DR. ERASMUS DARWIN. 41 



cried, " and he has blessed them." Her conviction to the 

 end was that, with any other man, she would not have 

 lived " one-third of these years." He had a quick sense 

 of wrong, and hot indignation at injustice. Like son and 

 grandson after him, he had an intense horror of slavery, 

 and was keen for the liberties of the people. An 

 Englishman in that ! he set the example to his descend- 

 ants of being a Liberal or Radical, and without faith 

 in the truth of revelation. Further, also, he was an 

 early riser. With his profession to live by, it is not 

 to be objected to him that, knowing the printing of 

 poetry to be fatal to the practice of medicine, it was 

 his resolution to conceal the former until it should be 

 beyond all danger in consequence of " the impregnable 

 rock on which at last he found his medical and philo- 

 sophical reputation placed." We have already seen 

 something of his position in all these references. He 

 was undoubtedly a man of determined will and quick 

 intellect, who could not but succeed in such a profession 

 as medicine. His books show him in that capacity as a 

 man of somewhat superficial generalisation, but with 

 boundless trust in the success of his own bias. No doubt, 

 in consequence of both, he must have been, locally, an 

 object of much popular admiration, as he wheeled himself 

 along in the machine which, with his love of mechanics, 

 he had specially invented for himself to the eventual 

 fracture of one knee-pan, however ! It is possible, too, 

 that some humorous saying of his told might have 

 occasionally given wing to his professional notoriety, as, 

 for example, that Unitarianism was " a feather-bed to 

 catch a falling Christian ! " 



So far as concerned the realm of thought, thought 

 proper, pure thought, his reading and education were 

 insufficient; and these hasty, scattered, ungrounded propos 

 of his cannot be accounted to philosophy. In poetry, 



