One more quotation, and I shall conclude with the conviction that the splendid specimens I have adduced must fully justify the opinion already offered as to the taste, power, and eloquence with which, as President of the Royal Society, he discharged the most delicate and arduous of all its duties.
In his address to Mr. (now Dr.) Buckland, on delivering to him the medal for his important memoir on the fossile remains discovered in the cave near Kirkdale, he thus concludes:—"If we look with wonder upon the great remains of human works, such as the columns of Palmyra, broken in the midst of the desert; the temples of Pæstum, beautiful in the decay of twenty centuries; or the mutilated fragments of Greek sculpture in the Acropolis of Athens, or in our own Museum, as proofs of the genius of artists, and power and riches of nations now past away; with how much deeper a feeling of admiration must we consider those grand monuments of nature which mark the revolutions of the globe—continents broken into islands; one land produced, another destroyed; the bottom of the ocean become a fertile soil; whole races of animals extinct, and the bones and exuviæ of one class covered with the remains of another; and upon these graves of past generations—the marble or rocky tombs, as it were, of a former animated world, new generations rising, and order and harmony established, and a system of life and beauty produced, as it were, out of chaos and death, proving the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness of the Great Cause of all being!"
I have noticed the apparent commencement of that general indisposition which had for some time been stealing upon him, undermining his powers, oppressing his spirits, and subduing his best energies; but in the end of 1826, his complaint assumed a more decided and alarming form. Feeling more than usually unwell, while on a visit to his friend Lord Gage, he determined to return to London, and was seized while on his journey, at Mayersfield, with an apoplectic attack. Prompt and copious bleeding, however, on the spot, arrested the symptoms more immediately threatening the extinction of life, and enabled him to reach home; but paralysis, the usual consequence of such seizures, had obviously, though at first but slightly, diminished his muscular powers, and given an awkwardness to his gait.
As soon as the more immediate danger of the attack had passed away, it was thought expedient to recommend, as the best means of his farther recovery, a residence in the southern part of Europe, where he would be removed from all the cares and anxieties that were inseparably connected with his continuance in London; and he accordingly quitted England, with the intention of spending what remained of the winter in Italy.
The following interesting letter to his friend will sufficiently explain the serious character of his malady, and the degree of bodily infirmity which accompanied it.
TO THOMAS POOLE, ESQ.
Ravenna, March 14, 1827.
MY DEAR POOLE,
I should have answered your letter immediately, had it been possible; but I was, at the time I received it, very ill, in the crisis of the complaint under which I have long suffered, and which turned out to be a determination of the blood to the brain; at last producing the most alarming nervous symptoms, and threatening the loss of power and of life.