Principles recognized by scientific men applied to the ether controversy.

  • Abbot, Jos. Hale (Joseph Hale), 1802-1873.
Date:
[1848]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Principles recognized by scientific men applied to the ether controversy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    could imagine him cracking a jest in the teeth of a ghost, and melting into thin air himself out of sympathy with the awful. Lamb was heart and soul a Londoner. Dr. Johnson himself was not more so. Although he passed the greater part of his life as clerk in the India House—doomed to the desk in murky Leadenhall-street, yet had he no yearnings for the country. He was not the man to sing— I care not, fortune, what you me deny, You cannot rob me of sweet Nature's face, &c. Johnson said, When you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields. Sir, I like to look upon mankind : let us walk down Fleet street. Lamb said the same; he was, as Tal- fourd prettily says of him, formed to nestle rather than to roam. In a letter to Southey, he says : I have a timid imagination, I am afraid. I do not willingly admit of strange beliefs, or out-of-the- way creeds or places. I never read books of travels, at least, not further than Paris or Rome. I can just endure Moors, because of their connection as foes with Christians ; but Abyssinians, Ethiops, Esqui- maux, Dervises, and all that tribe, I hate. I be- lieve I fear them in some manner. A Mahometan turban on the stage, though enveloping some well- known face, (Mr. Cook or Mr. Maddox, whom I see another day good Christian and English waiters, innkeepers, &c.,) does not give me pleasure un- alloyed. I am a Christian, Englishman, Londoner, Templar. And again, in a letter from Enfield to Words- worth : Here we have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them; with the garden but to see it grow; with the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock; with the maid but to hear her scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us, save as spectators of the pageant. We are fed we know not how ; quietists—confiding ravens. We have the otium pro dignitate, a respectable in- significance. Yet in the self-condemned oblivious- ness, in the stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life, not quite killed, rise, prompting me that there was London, and that I was of that old Jeru- salem. In dreams I am in Fleet Market, but I wake and cry to sleep again. I die hard, a stub- born Eloisa in this detestable Paroclete. What have I gained by health?—Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals?—A to- tal blank. O ! never let the lying poets be believed, who 'tice men from the cheerful haunts of streets, or think they mean it not of a country village. In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up to sol- itude, or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleep- ers ; but to have a little teasing image of a town about one ; country folks that do not look like coun- try folks; shops two yards square, half a dozen apples and two penn'orths of overlooked gingerbread for the lofty fruiterers of Oxford street; and for the immortal book and print stalls, a circulating library that stands still, where the show picture is a last year's valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels has not yet travelled— (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the Redgauntlet;) to have a new plastered flat church, and to be wish- ing that it was but a cathedral! The very black- guards here are degenerate; the topping gentry stock-brokers; the passengers too many to insure your quiet, or let you go about whistling or gaping ; too few to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet street. Confining, room-keeping, thickest winter, is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months. Among one's books at one's fire, by candle, one is soothed into an oblivion that one is not in the coun- try ; but with the light the green fields return, till I gaze, and in a calenture can plunge myself into St. Giles'. O! let no native Londoner imagine that health, and rest, and innocent occupation, in- terchange of converse sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than alto- gether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, Lon- don, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, playhouses, satires, epigrams, puns—these all came in on the town part, and the thither side of innocence. Nor was this the feeling of a moment ; it was his taste through life. He had no eye for the picturesque. Human nature, in its miseries, iu- firmities, its virtues, and socialities, was what lov- ingly attracted him ; and he liked towns because they spoke of man. In the same way he loved books. Mere descriptive passages, mere caprices of fancy, except in the authors he loved, were lost upon him. He cared nothing for theories ; spec- ulations on the great questions of philosophy and religion never troubled him, and he humorously describes Proclus (Coleridge having asked him to procure a copy) as one of those books the lid of which he shut faster than he opened it. But the dramatists were his especial favorites. He saw no flaws in thern. To his guileless mind their reckless disregard of the boundaries of morality and decency was nothing but the sportive freedom of imagination. He has written a most elaborate and ingenious defence of the comic dramatists of the restoration, upon the ground that they were dealing with the fictitious world of wit, and ought not to be measured by the ordinary standards of morality, because they treated not of actual life. No one but himself could have written this; no one but himself could believe it. Besides the dram- atists, he also loved the old humorists and mor- alists ; was fond of Quaker folios, because they led him into a quaint, honest world ; and had an especial regard for all old books. He had the spirit of an antiquary, not the grubbing patience, not the inordinate appreciation of minute points, which accompanies the antiquarian spirit. He was not a Cockletop; he was not a Ritson. To discover that some obscure'man was born on the 10th of May, and not, as generally supposed, on the 18th, inspired him with no thrill of delight, nor did it make him assume contemptuous airs towards the ignorant rest of mankind. A book was not better in his eyes than all other books, because it was older and more illegible ; but in that affectionate regard for the mysterious past, tn that lingering over the fragments of the ruined edifice, in that endeavor to reanimate in his mind the times which had been, and were no more, h' showed the antiquarian spirit in its true aspect