xxx THE LIFE OF HARVEY. 



to everything like military matters. Harvey's own candid 

 character, and the confidence so obviously reposed in him 

 when he was intrusted with the care of the Prince and the 

 Duke of York, forbid us to interpret the behaviour into any 

 lukewarmness or indifference as to the issue; but Harvey, 

 throughout his whole career, was a most peaceful man : he never 

 had the least taste for literary controversy, and can scarcely 

 be said to have replied to any of those who opposed his views ; 

 and in his indifference about the fight of Edge-hill he only 

 further shows us that he was not 



" Of those who build their faith upon 

 The holy text of pike and gun, 

 And prove their doctrine orthodox 

 By apostolic blows and knocks." 



With his fine understanding and freedom from party and 

 sectarian views of every kind, he probably saw that an appeal 

 to arms was not the way for political right to be elicited, or 

 for a sovereign to settle matters with his subjects. Harvey 

 had certainly no turn for politics, 1 and when we refer to 

 Aubrey we find that the fight of Edge-hill was hardly ended 

 before our anatomist had crept back into his shell, and become 

 absorbed in the subjects that formed the proper business of his 

 life. " I first saw him (Harvey) at Oxford, 1642, after Edge- 

 hill fight," says our authority, " but was then too young to be 

 acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came seve- 

 ral times to our college (Trin.) to George Bathurst, B.D., who 

 had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened 

 dayly to see the progress and way of generation." The 

 zealous political partisan would have found no leisure for re- 

 searches like these in such stirring times as marked the out- 



1 The author of the life of Harvey in the ' General Dictionary, Historical and 

 Critical' (folio, Lond. 1738), the original of all our other lives of Harvey, is cer- 

 tainly in error when he recognizes Harvey as the type of the Physician who takes 

 part in the Dialogue of Hy. Neville's Plato Redivivus, and assumes that he " relieved 

 his abstruser studies by conversations in politics." In a third edition of Neville's 

 work I find it stated that the physician who did so was Dr. Lower. 



