CHAELES BABBAGE. 183 



and marred his own fortune. There was not a place which he ever 

 sought (the Lucasian chair he did not seek) that he gained. He aspired 

 to the professorship of mathematics at the East India College at Har- 

 leyburgh ; to Playfair's chair at Edinburgh; to a seat at tbe Board of Lon- 

 gitude; to the mastership of the mint; and to the office of registrar- gen- 

 eral of births and deaths — and failed in all. On the other hand, there 

 was not an invention connected with his name — and in mathematical 

 mechanics he ranks among the foremost the world ever produced — which, 

 in the opinion of the best-disciplined minds of his day, he could not 

 have perfected had sufficient pecuniary means been at his command. 

 Unfortunately, he measured everything by his own unaided impressions, 

 and judged himself by others instead of judging others by himself. To 

 rest all claim to greatness on self-assertion rather than self-denial, thongh 

 it may have made the heroes of the classic ages, cannot but be a grave 

 fault in the conduct of any modern life. Still, he bore his disappoint- 

 ments bravely, possessed his intellect uudimmed up to the verge of his 

 fonrth-score year, made his old age a lesson — not unwisely at any time 

 enforced — of the philosophy with which the rest of death may be awaited, 

 and was to the last ready to contemplate calmly in his own case what 

 arose to the thought of Antony — 



I have been sitting longer at life's feast 

 Than does me good. I will arise and go. 



Extracts from a notice of Charles Babbage, by A. Quetelet, of Brussels, translated 

 from the "Annuaire de I'Observatoire royal de Brnxelles" for 187.3. 



Babbage says, in his passage from the Life of a Philosopher, " From 

 my earliest years I had a great desire to inquire into the causes of all 

 things and events which astonish the childish mind. At a later period 

 I commenced the still more important inquiry into those laws of thought 

 and those aids which assist the human mind in passing from received 

 knowledge to that other knowledge then unknown to our race." These 

 few lines express sufficiently well the character of the distinguished 

 savant whose career we shall endeavor rapidly to sketch. Notwith- 

 standing his own ardent desire to inquire into everything which could 

 interest himself, our author never seems to have dreamed of informing 

 others as to his exact age. According to his friends, he was born in 

 1792, and was consequently about 80 at the time of his death. 



He did not begin seriously tbe study of mathematics until after 

 the age of 22, when he was with his friend Herschel at Trinity College^ 

 Cambridge. They soon after published a joint work on matbematicSy, 

 which did much toward introducing the continental methods and nota- 

 tion of this science into England. Fourteen years after this, while Mr. 

 Babbage was in Eome, he accidentally read in an English newspaper the 

 following paragraph : " Yesterday the bells of St. Mary rang out a peal; 



