CHARLES B ABB AGE. 181 



about what trade I traveled for. 'The tall .gentleman in the corner,' 

 said my informant, 'maintained that you were in the hardware Hne, 

 while the fat gentleman, who sat next you at supper, was quite sure 

 that you were in the spirit trade. Another of the party declared that 

 they were both mistaken ; he said he had met you before, and that you 

 were traveUng for a great iron-master.' ' WeU,' said I, ' you, I presume, 

 knew my vocation better than our friends.' ' Yes,' said my informant, 

 'I knew perfectly well that you were in the Nottingham lace trade!'" 



In the year 1828 Mr. Babbage was nominated to the Lucasian pro- 

 fessorship of mathematics in his old university, occupying in that ca- 

 pacity a chair which had once been held by no less a man than Sir Isaac 

 Newton. This chair he held during eleven years. It was while holding 

 this professorship, at the general election of November, 1832, which fol- 

 lowed on the passage of the first reform bill, that he w^as put forward 

 as a candidate for the representation of Finsbury in Parliament. He 

 stood in the advanced liberal interest as a supporter not only of par- 

 liamentary, financial, and fiscal reform, but of the ballot, triennial par- 

 liaments, and the abolition of all sinecure posts and offices. Bat the 

 electors did not care to choose a philosopher ; so he was unsuccessful, 

 and never again wooed the suffrages of any constituency. 



Mr. Babbage was the author of published works to the extent of some 

 eighty papers. A full list of these, however, would not interest or edify 

 the reader. Perhaps the best known of them all is what he styled the 

 Ninth Bridgeivater Treatise, (which it was not,) a work designed at once 

 to refute the doctrine, supposed to be implied in the first volume of that 

 learned series, that an ardent devotion to mathematical studies is un- 

 favorable to a real religious faith ,• and also to adduce specimens of the 

 defensive aid which the science of numbers may give to the evidences 

 of Christianity, if that science bo studied in a proper spirit. As com- 

 pared with the eight treatises written by Chalmers, Whewell, Sir 

 Charles Bell, Dr. Buckland, and others, so far from discrediting its sup- 

 posititious name, it has probably been more generally read than any 

 work of the series. 



Mr. Babbage's contributions to political economy were both incidental 

 and direct. The tendency of his mind, upon whatever it was engaged, 

 was toward the x)ractical. There is scarcely one of his works — nay, there 

 is hardly one of the various emiiloyments in which he engaged himself 

 with his whole soul during his long life — that in its ultimate reach does 

 not lay hold of the industrial condition of mankind. Keen in investiga- 

 tion, acute in analysis, subtle in detection of error, and pre-eminently 

 logical m conclusions, no matter how purely intelled^ual may be the 

 laboratory of his workings, the experiments he makes and the outlooks 

 in which he indulges have for their end invariably the material benefit 

 of the working classes. Whether it be the solution of "problems relat- 

 ing to the calculus of functions" or relating to the "knight's move in 

 chess j" whether the "determination of the general term of a new class 



