weariness the London streets; that thereby there grew upon him such a brooding realization of the great capital's awfulness, of the "builded desolation," as perhaps had never before entered into the heart of man.

This vast London may be conceived in many ways. We may look on it as Wordsworth looked on it passing over Westminster Bridge, in that sonnet which has glorified it as though with a resurrection morn. We may think of it as John Sterling thought of it on his death-bed, "not as full of noise and dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand, and immortal." We may regard it in all its hurrying aspects of pleasure and business, poverty and pride. But perhaps the profoundest conception of it is that which, in one form or another, was throughout all his life Thomson's main inspiration-the conception of the City of Dreadful Night, the crowded solitary har bourage of souls that have forgotten Hope. I paced the silent and deserted streets

In cold dark shade and chillier moonlight grey; Pondering a dolorous series of defeats

And black disasters from life's opening day; Invested with the shadow of a doom That filled the spring and summer with a gloom Most wintry black and drear; Gloom from within as from a sulphurous censer Making the glooms without for ever denser,

To blight the buds and flowers and fruitage of my year.

This stanza comes from 'Insomnia,' one of his latest poems and one of his best, which repeats with realistic horror the imaginative picture of the Dreadful Night. And those to whom it may befall hereafter to pace forlornly through the "dolent city," νυκτὸς ἀμολγῷ, may think of that worn man issuing before daybreak from his grim bedroom in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and investing the "baleful glooms " and " soundless solitudes" with a darkness which never was on sea or land, the soul's inward and irredeemable night. Inward and irredeemable; for it would be unjust to that striving spirit to suppose that his personal failings, his petty disasters, were responsible for all this brooding gloom. He mourned for the doom of men; at the sight of "Our Lady of Annihilation" "Thou Night essential radiating night!"-whom he beheld ready to receive the hapless creatures whom some blind power had begotten into an impotent and yearning pain. It is not ours to solve his problems, or to discuss in what quarter his eyes might have looked for dawn. It was his fate to see thus much deeper than Secularist or Positivist with whom his lot was cast to see thus much deeper, and thus much alone. And it was his gift to express that vision in one strain of melody, incoherent indeed, and self-repeating, but wild and forlornly sweet, like that "voice blown over desolate places," which (as Plutarch tells us) would sometimes rise and fall in the solitudes when the last oracle had long been

The Philosophy of Mysticism. By Carl du Prel. Translated from the German by C. C. Massey. 2 vols. (Redway.)

THIS curious book professes to supply a rational basis and philosophical expression for a set of phenomena partly certain, partly doubtful, that have been called magical or mystical, supersensuous or supernatural. We have a restatement and, it is alleged, an explanation of various old marvels and some new ones, from the ecstasies of Plotinus and Christian or Buddhist saints to clairvoyance, unconscious cerebration, and the diagnosis of disease in dream. The work is by no means easy to characterize. That the author is voracious of wonders and utterly uncritical the narrative of the strange vision of "the celebrated Aspasia, who afterwards became Queen of Persia," more than sufficiently proves. Yet we hesitate to tax him with "insanity," the charge which, according to his preface, the "journalistic reviewer" is always ready to fling at writers who disagree with him, and

which reviewers of his own land have doubtless flung with more than ordinary reason at the Baron du Prel. The fact is, his book discovers a curious jumble of faculties and acquisitions. Side by side with ill-authenticated miracles we find speculations ingenious and far-reaching, however unsound; mystic Buddhists and philosophers of "the Unconscious" jostle and rub shoulders with Kant and-mirabile dictu with the great apostle of fact and nature himself, Francis Bacon. We have not for a long time met with anything more comic than the Baron solemnly quoting Bacon's admonition against self-enslavement to imperfect theories and wilful rejection of facts that we are unable to pigeon-hole. The Baron is, in fact, a perfect Proteus, and we know not where to have him. We own ourselves unable to say whether he is a mystic or a materialist, a

transcendentalist such as Kant or a transcendentalist such as the authors of the 'Unseen Universe,' a Darwinian evolutionist or an Hegelian, the prophet of the Unconscious" or its destroyer. His own translator seems to share our perplexities; for while we thank Mr. Massey for the general clearness of his rendering and for his lucid and persuasive introduction, we feel we must thank him most for the candid notes in which from time to time he shows that the Baron du Prel was talking about what he did not understand, and was seeking to unfold his mind to the world before he knew it himself. Mr. Massey sey proves with great clearness that the Baron denounced "superstition" and justified it in the same breath; that while professing to base himself on Kant he failed to understand Kant's fundamental doctrine. After this, one may ask, what remains to say of the Baron and his work? Were it not well flung into the nearest dust-bin, and thereafter totally forgotten?

Perhaps for practical purposes it would be best so to dispose of it. And yet we cannot help feeling some interest and sympathy in the Baron's futile ingenuities and innocently boastful eclecticism: he is so bitter an opponent of narrow eighteenth century Aufklärung, and himself such a charming type of nineteenth century Auf

so much; he is so guilelessly persuaded he possesses the winnowing fan that can sift the true from the false in the beliefs of all ages; he is altogether so superior, so lucid and unbiassed an intellect, a pupil in all schools and the judge of all. It is his function, he tells us, with as much emotion as so lofty a mind can stoop to-it is his function to smooth away the "harsh antagonisms in modern intellectual development." But "it is from these theoretical antagonisms that the harshness of our social antagonisms has grown; the reconciliation of the former must compose the latter." Therefore I, the Baron du Prel, stepping down from my throne of speculation, shall wave a wand, and lo! divisions will cease, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and a little child will lead them; poor mortals have misunderstood themselves, a blind egoism has been their only guide; I will clear away the obscurity, and show them a higher authority claiming their allegiance, a higher plan of life in which man ceases to be his brother's enemy, yet retains an interest as full as ever, or fuller, in his own individual existence. Who can fail to wish the Baron well in so noble a venture? Who cannot but feel some shame in ridiculing so fine an enthusiasm? And yet if its supposed resources are but illusion, and its supposed insight confusion, can we refrain from a smile, even if we follow it with a sigh?

The Baron's key, then, to the mysteries of man-in possession of which he can rise superior both to the ignorant wonderment of the mystics and the ignorant incredulity of "esprits forts" is the double personality of the soul. Others before now have spoken of this dual consciousness severing the person in somnambulism from the waking man, the sinner transported with his sin and hugging it from the same sinner remorseful and humbled; but they have either idly wondered at it or positively misconstrued it, as mere opposition of body and soul, an antithesis now made completely untenable by the progress of science. By what contrast, then, does the Baron du Prel construe it? We are embarrassed, not by the insufficiency of answers, but by the abundance and variety of them. At one time the contrast is that between the transcendental and the empirical Ego of Kant, at another merely the difference between the dazzling light of the sun and the fainter light of the stars, real but unperceived till the greater luminary has set. Again, the two modes of consciousness are viewed as mutually complementary, each disappearing of necessity as the other emerges, like the arms of a balance, of which one must sink if the other is to rise. Once more we are bidden to think of the "threshold of consciousness," the limit between what we actually feel and the sub-conscious states which are the result, physiological or psychological-we hardly know which to say-of stimuli too weak to arouse consciousness proper; dream, the natural or somnambulistic, may mean the pushing back of the "threshold," and the consequent revelation to us of what our waking consciousness could not suspect. Or perhaps the consciousness that only comes to light in dream is the result of a special dream-organ, whose seat is in the solar plexus of the sympathetic nerve-system-in

the way, is a new rendering of "Magister Artis Venter." Lastly, there is the great "Unconscious" of Schopenhauer and Hartmann-the source of all will and intelligence, whether in man or nature-which may unexpectedly disclose itself or some fraction of itself to the ordinary dreamer or the hypnotized subject, and thus, ceasing to be the absolutely "unconscious," present itself to us in certain states as a "transcendental consciousness." It appears Hartmann himself has at least recognized this as a possibility, and not resented as an affront the attempted withdrawal of the Isis-veil from his goddess "Unconsciousness"; perhaps he is only returning the compliments with which his own epoch-making work seems to judge from his preface to have been welcomed by M. du Prel; perhaps he is beginning to doubt if the world will any longer worship "an unknown god" in any form, and to think he would do well to allow at least "the transcendental's" skirts to be perceived by the adoring crowd. Of this, however, or of the personal relations generally of our two philosophers, we know nothing.

What should be the effect on the reader of this multiplied explanation? As each explanation contradicts all the rest as some are merely what Aristotle called "a flight to poetical metaphors," while others are gross and shameless travesties and misunderstandings of the conceptions of men who were at least philosophers, if mistaken ones -it would seem that the only result of the exposition could be to make us doubt the phenomena it affects to explain. This is particularly unfortunate, as those phenomena arouse not a little unbelief already; and in fact the Baron du Prel being aware of this, being aware that he relies on shaky authorities, and that he himself is hardly a practised or rigorous tester of evidence-"Aspasia, Queen of Persia," will kindly rise from her grave, if she ever had one, to prove thistells his readers, with many admirable quotations from the 'Novum Organum,' that he brings forward his host of facts merely to suggest that current theories are imperfect, merely to suggest the true amendment for them, which, once propounded, will commend itself by its own clearness and self-evidence, and being itself believed will bring with it belief in all the queer stories that suggested it - belief, for all we know, in "Aspasia, Queen of Persia," herself. Happily from this degradation at least we are delivered, for the Baron's theory turns out to be not one, but six at least. We are afraid before we can accept his present views he must turn to the congenial employment of proving that a theory, to be truly one, must be at least six. We fear we cannot assist him to a proof, but we can present him with a title, the appropriateness of which as a German and a student of Goethe he will be sure to recognize, "The Witch's Multiplication Table." Or possibly humour will be sacrificed to definiteness of phrase, and the bold inventor of the bi-unity of man will demonstrate what seems its necessary postulate under the name of the "sexi-unity" of truth.

It seems hardly worth while to point out minor absurdities in a writer professedly philosophical who understands by Kant's "Noumena" or Spencer's "Unknowable" something hidden indeed from us, but quite within the purview of finer and more varied sensibilities than ours. It seems waste of time to convict of smaller inconsistencies a thinker who finds the same relation between the brighter light of the sun and the fainter

conception of a dual or alternating consciousness - phenomena deeply interesting whatever may be their practical or philosophical importance. It is, indeed, open to doubt whether they enable the Baron to start a truer theory of human per

light of the stars as between the comple- ❘sonality on the basis of which he may

mentary arms of a balance or between a smaller circle and a wider circle that embraces it-all of which three images are used by Baron du Prel to render the relation of the "external consciousness" to the "transcendental." As for the sun and star image, to which the Baron shows a truly touching devotion, repeating ad nauseam that the setting of the sun is the condition of the appearance of the stars, we wonder he never asked himself if the setting of the stars necessarily caused the reappearance of the sun; because the new moon is hidden at its rising by the rays of the afternoon sun, does the sun reappear again when at an early hour of the night the moon sets, to gladden our eyes no more? But not to retraverse once-trodden ground, shall we laugh or groan at the new proof of the Kantian doctrine of the ideality of time, viz., that in dreams, or in drowning, the events of a whole life pass before us, losing nothing of their detail, in some two minutes or possibly less? It is rather startling, too, for those who believe that in the hypnotic state we see through and disregard the empty idealities of time, to hear that on one occasion a somnambulist actually recognized the insignificant interval of thirty seconds, and recognized it in the most emphatic way by refusing to perform an action dictated to her even this miserable thirty seconds before the appointed time. The veriest empiricist would almost be ready to grant the "ideality" or "transcendentality" of so ludicrously short a time-except perhaps when he was having a tooth pulled out. We ourselves it is a feeling no doubt unworthy of philosophers-cannot but feel a little upset at observing the absolute concurrence of the theories of the Vedas and the practice of fakirs with the latest results of modern science. So wholesale a reconciliation awakens, we must own, a somewhat unphilosophical cynicism. Hegeland Darwin | -well, perhaps they were complementary to one another, though they certainly were not, or would not have been, complimentary; but when these two great lights of our everglorious century are asked to join hands with fakirs and Vedic seers we cannot but turn our eyes from the unholy masquerade, till we reflect that even the Baron du Prel might bring all these gentlemen together, but could scarcely induce them to dance one harmonious measure.

And yet, perhaps, the Baron du Prel's book has in it a certain interest and even a certain originality not merely of blundering. It is a pity he wrote before the publication of MM. Binet and Féré's little book on animal magnetism. He would there have seen duly and faithfully set out the famous suppressed verdict of the Paris Academy of Medicine in 1831, on which he lays so much stress; but he would have learnt how little of his stock of data was to be considered as properly authenticated. Still it must be conceded to him that he is grappling in some measure with real facts, with mental phenomena most simply grouped by the

apportion responsibility more truly or build up ethics more solidly. The monism of our author-to which we understand he has consecrated another work, and of which, as a novelty in conception, he seems not a little proud seems, like so many more of his speculations, to repose on (in fact to amount to) no more than an idle metaphor, that of the double star, with its two components each directed, as Mr. Massey somewhat oddly, but perhaps truthfully renders it, to "a common point of gravity." ty." We cannot understand the idea, much less utilize it. And if the importance of the "dual consciousness" as the key to all philosophies is doubtful, its practical value as an aid to medicine or life generally seems hardly less doubtful. Yet it is, in some sense, true and exceedingly curious, and there can be no objection to the study of it provided the students do not lose their heads on the way. The Baron du Prel has unquestionably lost his and yet made some interesting or at least ingenious suggestions. He has proved an undoubted right to speak of the sundering of consciousness in sleep, as in those curious dreams where we feel ignorance or bewilderment, which is presently cleared up by an imaginary second person, who is, of course, merely ourselves over again. His formula for this is that "Dream is a dramatist," and the saying seems just and sagacious, but hardly to constitute a proof of the theory that we have an alternating consciousness, each part of which is unknown to the other, of which the less known is revealed in sleep. We admire though we are hardly convinced when the author tells us that self-consciousness, being but the latest blossom in the evolution of nature, is as yet poor and undeveloped; that self-consciousness is as inadequate to its object, the Ego, as consciousness at large to its object, the world. This neat expression gives him, he conceives, the right to pose as the Kant of our century, though he is mistaken in thinking that the real Kant established the illustrative part of his thesis, whatever the Baron may have done for the substantive half. He has made most and best use of Hartmann's conception of the "Unconscious"; and his idea of a transcendental life in which this "Unconscious" in us-merely inferred by Hartmann-can become conscious and vocal is certainly striking. Unfortunately we know very little what that "Unconscious" says when it becomes articulate, nor can we see any reason for an undoubting trust in its utterances even when they are intelligible. Nor would one wish to encourage the development of a transcendental life in which we shall see our organs and not merely ours, but others' visibly at work within us like the medical somnambulists in whom Du Prel so firmly believes. Still, if it is to be our destiny we must learn to submit.

The Pytchley Hunt, Past and Present. By the late H. O. Nethercote. (Sampson Low & Co.)

CRITICISM of this volume is disarmed by the opening note, which tells of the author's sudden death but one day after the completion of his manuscript. However, there is no ground for questioning that the book is what it professes to be, a history of the Pytchley Hunt from its foundation to the present day, with biographies of the different masters and all the best-known members of the hunt, liberally interspersed with anecdotes rather loosely connected with the text, but all related in the same spirit of overflowing good humour.

The writer commences his description of the various persons attached to the hunt with Lord Spencer's celebrated huntsman Dick Knight (1782), whose "halloa," we are told, was audible for three miles on a frosty morning, and who dissuaded his master from too long an inspection of an unpromising fence by the encouraging call, "Come along, my lord; the more you look at it the less you'll like it." Charles King seems to have been a worthy successor to Dick, and his diary, containing wonderfully minute notes of each day's hunting, fills several volumes, and occupies an honoured place even in the library at Althorp. Mr. Nethercote contrasts the sport in King's time with that of the present day, when railways and navvies constitute two formidable enemies of a fox's life, and the abundance of other game tends, in the author's opinion, to deaden and destroy the scent.

The list of mighty hunters is a long one, and there is a difficulty in selecting any for individual mention; foremost among them are the names of the Rev. J. Tyrwhitt Drake, Mr. Drury Wake, Sir Francis Head, Sir Charles Isham, and Capt. "Bay Middleton." Amongst the most noted masters of the hunt was (1808 to 1817) Lord Althorp, the well-known statesman, whose friends said of him that "he was a prizefighter thrown away." His own conviction of the advantages of boxing was so strong that he once seriously debated with himself whether it were not his duty to attend every prize fight, so as to encourage the noble science to the utmost of his power. Though twenty masters have come and gone since Lord Althorp resigned the management of the hunt, Mr. Nethercote declares that none has more fully realized the ideal of what a M.F.H. should be.

"Squire" Osbaldeston's mastership (1827 to 1834) was a brilliant epoch in the annals of the Pytchley. He was as devoted an adherent of the prize ring as Lord Althorp himself, and was famous for his feats on the racecourse and in the cricket field, as well as for his wonderful prowess in shooting. When sold at Tattersall's in 1840, Mr. Osbaldeston's hounds realized 6,440l., five couples alone fetching 9301. This is contrasted with the low prices fetched by "Jack" Mytton's pack, the indignation of whose huntsman found vent in the remark: "Well, they ought to have made more, for they were a capital lot of hounds, and would hunt hanythink, from a helephant to a hearwig"! The mastership of Mr. G. Payne (1844 to 1848) is pleasantly dealt with, and the lives led by such "fine old English gentlemen"

are vividly brought before the reader; one hears with astonishment of the long days in the saddle, when the rider seems to have been regardless of cold, fatigue, or hunger, and concluded with a "three bottle" carouse, or a card party lasting until dawn. The mastership of Lord Spencer is regarded as one of the most prosperous periods in the history of the hunt; he is the fourth Lord Spencer who has undertaken the office, though he resigned it after four seasons.

The sporting parsons of the hunt are depicted with a good deal of humour, and we are made to realize the individuality of these gentlemen, who were not deterred from following their favourite sport by language which was considered rather forcible even in those days, when men habitually swore. The letters addressed by the impostor Crouch to the Rector of Passenham, though certainly irrelevant to the history of the hunt, are so good in their way that no one will quarrel with their insertion; for cool and daring impudence they are not to be surpassed.

The chapter relating to the late Major Whyte-Melville is sympathetically written, and the novelist's encounter with Miss Strickland (historian of the queens of England) is amusingly described, but, by unfortunate error, Holmby House is spoken of as "Holdenby" throughout the book. This and other trifling mistakes will probably be corrected in a later edition.

an

Taking it as a whole, 'The Pytchley Hunt' is eminently readable, and is more likely to gain popularity than many a work better written and more carefully composed. Its very faults are of an honest kind, and attract rather than repel. They lie chiefly in the loose construction of the whole work, and a tendency to introduce anecdotes whether appropriate or the reverse. The old whist-playing adage "When in doubt play a trump";

runs

Mr. Nethercote's rule would appear to have been "When at a loss for an incident tell a story." Yet, in spite of the rudimentary character of his method, the result of his efforts will be pleasing to most readers and especially to members of the famous hunt.

Thomas Drummond : Life and Letters. By R. Barry O'Brien. (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.)

IF, as is said, our age is an age of biography, it is pre-eminently an age of Irish biography, and even within the last few months we have

had three important memoirs of men who had already played their part in Irish his tory between forty and fifty years ago.

it, and as it had been during the preceding period. Mr. O'Brien, however, is thoroughly master of the details of Irish his tory, and, if his style is rather wooden, he is usually so instructive that it would be ungrateful and ungracious to inquire whether sixty pages devoted to the Fairman Plot are, or are not, excessive in a life of Drummond. Drummond's early death and his lack of literary impulse render the materials for his biography somewhat scanty, but, on the other hand, his lofty intellect, his noble character and untimely death enlist the sympathy of the reader.

Thomas Drummond was born in Edinburgh October 10th, 1797, and his father, who was a writer to the signet, died less than three years later, leaving a widow and four children (of whom Thomas was the second) with an annual income of only 120l. Though so poor the Drummonds were of good family, and the widow contrived to give her children an education suited to their birth, making for them sacrifices which were repaid by the deepest affection and devotion. At fifteen Thomas was attacked by the passion for soldiering, which Wellington's successes in the Peninsula had excited; he felt "a strong inclination for the profession of military engineer," and in February, 1813, passed his entrance examination for Woolwich. He was speedily disenchanted, and confided to an aunt that he "would give worlds, if I had them, to get my discharge"; but his unhappiness did not result from disappointed ambition; a year later he had reached the highest point of distinction then open to him, and in July, 1815, obtained a commission in the Royal Engineers. We next hear of him in 1818, when he invented a model to supersede the old pontoon; but though it "experienced a gracious reception" at headquarters it disappeared, and Drummond was on the point of giving up his commission when he met Col. Colby, who in 1820 was appointed chief of the Ordnance Survey, and invited Drummond to join him. The connexion was a lasting one. Drummond worked for a time on the English survey, and four years later accompanied his chief to Ireland. In the meanwhile he had not only turned his attention to politics, but had made his mark in the scientific world by his invention of the "Drummond," or, as he himself modestly named it, the "lime" light-the precursor of the electric light.

Mr. O'Brien supplies a full and clear description of the principle and mechanism of Drummond's light, an invention which caused considerable stir in the scientific world and secured for the young engineer a reputation and many social advantages, among them a cordial reception at Court, of which he gives a lively description in a charming and affectionate letter to his mother. The Drummond light was of great service in the Irish survey, but its most important

either Mitchel or O'Connell; his life was comparatively uneventful, and was so fully occupied that his unofficial correspondence is exceedingly small, and a considerable part of the memoir is devoted to a description of the state of Ireland as Drummond found

"By the way, I dined with the Lord Chancellor the other day, not at his own house, but at the house of an intimate friend of his, a Mr.

Ker...... There were only eight persons present, all intimate friends of Brougham's, so that the conversation, at and after dinner, about men and things, more especially the Reform question,

was most entertaining and interesting. The Chancellor was in great spirits and talked the whole time. After returning to the drawingroom I displayed the light, at which they ex

pressed great admiration, though the Chancellor seemed greatly afraid of his eye and could hardly be persuaded to look at it. I spied him, however, peeping at a corner, and immediately turned the reflector full upon him, but he fled instanter.”

The Chancellor was at once impressed by Drummond's singularly attractive character; the acquaintance ripened into friendship, and when in 1832 a Boundary Commission was appointed, to mark out the rotten boroughs for destruction, Drummond was made chairman, on the suggestion of Lord Brougham. This proved the turning point in Drummond's career. In April, 1833, he was offered the post of private secretary to Lord Althorp, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and after some hesitation accepted it "at the united wish of the cabinet." The Irish survey was undertaken in 1834, and it was during its progress that Drummond's name first came to be associated with that country; and when Lord Melbourne formed his second administration, in the spring of 1835, Drummond became Under Secretary for Ireland, Viscount Morpeth being his chief, and the Earl of Mulgrave Lord Lieutenant.

At this point Mr. O'Brien gives a detailed picture of Ireland at that date. Emancipation had effected little; an exclusively Protestant and largely Orange police was employed in extorting the tithe from a Catholic peasantry; faction fights were a time-honoured custom, and Ribbonism undermined the whole of the three southern provinces. Drummond's first reform was to admit Catholics to the police; his next to confine them to their proper business-the preservation of the public peace; and by his firm and just administration he enlisted the sympathies of the people so strongly on the side of law and order that a peasant society was formed to put down faction fights, and report Ribbonmen and persons of bad character. There was a magic in his kind and gentle personality, and his wish, unsupported by any law or bribe, sufficed to put an end to the Sunday fairs and faction fights that used to disgrace the Phoenix Park. His sister wrote :

"On Sunday afternoons and evenings crowds used to assemble in the Phoenix Park. Drinking booths were opened, and few Sundays passed without riot and mischief ensuing. My brother talked the matter over with some friends, who told him he must not dream of interfering, because it was a very old custom and it would not do to attempt to put it down. He resolved, however, that he would make the attempt, so one Sunday afternoon, the people having assembled as usual, he rode out unattended among the crowd. To the keeper of the nearest booth he represented the consequences of the meetings

drunkenness, brawls, fighting, and then punish

ment; he said these things were to him very painful, and that it would give satis

faction' could the meetings be altogether given

up. The man immediately and without......even a show of sullenness set about packing up. He quickly left the grounds and never returned again. The same result occurred at other booths, and in a short time the park was cleared and the 'old custom' given up for ever."

Drummond seems to have won his popularity by his utter disregard for it; to rule with justice and sympathy and