Memoir of William Roscoe, Esq. 217 



My acquaintance with Mr Roscoe commenced in 1806, and 

 I soon had the felicity of being received as an intimate friend. 

 From 1810 I was further honoured by being consulted as his 

 physician, in which capacity I watched with much anxiety over 

 his declining health. From the time of the first derangement 

 of the affairs of the bank, the immense mental and bodily exer- 

 tions which he made produced great inroads on a constitution 

 naturally good. He then began, on much application to any 

 subject, to be seized with occasional faintness ; and once, in 

 1816, he was attacked at the bank with a slight loss of memory, 

 which speedily wore off. His habits of intense study, after 

 this period, produced similar effects ; and while engaged in the 

 controversy on prison discipline, after writing for the great- 

 est part of a night, to overtake a ship about to sail for America, 

 he was affected in the winter of 1827 with partial paralysis of 

 the muscles of the mouth and tongue. I was immediately called ; 

 the patient was freely bJed — on which he recovered his speech : 

 and the introduction of a seton in his neck removed the para- 

 lytic affection of the mouth. Intense study was forbidden : 

 and after a period of perfect relaxation from his literary occu- 

 pations, he recovered sufficiently to be able to complete his 

 botanical work, the catalogue of Mr Coke's library, and to cor- 

 rect for the press his latest tracts on prison discipline. It was a 

 great satisfaction to find his intellect quite entire, and it remained 

 so until within an hour or two of his death. His bodily feeble- 

 ness, however, gradually increased ; yet, by the affectionate 

 care of his family, his infirmities were little felt. His amuse- 

 ments were various reading, the illustration of his son's transla- 

 tion of Lanzi'*s History of Italian Painting, by a small collection 

 of engravings, together with putting the last hand to his botani- 

 cal work. He was unable for the fatigue of receiving much 

 company, or of seeing strangers, for some time before his death : 

 yet he loved to converse with a few friends, and took a lively 

 interest in the political events with which the last year (1 830) was 

 pregnant. On the French revolution of July, he wrote a long 

 and earnest letter to M. La Fayette (with whom he had before 

 occasionally corresponded), urging him to use the influence of 

 his name and popularity, to induce the French nation to spare 

 the lives of the ministers then under arrest ; pointing out how a 



