52 Mr. Faraday on the 



but frank, high-minded, public-spirited, warm-hearted, 

 loving art sincerely and nature not less. He seems to 

 have had a zest for knowledge of all kinds, and especially 

 a keen appreciation for the natural in art and the curious 

 and beautiful in nature. " Mr. Kershaw tells me that 

 you have taken leave of the arts to hunt for locusts " 

 wrote his friend, Captain R. Dewhurst, of Halliwell, as 

 early as 1784; but he continued to be a generous patron 

 of the arts to the end of his life. " I entertain a high 

 respect for the judgment and taste you are said to possess 

 in matters of art," John Landseer wrote to him on July 17, 

 1798, " and am, therefore, much gratified by the favourable 

 opinion you have been pleased to express of what I have 

 done." And in a letter dated June 6, 1804, Sir J. E. Smith 

 wrote to him, " I rely on your friendship in giving this letter 

 of introduction to Captain Hardwicke, a gentleman of whose 

 travels in the mountains of India you have, I dare say, read. 

 I have sent to the Botanic Garden, at Liverpool, some seeds 

 with which this gentleman has favoured me, with strict 

 charge that they are to be divided with you. He travels 

 now to see England. May I beg of you to direct and assist 

 him to things worthy of notice at Manchester ? Above all 

 let him see your garden and cabinet of insects. He has 

 brought home the best drawings ever done in India." 

 Broad as were his sympathies, Colonel Philips does not 

 seem to have had much faith in democratic ideas, but he 

 may have been influenced by his brother Francis. We 

 detect in the later letters increasing evidence of that 

 growing estrangement between the classes which resulted 

 in Peterloo five years after John Leigh Philips's death. 

 Yet we find him engaged in friendly correspondence with 

 men like Thomas Cooper, and taking a warm interest in 

 the agitation for the amendment of the criminal laws with 

 which Sir Samuel Romilly was identified. 



As we read these letters of a century or so ago, yellow 



