286 
JOHN YOUNG, ESQ. _ 
This well known able mezzotinto en- 
graver died on the 7th March, after a very 
Yong harassing illness. As keeper of the 
British Gallery, a delicate and difficult 
office, he acquitted himself in a manner 
which did him great honour; for he was 
the friend of artists, and a conciliator where 
many ‘sore feelings, jealousies and angry 
passions could not fail to be generated. As 
connected with the Artists’ Benevolent 
Fund, and other charities ofa similar kind, 
he was also distinguished for unwearied 
geal and judicious humanity. In his own 
department of art he possessed first-rate 
talents : he was, besides, a good judge of 
painting, and its sister-arts. His value 
will be rendered more apparent by the 
blank occasioned by his loss, than it- was, 
perhaps, during his active and useful life. 
JOHN BAXTER, 
At his house, No.3, Upper North Place, 
Gray’s-Inn- Lane (where, for the last 
twenty years, he had followed. though in a 
humble sphere, with great generosity and 
Henevolence, the profession of a surgeon), 
died, on the Ist of March, John Baxter: a 
man whose name the machinations of that 
faction so long in power, and which entailed 
upon this country by far the greatest por- 
tion of the burthen of its present enormous 
debt, hayé caused, in defiance of the humility 
of his station, to be recorded on the page of 
history, by an unparalleled attempt to sub- 
vert the constitutional law of treason, and, 
by the substitution of the legal sophistries 
of construction and distortion, subject to 
the arbitrary discretion of usurping autho- 
rity, the lives, the libert:es and rightful pri- 
vileges of the people. And if worth alone; 
" inflexible integrity and unshaken fortitude, 
without the adventitious aid of fortune and 
of station, could challenge the attention of 
mankind, John Baxter would have been 
entitled to more distinction than frequently 
emblazons the titles of the hereditary, or the 
court-created great. He was by trade, origi- 
nally, a Working-jeweller ; but, attached from 
his youth to anatomical and medical science, 
became qualified, in his maturer years, for 
regular admission, which he obtained, to 
chirurgical practice. Previously to this ini- 
tiation, however, he had devoted his manual 
industry to the support of himself and his 
family in the humble calling to which we 
have alluded ; and the simplicity of his 
manners accorded, at all times, with the sta- 
tion in which he was originally placed. He 
had, however, aclear and logical understand- - 
ing, was far from being deficient in general 
knowledge, and had the talent of expressing 
his thoughts, though without the least pre- 
tension to the energies, or the ornaments of 
eloquence, in well-constructed and coherent 
sentences—a grace in which some even of 
our celebrated parliamentary speakers, but 
for the eritical aid of reporters, would be 
found to be very deficient. He was much 
Obituary of the Month. 
devoted to subjects of political inquiry ; 
which became to him the fruitful source of 
trouble, persecution and danger. Of the 
unsubduable fortitude with which he could 
encounter these,. notwithstanding the unaf- 
fected quietness of his general demeanour, 
it was his destiny to be called upon for 
unequivocal examples. Having adopted 
the political sentiments, and the system of 
representation, promulgated by the Duke of 
Richmond and Mr. Pitt, in 1780, he became 
one of the earliest members of the much- 
misrepresented London Corresponding So- 
ciety—a faithful and well-authenticated his- 
tory of which is one of the most important 
desiderata of the political literature of the 
latter part of the eighteenth century. He 
was a diligent member of the committee of 
that association, and, as such, was included 
in the number of those who were arrested 
on the 14th of May 1794. John Baxter, 
however, was not one of those whom it was 
the particular object of the ministers to 
destroy ; but one of many, the object of 
whose arrest apparently it was, not that 
they should be treated as culprits, but ter- 
rified into witnesses, by whose testimony it 
was supposed others might be destroyed ; 
and as he was a man whose undoubted sin- 
cerity, in the cause in which he was em- 
barked, had occasioned his associates to re- 
pose in him an unlimited confidence, not 
only of their plans, of which they affected, 
indeed, no concealment, but of their senti- 
ments, and even those momentary indiscre- 
tions which, suggested by irritation, expire in 
the utterance; he might, in the temper of the 
times which “ existing circumstances” had 
inflamed, with but little assistance from the 
customary auxiliaries of invention and hard 
swearing, have entitled himself to no small 
portion of the rewards which treachery has 
but too frequently purchased with the price 
of blood. Neither intimidation nor blan- 
dishment, however,—neither the snares of 
jailors and king’s messengers, nor the array 
of privy-councils, could bend, or seduce, 
the upright mind of this honest mechanic ; 
and he nobly and disinterestedly preferred 
the perilous distinction of being one of the 
twelve selected for prosecution, under a 
factitious charge of constructive and accu- 
mulative treason, to the safety and the 
emolument of being the Judas, who could 
betray his trust. He was, accordingly, 
committed to Newgate, and was arraigned, 
with the other prisoners brought from the 
Tower for that purpose, in the October fol- 
lowing; where he remained in close custody 
till the conclusion and total failure of the 
prosecutions (December 1794); or, as Mr. 
burke expresses it, till “the Crown re- 
tired, defeated and disgraced, from its own 
courts.” On the 15th of that month, 
he was liberated. Baxter, however, found, 
as others have found (but he found it 
without repining), that the consciousness 
of integrity is the only reward that is to be 
expected by the honest und unconnected 
patriot, 
(April 1, 
