companied it. The sketch of the quarry is very explicit, and conveys a good idea of the stratification; and the sketch of the fossil, I have no doubt, is as accurate as a person unacquainted with comparative anatomy would be able to execute. Unfortunately it is not sufficiently determined to enable me to form a correct notion of the original; but if you had sent me one of the vertebræ I could have at once decided. The extremities of your socalled thigh bones are the parts which would afford information as to whether they are true thigh or leg bones, or paddle bones. Mr. Bensted (as the writer has ascertained from private memoranda) was at this time carefully detaching the various parts of this interesting fossil from its stony matrix. That was a work of great care and anxious labor, rendered doubly so at first from it becoming evident that an important portion of the skeleton was wanting. Fortunately the discoverer had just in time ascertained that the quarrymen had carted off to the barges at the wharf some considerable fragments of rock before he had been told of the original find. The boat was ready to leave Maidstone on its voyage to London, but the owner at once gave directions that the cargo should be carefully unloaded, and the missing fragments were recognized and carefully put together (with the other portions previously collected) under Mr. Bensted's vigilant supervision. He then communicated the result to other friends, and the great importance and value of the discovery was soon noised abroad. The extracts here given from letters which Mr. Bensted received at this time are valuable as showing the keen public interest felt in geology at that early date in the modern history of the science. From George Fairholme, dated Ramsgate, March 15, 1834: I feel greatly obliged for your clear and excellent reply to my queries respecting the fossil remains found in your quarry, and I hope to come over to Maidstone next week in order to see them. I shall probably be accompanied by a friend well skilled in comparative anatomy, by whose assistance we may perhaps be able to determine, if not what they do, at least what they do not belong to. We shall hope to come by the Canterbury coach, if nothing intervene to prevent us. This visit seems to have been paid, * This writer was of the ultra-conservative section amongst the geologists of this reign. His chief work, published in 1837, was entitled "New and Conclusive Physical Demonstration of the Fact and Period of the I took every opportunity when in London last week to endeavor to discover the species of the fossil animal found in your quarry at Maidstone, but I have not been successful, owing to the want of corresponding parts of known fossils with which to compare it. Still, if I do not greatly mistake, it is the great Iguanodon of Tilgate Forest. But unless the teeth are found, or some part to lead to a conjecture as to the form of the head, the species of the Saurian reptile to which it belongs will not correctly be known. On the 11th June he writes again, and the drift of some of his observations will readily be perceived :— I was fully prepared to find that the animal was the Iguanodon, and have already despatched short notices of it to the editors (Sir D. Brewster and others) of the London and have no doubt Mr. Mantell will give a more Edinburgh Philosophical Magazines; but I full detail of the particulars to the Geological Society. There are two points in your discovery which to me are highly interesting; the one is that the formations in the quarry are decidedly marine, and not fluviatile as they have sometimes been called. The ammonites are suffisea-shells of the limestone put it beyond quescient to prove this; but the shark's teeth and tion, notwithstanding the fossil wood which you mentioned to me you had occasionally found. The second is that we have decided proof of the rapidity with which the alternate sand and limestone beds must have been deposited, in the fact of the long femur-bone projecting out of the one into the looser materials of the other. When these materials were all softthat is, in the one case mud, and in the other of this animal must have been merely held sand-the bones of the decomposing carcase together by strong integuments, yet still in a movable condition. The long femur, therefore, being in a vertical position as regards the stratification, implies a very rapid deposition of both mud and the sandbeds; and if these two strata were deposited rapidly we must come to the same conclusion with regard to the other similar strata in your quarry. This is contrary to the common opinion of geologists, who would not hesitate in looking at those beds to conclude that each was the result of a considerable portion of time. Now, however, we know that the whole was formed quickly and by one marine action, so that the body of this Iguanodon must have floated on the waves length it sank into the sea, and the damaged in a swollen and corrupted condition until at carcase was covered up by rapid decomposition from muddy water. On the 4th of June, 1834, Dr. Mantell Mosaic Deluge." Notice the passages underlined in reached Maidstone from Brighton, a long day's journey in those days, and he spent the following letters. most of the next day in examining the newly found Saurian in a shed in Mr. Bensted's garden, specially erected by him to screen his operations on the stony skeleton of the Iguanodon from prying eyes. A few days after this visit the Sussex geologist writes to Mr. Bensted: Since my return I have been too much engaged to think over your very interesting specimen as I could wish; and though I have seen it, yet I wish that you were not so far off, so that I could have the opportunity of frequently inspecting it. I am also anxious that you should see the manner in which my specimens are preserved and cleaned out before you go on with your operations, as you will see how the bones you may meet with in future examinations may best be rendered durable. If you resolve to come, pray bring with you the piece that contains the other claw bone to compare it with some I have, for there is really no certainty except in actual comparison. Let me know a day or two before you come and I shall be most happy to show you all the hospitality in my power. Did the Maidstone editor notice your fossil in his paper? The only local notice of this remarkable discovery made by Mr. Bensted, which had already attracted the attention of many scientists, including Owen, De la Beche, Fitton, Prestwich, and Lyell, was in the shape of a short letter by the discoverer to the principal Maidstone journal, the Kentish Chronicle, published 1st July, but on which no comment at all was attempted by the editor! | task, for it has been very fatiguing, and more than once I have gone to bed at five in the morning almost tired of my labor. Incidentally we have here a proof that Mantell well deserved the term "indefatigable" applied to him by Hopkins. But it is evident that his correspondent at Maidstone was equally worthy of the same commendation, for Bensted continued to furnish Dr. Mantell with objects of geological interest which that enthusiastic man made time to investigate. But these labors of love in their turn must have entailed ceaseless inroads on the physician's scanty leisure, in maintaining the large Correspondence of which these letters are doubtless but a very small fraction. The whole of Dr. Mantell's collection, including the Iguanodon, is now in the natural history department of the British Museum at South Kensington. O. J. VIGNOLES. From Macmillan's Magazine. THE CENTENARY OF BOSWELL. ON the sixteenth day of May, 1791, was given to the world a work that was not only admirable in itself, but which marks the beginning of a new era in the art of the biographer. For Boswell has stripped torn off its full-bottomed wig, its robes, biography of its formal solemnity and has and its furred gowns, beneath which all was hidden. He has done for it the same great Mr. Bensted seems to have visited Dr. service which nearly fifty years earlier his Mantell's museum at Brighton, and prob- friend Garrick had done for the stage. ably was impressed with the conviction Richard Cumberland, the play-writer, has that his important fossil would find its described for us the scene which he witmost appropriate home in that collection. nessed one night at Drury Lane Theatre, At any rate, in July he had agreed to let when from the front row of the gallery he, Mantell have the specimen for £10, and a young Westminster scholar, saw the old we see by some extracts of letters that its order and the new meet in opposition. new owner had received it in due course," Upon the rising of the curtain Quin prewhich in those days of slow locomotion meant something very different from what we understand by that expression. Brighton, 10th Sept., 1834. I have been hard at work on the specimen, and have now put it together and placed it in my museum. We have discovered no other traces of teeth, nor even the impressions of one. There are no dermal or skin bones, and the toe bones you cleared are not ungular like those of the Hyleosaurus; but they are either finger or toe bones, very slender, and fourteen inches long. [Sketch given in original.] My excavations have also changed the characters of some of the other bones. I can find but one tibia and no fibula. In the course of a fortnight I hope to have finished my laborious sented himself in a green velvet coat embroidered down the seams, an enormous full-bottomed periwig, rolled stockings, and high-heeled, square-toed shoes. With very little variation of cadence, and in a deep, full tone, accompanied by a sawing kind of action, which had more of the senate than of the stage in it, he rolled out his heroics with an air of dignified indifference that seemed to disdain the plaudits that were bestowed upon him. . . But when after long and eager expectation I first beheld little Garrick, then young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stageheavens! what a transition! - it seemed as if a whole century had been stept over | he says, enlarging upon the excellent plan in the transition of a single scene. The of Mr. Mason in his memoirs of Gray. new order did not at once gain the day; that night Quin was more loudly clapped than Garrick. So the new method of biography was not at once triumphant. Dr. Parr swelled with pride at the very thought of his own life of Johnson, had he ever written it. "I once intended," he said, "to write Johnson's life; and I had read through three shelves of books to prepare myself for it. It would have been the third most learned work that has ever yet appeared. It would have come next to Bentley on the Epistles of Phalaris, and Salmasius on the Hellenistic language. Mine should have been not the droppings of Johnson's lips, but the history of his mind." It would have been so uniform in its stately ponderosity, that even the famous stamp would most certainly have been passed over in silence, which he gave that evening when he argued with Johnson about the liberty of the press. "Whilst Johnson was arguing, I observed that he stamped. Upon this I stamped. Dr. Johnson said, 'Why did you stamp, Dr. Parr?' I replied, Because you stamped; and I was resolved not to give you the advantage even of a stamp in the argument.' It would have added one, or perhaps two more, to that pile of eight thick volumes in which Parr's learning has been buried past all hopes of a resurrection by the piety of his friend and executor. Horace Walpole had been struck with the novelty of Mason's method. "You have fixed," he said, "the method of biography, and whoever will write a life well must imitate you." Boswell did imitate him as he acknowledges, when, instead of "melting down his materials into one mass, and constantly speaking in his own person,' he followed "the chronological series of Johnson's life," and introduced year by year his minutes or letters. But he went far beyond him, not only by the conversations which are the crowning glory of his work, but by the dramatic art with which in a few touches he sketches a character or brings before us a scene. Mason wrote dramas, but he knew nothing of dramatic biography. In fact it is not to him but to Boswell that we justly look as the founder of the new school. No one reads Mason, every one reads Boswell. He had mastered that secret which Lord Chancellor Thurlow asked him for, when he had finished reading the " Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides." "Could you," he said, "give a rule how to write a book that a man must read?" If he could not give the rule, at all events he knew how to work by it himself. He was not one of those careless geniuses who strike out a great thing at a single heat. He had long thought over his method. His 'prentice hand he had tried in his "Tour to Corsica," and his journeyman's hand in his "Tour to the Hebrides." In both cases the workman was mocked, and his work But what Parr had planned for Johnson, other writers did for their heroes. Biog-manship admired, or at least enjoyed. raphy was still, for a brief time, to keep When he came to his magnum opus, as its wonted state, and flow with majestic he delighted to call it, the immortal" Life," train. Dugald Stewart, a man whose name he had no doubt about the method he was received with as much respect as Bos- should pursue. More than three years well's was with ridicule, in spite of the before it was published he wrote to his new example so lately set him by a brother friend Temple: "I am absolutely certain Scot, treated Adam Smith, Robertson, and that my mode of biography, which gives Reid with the old-fashioned solemnity, not only a history of Johnson's visible and instead of raising to them a memorial progress through the world, and of his buried them beneath a monument. In publications, but a view of his mind in many other lives dull dignity solemnly struggled on, but struggled in vain. Henceforth a man's biography was no longer to be like one of Kneller's por. traits, and do for anybody. A new school sprang into existence, but though many skilful writers have since worked in it, Boswell remains the head as well as the founder. Boswell has not only, as he boasted, Johnsonized the land, but he has Boswellized the biographers. He does not, it is true, claim for himself the merit of the invention of this new style. He is, his letters and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a life than any work that has ever yet appeared." Two years later he recounted the labor, the perplexity, the vexation he had endured in his long task, and continued: " Though I shall be uneasily sensible of its many deficiencies, it will certainly be to the world a very valu able and peculiar volume of biography, full of literary and characteristical anecdotes, told with authenticity and in a lively manner." He might have said of his book what Johnson said of the great we read, Boswell that we talk of. Strongly and deeply marked as was the character of the hero, nevertheless the biographer has set his mark so deeply, too, that it is his name that the work bears. Johnson, in language that has moved men to tears, has told how the dictionary of the English language was written "with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers; but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow." Gibbon in his stately prose has recounted the progress of his history, from the day when he "sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter," to that calm June night three-and-twenty years later, when between "the hours of It was with a proud boast that he brought his preface to a close. "I have," he said, "largely provided for the instruction and entertainment of mankind." A hundred years have passed by, and each year has added its silent witness to the reasonableness of his boast. Each thirteenth day of December, the anniversary of Johnson's death, the Club of Johnso nians still gather together and bear their testimony too. They have set up their shrine in that Fleet Street which Johnson loved so well, where the ear of fancy still seems at times to catch the echo of his heavy tread, of his hearty laugh, and of his strong, deep voice. But if he is the hero whom they celebrate with their wor-eleven and twelve I wrote the last line of ship, it is Boswell who is the real founder of their religion. It is he who wrote their sacred book. It was on Monday, May 16th, 1791, that the great work was given to the world. When a short while ago I discovered this fact in the bookseller's advertisement in a newspaper of the time, I saw at once that it was not by chance that the day of publication had been selected. The choice, no doubt, was due to that strain of sentiment which in an odd way ran through Boswell's character. The dedication to his account of Corsica bears the date of October 29th, and so does the preface to the third edition. It was his birthday. Next to his birthday, perhaps, he reckoned as the greatest festival in his calendar Monday the 16th of May, for it was on that day of the month, and that day of the week, that eight-and-twenty years earlier he had first met Johnson. These touches of sentiment he kept, it seems, to himself; certainly he did not make them public. Perhaps I am the first to discover them. Two or three weeks before the life was brought out, Gibbon wrote from Lausanne to his publisher Cadell: "Boswell's book will be curious, or at least whimsical; his hero, who can so long detain the public curiosity, must be no common animal." Johnson was indeed no common animal, and Boswell was no common biographer. To his genius testimony is borne by the very name by which we speak of his book. The "Life of Scott" we do not know as Lockhart, or the "Life of Macaulay" as Trevelyan, or the "Life of Carlyle," as Froude; but the "Life of Johnson "is Boswell. It is Boswell that the last page in a summer-house in my garden," and stepped out upon his terrace above the gleaming waters of the Lake of Geneva. In his long and laborious path he had had few outside obstacles to overcome. "The eight sessions that he sat in Parliament," instead of being a hindrance, "were," he says, "a school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian." Far different was the story which Boswell had to tell. If a good man struggling with adversity is a spectacle for the gods, what must be the prince of biographers struggling with drink? His great work ran, as it were, a race with the bottle. Long it hung doubtful in the golden scales of fate whether Boswell would first finish his book, or drink would finish Boswell. Happily his strong constitution, aided by occasional fits of comparative temperance, carried the day. For many a year he had been too much given to drink. In the "Life of Johnson" he owns himself a lover of wine. His countrymen might have died of the dropsies which they contracted in trying to get drunk on claret. He, more fortunate, succeeded in getting drunk long before he died. He had not yielded to his intemperance without many a struggle. So early as the spring of 1775, under a venerable yew-tree in a Devonshire parsonage, he had given his friend, the vicar, a promise which kept him sober for a time. Three months later he wrote to him: "My promise under the solemn yew I have observed wonderfully, having never infringed it till the other day, a very jovial company of us dined at a tavern, and I unwarily exceeded my bottle of old hock; 66 and having once broke over the pale, I run | the bottle. That same ambition for distincwild; but I did not get drunk. I was, tion to which we owe the "Life of Johnhowever, intoxicated, and very ill next son"- which, to use his own words, "had day." Early in the next year we find him ever raged in his veins like a fever - had again supporting his failing resolution by often, by a miserable misdirection, robbed Vows. This time he made them not to a him of much of its just fruits. It had led parson, but to his hero of Corsica. "Gen- him to struggle, too often by unworthy eral Paoli," he wrote, “has taken my word means, for an eminence of life for which of honor that I shall not taste fermented he was wholly unfit. In what he called liquor for a year, that I may recover so- "the great wheel of the metropolis " he briety; I have kept this promise now was ever hoping "to draw a capital prize.' about three weeks; I was really growing He looked with envy on such men as a drunkard." The following year we find Wedderburn and Dundas. "Harry DunJohnson recommending him to drink das," he wrote, "is going to be made water only; "for," said he, “you are then king's advocate-lord advocate at thirtysure not to get drunk; whereas if you three. I cannot help being angry and drink wine you are never sure." In the somewhat fretful at this; he has, to be spring of 1778 he was a water-drinker, sure, strong parts, but he is a coarse, unupon trial, by Johnson's recommendation." lettered, unfanciful dog." He was ever Twelve years later, when he was carrying hoping for distinction by some sudden his book through the press, he was satis- stroke of fortune or the favor of some great fied with less heroic remedies. To his man. He joined the English bar. "I am friend Malone, who had helped him in the sadly discouraged," he wrote, "by having revision of the proofs, and who was un- no practice, nor probable prospect of it. easy at the slow progress, he wrote on Yet the delusion of Westminster Hall, of December 4th, 1790: "On the day after brilliant reputation and splendid fortune as your departure that most friendly fellow, a barrister, still weighs upon my imaginaCourtenay, called on me, and took my tion." He longed for a seat in Parliaword and honor that, till the first of March, ment, and, in the hope of winning one, my allowance of wine per diem should not fawned on the brutal Earl of Lonsdale. exceed four good glasses at dinner, and a It was in vain that he had courted Pitt. pint after it; and this I have kept, though I From him he met with the coldest neghave dined with Jack Wilkes at the Lon- lect. To borrow Johnson's words, he don Tavern after the launch of an India- was always "paying a shilling's worth of This regulation, I assure you, is court for sixpenceworth of good." That of essential advantage in many respects. he was not blind to his own folly is shown The magnum opus advances. I have by passages in his letters such as the revised page 216." following: "February 24, 1788, I have been wretchedly dissipated, so that I have not written a line for a fortnight. No man. and my other invitations, and particularly my attendance at Lonsdale's, have lost us many evenings. June 21, 1790, How unfortunate to be obliged to interrupt my work. Never was a poor, ambitious projector more mortified. I am suffering without any prospect of reward, and only from my own folly." Johnson had been dead more than six years before the life was published. With water-drinking and industry it might, Ivember 28, 1789, Malone's hospitality, well believe, have been finished in two. It had been long in hand. Boswell had begun to write it on the evening of that 16th day of May, 1763, when, in the back parlor of the house in Russell Street, Covent Garden, he first met the great lexicographer, and cried out to him: "Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." With many a break he had gone on with it till that last day in June, one-and-twenty years later, when in Sir Joshua Reynolds's coach he accompanied his old and fast-failing friend to the entry of Bolt Court, and heard him call out for the last time, "Fare you well,' as without looking back he sprung away with a kind of pathetic briskness." With so much already done, two years should have sufficed to bring the work to its completion. But there were other hindrances besides As if all these idle longings were not enough, the progress of the work, which was destined to be read "beyond the Mississippi and under the Southern Cross, and as long as the English exists either as a living or a dead language," I borrow Lord Macaulay's swelling diction-the progress of this great work was still further retarded by the matrimonial projects of the author. His first wife, to whom he had been much attached, "a true Mongomerie," as he boasted — whatever may be the exact force of that epithet of praise — |