Or leads o’er golden sands her threefold train
In steamy channels to the fervid main;
While swarthy nations crowd the sultry coast,
Drink the fresh breeze, and hail the floating frost:
Nymphs! veil’d in mist, the melting treasure steer,
And cool with arctic snows the tropic year.”
“If the nations who inhabit this hemisphere of the globe, instead of destroying their seamen and exhausting their wealth in unnecessary wars, could be induced to unite their labours to navigate these immense masses of ice into the more southern oceans, two great advantages would result to mankind, the tropic countries would be much cooled by their solution, and our winters in this altitude would be rendered much milder, for perhaps a century or two, till the masses of ice became again enormous.”—Ed.]
[Dr. Thomas Beddoes, born at Shiffnal in 1760, was a scientific Physician far in advance of his age; his Popular Essay on Consumption, 1779, his tracts entitled Hygeia, 1801, &c., may still be studied with profit. He paid particular attention to the medical use of the permanently Elastic Fluids, and avows that as “one rash experiment on a patient would demolish a plan on which the hope of relieving mankind from much of their misery is founded,” he made preliminary experiments on himself in the case of Oxygene and Consumption, as alluded to in the text, À propos of the artificial distribution of disease, it may be mentioned that in The Batchelor, p. 189, is a method for “discharging the Plague”.
He wrote much on the political topics of the day, always taking the liberal side, and attacking Pitt with great virulence and eloquence. The principles of the French Revolution were at first advocated by him with the utmost enthusiasm, but he was soon disgusted by the excesses committed. He was a student of German literature, and much admired by Immanuel Kant. He was also an intimate friend of Darwin’s, whose political opinions he shared, and whose works were intrusted to his revision in manuscript. A few months after the publication of Darwin’s Botanic Garden, its magnificent imagery and harmonious versification inspired some admirers to say that the style of this work was a style sui generis, and that it defied imitation. Dr. Beddoes maintained an opposite opinion. Much as he admired the poem in question, he thought that the Darwinian structure of verse might be imitated by a writer possessed of inferior poetical powers, and in a few days he produced in the same circle part of the manuscript of Alexander’s Expedition to the Indian Ocean as an unpublished work of the author of the Botanic Garden. The deception completely succeeded, and some enthusiastic admirers of the latter work pointed out with triumph “certain passages as proofs of the position that the author in his happier efforts defied imitation”. Beddoes’s success was the more extraordinary, as in the “Introduction” to a considerable extract from his poem which he printed in the Annual Anthology for 1796, he states that he had never before written twice as many lines of verse as the composition under notice consisted of.