ooks upwards, as enthusiastically
meditating on the contents of a book held in his dropped right hand. The
open leaf is the oration of that virtuous patriot in the senate, against
the grant of ship money, demanded by King Charles I. A flash of
lightning plays in Mr. Day's hair, and illuminates the contents of the
volume. The poetic fancy and what were _then_ the politics of the
original, appear in the choice of subject and attitude. Dr. Darwin sat
to Mr. Wright about the same period. _That_ was a simply contemplative
portrait, of the most perfect resemblance."[144]

. . . . . .

"In the year 1768, Dr. Darwin met with an accident of irretrievable
injury to the human frame. His propensity to mechanics had unfortunately
led him to construct a very singular carriage. It was a platform with a
seat fixed upon a very high pair of wheels, and supported in the front
upon the back of the horse, by means of a kind of proboscis which,
forming an arch, reached over the hind-quarters of the horse, and passed
through a ring, placed on an upright piece of iron, which worked in a
socket fixed in the saddle. The horse could thus move from one side of
the road to the other, quartering, as it is called, at the will of the
driver, whose constant attention was necessarily employed to regulate a
piece of machinery contrived, but _not well_ contrived, for that
purpose."

I cannot help the reader to understand the foregoing description. "From
this whimsical carriage, however, the doctor was several times thrown,
and the last time he used it had the misfortune, from a similar
accident, to break the patella of his right knee, which caused, as it
must always cause, an incurable weakness in the fractured part, and a
lameness not very discernible, indeed, when walking on even
ground."[145]

Miss Seward presently tells a story which reads as though it might have
been told by Plutarch of some Greek or Roman sage. Much as we must
approve of Dr. Darwin's habitual sobriety, we shall most of us be agreed
that a few more such stories would have been cheaply purchased by a
corresponding number of lapses on the doctor's part.

Miss Seward writes:--

"Since these memoirs commenced, an odd anecdote of Dr. Darwin's early
residence at Lichfield, was narrated to a friend of the author by a
gentleman, who was of the party in which it happened. Mr. Sneyd, then of
Bishton, and a few more gentlemen of Staffordshire, prevailed upon the
doctor to join them