APPENDIX OF NOTES. 55 1 



summer. Brougham is to write you in a day or two. He looks 

 well, and his present appearance would give you much satisfac- 

 tion. Horner and he are both particularly anxious that you should 

 approve of the plan of a chemical society." Letter addressed to 

 John Allen, in biographical notice of Dr Thomson prefixed to his 

 'Life of Cullen,' p. 16. Failing health compelled Dr Thomson to 

 retire from active life in 1835. It used to be his pride to tell how 

 in that same year he was sought in the privacy of his cottage at 

 Moreland by his friend of thirty years before, now Lord Chancellor, 

 and visiting Edinburgh on the occasion of the Grey festival ; and 

 how they talked over their old chemical recreations as if they were 

 still young students with the world before them. 



The contemporaries of John Allen who knew him in his social 

 eminence are fast diminishing, and his fame was not of a kind to 

 be revived in a new generation. He was born in 1770, near Edin- 

 burgh. There the small mansion of Bedford, his birthplace, the 

 possession of his family, still exists : it happens to be close beside 

 Colinton, where his friend James Abercrombie, Lord Dunfermline, 

 spent his latter years. He studied medicine, and lectured on 

 physiology and the other branches of science connected with the 

 medical profession ; but he did not settle down in practice. The 

 theatre of his great reputation was Holland House, where he was 

 the admitted chief among the wits and scholars who frequented the 

 hospitable table there. Besides science, he wrote on constitutional 

 history and Spanish politics. His small work called an ' Inquiry 

 into the Growth of the Eoyal Prerogative' (1830), is so important 

 and conclusive as to have often elicited the remark that there is 

 nowhere else so much light on the British Constitution within so 

 small a space. Another brief work, a ' Vindication of the Ancient 

 Independence of Scotland,' (1833), is a singularly clear explanation 

 of the historical conditions in which the Plantagenet kings vested 

 their claim for asserting a superiority over the crown of Scotland. 

 His articles in the ' Edinburgh Review ' are said to have exceeded 

 thirty in number. He died in 1843. Soon after his death there 

 was a design among his personal friends to collect and publish his 

 scattered works, but it unfortunately came to nothing. 



Malcolm Laing, born in Orkney, 1762 ; died in 1818. He was 

 for some time member of Parliament for Orkney. He was intimate 

 with Fox, and a valued and influential member of the Whig party 



