26 Charles Robert Darwin. 



personal appearance furnished us by the Swan of Lichfield 

 reminds us in not a few particulars of Dr. Johnson. He 

 was heavy-featured, corpulent, unwieldly ; a stammerer in 

 his speech ; with great gifts of conversation, witty and sar- 

 castic. With him as with the Ursa Major, a rough outside 

 concealed a heart extremely tender and even capable of sen- 

 timental softness. In the practice of his profession his 

 generosity and charity were not confined to Lichfield, but 

 made him loved and honored all the country round. For a 

 favorite patient, for whose restoration he had ceased to hope, 

 he composed an elegy, thus wearing out the sorrow of an 

 anxious night spent out-of-doors beneath her window watch- 

 ing the shadows of her attendants pass and repass. But 

 she recovered and her husband died, and Dr. Darwin mar- 

 ried her. His most famous poem occupied him many nights 

 and many busy days. It was "The Botanic Garden/' 

 which, with its second part, "The Loves of the Plants," 

 was published in 1791. It was the work of a man who 

 was little of a poet and much a man of science. Its dic- 

 tion is pompous and stilted to the last degree ; its machinery 

 of gnomes and sylphs and nereids was as absurd as Can- 

 ning's parody, "The Loves of the Triangles." But with 

 £900 in his pocket for his poem, the Doctor could afford 

 the laugh. It showed him thoroughly acquainted with the 

 system of Linnaeus. In his " Zoonomia," published a little 

 later, he dropped into prose. In this work he anticipated 

 Lamarck's conception of organic continuity and some of 

 the erroneous grounds of his conviction. His theory of 

 Beauty was that it inheres in curving lines and surfaces. 

 The sense of Beauty is a reminiscence of the infant's pleas- 

 ure in the contours of its mother's breast. " Wherefore a 

 child brought up by hand," said Sheridan, " should thrill 

 with rapture in the presence of a wooden spoon." But, 

 however fanciful at times, the average temper of the man 

 was patient and discerning. He was no echo of the past, 

 but a rude prophet of the coming man, even of his grand- 

 son, Charles Eobert Darwin, who established the doctrine 

 of organic continuity upon irrefragable foundations. 



Eobert Waring Darwin was the third son of Erasmus by 

 his first marriage, — which was not with the elegiac lady. 

 He followed the profession of his father, and confined him- 

 self to it more closely, and with results generally satisfac- 

 tory. He was eminently skillful, and he acquired a hand- 



