MEMOIR OF DR. LATHAM. 
31 
Esq., of Winchester. Hither he retired with his second wife, in 1819. He was 
enabled to save some of the choicest of his books from the wreck of his property, 
and that placid disposition which characterized him through life, aided, we trust, 
by higher hopes, enabled him to settle down, in the bosom of his daughters 
family, into his usual habits and pursuits. 
We find, by a letter to Col. Montagu, dated 1809, that he had at that time 
completed the reconstruction of his original work, with a view to a second edition. 
Some difficulties occurred on the part of the booksellers, and it was postponed 
for the time. In 1811 he had revised, and largely augmented with notes and 
observations from this, the ornithological part of Pennant’s British Zoology , of 
which a second edition was published by his son, Mr. D. Pennant. But although 
he had thus drawn upon his own work, he never relinquished the idea of re¬ 
publishing it himself entire, and continued to add daily to its stores. 
As much with a desire of withdrawing his mind from the painful events to 
which we have alluded, as with the hope of pecuniary advantage to the author, 
his friends now pressed him to print, by subscription, the work which he had 
prepared. Accordingly, in 1821, he commenced the publication of the General 
History of Birds , and it was completed in ten volumes, price twenty-one guineas, 
in about two years and a half. It was not likely, from the nature of the under¬ 
taking, that he would add much to his reputation by this late effort; but it 
was a curious and an interesting spectacle to see a man who had attained the 
eighty-second year of a laborious and harrassed life, busily engaged in editing 
a work which demanded so large a space of time for its completion ; and those 
who have witnessed him during that time retouching the copper-plates, with a 
steadiness of hand which is supposed to belong peculiarly to the prime of life, will 
not easily forget their admiration. 
He lived nearly fourteen years after the termination of this task, without sorrow 
or suffering, beyond that which he has in his correspondence described as the 
great evil of old age—to become the survivor of those whom he had valued and 
loved in life. He was already a widower for the second time, and his only 
remaining child, Mrs. Wickham, died in the beginning of 1835. During this 
year he first felt the failure of his eye-sight. Infirmities gradually increased ; but 
he was still an active and cheerful man. He took his daily walk alone—for he 
scorned the assistance of an arm—and if any one was happy enough to ask for 
information on any subject which his library could illustrate, neither the distance 
of the room, nor the weight of the folio to be brought down, deterred him from 
going himself to gratify his inquirers. 
Mr. J. E. Gray, of the British Museum, and one of the doctor’s most intimate 
friends in his latter years, possesses a copy of the second edition of Dr. Latham’s 
Index Ornithologicus , in which the author himself added all the new species he 
