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THE LIFE OF

DR. ERASMUS DARWIN.

[A. D. men to 1802,]

DR. ERASMUS DARWIN was the son of a private gentleman, near Newmark, in Nottinghamshire. He came to Lichfield to practice physic in the autumn of the year 1756, at the age of twentyfour; "bringing high recommendations from the university of Edinburgh, in which he had studied, and from that of Cambridge, to which he belonged.

A few weeks after his arrival at Lichfield, in the latter end of the year 1756, the intuitive discernment, the skill, spirit, and decision, which marked the long course of his successful practice, were first called into action, and brilliantly opened his career of fame.

ver.

The late Mr. Inge, of Thorpe, in Staffordshire, a young gentleman of family, and consequence, lay sick of a dangerous feThe justly celebrated doctor Wilks, of Willenhal, who had many years possessed, in a great degree, the business and confi dence of the Lichfield neighbourhood, attended Mr. Inge, and had unsuccessfully combated his disease. At length, he propounced it hopeless, and took his leave. It was then that a fond mother, wild with terror for the life of an only son, as drowning wretches catch at twigs, sent to Lichfield for our young, and as yet inexperienced physician. By an opposite, and entirely novel course of treatment, Dr. Darwin gave his dying patient back to existence, to health, prosperity, and all that high reputation, which Mr. Inge afterwards possessed as a public magis

trate.

This far-spreading report of this judiciously daring and fortunate exertion, brought Dr. Darwin into immediate and extensive employment, and soon eclipsed the hopes of an ingenious rival,

who resigned the contest; nor had he ever afterwards to contend with any other competitor.

Equal success, as in the case of Mr. Inge, continued to result from the powers of Dr. Darwin's genius, his frequent and intense meditation, and the avidity with which he, through life, devoted his leisure to scientific acquirement, and the investigation of dis case. Ignorance and timidity, superstition, prejudice, and envy, sedulously strove to attach to his prastice, the terms, rash, expert. menial theoretic; not considering, that without experiment the restoring science could have made no progress.

In 1757, he married Miss Howard, of the Close of Lichfield, a blooming and lovely young lady of eighteen. A mind, which had native strength; an awakened taste for the works of imagina tion; ingenious sweetness; delicacy, animated by sprightliness, and sustained by fortitude, made her a capable, as well as facinating companion, even to a man of talents so illustrious.-But, alas! upon her early youth, and a too delicate constitution, the frequen-, cy of her maternal situation, during the first five years of her marriage, had probably a baneful effect. The potent skill, and assiduous cares of him, before whom disease daily vanished from the frame of others, cuold not expel it radically from that of her he loved. It was however kept at bay for thirteen years.

The year after his marriage, Dr. Darwin purchased an old half timbered house in the Cathederal vicarage, adding a handsome new front, with Venetian windows, and commodious apartments. This. front looked towards Bacon-street, but had no street annoyance, being separated from it by a narrow deep dingle, which, when the doctor purchased the premises, was overgrown with tangled briars,.. and knot grass. A fortunate opening between the opposite hou, ses and this which has been described, gives it a prospect, suffi. ciently extensive, of pleasant and umbrageous fields. Across the dell, between this house and the street, Dr. Darwin flung a broad bridge of shallow steps, with Chinese paling, descending from his, hall-door to the pavement. The tangled and hollow bottom he cleared, and made a terrace on the bank, which stretched in a line, level with the floor of his apartments, planting the steep declivity, with lilacs and rose bushes; while he screened his terrace from the. gaze of passengers and the summer sun.

To this rus in urbe frequently resorted a knot of philosophic friends, the rev. Mr. Michell, many years deceased; the ingenious Mr. Kier, of West Broomwich, then captain Kier; 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 late accomplished Dr. Small, of Birmingham, who bore the blushing honours of his talents to an untimely grave.

The present sir Brooke Boothby afterwards becoming an occasional inhabitant of Lichfield, sought, on every possibility, the conversation of Dr. Darwin, and obtained his lasting friendship; and these, together with Mr. Munday, of Macketon, were the most distinguished of Dr. Darwin's scientific friends, who visited him from a distance, when he lived in Lichfield.

He once thought inoculation for the measles might, as in the small-pox, materially soften the disease; and, after the patriotic example of of lady Wortley Montague, he made the trial in his own family, upon his youngest son, Robert, now Dr. Darwin, of Shewsbury, and upon an infant daughter, who died within her first year. Each had, in consequence, the disease so severely, as to repel, in their father's mind, all future desire of repeating the experiment.

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In the year 1768, Dr. Darwin met with an accident of irre, trievable injury in the human frame. His propensity to mechanics had unfortunately led him to construct a very singular carriage. It was a platform, with a seat fixed on a very high pair of wheels, and supported in the front upon the back of the horses, by means of a kind of proboscis, which forming an arch, reached over the hind quarters of the horse, and passed through a ring, placed on an upright piece of iron, which worked in a socket, fixed in the saddle. The horse could thus move from one side of the road to the other, quartering, as it is called, at the will of the driver, whose constant attention was necessarily employed to regulate a piece of manchinery contrived, but not well contrived, for that purpose. From this whimsical carriage the doctor was several times thrown, and the last time he used it, had the misfortune, from a similar accident, to break the patella of his right knee,

which caused (as it always must cause) an incurable weakness in the fractured part, and a lameness, not very discernable indeed, when walking on even ground.

Dr. Darwin was happy in the talents, docility, and obedience of his three sons. An high degree of stammering retarded and embarrased his utterance. The eldest boy, Charles, had contracted the propensity. With that wisdom, which marked the doctors observations on the habits of life, with that decision of conduct which always instantly followed the conviction of his mind, he sent Charles abroad; at once to break the force of habit formed on the contagion of daily example, and from a belief, that in the pronunciation of a foreign language, hesitation would be less likely to recur than in speaking those words and sentences in which he had been accumstomed to hesitate. About his twelfth year he was committed to the care of the scientific, the learned, the modest, and worthy Mr. Dickinson, now rector of Blimel, in Shropshire.

That the purpose of the experiment might not be frustrated, Dr. Darwin impressed that good man's mind with the necessity of not permitting his pupil to converse in English; nor even to hear it uttered after he could at all comprehend the French language. Charles Darwin returned to England, after a two year's residence on the contsnent, completely cured of stammering, with which he was not afterwards troubled.

Dr. Johnson was several times at Lichfield while Dr. Darwin was one of its inhabitants. They had one or two interviews, but never afterwards sought each other. Mutual and strong dislike subsisted between them. It is curious that in Dr. Johnson's various letters to Mrs. Thrale, now Mrs. Piozzi, published by that lady after his death, many of them, at different periods, dated from Lichfield, the name of Darwin cannot be found.

Though Dr. Darwin's hesitation in speaking precluded his flow of colloquial eloquence, it did not impede, or at all lessen, the force of that conciser quality, wit. Of satiric wit he possessed a very peculiar species.

About the year 1771 commenced that great work, the Zoonomia, first published in 1794: Dr. Darwin read his chapter on instinct to a lady, who was in the habit of breeding canary birds.

She observed, that the pair which he then saw building their nest in her cage, were a male and female who had been hatched and reared in that very cage, and were not in existence when the mossy cradle was fabricated in which they first saw light. She asked him how, upon his principle of imitation, he could account for the nest he then saw building, being constructed, even to the disposal of every hair and shred of wool, upon the model of that in which the pair were born, and on which every other canary bird's nest is can. structed, where the proper materials are furnished. That of the pyc-finch, added she, is of much compacter form, warmer, and more comfortable. Pull one of them to pieces for its materials place another before these canary birds, as a pattern, and see if they will make the slightest effort to imitate their model! No, the result of their labour will, upon instinctive, hereditary impulse, be exactly the slovenly little mansion of their race; the same with that which their parents built before themselves were hatched, The doctor could not do away the force of that single fact, with which his system was incompatible; yet he maintained that system with philosophic sturdiness, though experience brought con. futation from a thousand sources,

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A few years before Dr. Darwin left Lichfield as a residence, he commenced a botanical society in that city. It consisted of himself, sir Brooke Boothby, then Mr. Boothby, and a proctor in the cathedral jurisdiction, whose name was Jackson. The doctor was probably disappointed that no recruits flocked to his botanical standard at Lichfield. Various observations, signed Lichfield botanical society, were sent to the periodical publications, and it was amusing to hear scientific travellers, on their transit over Lichfield, enquiring after the state of the botanical society there.

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 of the neighbourhood. Mrs.

This was the object of his Petrarchian attachment during the life of her husband.