28 The Hon. Henty Cavendish : [January, 
wanting beyond the faCt mentioned by himself in one of his 
papers, that he worked in a back and fore room, one of 
which was 14 feet high, — a description which, meagre as it 
is, puts out of court those of his biographers who assert 
that he lived in a set of stables fitted up for his accommo- 
dation. During this period his father, who was a compara- 
tively poor man, allowed him £5°° a Y ear * The smallness 
of the allowance is supposed by some to have been the 
cause of Cavendish’s habits of economy and oddities of 
character ; but this is equally untenable. Riches and po- 
verty are only relative, and the passionless philosopher — 
whose apparatus was chiefly made of glass plates, wire, tin- 
foil, cardboard, and firewood — must in those days have been 
fairly comfortable on such a sum. It is stated that the so- 
called meagreness of his annuity was owing to his father’s 
displeasure at his refusal to enter public or professional life : 
whether this be so or not it is impossible to know now, 
but the faCt nevertheless remains that Lord Charles 
was a poor man considering his high connections. He was 
a man of Science of no mean ability ; and although we have 
no means of knowing upon what terms he lived with his 
son, he must have appreciated his superior genius. 
Somewhere about 1 773, about ten years before his father’s 
death, Cavendish appears to have come into a large fortune 
of several hundred thousand pounds, but the source or 
sources of it are unknown, except we admit the hackneyed 
“ rich uncle from India ” theory. This fortune he added to, 
by his inability to spend, so considerably during the remain- 
der of his life that he died worth a million and a quarter 
sterling. 
He now seems to have removed to Montague Place, Russell 
Square, and to have taken a country house at Clapham, 
where he died. His wealth seems to have made no change 
in his habits; he still remained the silent investigator, 
dragging secret after secret out of his ricketty apparatus, 
and carefully hoarding it up. His wonderful habits of pre- 
cision, however, compelled him to make careful notes of all 
that he did, and it is from these notes that we know most 
of his greatness as an electrician. The twenty odd packets 
of essays and papers — most of them carefully prepared for 
reading or printing, but never published — were placed in the 
hands of Sir W. Snow Harris by the present Duke of Devon- 
shire when Lord Burlington ; but this “ valuable mine of 
results,” as they are called by Sir William Thomson, to 
whom they were shown in 1849, has been unworked till 
now. As we are not reviewing Prof. Maxwell’s work at 
