Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, (From the Economy of Vegetation, Canto iv.) A description of the cassia plant, 'cinctured with gold,' committing its 'infant loves,' or seeds, to be borne by Ontario's floods and sea-currents to the coasts of Norway, naturally suggests Moses in his Nile cradle, as that does African slavery. Moses on the Nile and Slavery. So the sad mother at the noon of night, The salt tears mingling with the milk he sips; Waits on the reed-crowned brink with pious guile, And trusts the scaly monsters of the Nile. Erewhile majestic from his lone abode, Embassador of heaven, the Prophet trod; Wrenched the red scourge from proud oppression's hands, Ye band of senators! whose suffrage sways Hear him, ye senates! hear this truth sublime, He who allows oppression, shares the crime!' (From The Loves of the Plants, Canto iii.) The two halves of the poem have no very close connection; Part II. only justifies the general and special title of the book, and in Part I. the section of Canto iv. addressed to the sylphs; the first three cantos of Part I. (addressed to fire-spirits, gnomes or earth-spirits, and water-nymphs respectively) deal with the forces of nature in general, and specially with the formation of the world. The plan of the book thus allows Darwin to bring in any subject he likes-Lock-lomond by Moonlight,' Montgolfier's balloon, the pictures of Wright of Derby, compliments to Wedgwood and Brindley the canal-maker, and a really eloquent tribute to John Howard, the prisoners' friend. The following passage on the power of the steam-engine (written about 1780 in an invocation to the nymphs of fire, who are responsible for many chemical, electrical, and industrial inventions) goes beyond the achievements of M. Santos-Dumont and almost rivals in brief the visions of Mr H. G. Wells: Nymphs! you erewhile on simmering cauldrons play'd, Soon shall thy arm, Unconquered Steam! afar Darwin's parallels are sometimes both extravagant and gross; there is a constant throng of startling metaphors; and the descriptions are worked out with tiresome minuteness. A third part of the Botanic Garden was added in 1792; for the copyright of the whole he received £900. Darwin next published Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1794-96), partly written long before, a curious and original physiological prose treatise. Sympathising with his aim here to establish the physiological basis of mental phenomena, G. H. Lewes credits him with 'a profounder insight into psychology than any of his contemporaries and the majority of his successors.' Johannes Müller quotes and corrects him; and the Zoonomia directly influenced medical science by insisting on the (only recently recognised) importance of stimulants in fever, and on the rational treatment of the insane. In 1801 Darwin issued another philosophical disquisition, Phytologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening. He also wrote a short treatise on Female Education, intended for the instruction and assistance of part of his own family. He praised, practised, and preached teetotalism, and died of gout in his seventy-first year. Shortly after his death was published a poem, The Temple of Nature, which is even more didactic than the Botanic Garden, and more inverted in style and diction. The poetical reputation of Darwin was as bright and transient as the blooming of his plants and flowers. Cowper said his verse was as 'strong' as it was 'learned and sweet.' He really exercised an influence which may be traced in the Pleasures of Hope and other poems of the closing century. His command of poetic diction, elaborate metaphors, and sonorous versification was well seconded by his curious and multifarious knowledge; but the effect of the whole was artificial. The Rosicrucian machinery of Pope gave scope for wit and satire in the delineation of human passions and pursuits; but who can sympathise with the loves and metamorphoses of the plants? Multitudinous metaphors are less trying to faith and patience than long-drawn-out and fantastic allegory such as this. But it seems generally admitted that it was an external accident that mainly blasted Darwin's fair fame. The personification of the plants and their 'pledging their nuptial vows' (not uncomplicated by polygamy and polyandry) gave a fatal opportunity to a parodist, and in the 'Loves of the Triangles' in George Canning's Anti-Jacobin (1799– 1801) was too obviously and mercilessly burlesqued. Friends and critics, from Miss Seward to Charles Darwin, agree that the sudden collapse of Darwin's poetic credit was due to the ingenuity and prodigious popularity of the burlesque. Horace Walpole in his letters repeatedly alludes with admiration to Dr Darwin's poetry, and writes thus in a letter of May 14, 1792: The 'Triumph of Flora,' beginning at the fifty-ninth line, is most beautifully and enchantingly imagined; and the twelve verses that by miracle describe and compre hend the creation of the universe out of chaos, are in my opinion the most sublime passages in any author, or in any of the few languages with which I am acquainted. There are a thousand other verses most charming, or indeed all are so, crowded with most poetic imagery, gorgeous epithets and style: and yet these four cantos do not please me equally with the Loves of the Plants. The 'Triumph of Flora' begins with the line 'She comes! the goddess!' in the passage quoted below; the other twelve verses commended are last in the same extract, from 'Let there be light' on. Invocation to the Goddess of Botany. O'er the still dawn thy placid smile effuse, She comes! the goddess! through the whispering air, When love divine, with brooding wings unfurled, Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, (From exordium of the Economy of Vegetation.) The thirty-eight lines that immediately precede this passage are almost verbatim Miss Seward's; and in this extract the eight lines from 'Thus spoke' are also hers. The rest is Darwin's. Destruction of Senacherib's Army by a From Ashur's vales when proud Senacherib trod, Raised his pale hands, and breathed his pausing sighs, Gave the soft south with poisonous breath to blow, (From the Economy of Vegetation, Canto iv.) Pleased with the distant roar, with quicker tread And one fair girl amid the loud alarm Oh spare, ye war-hounds, spare their tender age; Quick through the murmuring gloom his footsteps tread, Song to May. Born in yon blaze of orient sky, For thee the fragrant zephyrs blow, And brighter blossoms gem the bower. Light graces dressed in flowery wreaths And hail thee Goddess of the spring! (From The Loves of the Plants, Canto ii.) Song to Echo. Sweet Echo! sleeps thy vocal shell, And if, like me, some love-lorn maid (From The Loves of the Plants, Canto iv.) Naturally it is 'fair Avena' (i.e. oats) that brings the poet to the banks of Tweed. If Darwin's poetic glories have been allowed to rest in oblivion, full justice has of late been done to his singular scientific and speculative insight. Dr Ernst Krause in his work on the subject compares him thus with his famous grandson ; 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 arrangements 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 found 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. The evidence of this I shall adduce hereafter. The unusual circumstance that a grandfather should be the intellectual precursor of his grandson in questions which nowadays more than any others move the minds of men, must of itself suffice to excite the liveliest interest. But at the same time it must be pointed out that in this fact we have not the smallest ground for depreciating the labours of the man who has shed a new lustre upon the name of his grandfather. It is one thing to establish hypotheses and theories out of the fullness of one's fancy, even when supported by a very considerable knowledge of nature, and another to demonstrate them by an enormous number of facts, and carry them to such a degree of probability as to satisfy those most capable of judging. Dr Erasmus Darwin could not satisfy his contemporaries with his physio-philosophical ideas; he was a century ahead of them, and was in consequence obliged to put up with seeing people shrug their shoulders when they spoke of his wild and eccentric fancies, and the expression 'Darwinising' (as employed, for example, by the poet Coleridge when writing on Stillingfleet) was accepted in England nearly as the antithesis of sober biological investigation. Darwin had the misfortune to be one of the many victims of the 'practical' and mischievous jokes of George Steevens the Shakespearean commentator. In the fourth canto of the Loves of the Plants Darwin gives rather an extravagant version of the upas-tree superstition, and prints as pièce justificative a long article in the London Magazine for 1783, said to be from the Dutch of a physician resident in Java, but subsequently discovered to be a pure fabrication by Steevens. See Krause's essay on Darwin's scientific works, translated by Dallas, and the prefatory Life by Charles Darwin (1879; 2nd ed. 1887). The earliest Life was that by Miss Seward. Anna Seward (1747-1809), born at Eyam rectory, Derbyshire, was the daughter of the Rev. Thomas Seward, from 1754 canon-residentiary of Lichfield, who, himself a poet, was one of the editors of Beaumont and Fletcher. She was early trained to a taste for poetry, and before she was nine could repeat the first three books of Paradise Lost. Her own earliest verses were elegiac poems -on Captain Cook, Garrick, Major André, and others-which, spite of their artificial and inflated style, attained some measure of celebrity. Darwin complimented her as 'the inventress of epic elegy ;' Johnson highly praised some of her things; and she was known by the name of the Swan of Lichfield. Miss Mitford, less complimentary, called her 'a sort of Dr Darwin in petticoats;' but she had more in common with Hayley and Gifford's other victims in the Baviad. A poetical novel, Louisa (1782), passed through several editions. Her Memoir of Dr Darwin appeared in 1804 After bandying compliments with the poets of one generation, Miss Seward in the next engaged Sir Walter Scott in a literary correspondence, and bequeathed to him for publication three volumes of her poetry, which he issued, with a memoir, in 1810-not without misgivings. At the same time she left her correspondence to Constable, who published the letters from 1784 and 1807 (6 vols. 1811). Both collections were unsuccessful. The applauses of Miss Seward's early admirers were only calculated to excite ridicule, and the vanity and affectation which were her besetting sins destroyed alike her poetry and her prose. Some of her letters, however, are written with spirit and discrimination; and Macaulay, writing to his sister Hannah, reported, 'The books which I had sent to the binder are come, and Miss Seward's letters are in a condition to bear twenty more reperusals.' Hannah More (1745-1833), adopting fiction as a means of conveying religious instruction, can scarcely be said to have been ever 'free of the corporation' of novelists; nor would she perhaps have cared to owe her distinction solely to her connection with so motley and various a band. She withdrew from the fascinations of London society, the theatres and opera, in obedience to what she conceived to be the call of duty, and, latterly at any rate, much of contemporary literature became taboo to her. This lovable woman was the fourth of the five daughters of Jacob More, who taught a school in the Gloucestershire village of Stapleton (now absorbed in Bristol), where Hannah was born. At twelve she was sent to a boardingschool just started by her eldest sister in Bristol. In 1773 she published a pastoral drama, The Search after Happiness, which by 1796 had reached an eleventh edition; in 1774 she brought out a tragedy, The Inflexible Captive. In 1773 or 1774 she made her entrance into the society of London, and was domesticated with Garrick, who proved one of her kindest and steadiest friends. She was received with favour by Johnson, Reynolds, Burke, and their set. In 1777 Garrick brought out her tragedy of Percy at Drury Lane, where it had a run of twenty-one nights; the theatrical profits amounted to £600, and for the copyright of the play she got £150 more. She had already published two legendary poems, Sir Eldred of the Bower and The Bleeding Rock; and in 1779 her third and last tragedy, The Fatal Falsehood, was acted, but only for three nights. At this time she lost her friend Garrick by death. In 1782 appeared a volume of Sacred Dramas, with a poem, Sensibility. All her works were successful, and Johnson, with a friend's partiality, declared she was 'the most powerful versificatrix in the English language.' Her poetry is now forgotten; but Percy has so many good points that one cannot help thinking the venerable Mrs Hannah More might have been remembered as a playwright had she settled down seriously to dramatic work. In 1786 she issued another volume of verse, Florio, a Tale for Fine Gentlemen and Fine Ladies; and The Bas Bleu, or Conversation. The latter which Johnson complimented as 'a great performance' - was an elaborate eulogy on the Bas Bleu Club, a literary assembly that met at Mrs Montagu's (see page 418). About this time Hannah resolved to devote her abundant good sense and keen observation exclusively to high objects. The gay life of the fashionable world had lost its charms, and, having published her Bas Bleu, she retired to the small cottage of Cowslip Green in Blaydon parish in Somerset. Her first prose publication was Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788), and, published anonymously, was by Cowper assumed to be the production of one of the most scholarly and well-born men of the time, presumably Wilberforce. This was followed in 1791 by an Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World. As a means of counteracting the political tracts and exertions of Jacobins and levellers, 'Mrs' More (for so she came, in the fashion of the day, to be styled) in 1795-98 wrote a number of tales, published monthly under the title of The Cheap Repository, which attained to a sale of about a million each number; of these the best-known was The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. With the same object, she published a volume on Village Politics. Her other principal works were Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799); Hints towards forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805; written at the queen's request for behoof of the Princess Charlotte); Calebs in Search of a Wife (1809); Practical Piety (1811); Christian Morals (1812); Essay on the Character and Writings of St Paul (1815); and Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign and Domestic, with Reflections on Prayer (1819). Her collected works (1830) fill eleven volumes octavo. Of Calebs ten editions were sold in one year. The tale has a fine vein of delicate irony and sarcasm, and some of the characters are admirably drawn, but the didactic aim and tone repel ordinary novel-readers; the story was not unfairly called 'a dramatic sermon.' The popularity of her books enabled her to live in ease, and to dispense charities generously. Her sisters also secured a competency, and they all lived together at Barley Wood, a house in the neighbouring parish of Wrington, Locke's birthplace, whither Hannah moved in 1802. From the day that the school was given up, the existence of the whole sisterhood appears to have flowed on in one uniform current of peace and contentment, diversified only by new appearances of Hannah as an authoress, and the ups and downs which she and the others met with in the prosecution of a most brave and human experiment—namely, their zealous effort to extend the blessings of education and religion among the inhabitants of certain villages situated in the wild Cheddar district some ten miles from their abode, who, from a concurrence of unhappy local and temporary circumstances, had been left in a state of ignorance hardly conceivable at the present day.' And their labours so prospered that ere long the sisterhood had the pleasure of witnessing a yearly festival celebrated on the hills of Cheddar, where above a thousand children, with the members of women's industrial clubs-also established by them-after attending church service, were regaled at the expense of their benefactors. In Hannah's latter days there was perhaps a tincture of supererogatory severity in her religious views. But her unfeigned sincerity, her exertions to instruct miners and cottagers, and the untiring zeal with which she laboured, even amidst severe bodily infirmities, to spread sound principles and intellectual culture from palace to cottage, entitle her to rank amidst |