Strangely enough, in spite of her correct taste, Mrs. Barbauld was quite fascinated by Darwin's "Botanic Garden" when it first appeared, and talked of it with rapture; for which I scolded her heartily. -ROGERS, SAMUEL, 1855, Recollections of Table-Talk, ed. Dyce.

Nothing is done in passion and power; but all by filing, and scraping, and rubbing, and other painstaking. Every line is as elaborately polished and sharpened as a lancet; and the most effective paragraphs have the air of a lot of those bright little instruments arranged in rows, with their blades out, for sale. You feel as if so thick an array of points and edges demanded. careful handling, and that your fingers are scarcely safe in coming near them. Darwin's theory of poetry evidently was, that it was all a mechanical affair-only a His own higher kind of pin-making.

poetry, however, with all its defects, is far from being merely mechanical. The "Botanic Garden" is not a poem which any man of ordinary intelligence could have. produced by sheer care and industry, or such faculty of writing as could be acquired by serving an apprenticeship to the trade of poetry. Vicious as it is in manner, it is even there of an imposing and original character; and a true poetic fire lives under all its affectations, and often blazes up through them. There is not much, indeed, of pure soul or high imagination in Darwin; he seldom rises above the visible and material; but he has at least a poet's eye for the perception of that, and a poet's fancy for its embellishment and exaltation. No writer has surpassed him in the luminous representation of visible objects in verse; his descriptions have the distinctness of drawings by the pencil, with the advantage of conveying, by their harmonious words, many things that no pencil can paint. His images, though they are for the most part tricks of language rather than transformations or new embodiments of impassioned thought, have often at least an Ovidian glitter and prettiness, or are striking from their mere ingenuity and novelty. CRAIK, GEORGE, 1861, A Compendous History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 382.

Now the book I mean shows us the scientific faculty and the poetic faculty and no weak faculties either-working along together, not merged, not chemically

united, not lighting up matters like a star,-with the result, as seems to me, of producing the very funniest earnest book in our language. It is "The Loves of the Plants," by Dr. Erasmus Darwin.LANIER, SIDNEY, 1881, The English Novel, p. 191.

For all Wordsworth's exultant prophecy on the harmony of Poetry and Science, it cannot be said that any very assuring illustration of the circumstance has happened before his date or since. The "Botanical Garden" of Erasmus Darwin looms almost tragically alone, like the forlorn desert image of Shelley's famous sonnet, as a warning, if not a menace, to all travellers in this demesne.-BAYNE, WILLIAM, 1898, James Thomson (Famous Scots Series), p. 62.

ZOONOMIA

1794-6

If, however, the doctrines of the "Zoonomia" are not always infallible, it is a work which must spread the fame of its author over lands and seas, to whatever clime the sun of science has irradiated and warmed. The "Zoonomia" is an exhaustless repository of interesting facts, of curious experiments in natural productions, and in medical effects; a vast and complicated scheme of disquisition, incalculably important to the health and comforts of mankind, so far as they relate to objects merely terrestrial; throwing novel, useful, and beautiful light on the secrets of physiology, botanical, chemical, and aerological.-SEWARD, ANNA, 1804, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin, p. 68.

The second part of the Zoönomia is occupied with an enumeration of diseases, classified on the above principles, illustrated by brief reports of cases, and with suggestions as to their medical treatment. All diseases are morbid motions, and are divided into four classes, as those motions are irritative, sensitive, voluntary, or associative. The four classes are divided into eleven orders, founded on the increased, diminution, or inversion of the motion. The eleven orders are divided into forty-one genera, thirty-seven of which are founded on the part of the system affected, the other four on the fundamental classification. Nothing could have a more admirable simplicity upon paper; and we must pardon those who hailed it with the

no

enthusiastic faith that the Newton of morbid physiology had appeared in Erasmus Darwin. . . Dr. Darwin's theory of evolution was closely connected with his scheme of classifying diseases; the most signal defect of that scheme was the failure to recognize any other differences than differences of degree. There was sharpness of definition anywhere. It is, I confess, patent to every eye that some disorders in the human system have this indefinite character. There seems to be no dividing line between the highest state of health and complete disorganization and prostration; the one runs into the other more gradually than the oaks into the chestnuts. But, on the other hand, there are, certainly, some diseases which are sharply defined. The modern microscope, modern chemical reagents, and the modern spirit of experimental science are producing indisputable results in this field. The revulsion from Darwin's method of classifying diseases will, we think, be followed by revulsion from its method of classifying organic beings. - HILL, THOMAS, 1878, Erasmus Darwin, Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. 35, pp. 470, 480.

Like Buffon, Dr. Darwin had no wish to see far beyond the obvious; he missed good things sometimes, but he gained more than he lost; he knew that it is always on the margin, as it were, of the self-evident that the greatest purchase against the nearest difficulty is obtainable. His life was not one of Herculean effort, but, like the lives of all these organisms that are most likely to develop and transmit a useful modification, it was one of well-sustained activity; it was a long-continued keeping open of the windows of his own mind, much after the advice he gave to the Nottingham weavers. Dr. Darwin knew, and, I imagine, quite instinctively, that nothing tends to oversight like over-seeing. does not trouble himself about the origin of life; as for the perceptions and reasoning faculties of animals and plants, it is enough for him that animals and plants do things which we say involve sensation and consciousness when we do them ourselves or see others do them. If, then, plants and animals appear as if they felt and understood, let the matter rest there, and let us say they feel and understand -being guided by the common use of language, rather than by any theories

He

concerning brain and nervous system.--BUTLER, SAMUEL, 1879, Evolution Old and New, p. 197.

The "Zoonomia" is largely devoted to medicine, and my father thought that it had much influenced medical practice in England; he was of course a partial, yet naturally a more observant judge than others on this point. The book when published was extensively read by the medical men of the day, and the author was highly esteemed by them as a practitioner.DARWIN, CHARLES, 1879, The Scientific Works of Erasmus Darwin, by Krause, tr. Dallas, Preliminary Notice, p. 105.

GENERAL

Milton is harmonious to me, and I absoiutely nauseate Darwin's poems.-COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1796, Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, vol. I, p. 164.

Meantime the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's "Botanic Garden," which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold, and transitory.-COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1817, Biographia Literaria.

Dr. Darwin has splendidly exemplified the effects of his own theory, which certainly includes much truth, but not the whole truth. Endued with a fancy peculiarly formed for picture-poetry, he has limited verse almost within the compass of designing and modelling with visible colours and palpable substances. Even in this poetic painting, he seldom goes beyond the brilliant minuteness of the Dutch school of artists, while his groups are the extreme reverse of theirs, being rigidly classical. His productions are undistinguished by either sentiment or pathos.

He presents nothing but pageants to the eye, and leaves next to nothing to the imagination; every point and object being made out in noonday clearness, where the sun is nearly vertical, and the shadow most contracted. He never touches the heart, nor awakens social, tender, or playful emotions.-MONTGOMERY, JAMES, 1833, Lectures on General Literature, Poetry, etc., p. 126.

All optic nerve.-BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1842-63, The Book of the Poets.

As a poet, his "Botanic Garden" by its tawdry splendor gained him a tawdry reputation; as a philosopher his "Zoonomia, or, Laws of Organic Life," gained him a reputation equally noisy and fleeting.LEWES, GEORGE HENRY, 1845-46, Biographical History of Philosophy, p. 609.

The poet-laureate of botany.-COLLIER, WILLIAM FRANCIS, 1861, A History of English Literature, p. 352.

Almost every single work of the younger Darwin may be paralleled by at least a chapter in the works of his ancestor; the mystery of heredity, adaptation, the protective arrangement of animals and plants, sexual selection, insectivorous plants, and the analysis of the emotions and sociological impulses; nay, even the studies on infants are to be already discussed in the writings of the elder Darwin. But at the same time we remark a material difference in their interpretation of nature. The elder Darwin was a Lamarckian, or, more properly, Jean Lamarck was a Darwinian of the older school, for he has only carried out further the ideas of Erasmus Darwin, although with great acumen; and it is to Darwin therefore that the credit is due of having first established a complete system of the theory of evolution. -KRAUSE, ERNST, 1879, The Scientific Works of Erasmus Darwin, tr. Dallas, pp. 132.

He was a poet, in his day a very popular poet, whose works went through many editions. His stately verses are repugnant to modern taste, and it is hard to imagine them ever becoming popular again. Yet this is in a great measure due to the fact that they are written in a language which is wholly gone by, and which in the ears of those educated in this post-Wordsworthian age sounds stilted and pompous. Byron called the author of the "Loves of

the Plants" a "mighty master of unmeaning rhyme," but this is unfair. His poetry is anything but unmeaning. It is at times even eloquent. The chief defect that would be found with it nowadays. (leaving out of view the Johnsonese vocabulary and style) would be that it is rather rhetorical than poetical.-SEDGWICK, A. G., 1880, Erasmus Darwin, The Nation, vol. 30, p. 254.

Unfortunately for his lasting fame, Dr. Darwin was much given to writing poetry; and this poetry, though as ingenious as everything else he did, had a certain false gallop of verse about it which has doomed it to become since Canning's parody a sort of warning beacon against the worse faults of the post-Augustan decadence in the ten-syllabled metre. Nobody now reads the "Botanic Garden" except either to laugh at its exquisite extravagances, or to wonder at the queer tinsel glitter of its occasional clever rhetorical rhapsodies. But in his alternative character of philosophic biologist, rejected by the age which swallowed his poetry all applausive, Erasmus Darwin is well worthy of the highest and deepest respect, as a prime founder and early prophet of the evolutionary system. His "Zoonomia," "which, though. ingenious, is built upon the most absurd hypothesis"-as men still said only thirty years ago contains in the germ the whole theory of organic development as understood up to the very moment of the publication of the "Origin of Species."ALLEN, GRANT, 1885, Charles Darwin (English Worthies), p. 21.

But

The antithesis to Edmund Waller is Erasmus Darwin. . . . He was, indeed, an extraordinary being, and if verve, knowledge, a brilliant vocabulary, and boundless intellectual assurance could make any man a poet, Darwin might have been one. he has no imagination, and almost every fault of style. When he desires to seem glowing, his verses have the effect of ice; his very versification, for which he was once greatly admired, is so monotonous and so exasperatingly antithetical, that it reads like a parody of the verse of the earlier classicists. His landscapes, his sketches of character, his genre-pieces, his bursts of enthusiasm, are all of them ruined by his excessive insincerity of style, his lack of genuine vivacity, and his unceasing toil and tumidity of phrase. In

his abuse of personation, as in many other qualities, he is the typical helot of eighteenth-century poetry, and the great temporary success of his amazing poem led to the final downfall of the school. To rival the hortus siccus of Darwin was more than the most ambitious of grandiose poetasters could hope to do.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, pp. 328, 330.

Darwin's poetry would be forgotten were it not for Canning's parody. He followed the model of Pope, just passing out of favour, for his versification, and expounded in his notes the theory that poetry should consist of word-painting. He had great facility of language, but the effort to give an interest to scientific

didacticism in verse by elaborate rhetoric and forced personification was naturally a failure. Darwin would not have shrunk from Coleridge's favourite phrase, "Inoculation, heavenly maid." Yet it is remarkable that Darwin's bad poetry everywhere shows a powerful mind." . . The permanent interest in his writings depends upon his exposition of the form of evolutionism afterwards expounded by Lamarck. He caught a glimpse of many observations and principles, afterwards turned to account by his grandson, Charles Darwin; but though a great observer and an acute thinker, he missed the characteristic doctrine which made the success of his grandson's scheme.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1888, Dictionary of National Biography.

This character is well contrived to purge the selfish and malignant passions, by exhibiting the hideous effect of their unrestrained indulgence.-GREEN, THOMAS, 1810, Diary of a Lover of Literature.

I now leave "Childe Harold" to live his day, such as he is; it had been more agreeable, and certainly more easy, to have drawn an amiable character. It had been easy to varnish over his faults, to make him do more and express less; but he never was intended as an example, further than to show, that early perversion of mind and morals leads to satiety of past pleasures and disappointment in new ones, and that even the beauties of nature, and the

These include two other novels, "Medical Moore died at Richmond.—PATRICK

stimulus of travel (except ambition, the most powerful of all excitements) are lost on a soul so constituted, or rather misdirected. Had I proceeded with the poem, this character would have deepened as he drew to the close; for the outline which I once meant to fill up for him was, with some exceptions, the sketch of a modern Timon, perhaps a poetical Zeluco.—BYRON, LORD, 1813, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Addition to the Preface.

Dr. Moore, the father of the hero of Corunna, with good narrative power, some sly humour, and much observation of character, would have been, in our day, a writer of the Peacock family. Nevertheless, to one who is accustomed to our style of things, it is comic to read the dialogue of a jealous husband, a suspected wife, a faithless maid-servant, a tool of a nurse, a wrong-headed pomposity of a priest, and a sensible physician, all talking Dr. Moore through their masks. Certainly an Irish soldier does say by Jasus, and a cockney footman this here and that there; and this and the like is all the painting of characters which is effected out of the mouths of the bearers by a narrator of great

power. I suspect that some novelists repressed their power under a rule that a narrative should narrate, and that the dramatic should be confined to the drama. -DE MORGAN, AUGUSTUS, 1872, A Budget of Paradoxes, p. 113.

His novel "Zeluco" (published in 1789) produced a powerful impression at the time, and indirectly, through the poetry of Byron, has left an abiding mark on literature. The novel would in these days be called a psychological novel; it is a close analysis of the motives of a headstrong, passionate, thoroughly selfish and unprincipled profligate. It is full of incident, and the analysis is never prolonged into tedious reflections, nor suffered to

intercept the progress of the story, while the main plot is diversified with many interesting episodes. The character took a great hold of Byron's imagination, and probably influenced his life in some of its many moods, as well as his poetry. It is not too much to say that the common opinion that Byron intended "Childe Harold" as a reflection of himself cannot be cleared of its large mixture of falsehood with a study of Moore's "Zeluco." Byron said that he intended the Childe to be "a poetical Zeluco," and the most striking features of the portrait were undoubtedly taken from

that character. At the same time it is obvious to everybody acquainted with Moore's novel and Byron's life that the moody and impressionable poet often adopted the character of Zeluco, fancied himself and felt himself to be a Zeluco, although he was at heart a very different BAYNES, THOMAS SPENCER, ed., 1884, Encyclopædia Brittanica, vol. XVI, p. 830.

man.

Owing to the praise bestowed on it by Mrs. Barbauld, has been far too generally accepted as one of the most notable of eighteenth-century novels. Zeluco, the Byronic villain, and Laura, his amiable and suffering wife, are highly conventional types of evil and of good.-RALEIGH, WALTER, 1894, The English Novel, p. 193. The book, besides the unlucky drawback that almost all its interest lies in the latter part, has for hero a sort of lifeless monster of wickedness, who is quite as uninteresting as a faultless one and shows little veracity of character except in the minor personages and episodes. In these, and indeed throughout Moore's work,

there is a curious mixture of convention with extreme shrewdness, of somewhat commonplace expression with a remarkably pregnant and humorous conception. But he lacks concentration and finish, and is therefore never likely to be much read again as a whole.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 28.

GENERAL

Every reader of extracts from the writings of Dr. Moore must feel a strong desire to become more intimately acquainted with an author so conversant with men and manners and so eminent for the benevolence of his heart and the purity of his morals, and thus be irresistibly induced to purchase all his works and place them in his library by the side of Johnson, Fielding, and Smollett.-PREVOST, F., AND BLAGDON, F., 1803, Mooriana.

He is characterised by profound knowledge of the world, admirable good sense, intimate acquaintance with human nature, a lively imagination, a rich vein of original humour, and an incomparable power of representing life and manners with discrimination, force, and delicacy.-ANDERSON, ROBERT, 1820, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of John Moore, p. 49.

As an author, Dr. Moore was more distinguished by the range of his information than by its accuracy or extent upon any particular subject, and his writings did not owe their celebrity to any great depth or even originality of thought. As a novelist he showed no extraordinary felicity in the department of invention, no great power of diversifying his characters, or ease in conducting his narrative. The main quality of his works is that particular species of sardonic wit, with which they are indeed perhaps profusely tinctured, but which frequently confers a grace and poignancy on the general strain of good sense and judicious observation that pervades the whole of them.-CARLYLE, THOMAS, 1820-23, Edinburgh Encyclopædia, Montaigne and other Essays, p. 44.

The popularity of the work ["View of Society"] was mainly owing to its amusing sketches, to the many good stories which it contains, and to the lively and animated style in which the whole is written.HILLARD, GEORGE STILLMAN, 1853, Six Months in Italy.