a former generation, and at the same time rejoice in the healthier tone of our own.

In 1810 the Royal Institution was made the subject of a private Act of Parliament. The proprietors surrendered their pecuniary interests, and many changes were introduced, the most important perhaps being the admission of members by election, instead of, as previously, by the mere money payment on the purchase of a share. The Institution was thus placed upon the most fitting basis, but two years later sustained the heavy loss occasioned by the retirement of Davy. Sir Humphry was married on April 11, 1812, and on the previous day gave his last lecture. He continued, however, to hold the Professorship of Chemistry till the following year, when he was succeeded in it by Mr. Brande.

It is unnecessary to attempt any recapitulation or analysis of all Davy's discoveries; or to enter into the story of his introduction of Faraday to the scene of his own labours, in which he became for a brief space, his assistant and pupil, and then for so many years his noble successor. Davy's work is too well known to require detailed mention; and the life of Faraday, which was, from the time he first went to Albemarle Street, identified with that of the Royal Institution, has recently formed the subject of an article in these pages. For fifty years he was the soul and support of the place; and by his love of science for its own sake, and by his total renunciation of all selfish interests, he was enabled to carry it through a period of considerable pecuniary difficulty. During eighteen years of this time, the assiduous attention of the immediate predecessor of Dr. Bence Jones, in the place of honorary secretary, was of the utmost service. Mr. Barlow's constant kindness and never-failing courtesy will long be remembered, together with the pleasant gatherings at his house in Berkeley Street, Piccadilly, to which so many of the audience had the advantage of adjourning from the Friday evening lectures, to talk them over, and enjoy a very agreeable phase of social life. The founders of the Royal Institution, if they could now witness the results of their work, extending as they do, over a period of seventy years, might well be proud of what they have been the instruments of achieving. Its successive Professors, Davy, Faraday, and Tyndall, have been recipients of the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society for their respective researches in Light and Heat. In its laboratories the discoveries have been made of the alkaline metals, of the elementary character of chlorine, of the base of the aniline dyes, of the nature of obscure r heat, and of the principles

which have led to the manifold modern applications of electricity as a dynamical and illuminating power These results have been the reward of investigations undertaken, in the first place, in the purest spirit of scientific inquiry. To know the truth in nature has been the primary object; utilitarian and economical adaptation has followed. Nevertheless, the philosophy practised has been, in Baconian phrase, emphatically a philosophy of fruit; and in no place dedicated to science has so much been effected for the relief of man's estate.'

The Royal Institution, in all respects, has never been in a more satisfactory condition than at the present time. With such professors as it now has the satisfaction of seeing on its permanent establishment; with such lecturers as those who honour it by appearing in the morning courses; or those who generously contribute to the instruction and intellectual amusement of the Friday evenings; with the veteran, but ever young, Sir Henry Holland, as its President, there is ample ground for trust that the constant high reputation of the Royal Institution will, in these days, suffer no decay.

It is one of the traditions of this Journal that we abstain from critical notices of the works and lives of the eminent persons who have honoured us by contributing to these pages, more especially during their own lifetime. We regret that the respect we feel it right to pay to this rule of propriety and good taste, has debarred us from according to the Recollections of the Past Life' of Sir Henry Holland that place which other critics of all ranks and classes in literature and society have not been slow to assign to it: but we hail the more cordially the just success which has attended the publication of his last work. Sir Henry Holland is, as is well known, not only one of the oldest and ablest contributors to the Edinburgh Review,' but he is one of the few persons now living who is a contemporary of the whole period of our long career, and during that period he has been associated by the ties of intimate friendship with those who have directed or participated in our labours. On many occasions his advice, his experience, and his fine judgment on questions both of literature and science have been of the greatest value to us, and have extended far beyond the subjects he has himself occasionally consented to treat in this place.

The Record of Past Life,' which he has just given to the public, after having reserved it for some little time to the circle of his family and his friends, affords ample proof of the services which he was qualified to render to us. Gifted with

indefatigable energy and inflamed with a noble curiosity to leave unseen no part of the theatre of history and of the world, he has been the most active and constant spectator of the great drama of society in our age. With the lenis sermo and the hilaris vultus, which he affectionately borrows from Celsus, as the best simple of his art, Sir Henry Holland has been everywhere. Men and places, literature and science, the frontier lands of the desert and the focus of London society, are alike reflected in the animated microcosm of his life, and we can only regret that the impressions produced by so prodigious a series of incidents and persons should of necessity be beaten out to a film of extreme tenuity. Perhaps, after all, the pages of the book which will be best remembered are those concluding passages in which he has condensed into a mild and genial philosophy the experience of a man of the world, who has skimmed with a light foot and ready hand over so many of the rough and smooth places of the world.

But if there be one place of social resort and intellectual culture more than another in which Sir Henry Holland is entitled to be held in honour, it is the Institution which forms the subject of these pages. He says of it himself:

:

'My connexion with the Royal Institution has been very valuable to me. A long and intimate friendship with Faraday, succeeding to that with Young and Davy, kept me in the train of those great discoveries which have illustrated their names, and given a well-merited fame to the place in which they were made. Like the observatory of the astronomer, the laboratory of the experimental philosopher is, or ought to be, a spot set apart from the turmoil of the world without. I have often felt a certain emotion in coming suddenly from the crowded and noisy pavement of Piccadilly to those silent laboratories of Albemarle Street (almost buried below ground), where science working through fruitful experiment has disclosed so many secrets of the natural world. It is in some respects even a more striking contrast than any of those I have denoted in my life of travel.'

This connexion with the great discoverers of the age is not confined to Sir Henry's English experience. He describes a night spent with Encke and Galle in the observatory of Berlin some ten or twelve days after the discovery of the planet Neptune on this very spot. The name to be given to the new planet was discussed. The choice had been remitted to Leverier. Within an hour his answer arrived proposing the name of Neptune, upon which Encke exclaimed, So lass den Namen Neptun sein.' And thus Sir Henry stood sponsor for that remote and solitary planet!

But we must return with him to the Royal Institution :

'My acquaintance with Davy early in life gave me also an early connexion with the Royal Institution, and with that laboratory which gained its first fame from his discoveries-a fame largely augmented by the genius and labours of Faraday, and well sustained by the eminent men who, as Professors of the Institution, now work on the same spot. More than sixty years have elapsed since I saw in the theatre there the minute globules of the alkaline metals, then first evolved in their elementary form; and witnessed the beautiful experiments by which Davy illustrated those relations between chemical actions and electricity, the foundation of so many ulterior discoveries. At a later time, in the same place, Faraday showed to me and other friends the small luminous spark which he had just succeeded in eliciting from the magnet-the feeble precursor of those marvellous torrents of electricity which are now procured from the same source by methods as wonderful as the phenomena they produce. But a short time ago I saw once again on the shelves of the Institution the simple apparatus, devised by himself, through which he obtained this first result, the germ of so many others. Looking at what these results have been, there is grandeur in the very simplicity of their origin.

'The interest I have long felt in the labours and fame of the Royal Institution has become of late years more direct and personal, from the honour of its Presidency having been conferred upon me on the death of the Duke of Northumberland. Thinking it a point of chief importance to maintain the high character of the Institution as a school of scientific research, I have sought, in conjunction with others (and very especially with the aid of my friend Dr. Bence Jones), to establish a Research Fund, applicable mainly to the objects of the Laboratory. This aim has been well fulfilled; and I hold a confident belief that our Laboratory, and the eminent men who now work in it, will continue, as heretofore, to furnish discoveries for the lecture theatre above, and for more lasting record in the "Transactions of the Royal Society," which have already drawn so largely from this source. Every great discovery is the parent of many others; and the objects and aims of science are both enlarged and better defined by each successive attainment.'

Next in rank to those great and single-minded discoverers who are absorbed in the contemplation of the laws of nature, may be placed those who render their discoveries popular and intelligible to society, for they must be the first pupils of those that know.' It is not one of the least merits of Sir Henry Holland that he has always advanced with the broad stream of scientific inquiry, in an age when scientific inquiry has changed the whole face of things; and that by his writings, and by the direction he has given to the labours of the Royal Institution, he has largely contributed to the diffusion of knowledge. This brief notice of that remarkable Society cannot therefore be more appropriately closed than by this imperfect tribute to the services he still renders to it.

!

ART. III.-Le Duc de Broglie. Par M. GUIZOT. Paris:

1872.

THE HE biography of a veteran statesman, born in 1785 and dying in 1870, written by another veteran statesman of about the same ripe age, but who retains in his ninth decade all the literary vigour of his earlier life, would in itself be a curiosity in literature. With what interest should we not cherish a similar record of two lives, united by a similar friendship, if such a work had been written two centuries ago, by a man born under Queen Elizabeth and writing under Charles II., who might have had a faint recollection of the Armada, and have seen the plays of Shakspeare acted by himself; who might have heard Francis Bacon plead in Westminster Hall, or hunted with King James at Theobalds'; who would have mixed with the courtiers of Charles I., heard the speakers of the Long Parliament, witnessed the trial and the tragedy of Whitehall, seen Cromwell face to face, and perhaps lingered with Milton in the garden at Chalfont; and who, in his later years, cheered and toasted the King's Restoration, unconscious that the last scene of the English Revolution was yet to come. Many a man lived through, and saw, all these things, and if the taste and talent for memoir-writing had been as common in England as it was in France, even in the seventeenth century, such a narrative of a single life might exist. Unfortunately we have nothing of the kind, and the English memoirs of that most eventful age are brief and fragmentary. In this respect the literature of France is far richer than our own. Almost everyone who has played a prominent part in the events of the last eighty years in that country has written memoirs or biographical notes; and, when the life of the writer has been so extended as to include the whole of that period, these reminiscences embrace the history of a most extraordinary series of events. The small volume now before us is a modest contribution to these biographical annals, in which personal recollections and interests are so happily blended with public events. The late Duke de Broglie, with the characteristic modesty of his disposition, never sate down to write his memoirs. But he has left behind him a large collection of memoranda on the events of his own life, and on the transactions in which he was engaged, which are of infinite value to his family, and may hereafter be of no small interest to posterity. To these papers M. Guizot has had free access. He has culled from them, with a sparing but judicious hand, the most striking and curious