Sir John Soane, who bequeathed to the country his Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which cost him upwards of 50,000l., was the son of a bricklayer, and was born at Reading in 1753; he was errand-boy to Dance, the architect, and subsequently his pupil. He rose to great eminence, grew rich and liberal; he gave for Belzoni's elaborate sarcophagus in the Soane Museum, 2,000 guineas; paid large sums for art rarities; subscribed 1,000l. for the Duke of York's monument, was contended with his knighthood, and declined to receive a baronetcy. Yet he was a man of overweening vanity, and was much courted by legacy-hunters; whilst his alienation from his son assisted in raising up many enemies, in addition to those which Soane's remarkable success brought against him. From the latter section may have proceeded the following curious and popular squib of the day, said to have been found under the plates at one of the artistic or academic dinners. It is headed:—
"The Modern Goth.
"Glory to thee, great Artist! soul of taste!
For mending pigsties where a plank's misplaced:
Whose towering genius plans from deep research
Houses and temples fit for Master Birch
To grace his shop on that important day,
When huge twelfth-cakes are raised in bright array.
Each pastry pillar shows thy vast design—
Hail! then, to thee, and all great works of thine.
Come, let me place thee, in the foremost rank,
With him whose dullness discomposed the bank;
[A line illegible.]
Thy style shall finish what his style begun.
Thrice happy Wren! he did not live to see
The dome that's built and beautified by thee.
Oh! had he lived to see thy blessed work,
To see plaster scored like loins of pork;
To see the orders in confusion move:
Scrolls fixed below, and pedestals above:
To see defiance hurled at Rome and Greece,
Old Wren had never left the world in peace.
Look where I will, above, below, is shown
A pure disordered order of thine own;
Where lines and circles curiously unite,
A base, confounded, compound Composite:
A thing from which, in truth it may be said,
Each lab'ring mason turns abash'd his head;
Which Holland reprobates, and Dance derides,
Whilst tasteful Wyatt holds his aching sides.
Here crawl, ye spiders! here, exempt from cares,
Spin your fine webs above the bulls and bears!
Secure from harm enjoy the charnell'd niche:
No maids molest you, for no brooms can reach;
In silence build from models of your own,
But never imitate the works of Soane!"
Soane is described by his biographer as "one of the vainest and most self-sufficient of men, who courted praise and adulation from every person and source, but dreaded, and was even maddened by, anything like impartial and discriminating criticism." But he grew so disgusted with his flatterers, that a short time before his death he shut himself up in a house at Richmond, to get out of the way of their attentions.
Jedediah Buxton. Ætat. 49.
Numeros memini. Virgil.
[Extraordinary Calculators.]
On the 3rd of July, 1839, some of the eminent members of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, including MM. Arago, Lacroix, Libri, and Sturm, met to examine a remarkable boy whose powers of mental calculation were deemed quite inexplicable. This boy, named Vito Mangiamele, a Sicilian, was the son of a shepherd, and was about eleven years old. The examiners asked him several questions which they knew, under ordinary circumstances, to be tedious of solution—such as, the cube root of 3,796,416, and the 10th root of 282,475,249; the first of these he answered in half-a-minute, the second in three minutes. One question was of the following complicated character—"What number has the following proportions, that if its cube is added to 5 times its square, and then 42 times the number, and the number 42 be subtracted from the result, the remainder is equal to 0 or zero." M. Arago repeated this question a second time, but while he was finishing the last word, the boy replied—"The number is 5!"