ments, and reflections after his settlement in England. As we meet with it in the portion of the memorandum book of 1616 we have before us, the idea had long passed the embryo state. of our quotation proclaim the advanced inquirer, as does the third the important conclusion at which he had already arrived: the ligature of the artery finally proving the passage of the blood from the arteries to the veins, and its ceaseless motion in a circle in virtue of the beat of the heart.

The two leading paragraphs

SECTION XVI.

HARVEY'S CHARACTER AND PERSONAL APPEARANCE, HIS LAST ILLNESS, DEATH, AND BURIAL.

WE have taken occasion from time to time in the course of our narrative, to glance at the mental and moral constitution of Harvey, mainly on the ground of inference from his bearing on particular occasions, and from what appears in his writings. Happily we have in addition a few particulars from the pen of a contemporary, John Aubrey,' which, though perchance they do not harmonize in every respect with the facts in his public life and the portrait he gives us of himself

1 "Letters and Lives of Eminent Persons." 2 vols. 8vo. London,

through his works, are nevertheless so interesting, that they cannot be left unnoticed.

"In person," Aubrey informs us, "Harvey was not tall, but of the lowest stature; round faced; olivaster (like wainscot) complexion; little eye, round, very black, full of spirit; his hair black as a raven, but quite white twenty years before he died." The fine portrait we have of Harvey by Cornelius Jansan, in the library of the Royal College of Physicians, and the engraving after it, in bust form, by W. Faithorne, a contemporary of Harvey, correspond in all respects with this account; the temperament is nervous-bilious; the forehead compact and square, and of greater width than usual between the temples; the expression highly intellectual, contemplative, independent and manly.

"In temper,” Aubrey says, “he was like the rest of his brothers, very choleric, and, in his younger days, he wore a dagger, as the fashion then was, which he would be apt to draw out upon every occasion"-by way of gesticulation, doubtless, to lend force to his words; for in his public and literary life, Harvey showed everything but the nature that would have led him to use a dagger: he seems, indeed, at all times to have had his temper under entire control. The way in which he himself speaks of the robbery of his apartments and the destruction of his papers, has nothing of acrimony in it. With the opportunity presenting itself to him, too—as when he sends Nardi the book on the troubles in England-he is not tempted to utter

X

even a splenetic word against the party which had been all along opposed to his friends, and by which he had himself suffered severely. Harvey was, probably, a marked man by the Parliamentarians, but he gave them no occasion to interfere with him.

Harvey appears not to have esteemed the fair sex very highly. He would say, that "we Europeans knew not how to order or govern our women, and that the Turks were the only people who used them wisely;" surely a regretable saying on the part of our anatomist; for the woman is but the other, and oftentimes the better, half of the man. It is savagery or barbarism that treats womankind as either a slave or plaything. But, indeed, if Aubrey may be trusted, Harvey did not think much of mankind in general; he was wont to say, that "man was but a great mischievous baboon." Harvey, however, married young, speaks affectionately of his wife, and in his age seems still to have thought that the old man was best tended by the hand of a woman not too far stricken in years.'

Harvey, in his own family circle, must have been affectionate and kind-characteristics of all his brothers

-who appear to have lived together through their lives in perfect amity and peace. But our Harvey's sympathies were not limited to his immediate relations attachment, friendship, was a marked ingredient in his nature. His will from first to last is

:

1 Vide Aubrey, op. cit. p. 381.

a piece of beautiful humanity, and more than one widow and helpless woman is there provided for. He had no child of his own to whom he could have made his memory dear, but he was anxious to live in the minds of his sisters-in-law and of his nephews and nieces, whose legacies are mostly given to the end that they may buy something to keep in remembrance of him. To Dr. Ent he was much attached, and besides his bookcases, there are "five pounds to buy a ring." Dr. Scarborough, who also stood high in Harvey's favour, has his "silver instruments of surgery and his best velvet gown."

We cannot fancy that Harvey was at any time very eager in the pursuit of wealth. Aubrey tells us that, "For twenty years before he died, he took no care of his worldly concerns; but his brother Eliab, who was a very wise and prudent manager, ordered all, not only faithfully, but better than he could have done for himself." The effect of this good management was that Harvey lived, towards the end of life, in easy circumstances. Having no costly establishment to maintain, for he always resided with one or other of his brothers in his latter days, and no family to provide for, he could afford to be munificent, as we have seen him, to the College of Physicians, and at his death he is reported to have left as much as 20,000 to his faithful steward and kind brother Eliab, who always meets us as the guardian angel of our anatomist in a material point of view. Honoured be the name and the

memory of Eliab Harvey for his good offices to one so worthy!

Though of competent estate, in the enjoyment of the highest reputation, and trusted by two sovereign Princes in succession, Harvey never suffered his name to be coupled with any of those lower-grade titles that were so freely conferred in the time of both the First and Second Charles. When we associate Harvey's name with a title at all, it is with the one he won for himself from his masters of Padua: by his contemporaries he is always spoken of as Doctor Harvey; we in the present day rightly class him with our Shakspeares, and our Newtons, and speak of him as Harvey. Harvey, indeed, had no love of ostentation. The very buildings he erected in connection with the College of Physicians, at Amen Corner, were built at the suggestion and under the auspices" of others. Harvey's mind was largely imbued with the imaginative faculty how finely he brings in the classical allusion to "the Sicilian sea, dashing among the rocks around Charybdis, hissing and foaming and tossed hither and thither," in illustration of those who reason against the evidence of their senses. And then what unbounded confidence he has in Nature, and how keenly alive he is to her perfections in every sphere: Nature has not been sedulous to deck out animals only with ornaments; she has further thrown an infinite variety of beautiful dyes over the lowly and insensate herbs and flowers.