Page:Notes and Queries - Series 4 - Volume 4.djvu/119

 s.i V.AUGUST NOTES AND QUERIES. Ill he temporarily abandoned the oversight of his own multifarious occupations in order to exert all his strength in procuring aid for the sufferers. With the help of the Duke of Sussex he got a committee together in Westminster and in the city of London : the first obtained a parliament- ary grant of 100,000/., and the second furnished a rather larger sum in private contributions. This was the occasion on which the use of Whitehall Chapel was granted for a musical performance in aid of the subscription. For two years Mr. Ackermann undertook the task of correspondence with the German committee for distributing those sums, of examination into the urgency of each appeal for help, and of dividing the fund. The " Westminster Association for the further Relief of the Sufferers by the War in Germany " proposed to acknowledge his pains, probity, and prudence by a silver testimonial. This was de- clined by him, as was also a vote of thanks to be inscribed in gold on parchment. He begged that all thanks might be comprised in a few auto- graph lines from the Archbishop of Canterbury. This, surely, was not the sort of man to propose to gain a doubtful profit by " a satire upon the national clergy," which was the object of the illustrator and of the publisher of the Tours of Dr. Syntax, as absurdly attributed in dubious terms to them by the reporter of the observations said to have been made by W. Combe, and printed in the " Advertisement " prefacing his Letters to Marianne. The relief afforded to his distressed subjects was acknowledged on the part of the King of Saxony by the presentation of his portrait in a gold box set with diamonds to the Archbishop of Canterbury, as president of the Westminster com- mittee ; diamond rings to Messrs. Howard, Marten, and Watson, three of the secretaries to it j as well as an appropriate memorial to those three gentle- men and Mr. Ackermann, made in the porcelain manufactory at Meissen, on behalf of the Dresden committee. The gift to Mr. Ackermann was a vase ^ twenty-four inches high, allusive to Trajan's provision for children, with a pair of groups viz. Castor and Pollux, Pylades and Orestes j and in- stead of the diamond ring, Mr. Ackermann re- ceived the Order of Civil Merit. On his visit many months afterwards his modesty was evident. After an interview with the King of Saxony, who, pressing his hand, declared the popular gratitude, Mr. Ackermann on returning to the hotel heard of the^intention of the municipality of Dresden to give him a fete. When the managers arrived to offer the invitation, they found that during the night he had started for Leipzig. There he could not avoid a public oration ; but at Zurich, Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg he begged to be excused the parade of the receptions that were proposed. In 1815 a similar activity was displayed by Mr. Ackermann in the collection and distribution of 300,000 thalers for the relief of the wounded Prussian soldiers, and of the orphans and helpless parents of the fallen patriots. These philanthropic services were acknowledged with a diamond ring by the King of Prussia. The influx of Spanish exiles after 1815 is perhaps almost forgotten in England: in some respects it was as heartrending to Mr. Ackermann as that from France a quarter of a century previ- ously, and he immediately devised a means of benefiting permanently several of the most dig- tressed amongst them. He not only spent large sums in procuring Spanish translations of Eng- lish works and original Spanish elementary books, and in publishing them, but established branch book and print shops in many of the chief towns across the Atlantic. The value of this contribu- tion to the advancement of Southern America was acknowledged by President Bolivar in a letter dated at Bogota, December 15, 1827. About fifty volumes and half as many school-books had been thus published before 1830. Amongst the cases of assistance to individuals which did honour to him a few became public. The case of Mrs. Bowdich in 1824 was adopted by the Literary Gazette and by him ; and one of the journals of that date says : " Fortunate indeed, then, for an individual to meet with such an advocate. We know that the exertions of Mr. Ackermann are indefatigable in this particular case." The discretion which he exercised in choosing his subordinates, and the liberal manner in which he repaid their services, enabled him to produce several books which deserve the notice of all those who know how to appreciate the merit of these illustrated works in colour, relatively to others of similar pretension, both of that time and of the present day. With aquatinters like S. Mitan, and the school of hand-colourists which Mr. Ackermann educated, the works of artists were copied, and the sketches of amateurs were produced, in a manner that derides such distant imitations as those in Mr. Hotten's edition of Dr. Syntax, and surpasses even the best chromolitho- graphs of the present time, which can compete with them on no ground but that of a cheapness of production, which, for several reasons, does not benefit the purchaser. Amongst such works that pass under his name for want of a known author, or that present an author's name on the title-page, may be specified under abbreviated titles the fol- lowing publications : 1809-10, Microcosm of London, 104 pi. after Pugin and Rowlandson, with text to the first two volumes by W. H. Pyne (whence it is sometimes confused with Pyne's Microcosm), but to the third volume by W. Combe. 1812, Westminster Abbey, 84 pi. after Pugin, Huett, and Mackenzie, with text by Combe. 1813, Historical Sketch of Moscow, 12 pi. 1814,