Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/96

44 gathered, as if by an involuntary and irresistible tendency. To it he consecrated the labour of his life; it was the favourite study of his earlier years, and his old age continued to be cheered by it. In every thing belonging to this science there was a marvellous quickness and accuracy of perception—an extreme justness of observation and inference about him. When the conversation turned upon any geographical subject, his ideas assumed a kind of poetical inspiration, and flowed on in such unbroken and close succession, as to leave no opportunity to his auditors of interposing a question or pursuing a discussion. Once engaged, there was no recalling him from his wild excursive range—on he went, revelling in the intensity of his own enjoyment, and bearing his hearers along with him over chains of mountains and lines of rivers, until they became utterly bewildered by the rapidity with which the physical features of every region of the globe were made to pass in panoramic succession before them.

From his childhood Mr. Bell had been subject to severe attacks of asthma. These gradually assumed a more alarming character, and ultimately compelled him to leave Glasgow for a residence in the country. The place which he selected for his retirement was a humble cottage in the neighbourhood of the village of Campsie, about twelve miles north of Glasgow. Here he spent the last ten or twelve years of his life in much domestic comfort and tranquillity.

He was abstemious in his general habits; and his only earthly regret—at least the only one which he deemed of sufficient consequence to make matter of conversation—was the smallness of his library, and his want of access to books. Yet it is astonishing how little in the republic either of letters or of science he allowed to escape him. His memory was so retentive, that nothing which he had once read was ever forgotten by him. This extraordinary faculty enabled him to execute his literary commissions with a much more limited apparatus of books, than to others less gifted would have been an indispensable requisite.

The closing scene of Mr. Bell's life was calm and peaceful. He had, as already mentioned, long suffered violently from asthma. This painful disease gradually gained upon his constitution, and became more severe in its periodical attacks, and the exhausted powers of nature finally sunk in the struggle. He expired on the 3d of May, 1833, in the sixty-fourth year of his age, and was buried, at his own express desire, in the old churchyard of Campsie—a beautiful and sequestered spot.

In forming an estimate of Mr. Bell's literary character, we must always keep in view the difficulties with which he had to struggle in his unwearied pursuit of knowledge. He was without fortune, without powerful friends, and destitute, to a great extent, of even the common apparatus of a scholar. He laboured also under defects of physical organization which would have chilled and utterly repressed any mind less ardent and enthusiastic than his own in the pursuit of knowledge: yet he surmounted every obstacle, and gained for himself a distinguished place among British geographers, in despite both of his hard fortune and infirm health. Many men have made a more brilliant display with inferior talents and fewer accomplishments; but none ever possessed a more complete mastery over their favourite science, and could bring to any related task a greater amount of accurate and varied knowledge. That he was an accomplished classical scholar is apparent from the immense mass of erudite allusions which his writings present; but he was not an exact scholar. He knew little of the niceties of language; his compositions are often inelegant and incorrect; he had no idea