Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 9.djvu/514

500 mathematician of genius, the friend and fellow-worker of Herschel, and the inventor of the calculating machine. He was nearly eighty when he died, and for every year of his life he had published a volume of mathematical studies. To the London public, however, he was known by less reverend associations. Punch had made a byword of him for the incessant warfare which his irritable temper, strained by a long course of delicate experiments, led him to wage against street musicians. Mr. Babbage's face was as well known in the London police courts as in the rooms of the Royal Society. Sir Roderick Murchison, born in the same year, died in the same month. He was one of the first of English geologists, though, strange to say, he had begun life as an officer in Lord Wellington's Peninsula army. He prophesied the discovery of gold in Australia, from a comparison of some Australian rock with the rock of the Ural Mountains, some years before the actual discovery. In 1853, he was appointed Director-General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain; and besides his official posts, he held a principal place in the Geographical Society, and was a notable herald of geographical discovery. Sir John F. W. Herschel, the greatest perhaps of recent English astronomers, also died in this year, and just at the same ago as Murchison and Babbage. His works and discoveries are hardly of a kind to be recorded at length in a popular History; it is enough to say that his long life was spent in ceaseless observations of the heavens, and his keen intellect perpetually employed in methodising and inferring from what he had observed. His father was the famous Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus (now called "Herschel"), the most distant of the known planets. The son, going up to Cambridge prepared by private tuition, came out Senior Wrangler, and at once began to tread in his father's footsteps. He discovered about 500 new nebulæ; and he was the first Englishman to make a systematic study of the southern heavens, taking up for four years a station at the Cape of Good Hope. His presence in the young colony, it may be added, was of immense benefit to education; for it is to him that the development of the school system, now enjoyed by the people of the Cape, is chiefly owing. He also may be regarded as the first person who, if we may use the phrase, applied the "comparative method" very widely to meteorology. His "Instructions for Making and Registering Meteorological Observations at Various Stations in Southern Africa," which were published by official authority, marked an era in the history of the science. Before this book appeared, however, he had been long recognised as, in his own line, the most distinguished Englishman living. Honours came quickly upon him. He was made a baronet at the time of the Coronation; and most of the academies in Europe opened their doors to him. His clear and charming style, too, widened the circle of his readers, and gave an insight into the method of science to hundreds of those who could not cope with the details. His "Outlines of Astronomy," and his "Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy," were books essentially popular, in the best sense of the term.

Of those whose names are contained in the obituary of the year, there is one so thoroughly representative of his age that we may dwell upon his life at rather greater length. This was George Grote, who, while diligently following the business of a London banker, made himself at one time of his life the chief public spokesman of the "Philosophic Radical" party, and by his writings on the history and philosophy of Greece gave a new reality to those subjects, and raised immensely the reputation of English scholarship. He came of a race of bankers. His grandfather, a native of Bremen, came over in the middle of the last century, and in 1766 founded the banking-house of Grote, Prescott, and Co. The second son of this George Grote, also called George, was the father of the historian, who was born at Clay Hill, near Beckenham, in 1794. His father was true to the traditions of mercantile life, and though he sent his son to the Charterhouse School till he was sixteen, never dreamed of allowing him to carry on the studies of which he had become so fond, by entering the University. "He felt no inclination," says Mrs. Grote in her memoirs of her husband, "to promote the young George's intellectual turn of mind, at the expense of giving him a college training; whilst, on the other hand, he required his son's services for his own convenience." And so the boy, whose very hand-writing to the day of his death showed the methodical, prosaic nature of his early training, went into his father's bank at sixteen years of age, and worked there for thirty-two years. In his leisure time, however, he kept up his study of classical authors; he began to learn music too, and German, and used to play Handel with his mother in the long evenings at home. But he made no secret of his aversion to the dulness of the ordinary family routine. He could not stand his father's City friends, nor his mother's extreme Calvinism. He took refuge from both with friends of his own age—with George Norman and Charles Cameron, and other young men of an inquiring and eager turn of mind—and in 1816 we find him talking of having made a sort of abridgement of part of Sismondi's "History of the Italian Republics." A little later on, a new era in his life began with his first meetings with James Mill, the utilitarian philosopher and historian. At first he did not fall wholly under the spell of that powerful propagandist; he disliked that "readiness to dwell on the faults and defects of others" which marked the elder Mill so strongly, and which gained him so many enemies. But very soon, as Mill made a point of winning Grote to his principles, he won him, even to share his strong antipathies. "Mr. Mill," says Grote's biographer, "had the strongest convictions as to the superior advantages of democratic government over the monarchical or the aristocratic; and with these he mingled a scorn and hatred of the ruling classes, which amounted to positive fanaticism. Coupled with this aversion to aristocratic influence (to which influence he invariably ascribed most of the defects and abuses prevalent in the administration of public affairs), Mr. Mill entertained a profound prejudice against the Established Church, and, of course,