Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/446



Each is impressed precisely according to the faculties of his mind, which are aroused to sympathetic exercise. If intellectual powers be portrayed, it is the corresponding intellect that will be most incited, and this precisely in the degree in which each reader himself possesses it. Kindness of heart most impresses those who are endued with a high degree of benevolence; and just actions afford pleasure in proportion as the mind of the person contemplating them is itself conscientious. These few illustrations suffice to explain what the antecedent proposition is intended to convey.

The uses of biography are to preserve a memorial of the dead,—to furnish an example to the living; and its ends are attained only when both these purposes are adequately fulfilled. On both these grounds the life about to be recorded, in the following brief memoir, merits the attention of survivors. A career displaying so much moral worth, so much practical virtue, deserves to be held in remembrance on its own account, as exhibiting human nature in its more amiable portraiture, while it presents an example which every right feeling, every dictate of duty, should incline us to emulate.

Dr. Joseph Thackeray, whose premature fate it is our melancholy office to record, departed this life at Bedford, on the 5th July, 1832, in the 49th year of his age, the victim of a bilious fever, and after an illness of ten days. He was born at Cambridge, on the 27th March, 1784, being the 16th child of Thos. Thackeray, an eminent medical practitioner of that town. Ere we proceed to commemorate the useful and exemplary life of the son, a passing tribute