Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 05.djvu/117

 server’ and of ‘Bell’s Life,’ had not the public spirit of his predecessor, and the paper began to decline in a commercial sense. In 1834 it was again sold for the sum of 16,500l. to Sir John Easthope and two partners. The ‘Times' had distanced the ‘Chronic1e,’ when, by a sudden change in its politics in 1835, it caused numbers of its Whig subscribers to abandon it and support the ‘Chronicle.’ Black was so elated by this turn of fortune that he exclaimed, ‘Now our readers will follow me anywhere I like to lead them!’

In 1835 Black fought a duel with John Arthur Roebuck. The latter had published a pamphlet in which cowardice was attributed to the editor of the ‘Chronicle.' A meeting took place at which the principals fired twice, and the seconds nearly engaged in mortal combat.

When Lord Melbourne returned to office (8 April 1835) he found a useful ally and a congenial companion in Black. A story is told of the prime minister having vowed he would make Black a bishop on an occasion when he was foiled of his intention to confer that dignity on Sydney Smith. Black supported the ministry with all his powers, and wrote some specially vigorous articles against Sir Robert Peel in 1839. Melbourne during his next administration professed a desire to serve Black, who declined the offer on the ground that he ‘lived happily on his income.’ ‘Then by ——— I envy you,’ said the peer, ‘and you’re the only man I ever did.’ With Lord Palmerston he did not get on quite so well. He once vexed the soul of the busy foreign secretary by launching out into half an hour’s dissertation on the ethnological peculiarities of the yellow-haired races of Finland, when the business of the interview was simply to know what the government meant to do at a certain crisis in foreign affairs. Lord Brougham was very intimate with ‘Dear Doctor,’ as he styled Black, a title derisively applied by Cobbett, and not agreeable to Black's ears. It was Black's great pleasure to encourage the budding talents of the young writers around him, and among others that of Charles Dickens, who began his literary career as a reporter for the ‘Chronicle.' Latterly there was thought to be a decline of energy in the management of the paper, and Black, in 1843, received an intimation that his resignation would be accepted. Black, who was now sixty years old, had saved no money, and had to part with his beloved books, some 30,000 volumes. Friends and admirers rallied round him, and a sum, to which the proprietors of the ‘Chronicle’ contributed, was raised sufficient to buy him an annuity of 150l. His old friend Mr. Walter Coulson placed a comfortable cottage at Snodland, near Maidstone, at his disposal, and there Black passed the remaining twelve years of his life in the study of his favourite Greek, chiefly the Septuagint version of the Scriptures, and in the assiduous practice of gardening. B1ack’s Newfoundland dogs, Cato and Plutus, were as well known as himself. One of them rescued from the Thames a boy, who subsequently attained a seat on the judicial bench. Mr. James Grant describes Black in his latter years as having ‘the blunt and bluff appearance of a thickset farmer never seen in the streets without being accompanied by a large mastiff (? Newfoundland), and a robust stick in his hand.' He died 15 June 1855.

 BLACK, JOSEPH, M.D. (1728–1799), an eminent chemist, was born in 1728 at Bordeaux, where his father, John Black, carried on the business of a wine-merchant. John Black was a native of Belfast, but of Scottish extraction, and married a daughter of Robert Gordon, of the Gordons of Hillhead in Aberdeenshire, like himself engaged in the Bordeaux wine trade, by whom he had eight sons and five daughters. The worth of his sterling character and well-informed mind obtained for him the friendship of Montesquieu. At the age of twelve Joseph Black was placed at a grammar school in Belfast, and in 1746 proceeded thence to the university of Glasgow. There he chose medicine as his profession, and became enamoured of chemistry through the teachings of William Cullen, the first in Great Britain to raise the science to its true dignity. Cullen noted Black's aptitude, promoted him from the class-room to the laboratory, and imparted to him, as his assistant, his own singular dexterity in experiment.

When Black went to Edinburgh to complete his medical education in 1750 or 1751, he found an active controversy in progress as to the mode of action of the lithontriptic medicines then recently introduced into the pharmacopœia. He took up the subject, and finding himself, in 1752, on the brink of an important discovery, he postponed taking his degree until its proofs were assured. There is, perhaps, no other instance of a graduation thesis so weighted with significant novelty as Black's ‘De humore acido à cibis orto, et Magnesia alba,' presented to the faculty 11 June 1754. Developed and perfected, it was read before the Medical Society of Edinburgh 5 June 1755, published in the second