Ixxviii 



pointments in the public service, of the Commission appointed to consider 

 the site of the National Gallery, and (in 1867) of the Trades' Unions 

 Commission. And those who acted with him in these several capacities 

 can bear testimony to the influence which he exercised through his singu- 

 larly calm and temperate judgment and the unfailing considerateness with 

 which he weighed the opinions of his colleagues. He was for the last five 

 years of his life Chairman of the Hudson's Bay Company. In April 1863 

 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Besides his other literary 

 works, of which mention has been made, he was the author of the little 

 philological essay entitled Shall and Will, two chapters on future auxi- 

 liary verbs" (1856 and 1858) — of a translation of 'Yiga Glam's Saga' from 

 the Icelandic (1866) (a language of which the study occupied him a good 

 deal towards the end of his life) — of articles on art-subjects in the Edin- 

 burgh Review, on Eastlake (1847), Cavalcasella (1865), and Holbein (1866), 

 on the law of settlement, on the American Civil War (1862) — and in the 

 Quarterly on Isaac Taylor's ' Words and Phases,' and the ' Life of Sir 

 John Eliot.' He also occasionally amused himself with poetical com- 

 position ; his essays in that department, chiefly translations, appeared 

 from time to time in Eraser's Magazine. He was engaged at the time 

 of his death on editing a translation of Van Praet's volume of historical 

 miscellanies, whioh has since been completed by Sir Alexander Gordon. 

 If the subjects to which his attention was thus devoted appear to in- 

 dicate rather a discursive mind than serious addiction to any individual 

 study, it must be remembered that his business in life was the public 

 service, and his pursuits in literature and art mere accessories, to supply 

 an active intellect with employment in the intervals of its appropriate 

 labour. 



Sir Edmund Head died suddenly, on the 28th of January 1868, pro- 

 bably of disease of the heart, of which the existence was unknown to himself 

 and his friends. With him the old Baronetcy enjoyed by his family be- 

 came extinct. 



