Page:The Hunterian Oration1843.djvu/16

 comprehension of nature, the feeling and under- standing of the human family. Man appears a superb creature in the Vatican.”

On the last day which he spent in Rome, he stood by the palace of the Cesars, from which he took his sketch of the Coliseum. “ It is a place,” he says, “‘to raise strange and solemn thoughts.” A mountain has been formed there by ruins, now covered with vineyards and cultivated fields. “‘ Pil- lars and entablatures make the way uneven, and the acanthus is growing by the side of the broken capital, on which it is chiselled.”

So much inventive genius and such indefatigable industry are rarely united in the same person ; and when we add the warmth of his friendships, and, among his lesser qualities, the exquisite refinement of his taste, the combination is not often to be paralleled. He had some of the irritability that so often accompanies genius ; yet, take him as he was, he has left a blank not easily filled up, either in the republic of science, or the circle of his friends.

I need not apologize, I think, for the length at which I have discussed the merits of our illustrious fellow-labourer; for the very conditions of my office require that I should celebrate the deserts of those persons recently deceased, whose labours shall have “ contributed to the improvement or extension of chirurgical science.”

In this class we must also rank one whose loss was recently felt, not only in the nation where it occurred, but by all Europe, which he had instructed. I mean Larrey.