OF THE LATE PROFESSOR ROBISON. 505 



personal kindness, and could trust only to the justice and mo- 

 deration of his claims. These were of little advantage to him ; 

 for such was the inattention- of the Lords of the Admiralty, 

 and the Members of the Board of Longitude, that he could 

 not obtain access to- any of them, nor even receive from them 

 any answer to his memorials. 



The picture which his letters to his father present, at this 

 time, is that of a mind suffering severely from unworthy treat- 

 ment, where it was least suspected. Men in office do not re- 

 flect, while they are busy about the concerns of nations, how 

 much evil may be done by their neglect to do justice to an 

 individual. They may be extinguishing the fire of genius, 

 thrusting down merit below the level it should rise to, or prema- 

 turely surrounding the mind of a young man, with a fence 

 of suspicion and distrust, worse than the evils which it proposes 

 to avert. Like other kinds of injustice, this may, however, meet 

 with its punishment; though the victim of unmerited neglect 

 may remain for ever obscurej and his sufferings for ever un- 

 known, he may also emerge from obscurity, and the treatment 

 he has met with may meet the eye of the public. It is probable 

 that the member of these Boards most conspicuous for ran<k 

 or for science, would not have been above some feeling of re- 

 gret, if he had learnt that the young man whose petitions he 

 disregarded, was to become the ornament of his country, and 

 the ill treatment he then met with, a material fact in the his- 

 tory of his life.. 



But though we must condemn the neglect of which Mr Rb- 

 BisoN had so much reason to complain, v/e do by no means re- 

 gret that the recompense, which he or his friends had in view, 

 was not actually conferred on him. This was no other than 

 an appointment to the place of a purser in a ship of war; a 

 sort of preferment which, to a man of the genius, information, 



and 



