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board to whatever room he might be in. The audience generally consisted of the Observatory assistant and myself. He was not so much teaching, as throwing his mind into a didactic attitude. I amused him once by saying that his lecturing us on equations of the fifth degree reminded me of the lion preparing for action by whetting his claws on the bark of a tree. He appeared to enjoy intensely arithmetical calculations. I never saw him look so perfectly happy as when running like a sleuth-hound on the track of some unhappy decimal which had marred the work, and unearthing it in its den.... I cannot otherwise express his attachment to his own мs. volumes than by saying that he loved them. He once, at a luncheon party of students at the Observatory, ranged some thirty of them on the chimney-piece, and, turning to the students, said, "These books represent much of the happiness of my life.'"

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A good idea of the process of "incubation above mentioned is given by the following extract from a letter to a mathematical friend. Hamilton is speaking of one of the most beautiful discoveries contained in his last work on quaternions, the general symbolical solution of a vector equation of the first degree; and he writes, in 1859, the day after the discovery was made :

"While I was walking, on business of another sort, through Dublin yesterday, the question again occurred to me.

"Puræ sunt plateæ, nihil ut meditantibus obstet "

"I nunc, et versus tecum meditare canoros."

We give here, as curiously applicable to Hamilton himself, another of his sonnets,— "those fourteen-lined productions," as he says, " to which I attach but little value on the artistic side, although some of them are associated with happy or mournful moments, and which at all events may, to a man's self, serve as instruments of culture, and may

have some social or other interest to those who know him chiefly as a writer, or thinker, on subjects of a very different kind."

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The following final extract, from a letter written in 1858, gives a very clear insight I was not so rash as to attempt the composition into the view Hamilton took of his own disof a Sonnet in the streets; though, in accept-coveries, and of the comparative value which ance of a challenge from a Lady, long ago, he attached to methods and results. There beside whom I was sitting in a Music Room, I is no doubt that, in the case of quaternions did dash off a Sonnet before the performance had ceased. But those days are over:-hap- at least, he sought mainly to improve his pily? Yes, so far as the getting a little more methods, and almost studiously avoided the sense, and less sensibility, is concerned. treatment of new subjects; and the result is, that in his hands alone the development attained is extraordinary ::

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"The problem, however, (though not the Sonnet,) haunted me, as it happened, yesterday, while I was walking from the Provost's House to that of the Academy; and though I wrote nothing down, that day, (for I had an immensity of other things to attend to,) I resumed it this morning; and arrived at what you might call, in the language of your last, a 'perplexingly easy" solution (in the sense of being very UNLABORIOUS, for I do not pretend that the reasoning does not require close attention). So simple does this solution appear, that I hesitate as yet to place entire confidence in it; and therefore, till I have fully written it out, for at present it is partly mental,—and have given it a complete and thorough reexamination, I hesitate to communicate it to you."

"I reminded the R. I. A. that, so long ago as 1831, I had communicated to that body an Extension of (what is usually called) Herschel's Theorem: namely, the following extended Formula... By making the two particular assumptions . . . my formula becomes . . . which is, if I remember rightly, one form of Herschel's Theorem. In speaking of 'Herschel's Theorem,' I believe that I follow an usage, which of course he did not originate, but against which he has never complained. In my own case, however, I did complain, although (as I hope) gently, that a much less general formula of mine, which had indeed occurred in the same short paper of 1831 . . .

had been cited, in a then recent number of the Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, under the title of " Hamilton's Theorem." What I meant was merely this;-that although I had no desire to have any theorem of mine so named, yet it was scarcely just, in my opinion, to select, out of a single and short paper, a formula which involved only one functional characteristic, one symbol of operation, and one ultimately evanescent variable; and by the manner in which the formula so selected was mentioned, or by the title under which it was cited, to ignore, or even virtually to reject, the much more general equation, which (as you see) involved two functional signs, two operators, and two ultimately evanescent variables. So, don't cite anything as "Hamilton's Theorem," if you wish not to tread upon my corns! I hope, indeed, that it may not be considered as unpardonable vanity or presumption on my part, if, as my own taste has always led me to feel a greater interest in methods than in results, so it is by METHODS, rather than by any THEOREMS, which can be separately quoted, that I desire and hope to be remembered. Nevertheless it is only human nature, to derive some pleasure from being cited, now and then, even Theorem," especially when . the quoter can enrich the subject, by combining it

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with researches of his own."

...

In concluding, we have only to express a hope that we have rendered intelligible to the general reader, though perhaps in but small degree, at all events the nature of some of the grand investigations of this illustrious man. Of course there will ever be many who, though (or perhaps because) totally incapable of understanding anything lofty or difficult, will sneer out over such pages the cui bono of ignorance. They cannot see one of the sources of the vastness of modern commerce in Newton meditating about gravity, another in Watt patching a trumpery model. To their narrow vision the designer of a new easy-chair or the inventor of a new sauce, a lucky speculator or a sensation-novelist, even, it may be, a mountebank assuming the guise of a philosopher, is the grandest of the human race; but, while science lasts, the name of Hamil ton will hold an honoured position among those of her few greatest sons.

We have endeavoured to give, in brief compass, a trustworthy account of Hamilton and his works. Of himself the account is easy, being mainly quoted from his correspondence. In our account of his works we have endeavoured, so far as we could, to avail ourselves of extracts from his writings. In several cases this was impossible; and we must warn the reader not to judge of the importance of the subject by the extremely small fragments which we have been forced to give as popularly intelligible specimens. Many of the preceding extracts are taken

from letters which we have received from Hamilton himself. We have derived some assistance from articles, or sketches, in the Dublin University Magazine (Jan. 1842), the Gentleman's Magazine (Jan. 1866,) and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (Feb. 1866). The last of these, especially, is an admirable tribute to Hamilton's memory, but is somewhat marred by inaccuracies in the note on the nature of quaternions. And we must express our obligations to W. E. Hamilton, Esq., C. E., the elder son of Sir William, for facts and documents; and for his kindness in verifying the statements we have made as to his father's ancestry and early history.

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first of these sketches, the Rev. R. P. Graves, We are glad to hear that the author of the one of Hamilton's oldest friends, and brother of his former colleague in the University the Bishop of Limerick, is about to write his biography. The prospect of such a volume leaves us but one wish to express, that the authorities of Trinity College may publish, as speedily as possible, if not all, at least all

that is most valuable in, the мss. of the most distinguished among the many great men who, as students and professors, have shed lustre on the University of Dublin.

We conclude with an extract from the Opening Address (Session 1865-6) of the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which Hamilton was an Honorary Fellow.

"Sir John Herschel once wrote thus:'Here whole branches of continental discovery are unstudied, and, indeed, almost unknown choly truth. We are fast dropping behind. In even by name. It is vain to conceal the melanmathematics we have long since drawn the rein and given over a hopeless race, etc.' Hamilton, while second to none, was one of the earliest of that brilliant array of mathematicians, who, since Herschel wrote, have removed this stigma, and well-nigh reversed the terms of his statement. Another was the late Professor ranks of British science which will not soon be Boole. . . . Their death has made a gap in the filled; and our sorrow is but increased by the recollection that they have been removed in the full vigour of their intellect, and when their passion for work was, if possible, stronger than ever."

ART. III.-1. The Book of Ballads. Edited by BON GAULTIER. Seventh Edition. Edinburgh, 1861.

2. Firmilian. Edinburgh, 1854.
3. Tales from Blackwood. Edinburgh.

4. Headlong Hall, etc. Bentley's Standard | times as well known as Henry Taylor. But Novels, 1837.

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SINCE the days of the prince of biographers, the wise and warm-hearted Plutarch of Chaeronea, very little has been done in literature for that parallelism which was so essential a part of his biographical theory. To take men of eminence, and place them in juxtaposition; to observe their points of similarity, and of dissimilarity in similarity, so that each should be separately more intelligible from the comparison of him with the other; -this, the Plutarchian idea, has been less fruitful than might have been expected, considering the just popularity of Plutarch from the days of Montaigne downwards. Bishop Hurd deserves the praise of having advocated its study, and of having suggested some material for the purpose; and Coleridge, in what he called the "landing-places" of his Friend, so far followed it up, that he made most ingenious suggestive comparisons between Luther and Rousseau, and between Erasmus and Voltaire. We are not going to deal just now with men of such magnitude; but we must be allowed to congratulate ourselves on having a good opportunity of applying the doctrine in the case of a group of distinguished contemporaries recently taken away. Within about a twelvemonth three humorists have been blotted from the roll of living British men of letters: Professor Aytoun, Mr. Thomas Love Peacock, and the Reverend Frank Mahonybetter known as Father Prout. Each of these men represented one of the three kingdoms: Aytoun, our own bonnie Northern land; Peacock, England; and Mahony, Ireland.

They were all humorists. They were all lyrists. They were all more or less Bohemian and eccentric in the exercise of their gifts. They were all men of classical education. They were all men of strongly marked national type. Finally, they had this, too, in common, that they never became exactly popular, that is, universally popular in the sense in which Thackeray or Jerrold were so, but enjoyed their chief reputation among the cultivated classes. Every generation has writers of this peculiar type-writers often of higher powers and attainments than many who are better known, but who, somehow, never pass the line which divides those who are distinguished from those who are famous. It is curious to reflect that De Quincey never had a tithe as many readers as Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and that Mr. Tupper is some fifty

this is one of the eternal phenomena of literature which never discourages real men of letters, while it ought to teach critics that perhaps their most important duty is to help to make known those whom the world has not learned to know for itself. If we propose to glance now at what was done by the three gentlemen just mentioned, for their generation, our object is partly to induce readers to become better acquainted with them at first-hand. Professor Aytoun's works are, indeed, well known in Scotland, but might be better known in the South and in Ireland. Peacock, in spite of the admirable wit and cleverness of his tales, is, we suspect, little appreciated out of London. Father Prout is loved and honoured by own countrymen, and in the literary world of the metropolis his name is a household word; but, elsewhere, few know how much,enjoyment may be got from his pages. We should like to see the reputation of these brilliant men counter-changed, as the heralds saythe Scoth and Irish reputations crossing into each other-and the English intermingling with both. We are no friends to excessive centralization. Indeed, we cherish national individualism as one of the conditions of literary variety, raciness, and colour. But nationality without intercommunion has a constant tendency to degenerate into provincialism; and provincialism preserves national traits not as living things, but as petrifactions. The intellectual life of every country ought to blow over into other lands like a wind. The north wind is necessary to keep the south cool, and the south wind is necessary to keep the north from freezing. Now, it so happens, as has been already briefly hinted, that each of our three humorists had a strong flavour of his own country about him. In an age when so many Scotchmen emigrate, Aytoun devoted his life to Scotland. He formed himself on native models, and attached himself to a native school of literature. His humour--and it is humour with which we have to do in this paper-was essentially Scotch; that is to say, hearty or even vehement in expression sometimes, but dry to the taste; shrewd and thoughtful at bottom; and based on character rather than light and brilliant. He did not shine in epigram. His prose style wanted clearness, terseness, grace. His strong point both as writer and talker was humour proper, fun, a perception of the ludicrous; but a perception of the ludicrous from a Scot's point of view, in which the intellectual rather than the moral pleasure to be derived from it is the predominant object sought. Peacock, again, was eminently English in

it.

his clear good sense, his quick penetrating sarcasm, embodied with classic neatness of expression, and his fine practical contempt for all extravagances of taste and speculation. When we come to Prout, we find his genius not less characteristic of his nation. His fun is full of all kinds of playfulness, and fancy, and paradox,-real larky fun, to use a familiar expression,--such as the English kind rarely is, and the Scotch almost never. In pure epigram, the Englishman has the best of The Irishman's epigram is most fanciful; his precious stones are coloured. The Scot does not excel in epigram at all; nor much in that drollery, the drollery of abandon, of which downright noisy laughter is the natural result. The Englishman's joke is like a smile--a smile in which his intellectual eyes take a part; the Irishman's is a poke in your ribs, accompanied with a laugh, shrill rather than hearty; the Scot's is a deep chuckle, an inward laugh, which does not disturb the lines of a mouth full of a sagacious knowingness, and a conscious sense of the pregnant meaning of which the best Scotch pleasantry is full. While thus distinctly gifted according to their distinct races, our three celebrated specially each his piny TаTρida yaîav. The author of the "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers" wrote with obvious delight of the "Thundering Spey." The author of "Headlong Hall" not only devoted a special poem to the "Genius of the Thames," but loved the noble river, and haunted it all his life. His favourite amusement in old age was to take his family out on it for a row, and his bones lie in the churchyard of Shepperton, not far from its wave. The author of the "Reliques of Father Prout" devoted perhaps his best lyric to the "Bells of Shandon, that sound so grand on the pleasant waters of the river Lee;" and he, too, lies near the Lee, as Peacock does near the Thames, and Aytoun near the Forth-each amidst the scenery first loved and last forgotten of his ancestral land. Any one of them might have addressed a friend in the tenderest of all the odes of their common literary ancestor, the beloved Venusian lyrist :——

"Ille te mecum locus et beatæ
Postulant arces; ibi tu calentem
Debitâ sparges lacrimâ favillam
Vatis amici."

Having thus indicated in a broad rapid way the general elements of comparison between our writers, we shall follow the Plutarchian plan by giving a sketch of each of them separately, before attempting to make the comparison complete. The order in which they died happens also to be the alphabetical order, so that it is not our Scot

tish patriotism only which has made us give Professor Aytoun the first place. Aytoun came of a good old Scottish family, now represented by Mr. Roger Sinclair Aytoun of Inchdairnie, the respected Member for the Kirkcaldy Burghs. The family took its name at a very remote period from the lands of Aytoun in Berwickshire, and was first established in Fife in the sixteenth century by a gentleman who was Governor of Stirling Castle. Their arms were an engrailed cross with roses; and the founders of the Fife branch adopted a beautiful motto by way of difference on settling in their new home. "Et decerpta dabunt odorem," they said, and the transplanted roses justified the modest boast. Sir Robert Aytoun, the poet, on whose tomb in Westminster Abbey the motto may still be read, was one of the Fife stock, of the house of Kinneden. The branches in the "East Neuk" of Fife seem to have dwindled away; but Inchdairnie, settled some seven miles to the north of Kirkcaldy, held on, and has survived to our time, in spite of an interest in politics during great historical crises, which has been fatal to many a landed line. They produced Covenanters in the seventeenth century, and Jacobites in the eighteenth; and one of the Jacobites, who seems from the books which he left behind him to have been a man of science and letters, passed some time in exile in Holland. Of this family, and sprung, we believe, from their marriage with the daughter of a once well-known judge, Lord Harcarse, William Edmondstoune Aytoun was a cadet; a fact which helps to explain his tinge of feudal sentiment and romance,that old Scottish quality found in Scotsmen unlike each other in everything else—in Knox and Sir Walter, in Smollet and in Hume. He was born in Abercromby Place, Edinburgh, on the 21st June 1813, and was the son of Mr. Roger Aytoun, Writer to the Signet. He went to the Edinburgh Academy at eleven years of age, and in 1827 or 1828 to the College, where he remained till 1832. The head-master of the Academy at that time was Archdeacon Williams, a man of learning and wit, and author of several remarkable books, especially of a Life of Cosar, which is far too little known. The classical professors of the College were Pillans and Dunbar, the first a Latin scholar of some elegance, the second a good teacher, as far as his range of teaching went. Aytoun benefited at least as much as his best fellowstudents by this classical training; but the ancient literature had no special attractions for him, and he never knew it so well as either Peacock or Father Prout. On the other hand, he learned German in Germany,

and we have heard contemporaries of his describe his youthful enthusiasm for Macaulay's" Ivry" and "Armada," which, together with the influence of Scott, then the first intellectual influence felt by every young Scotsman, prepared him for the "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers " by and bye. Nature had formed Aytoun for the Tory school of Scottish literature, but his father, who had been agent to the Duke of Hamilton, was a Whig, and the future Jacobite of Blackwood was for some time devoted to "the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill." The natural development of Aytoun's mind, however, brought him gradually into more congenial associations, and he became a Tory of the special Scottish type then in fashion, and now extinct. We have nothing to do with politics on this occasion, but nobody, we think, will quarrel with us if we say as a mere matter of history, that this extinct type of Scottish Toryism-the Toryism of Scott and John Wilson-appealed not unnaturally to the hearts and imaginations of the young. It was a picturesque and patriotic Toryism for one thing, basing itself on the past, and especially on the past of Scotland.

It was a jolly Toryism, in the next place, glorying in convivial riot, and delighting to express itself with unbounded freedom of humour and sarcasm.

There is a fearful legend in Edinburgh that a song was sung at the Tory suppers of that day, the chorus of which was:

"Curse the people,

Blast the people,

D-n the lower orders!"

This was probably a Whig joke, but we need only to turn to the Noctes Ambrosiana to see with what license of savage, yet somehow not essentially bitter jocosity, the great Christopher thought himself entitled to treat opponents; and with what a daring hand he claimed for himself and his friends the fiercest pleasures of the social board. An enemy was a "gander," a "stot," a mean eunuch;" while a friend, besides the possession of every serious virtue, enjoyed a stomach to which no amount of supper and no long succession of tumblers could do the least mischief. There was something in all this fun which tickled the fancy of youngsters; and the effect of it is very visible in Aytoun's contributions to the Bon Gaultier Ballads, the chief effusions of his humour in verse. Mr. Theodore Martin had been writing for some time under the nom de plume of Bon Gaultier before he became acquainted with Aytoun, and the title was retained as a common designation when they began to work together in Tait's Magazine and Fraser. Most of the ballads were joint

handiwork, but a few of the best are known to have been exclusively Aytoun's, among which we may mention "The Massacre of the Macpherson," "The Queen in France," "The Rhyme of Sir Launcelot Bogle," and "Little John." We quote the first of these, in spite of its being so well known on this side Tweed, because there is a dryness of sarcasm about it, which we have already declared to be essentially Scotch, as distinct from the satire either of England or Ireland :

"THE MASSACRE OF THE MACPHERSON. (From the Gaelic.)

I.

Fhairshon swore a feud
Against the clan M'Tavish;
Marched into their land
To murder and to rafish ;
For he did resolve

To extirpate the vipers, With four-and-twenty men And five-and-thirty pipers.

II.

But when he had gone

Half-way down Strath Canaan, Of his fighting tail

Just three were remainin',
They were all he had,

To back him in ta battle;
All the rest had gone
Off, to drive ta cattle.

III.

'Fery coot!' cried Fhairshon, 'So my clan disgraced is; Lads, we'll need to fight

Pefore we touch the peasties. Here's Mhic-Mac-Methusaleh Coming wi' his fassals, Gillies seventy-three, And sixty Dhuinéwassails!'

IV.

'Coot tay to you, sir;

Are you not ta Fhairshon?
Was you coming here

To fisit any person?
You are a plackguard, sir!

It is now six hundred
Coot long years, and more,
Since my glen was plundered.'

V.

'Fat is tat you say?

Dare you cock your peaver? I will teach you, sir,

Fat is coot pehaviour! You shall not exist

For another day more; I will shoot you, sir,

Or stap you with my claymore!'

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