In 1813, when obliged to abandon his arduous profession, in consequence of over-mental excitement, the sum of £8,000 was voted by Parliament, upon the motion of Mr. Whitbread, for the purchase of Mr. Hargrave’s law books, which were enriched with valuable notes, and for 300 MSS., to be deposited in the library of Lincoln’s Inn, for public use. As documents of national historical importance may be particularised, Mr. Hargrave’s first publication, in 1772, entitled ‘The Case of James Somerset, a Negro, lately determined by the Court of King’s Bench, wherein it is attempted to demonstrate the present unlawfulness of Domestic Slavery in England;’ his ‘Three Arguments in the two causes in Chancery on the last Will of Peter Thellusson, Esq., with Mr. Morgan’s
Calculation of the Accumulation under the Trusts of the Will, 1799;’ and his ‘Opinion in the Case of the Duke of Athol in respect to the Isle of Man.’
Opposite to York Place was a fine, open, airy piece of ground to which Mr. Curtis, the eminent naturalist, removed his botanical garden from Lambeth Marsh, as a more desirable locality. Upon the south-east portion of this nursery-ground the first stone was laid by H.R.H. Prince Albert, on the 11th July, 1844, of an hospital for consumption and diseases of the chest, and which was speedily surrounded by houses on all sides; probably a circumstance not contemplated at the time the ground was secured.
The botanical garden of Mr. Curtis, as a public resort for study, was continued at Brompton until 1808, when the lease of the land being nearly expired, Mr. Salisbury, who in 1792 became his pupil, and in 1798 his partner in this horticultural speculation, removed the establishment to the vacant space of ground now inclosed between Sloane Street and Cadogan Place, where Mr. Salisbury’s undertaking failed. A plan of the gardens there, as arranged by him, was published in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ for August, 1810. [85]
Mr. Curtis, whose death has been already mentioned, was the son of a tanner, and was born at Alton, in Hampshire, in 1746. He was bound apprentice to his grandfather, a quaker apothecary of that town, whose house was contiguous to the Crown Inn, where the botanical knowledge of John Lagg, the hostler, seems to have excited rivalry in the breast of young Curtis. In the course of events he
became assistant to Mr. Thomas Talwin, an apothecary in Gracechurch Street, of the same religious persuasion as his grandfather, and succeeded Mr. Talwin in his business. Mr. Curtis’s love of botanical science, however, increased with his knowledge. He connected with it the study of entomology, by printing, in 1771, ‘Instructions for Collecting and Preserving Insects,’ and in the following year a translation of the ‘Fundamenta Entomologiæ’ of Linnæus. At this time he rented a very small garden for the cultivation of British plants, “near the Grange Road, at the bottom of Bermondsey Street,” and here it was that he conceived the design of publishing his great work, ‘The Flora Londinensis.’
“The Grange Road Garden was soon found too small for his extensive ideas. He, therefore, took a larger piece of ground in Lambeth Marsh, where he soon assembled the largest collection of British plants ever brought together into one place. But there was something uncongenial in the air of this place, which made it extremely difficult to preserve sea plants and many of the rare annuals which are adapted to an elevated situation,—an evil rendered worse every year by the increased number of buildings around. This led his active mind, ever anxious for improvement, to inquire for a more favourable soil and purer air. This, at length, he found at Brompton. Here he procured a spacious territory, in which he had the pleasure of seeing his wishes gratified to the utmost extent of reasonable expectation. Here he continued to his death;”
having, I may add, for many years previously, devoted himself entirely to botanical pursuits.
To support the slow sale of ‘The Flora Londinensis,’ Mr. Curtis, about 1787, started ‘The Botanical Magazine,’ which became one of the popular periodicals of the day, and Dr. Smith’s and Mr. Sowerby’s ‘English Botany’ was modelled after it.
What Mr. Curtis, as an individual, commenced, the Horticultural Society are endeavouring, as a body, to effect.