From The Quarterly Review.

there is no room here for pleading in excuse that while the bereavement is recent, and the sense of loss bitter, it is difficult to restrict the volume in which affectionate admiration loves to pour itself forth. The lapse of seventeen years was surely ample enough to allow the cooler judgment to control the effusiveness of the heart.

The pictorial illustrations with which the letter-press is enlivened are significant of the scale on which the work is constructed. Besides four portraits or sketches of the subject of the memoir, we find one of his father, another of John Dawson, the remarkable old surgeon

SEDGWICK'S LIFE AND LETTERS.* THIS is, in several ways, a very interesting and useful memorial of a remarkable man; but it might, we venture to say, have been doubled in interest, and more than doubled in utility, if it had been halved in length. No one would object to a couple of volumes or even more being dedicated to a biographical portraiture, when the subject has stood high above the mass of mankind, a king of thought or action by whom new fields of knowledge have been opened, new conditions of society inaugurated, or the course of the world permanently changed. But until human life shall be lengthened, or a con- mathematician with whom he read for a siderable portion of its crowded interests eliminated, two huge volumes, containing nearly twelve hundred pages, must be pronounced inordinate for the record of even the foremost of the lower rank whether of thinkers or workers, however useful they may have been in their generation, or large the troop of friends in whose affections their departure has left a vacant place. Had the old Hebrew "Ecclesiastes," or the writer of his epilogue, lived in this day of monster biographies, it may be easily conjectured that his complaint of the numerousness of books would have been supplemented by a sarcastic growl at their bulk. All parties suffer from this undue prolixity of literary commemoration. The quality of the volumes is deteriorated, their circulation contracted, the reader of them bored; while the object of the cult himself, instead of being presented in clear and sharp outline which stamps itself on the memory, becomes attenuated into a confused and washy image, indistinctly discerned and readily forgotten.

In the case before us, the mischief may be partly due to the fact that the work is the joint production of two authors, one of whom undertook the biography proper, and the other the science; in practical independence of each other, we should guess, and light-hearted irresponsibility for the resulting bulkiness. At any rate

The Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick. By J.

Willis Clark and T. McKenny Hughes. 2 vols.

don, 1890.

Lon

few months before entering Cambridge, and a third of Dr. Woodward, the founder of the geological professorship of which Sedgwick was the seventh tenant. Then we have two views of the street of his native place, the little town of Dent, and another of the vicarage in which he was born, a drawing of the farmhouse in which he lodged while he was a boy at Sedbergh school, a sketch of the old doorway of the school, a view of the house at Norwich occupied by him when in residence as canon of the cathedral, and another of a fountain erected to his memory at his birthplace. All this may possibly afford gratification to leisurely readers with whom time is no object, but it can scarcely be called business. Still more flagrant is the waste of room caused by prefacing the biography with a chapter of forty-four pages devoted to the geography, history, and social characteristics of the vale of Dent; and by taking occasion of Sedgwick's election to the Woodwardian professorship to fill another long chapter with notices of its founder, and of the first six occupants of the chair. One may be thankful that a line has been drawn somewhere in the range of possible topics, and that the record of Sedgwick's election on the foundation of Trinity has not been expanded into a history of the great college, with notices of its royal founder. Speaking more generally, we should say that the letters selected for publication, charming as many of them are beyond all other contents of the work, are twice as

many as are needed to exhibit the writer's | Yet what more cynical than the language personality and character; and that a of his early manhood about the tenderest great deal of space besides is needlessly of all relations! To his most intimate taken up by trivial details of geological friend, William Ainger, afterwards princitours, which really afford neither instruc- pal of St. Bees, and canon of Chester, he tion nor entertainment. Occasionally, too, writes at the age of twenty-three: “ Mara more severe reticence would have been riage may be well enough when a man is desirable about unedifying and long-buried on his last legs, but you may depend on it contentions, notably the quarrel with Sir that to be linked to a wife is to be linked Roderick Murchison, and the war of pam- to misery. From the horrid state of matphlets with Dr. French, the master of rimony I hope long to he delivered ;" and Jesus College. The account given of the three years later, he rejoices that a friend latter incident has, we notice, elicited, and with whom he is staying "is not torwe fear with reason, an indignant protest mented by that bane of domestic happifrom one of Dr. French's representatives. ness, a wife." Yet, if ever a man revelled Having thus despatched the least grate- in female society, especially that of lively ful portion of our critical task, from which damsels, finding in it a stimulus which as wielding for the nonce the bâton of the quickened his faculties and brightened literary police we have not thought it right his life, it was Sedgwick in his maturer to shrink, we pass on with relief to the years. Nor, by his own confession, was more pleasing part of our office. While even his earlier life free from affairs of endeavoring to arrive at an estimate of the heart. In a letter written in his sevenSedgwick's character and achievement, it tieth year, giving an account of a visit to must be borne in mind that his bringing Matlock in 1818, when he was thirtyup was an entirely rude and rustic one, three, he says: "That year I was a dancamong the hardy dalesmen of the north- ing-man, and I fell three-quarters in love, west corner of Yorkshire where it juts but as you know did not put my head into Westmoreland, whose warm blood, through love's noose." Again, in a playful simplicity of character, and sturdy fea- letter to one of his young female confesstures of both mind and body were his best ors three years earlier, he parenthetically inheritance. He tells us himself, "I acknowledges, "I have all my life been never saw London till I was a fellow of thought like Romeo, and, like him, I have Trinity College, after six years of univer- been sadly crossed in love." Not till late sity residence." Here may be found, it in life did he quite renounce the prospect seems, the explanation of the singularly of marriage, and even then with an evident dull and barren record of his youth and pang, as we learn from a letter written early manhood, during which he was wear when he was sixty: "I have now given up ing off his awkward rusticity and igno- all thoughts of marriage, and it is high rance of the world, and slowly growing time, is it not? But, do you know, it is a into familiarity with a more advanced cul- very hard thing for a man to give up, even ture and thought. In fact, the only point at my own time of life." In the whimsical of interest presented by this portion of manner which was characteristic of him, his life is the piquant contrast between he laid at the door of his sponsors his his strong domestic affections, and his doom to die unmarried. "Both my godprofessed contempt, perhaps in part af- fathers," he used to say, 'are old bachfected, for matrimony. What could be elors, and my godmother (God be with tenderer than his language about his her!) is as arrant an old maid as ever mother! "The word 'mother' has a whispered scandal round a tea-table. My charm in its sound, and there was a blank own destinies were therefore fixed at the in the face of nature, and a void in my font, and I already feel myself fast sinking heart, when I ceased to have one. in the mire of celibacy." But the lot was The memory of my dear mother and my of his own choosing. If till middle life dear old father throws a heavenly light want of pecuniary means was an insurover all the passages of my early life." mountable hindrance, before he had com

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pleted his half-century the obstacle was | fessor Sedgwick, and now we shall have a
removed by the offer from Lord Brougham wedding!" I am looked on as Dan Cupid's
of a valuable chancellor's living. Com- whipper-in and Hymen's torchbearer. A fool-
menting on his refusal of this for the sake may be a wit's whetstone (better a whetstone
of his fellowship and geological chair, his than nothing), and an old bachelor, if he do
biographer remarks: "Sedgwick made a
nothing else, may warn by his example, and
fatal mistake when he cut himself off irrev- teach men not to do as he has done, but to
listen to reason, and learn how to love wisely
ocably from marriage. . . . In the lone before the soul is withered in a withered body.
liness which is inseparable from old age
within the precincts of a college, he not
seldom dwelt upon what might beer, had

he been blest with a wife and children."

ness.

Of the truth of this remark the published
correspondence offers frequent confirma-
tion. For instance, at fifty-eight he pa-
thetically writes: "I have been a bad
economist of my happiness; I am wither-
ing on the ground without fruit or blos-
som, and am not permitted to live over
again in the joys of the young who are
near and dear to me." And again, four
years later: "I am certain that I have not
been a good economist of my own happi-
But I am never in good spirits for
a day or two after my return from college.
'Tis after all but a cold home." In less
direct ways also the sense of having
missed a blessing which might have been
his for the asking betrays itself more or
less clearly. It may be detected in his
delight in romantic love-affairs, and in the
weddings of his young friends, and per-
haps in the relish with which he promises
Dr. and Mrs. Somerville to rig up for
them in college "a regular four-posted
matrimonial bed a thing utterly out of
our regular monastic system." So also in
his enthusiastic admiration for the great
Swedish singer: "Jenny Lind has been
here . . . Were it not a sin, I should envy
the man who is going to marry her. It
once or twice struck me how charming it
would be to have her at one's side and to

Another thing to be taken into account, when the limitation or partial failure of Sedgwick's career, in comparison with his great abilities, is to be explained, is the

almost continuous ill-health to which he was subject from his early manhood. "From 1813 to his death," says his biographer, "he could never count on robust health for even a single day." Undoubtedly the scantiness of his achievement as a whole was due, in a considerable degree, to a defect in his native temperament, which with all its energy and emotional

force lacked steadfastness and concentra

tion, and never allowed him to be thoroughly loyal to his vocation as a man of science. But the effect of constitutional weakness of purpose, in impairing and limiting his work, was certainly aggravated to a serious extent by the continual recurrence of fits of physical infirmity, which were almost sure to interrupt and postpone the business in hand, whenever it made a call on his powers for peculiar application and sustained self-restraint. This may fairly be pleaded in extenuation of the somewhat severe judgment passed upon him by his biographer when describing the position in which Sedgwick found himself on his election to the geo| logical chair:

Most men in the position which Sedgwick now held, with an annual course of lectures to deliver, the value of which had received a

teach her English. Is it not said that old substantial acknowledgment from the Uni-
men dream dreams?" One more passage almost boundless field of geology before him,
versity a Museum to maintain- and the
must be added, for the sake of illustrating
a terra incognita of which he had just com-
the mixture of fun and pathos, which was menced the exploration — would have devoted
habitual with him. Informing a corre- themselves to their new duties with a single-
spondent that he had returned to Norwichness of purpose which would have excluded
to assist at the marriage of the bishop's
niece, he goes on:-

Whenever I am seen in Norwich all the lasses cry out with ecstasy, "There's Pro

most other interests. But this was what Sedgwick never could bring himself to do. He had no intellectual self-control; he could never shut his eyes and ears to what was going on around him; and we shall continually find

his geological work laid aside for long inter- | following passage: "I lost my health by vals, because he had allowed himself to be hard reading - by the festive habits of the carried away by something foreign to what university and for five years I was in a ought to have been the real purpose of his condition often of wretchedness. Caution life-something which others less occupied the young men." It must not be inferred than himself would have done as well [as], or from this frank confession that he was better than he did. . . The consequences may be easily imagined. Geological memoever given to any excess beyond what was randa which ought to have been arranged customary in those days of rude convivwhen the subject was fresh in his mind were iality; indeed, for the greater part of his laid aside specimens remained for months-long life he was exceptionally temperate. sometimes for years — undetermined, or even not unpacked; promised papers were not finished perhaps not begun.

To the same effect was the opinion which his brother geologist, but on a higher level of science, expressed after Sedgwick had explained to him his refusal of the chancellor's living, and his resolve to hold on to geology till he had brought out a volume on the primary rocks – 46 fifteen book," he said, "with which I have been pregnant for seven or eight years:

- a

years

The mischief was begun early, in his native place where, as his biographer tells us, "from the young men of his own age, whose ideas of amusement were confined to sport, wakes, and drinking-bouts, he could have learnt nothing but tastes and customs more honored in the breach than the observance." Unfortunately the tone of society at Cambridge, during the first of the century, was scarcely such as to bring the incautious youth under that discipline of self-restraint, which I know Sedgwick well enough [wrote Lyell, a few years later was imperiously forced in his diary] to feel sure that the work won't upon him by the break down of his health. be done in a year, nor perhaps in two; and How keen were his regrets may be seen then a living, etc., won't be just ready, and from the utterances of his declining he is growing older. He has not the appli- years. "What a comparative blank my cation necessary to make his splendid abilities | life has been! If I ever conceived a plan, tell in a work. Besides, every one leads him I rarely began it, or I left others to carry astray. A man should have some severity of it out." "With you," he once wrote to character, and be able to refuse invitations, Whewell, "supply and demand go toThe fact is that to become great in sci-gether in deeds, with me only in words. ence a man must be nearly as devoted as a Vox et præterea nihil should be

etc.

lawyer, and must have more than mere talent.

In his whimsical way Sedgwick pretended to ascribe his valetudinarian habit to circumstances attending his birth which were a favorite topic of his lighter moods. Here is the latest version of them, written to one of his young lady intimates in his eighty-sixth year:

my motto.' In compensation for physical infirmity Sedgwick's temperament was an elastic one, providing him with an inexhaustible fund of high spirits which found amusement everywhere, and made even his bodily pains a subject of grotesque description. Perhaps his letters during the last third of his life are too full of his ailments, but they are not the less entertain'Tis a damp wind that tortures the hygroing on that account. Now he is "as metrical skin I owe to an old hag of a mid- mellifluous as a frog;" then "my nose wife. I will let you into a secret! In the year 1785 I was introduced into this wicked, is quite indecent - my eyes are two living freezing, and fighting world by an aged mid- fountains of salt water; voice I have none wife, who wrapped my youthful person in a that is human, but I sometimes bark like hygrometrical envelope, which stuck so tightly an old toothless mastiff. I am little better to me that (with all my rubbing, scraping, than a barking automaton." He is torkicking, and plunging, for eighty-five long mented by influenza, but has his revenge years) I have never been able to shake it off. in telling a fair correspondent that "the Here it is ·creased and fretted a little - but influenza is worse than Circe's dose. It as close a fit as ever! turns a man, even a beautiful man like myself (for surely, my dear Kate, you might say of me in Milton's own words, 'Adam, the goodliest man of men since born '), into a slimy reptile." Gout prostrates him, and compels him to make colchicum his meat and drink for a month, till he is

We are on safer ground when we accept the more serious explanation given by him, in the way of warning, to the young men of his geological class at the close of his fortieth annual course of lectures, under the impression that he was taking a final leave of them, though in fact he continued to lecture for twelve years more. The notes for the occasion contain the

66

as stupid as an ill-fed jackass, and as cross as a cat with its foot in a trap." For a cough he is rubbed and reddened with a