pearances connected with them, are governed by certain laws no less than the phases of the moon. But the laws which determine the latter are known and calculable, while those of the former are hidden from us. At all events, the number and variety of their effects baffle our powers of calculation; and that the sky is clear or obscured at any particular time, we speak of, in common language, as a matter of accident. Well at the time of the full moon, but when the sky is completely covered with black clouds, I am walking on in the dark, aware of no particular danger: a sudden gust of wind rends the cloud for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses to me a chasm or precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced my foot. This is what is meant by luck, and according to the more or less serious mood or habit of our mind we exclaim, how lucky"! or, how providential! The co-presence of numberless phænomena, which from the complexity or subtlety of their determining causes are called contingencies, and the co-existence of these with any regular or necessary phænomenon (as the clouds with the moon for instance) occasion coincidences, which, when they are attended by any advantage or injury, and are at the same time incapable of being calculated or foreseen by human prudence, form good or ill luck. On a hot sunshiny afternoon came on a sudden storm and spoilt the farmer's hay and this is called ill luck. We will suppose the same event to take place, when meteorology shall have been perfected into a science, provided with unerring instruments; but which the farmer had neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck, but imprudence. Now apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him, only what possibly from his own abilities he might have effected for himself, his good luck will excite less attention and the instance be less remembered. That clever men should attain their objects seems natural, and we neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that success of themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight; but we dwell on the fact and remember it as something strange, when the same happens to a weak or ignorant man. So too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other distin guished waves in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one great constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion and the power of prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having been as they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and founder of philosophic alchemy: if they had presented themselves to Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down material nature under the inquisition of reason, and force from her, as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions ;-yet still they would not have been talked of or described, as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbors, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the general powers of his understanding; then, "O what a lucky fellow!-Well, Fortune does favor fools-that's certain!-It is always so!"And forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar instan ces. Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never collecting the other, we do, as poets in their diction, and quacks of all denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and at once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the marvellous, by the sweeping proverb, Fortune favors fools.' 6 ESSAY II. Quod me non movet æstimatione: CATULLUS.* It interests me not by any conceit of its value; but it is a remembrance of my honored friend. THE philosophic ruler, who secured the favors of fortune by seeking wisdom and knowledge in preference to them, has pathetically observed-The heart knoweth its own bitterness; and there is a joy in which the stranger intermeddleth not. A simple question founded on a trite proverb, with a discursive answer to it, would scarcely suggest to an indifferent person any other notion than that of a mind at ease, amusing itself with its own activity. Once before (I believe about this time last year) I had taken up the old memorandum-book, from which I transcribed the preceding essay, and it had then attracted my notice by the name of the illustrious chemist mentioned in the last illustration. Exasperated by the base and cowardly attempt which had been made to detract from the honors due to his astonishing genius, I had slightly altered the concluding sentences, substituting the more recent for his earlier discoveries; and without the most distant intention of publishing what I then wrote, I had expressed my own convictions for the gratification of my own feelings, and finished by tranquilly paraphrasing into a chemical allegory the Homeric adventure of Menelaus with Proteus. Oh! with what different feelings, with what a sharp and sudden emotion did I re-peruse the same question yester-morning, having by accident opened the book at the page upon which it was written. I was moved for it was Admiral Sir Alexander Ball who first proposed the question to me, and the particular satisfaction which he expressed, had occasioned me to note down the substance of my reply. I was moved because to this conversation I was indebted for the friendship and confidence with which he after* XII-Ed. wards honored me; and because it recalled the memory of one of the most delightful mornings I ever passed; when, as we were riding together, the same person related to me the principal events of his own life, and introduced them by adverting to this conversation. It recalled, too, the deep impression left on my mind by that narrative, the impression, that I had never known any analogous instance, in which a man so successful had been so little indebted to fortune, or lucky accidents, or so exclusively both the architect and builder of his own success. The sum of his history may be comprised in this one sentence: Hæc, sub numine nobismet fecimus, sapientia duce, fortuna permittente. (These things, under God, we have done for ourselves, through the guidance of wisdom, and with the permission of fortune.) Luck gave him nothing in her most generous moods, she only worked with him as with a friend, not for him as for a fondling; but more often she simply stood neuter, and suffered him to work for himself. Ah! how could I be otherwise than affected by whatever reminded me of that daily and familiar intercourse with him, which made the fifteen months from May 1804, to October 1805, in many respects, the most memorable and instructive period of my life?—Ah! how could I be otherwise than most deeply affected, when there was still lying on my table the paper which, the day before, had conveyed to me the unexpected and most awful tidings of this man's death,-his death in the fulness of all his powers, in the rich autumn of ripe yet undecaying manhood? I once knew a lady, who after the loss of a lovely child continued for several days in a state of seeming indifference, the weather, at the same time, as if in unison with her, being calm, though gloomy; till one morning a burst of sunshine breaking in upon her, and suddenly lighting up the room where she was sitting, she dissolved at once into tears, and wept passionately. In no very dissimilar manner did the sudden gleam of recollection at the sight of this memorandum act on myself. I had been stunned by the intelligence, as by an outward blow, till this trifling incident startled and disentranced me; the sudden pang shivered through my whole frame; and if I repressed the outward shows of sorrow, it was by force that I repressed them, and because it is not by tears that I ought to mourn for the loss of Sir Alexander Ball. He was a man above his age: but for that very reason the age has the more need to have the master-features of his character portrayed and preserved. This I feel it my duty to attempt, and this alone: for having received neither instructions nor permission from the family of the deceased, I can not think myself allowed to enter into the particulars of his private history, strikingly as many of them would illustrate the element and composition of his mind. For he was indeed a living confutation of the assertion attributed to the Prince of Condé, that no man appeared great to his valet de chambre-a saying which, I suspect, owes its currency less to its truth, than to the envy of mankind and the misapplication of the word, great, to actions unconnected with reason and free will. It will be sufficient for my purpose to observe that the purity and strict propriety of his conduct, which precluded rather than silenced calumny, the evenness of his temper and his attentive and affectionate manners, in private life, greatly aided and increased his public utility: and, if it should please Providence, that a portion of his spirit should descend with his mantle, the virtues of Sir Alexander Ball, as a master, a husband, and a parent, will form a no less remarkable epoch in the moral history of the Maltese than his wisdom, as a governor, has made in that of their outward circumstances. That the private and personal qualities of a first magistrate should have political effects, will appear strange to no reflecting Englishman, who has attended to the workings of men's minds during the first ferment of revolutionary principles, and must therefore have witnessed the influence of our own sovereign's domestic character in counteracting them. But in Malta there were circumstances which rendered such an example peculiarly requisite and beneficent. The very existence, for so many generations, of an order of lay celibates in that island, who abandoned even the outward shows of an adherence to their vow of chastity, must have had pernicious effects on the morals of the inhabitants. But when it is considered too that the knights of Malta had been for the last fifty years or more a set of useless idlers, generally illiterate,*-for they thought litera * The personal effects of every knight were, after his death, appropriated to the Order, and his books, if he had any, devolved to the public library. This library therefore, which has been accumulating from the time of their first settlement in the island, is a fair criterion of the nature and degree of their literary studies, as an average. Even in respect to X VOL. 11. |