Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/91

 Waring, had a taste for poetry and botany. He published ‘Principia Botanica’ (3rd edit. 1810), containing ‘many curious notes on biology.’ John, the third son, became rector of Elston; and Erasmus, the fourth, was born at Elston Hall 12 Dec. 1731. In 1741 he was sent to Chesterfield School, whence he wrote letters, showing decided talent, to his sister, and in 1750 entered St. John's College, Cambridge. Here he held the Exeter scholarship, and in 1754 graduated B.A., being first of the junior optimes. At Cambridge he wrote a poem on the death of Prince Frederick of Wales (published in the ‘European Magazine’ for 1795). In the autumn of 1754 he went to Edinburgh to study medicine. His father died 20 Nov. 1754. In 1755 he took the M.B. degree at Cambridge, and finally left Edinburgh to settle as a physician at Nottingham in September 1756. As no patients came, he moved in the November following to Lichfield. Here his practice steadily increased to about 1,000l. a year. In December 1757 he married Mary Howard, with whom he lived happily till her death in 1770, after a long illness. At Lichfield he was familiar with many distinguished men. In 1766, while botanising, he accidentally met Rousseau at Wootton Hall, with whom he afterwards corresponded. He was intimate with Bolton, Watt, Wedgwood, the Sewards, and other well-known men. They held monthly, or, as Darwin called them, ‘lunar meetings’ at each other's houses. Darwin was a good talker, though troubled by a stammer. He met Johnson once or twice, but they disliked each other as heartily as was to be expected; Darwin being a freethinker and a radical, and a dictator in his own circle (SEWARD, pp. 69–76). The fame of an ingenious carriage which he had invented brought him the acquaintance of R. L. Edgeworth. At Edgeworth's first visit Darwin came home with a man whom he had found dead drunk on the road and benevolently taken into his carriage, and who turned out to be Mrs. Darwin's brother. Edgeworth afterwards introduced Thomas Day, author of ‘Sandford and Merton’ [q. v.] In 1781 Darwin married the widow of Colonel Chandos-Pole of Radbourne Hall, whose acquaintance he had made when attending her children in 1778, and to whom he had addressed many passionate poems before her husband's death in 1780. She disliked Lichfield, and upon his second marriage he settled at Radbourne Hall, and thence moved to Derby and afterwards to Breadsall Priory, where he died, suddenly and painlessly of heart disease, 18 April 1802. Darwin was a man of great bodily and intellectual vigour. He was of large frame and unwieldy in later life, as appears from the characteristic portrait by Wright of Derby, a photograph of which is prefixed to the work by his grandson, Charles Darwin. Several accidents in his youth had made him clumsy in his movements and nervously cautious. He was exceedingly energetic in his profession, and his carriage was fitted up for reading and writing. Like Blackmore he wrote much of his poetry while visiting his patients (, ii. 245). He was irascible and imperious, even to his elder children, though he became strongly interested in their success, and was warmly loved by his second family. Although he could be caustic and severe, he acquired the name of ‘the benevolent,’ and while despising cant was most actively helpful to real sufferers. He showed his public spirit by getting up a dispensary at Lichfield and founding the Philosophical Society at Derby (both in 1784). He was a strong advocate of temperance, and for many years an almost total abstainer. He confined himself to English wines, possibly to minimise the temptation to excess. Miss Seward, however, tells a singular story, which had some foundation (, p. 59), of his swimming a river in his clothes in a state of ‘vinous exhilaration,’ and then delivering a lecture from a tub in the market-place of Nottingham upon prudence and sanitary regulations. He persuaded most of the neighbouring gentry to become water-drinkers (, Memoirs, ii. 69). Many anecdotes are told of his kindness to his patients and servants, of his charity to the poor, and his gratuitous attendance upon the inferior clergy of Lichfield. He was accused of avarice, but this was apparently due to a serious acceptance of his own bantering assertion that he only wrote for money. His professional fame was such that George III said that he would take him as his physician if he would come to London. Darwin, however, declined to move. The falsehood of some unfavourable anecdotes given by Miss Seward is fully exposed by Charles Darwin, who attributes her dislike to her failure in marrying him after the death of his first wife. She published, indeed, a retractation of one of the most offensive, imputing a want of natural feeling on his son's death (, p. 74;, Letters, iv. 135). Charles Darwin also replies to some statements in the life of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, who seems to have been shocked by the doctor's rough sceptical talk. Darwin sacrificed his early poetical impulses to his profession. In 1775 he sends a friend some verses written after a ‘twenty years' neglect of the muses,’ and promises to give up poetry and prepare a medical work (the