DISCOVERIES OE SIR ISAAC NEWTON. 455 



pliant in all schools. Meanwhile his life went on at Cambridge : as 

 one of the Commission of the Senate when James wanted to intrude 

 his monk for a degree, he took the lead in withstanding the brow- 

 beating of Jeffreys and the cajoleries of friend William ; was returned 

 as member for the University to the Convention Parliament, and 

 ultimately received the appointment of Master of the Mint which 

 he retained till his death, and in which office he carried out success- 

 fully that tremendous operation of reforming the coinage, so graphi- 

 cally described by Maeaulay ; a similar plan for Ireland was defeated 

 by the factious malignity of Swift in the well-known Draper Letters. 

 Thus, then, for the last half of his long life, Newton lived in London 

 attending to the duties of his office, and devoting his leisure to phi- 

 losophy and kindred subjects, living in ease and affluence, dispensing 

 a golden mean of hospitality, knighted by his Sovereign, President of 

 the Royal Society, (annually re-elected for twenty-five years,) in 

 familiar intercourse with the Princess of Wales (afterwards wife of 

 George II.,) entertaining distinguished foreigners who came on pil- 

 grimage to him, in correspondence with all that was good and great 

 in that age, generously assisting struggling talent, and dying peace- 

 fully at the age of eighty-five with that remarkable utterance of his 

 death-bed, " I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to 

 myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, 

 and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or 

 a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all 

 undiscovered before me." His body lay in state in the Jerusalem 

 Chamber, was buried in Westminster Abbey, Dukes and Earls 

 bearing the pall, and the Bishop of Rochester officiating ; a splendid 

 monument to him rises in the Abbey with an epitaph which is truth- 

 ful because for him exaggeration is impossible ; a medal to his honor 

 is struck at the Tower ; Roubillac carves the glorious statue (his 

 masterpiece) which stands in the ante-chapel of Trinity, and the bust 

 which side by side with that of Bacon, adorns their Library, con- 

 trasting with the plaster-cast from the face after death that lies be- 

 side it, (in which the phrenologist will note the lumps, like pigeons' 

 eggs, that cluster on the lower brow, and which Roubillac has soft- 

 ened into beauty and vacancy ;) the telescopes made by his own hands 

 are cherished by Trinity and the Royal Society as their choicest 

 treasures ; his image is familiar in the Pantheons of all countries, 

 and his name is borne alike by a French war vessel and one of the 

 floating palaces of the Hudson, and in connection with that philosophy 

 of which he laid the foundations deep and wide, never to be shaken, 

 has become a household word in all languages and among allpouplQg, 



