DR. ROBERT WARING DARWIN. 63 



his practice till within a year of that date, when in a few 

 months he would have been eighty-three. He took his 

 degree before he was nineteen, and, with 20 from his 

 father, and afterwards as much from an uncle, he went into 

 practice at Shrewsbury when he was not yet twenty-one. 1 

 In his thirtieth year he married, then in her thirty-second, 

 Susannah, the daughter of Josiah Wedgewood of Etruria. 

 She was a sweet, gentle, sympathetic, happy-natured 

 woman, who died after twenty-one years of married life, 

 1 laving brought her husband a dowry of 25,000, to 

 which more was afterwards added on deaths of relatives. 

 It is Charles who tells it us, and we are not unprepared 

 to hear it, that his father was a cautious and good man 

 of business, so that he hardly ever lost money by an 

 investment, and left to his children a very large property. 

 Most men who save, it is not unlikely, are decidedly 

 averse to withdraw a single corn (or coin) from the 

 growing heap till, by death, they have left it, so far as 

 they are concerned, summed : it is an engaging proof of 

 the perfect health and sweetness of the man that, as a 

 father, he (Dr. E. W.) grudged not one single break upon 

 the solid whole, did it but avail to profit his children. 

 His son Erasmus studied medicine without intention to 

 practise ; and Charles, who even at sixteen knew a com- 

 petency behind him, tells such a tale, with respect to 

 Shrewsbury, Edinburgh, Cambridge, the Beagle, settle- 

 ment in marriage, etc., as proves his father's unstinted 

 liberality to himself in money matters, although " I never 

 imagined," he adds, " that I should be so rich a man as I 

 am." Happy the children who are born into the single 

 animation of such true family concrete ! 



1 It is the son (Charles) tells of these two twenty pounds to his 

 father. The grandson (Mr. Francis) calls the statement " incorrect," 

 as 1000 fell to him under his mother's settlement, and he got 

 400 from an aunt. The question, however, is when ? 



