[492] George Wilson Meadley (1774-1818) published his Memoirs of ... Paley in 1809. He also published Memoirs of Algernon Sidney in 1813. He was a merchant and banker, and had traveled extensively in Europe and the East. He was a convert to unitarianism, to which sect Paley had a strong leaning.
[493] Watson (1737-1816) was a strange kind of man for a bishopric. He was professor of chemistry at Cambridge (1764) at the age of twenty-seven. It was his experiments that led to the invention of the black-bulb thermometer. He is said to have saved the government £100,000 a year by his advice on the manufacture of gunpowder. Even after he became professor of divinity at Cambridge (1771) he published four volumes of Chemical Essays (vol. I, 1781). He became Bishop of Llandaff in 1782.
[494] James Adair (died in 1798) was counsel for the defense in the trial of the publishers of the Letters of Junius (1771). As King's Serjeant he assisted in prosecuting Hardy and Horne Tooke.
[495] Morgan (1750-1833) was actuary of the Equitable Assurance Society of London (1774-1830), and it was to his great abilities that the success of that company was due at a time when other corporations of similar kind were meeting with disaster. The Royal Society awarded him a medal (1783) for a paper on Probability of Survivorship. He wrote several important works on insurance and finance.
[496] Dr. Price (1723-1791) was a non-conformist minister and a writer on ethics, economics, politics, and insurance. He was a defender of the American Revolution and a personal friend of Franklin. In 1778 Congress invited him to America to assist in the financial administration of the new republic, but he declined. His famous sermon on the French Revolution is said to have inspired Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.
[497] Elizabeth Gurney (1780-1845), a Quaker, who married Joseph Fry (1800), a London merchant. She was the prime mover in the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate, founded in 1817. Her influence in prison reform extended throughout Europe, and she visited the prisons of many countries in her efforts to improve the conditions of penal servitude. The friendship of Mrs. Fry with the De Morgans began in 1837. Her scheme for a female benefit society proved worthless from the actuarial standpoint, and would have been disastrous to all concerned if it had been carried out, and it was therefore fortunate that De Morgan was consulted in time. Mrs. De Morgan speaks of the consultation in these words: "My husband, who was very sensitive on such points, was charmed with Mrs. Fry's voice and manner as much as by the simple self-forgetfulness with which she entered into this business; her own very uncomfortable share of it not being felt as an element in the question, as long as she could be useful in promoting good or preventing mischief. I can see her now as she came into our room, took off her little round Quaker cap, and laying it down, went at once into the matter. 'I have followed thy advice, and I think nothing further can be done in this case; but all harm is prevented.' In the following year I had an opportunity of seeing the effect of her most musical tones. I visited her at Stratford, taking my little baby and nurse with me, to consult her on some articles on prison discipline, which I had written for a periodical. The baby—three months old—was restless, and the nurse could not quiet her, neither could I entirely, until Mrs. Fry began to read something connected with the subject of my visit, when the infant, fixing her large eyes on the reader, lay listening till she fell asleep." Memoirs, p. 91.
[498] Mrs. Fry certainly believed that the writer was the old actuary of the Equitable, when she first consulted him upon the benevolent Assurance project; but we were introduced to her by our old and dear friend Lady Noel Byron, by whom she had been long known and venerated, and who referred her to Mr. De Morgan for advice. An unusual degree of confidence in, and appreciation of each other, arose on their first meeting between the two, who had so much that was externally different, and so much that was essentially alike, in their natures.—S. E. De M.
Anne Isabella Milbanke (1792-1860) married Lord Byron in 1815, when both took the additional name of Noel, her mother's name. They were separated in 1816.
[499] An obscure writer not mentioned in the ordinary biographies.
[500] Not mentioned in the ordinary biographies, and for obvious reasons.