DEATHS OF EMINENT PERSONS DURING THE YEAR 1851.
No one who knows England can wonder that her annual obituary presents such long lists of great names, when it is remembered how widespread is her empire, and how varied her enterprise. It is only possible to select a few of the remarkable persons for notice, whose departure from this life in 1851 excited the attention and regret of large classes, or of the whole nation.
On the 1st of February occurred the death of Mrs. Shelley, widow of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the celebrated poet. Mrs. Shelley was a lady of extraordinary gifts, and these were stimulated by the genius of her husband. As an authoress she will always rank high, although only one of her books has attained a just proportion of fame, “Frankenstein.” That was received throughout Europe and America as one of the most remarkable works of imagination which the 19th century had seen, and it gained for her a reputation as lasting as extensive. “Lodore,” “Volperga,” “The Last Man,” and others produced also a great impression, but not one of a very permanent character, at least, in the British Isles. “The Last Man” deserves a higher estimation than has been awarded to it. There is a very penetrating sadness in all Mrs. Shelley’s works written after the loss of her gifted husband, and an impression of enervated physical strength, and effort to write in spite of depression, is conveyed to the reader.
On the 5 th, at Guildford, Surrey, the Rev. John Pye Smith, D.D., LL.D., F.R.S., for many years Principal of the Independent Congregational College, at Homerton. He was one of the greatest scholars of his age. The author of this work knew him well, and can in truth say his virtues were as conspicuous as his scholarship was profound. He was especially benevolent and modest. A celebrated divine once said of him that he “had a very troublesome conscience,” referring to its extreme tenderness, and his nervous scrupulousness lest he should wear the remotest appearance of evil. His religious works are chiefly critical and controversial, and are written in a style of quiet and graceful simplicity, with great perspicacity of expression and perspicuity of thought. His “Scripture Testimony of the Messiah” is a wonderful monument of human learning and clear, candid, and cogent logic. It is the greatest standard work in the language, on “the Unitarian Controversy.” When he retired from the direction of’ the college at Homerton, where he trained many eminent men for the Christian ministry among congregationalists, three thousand guineas were presented to him as a tribute of respect. At his death the interest of the same was applied to divinity scholars in the college for candidates for the Christian ministry among the congregationalists, established at St. John’s Wood, London, the Principal of which was Dr. John Harris, author of many curious and literary productions much prized in tire religious world.
February 23rd, at Hampstead, London, Joanna Baillie, the celebrated authoress. She was the friend of Sir Walter Scott, who admired both her poetic and dramatic genius exceedingly. Her plays, although open to criticism as to selection of subject, plot, and stage effectiveness, display the poetic power of her mind to great advantage.
April 28th, in London, aged eighty-one, Admiral Sir Edward Codrington. He saw great variety of service as a naval officer, and displayed professional skill and personal courage. In 1826, he received the command of the Mediterranean fleet. He commanded the following year the combined fleets of England, France, and Russia, in the destruction of the Egyptian fleet, at Navarino. A son of this eminent and amiable man subsequently commanded the British army in the Crimea, during a war of England and her allies against Russia.
May 23rd, at Florence, where he officiated as British minister to the court of Tuscany, the Right Honourable Richard Lalor Shiel. He was the son of an Irish merchant, and was born in Dublin. His early education was in the English Jesuit College, at Stonyhurst, a place which made many bad Catholics by the excess of its ultra-montanism. Mr. Shiel was afterwards a student of the Dublin University, where he distinguished himself. He was called to the Irish bar in 1814. He wrote several plays which had merit, and were for a time made popular by the acting of Miss O’Neil. Mr. Shiel was never very successful as a lawyer, his taste lying in the direction of dramatic literature and politics. He began his political career at an early age; his first passionate oration, to a Dublin Roman Catholic audience, was made at eighteen years of age. He became one of the leaders of the Roman Catholic emancipation movement, being second to O’Connell only as a leader of party and an orator; his eloquence, however, was more refined than that of his more potential colleague. His speeches were dramatic, rhetorical, and effective. Their moral tone was offensive, vituperative, and vindictive. He was very small of stature, ungainly and unprepossessing in appearance, and had a strange squeaking voice; but in spite of these and other defects he was, next to O’Connell, the most powerful agent in carrying Roman Catholic emancipation. He was, however, never heartily trusted by O’Connell, who saw his value as an instrument and flattered his vanity by fulsome panegyric: when, however, the great agitator suspected the drift of any movement of Shiel, he turned against him his keen although coarse satire, and, by his contemptuous sneers and ludicrous and striking caricatures, turned the tide of popular feeling against his subtle and unreliable colleague. After Roman Catholic emancipation was achieved Mr. Shiel became a member of the imperial parliament, where he distinguished himself by his eloquence more than he ever did as a tribune. His oratory was, however, characterised more by histrionic passion, rhetorical artifice, and boldness of declamation, than by logic or truth. Many times the beauty of his parliamentary orations dazzled his opponents, and drew forth their admiring eulogy, and often his sarcasms smote them with a severity more terrible than any launched from his side of the house. He became a mere whig partisan; his ambition was office, and he excited the strong resentment of the Irish party, with which he had acted, by his silence where “Irish or Catholic interests” were concerned, if the whig party were opposed to their demands. No orator had espoused with more seeming heartiness various liberal opinions, which he abandoned when he became a pet of the Whigs. Like O’Connell he had harangued with great fervour large democratic assemblages in favour of the voluntary principle in religion, and like O’Connell he mocked it and vituperated it, when it served his purpose to do so. He had been a great anti-slavery agitator, uttering fervent sentiments concerning the equal right of men of all creeds and colours, and the duty and policy of applying this great principle in the West India possessions of England, and all over the world; but when his parliamentary party adopted a course which displeased the anti-slavery party, and a deputation of eminent philanthropists waited upon him, believing that in Richard Lalor Shiel the black man had a friend as true as he had been an eloquent advocate, those gentlemen were received with a haughty insolence, and a contemptuousness which there was not even a decent effort to suppress. Upon the Protestant dissenters of England he poured loud and eloquent praise when he was agitating for Roman Catholic emancipation, as the English dissenters gave an ostentatious support to that movement. When the end was gained which he hoped to serve by such flattery, he manifested a profound animosity to those whose services he had commended. His real views on subjects of civil and religious liberty were selfish and narrow. His professed patriotism was to a certain extent real, but it was narrow and invidious where true, and it was for the most part simulated. He was an object of hatred to the ultramontane party in his own church; and a report prevailed in Europe, which does not appear to have been substantiated, that he was, by that party, ingeniously deprived of life through skilful agency appointed for that purpose.
August 5th, Mrs. Harriet Lee, in her ninety-eighth year. This lady was one of the authoresses of the “Canterbury Tales.” Her works were various and popular.
August 6th, at Hong-Kong, the distinguished missionary, Gutzlaff. He was by birth a Pomeranian, but was associated with the English so intimately as interpreter, and as secretary to the Hong-Kong government, that he was always regarded as a British citizen.
August 12th, aged fifty, the Honourable Elliott Drinkwater Bethune, a man whose efforts for legal reform in England and India won for him the gratitude of the good, and caused him to incur the bitterest hostility of the selfish classes affected by proposals of reform.
November 18th, aged eighty-one, at Herenhausen, the King of Hanover, uncle to her majesty.
December 19th, at Chelsea, London. Joseph Mallord William Turner, the great English landscape painter, whose works are too well known, and whose fame is too widely spread, to require more particular notice.