APPENDIX. NOTE A. IN the summer of the year 1836, a lady residing in the neighbourhood of Birmingham, and related to a gentleman well known in the scientific world, was precipitated from this spot into the gulf below; from the effects of which she almost immediately expired. In the capacity of physician I attended her in her dying moments. It was a melancholy season for those friends who had accompanied her into this part of Devonshire, whither they had partly gone on account of her health. Various accidents have taken place here from time to time, but none of so serious a nature as this, which was rendered the more disastrous in consequence of the lady having been under medical assistance for many years, and now, I believe, for the first time during that interval, suffered to remove from her more immediate neighbourhood. This narrow and dangerous, though beautiful, pathway has since been widened at the expence of the neighbouring gentry. The Rev. J. J. Scott and Mr. Knight, a gentleman who some years ago purchased the extensive mountainous tract of Exmoor from Government, which he has since cultivated and laid out in farms, have been the principal contributors. It now forms one of the most splendid rides and drives in the kingdom for the distance of nearly three miles, though, perhaps, not the safest. The assistance of Mr. Scott has been most munificent. NOTE B. Through the kindness of the proprietor* these delightful grounds are open to the public during the summer months. Without such a privilege one of the finest objects in the beautiful scenery of Lynmouth would be lost to the visitor. This is only one of the many instances in which Mr. Herries has shewn kindness and benevolence of disposition to the inhabitants and tourists. He is justly respected by his neighbours, and venerated by the poor. He has contributed bountifully to the improvement and enlargement of the parish church, which was served many years by one of the best of men, and whom I have the honour of reckoning among the number of my most sincere friends-a man who has yet been exposed to unpardonable persecutions; but virtue and goodness never go unmolested. They are qualities at which the proud and envious are always levelling their venomous shafts. Villany will flourish in the world while virtue goes unrewarded; and why?—because man has nothing to envy in the villain, and envy is the strongest passion of the breast. It is this which breaks the ties of friendship, so called, though they may appear to have been cemented by the daily intercourse of years-this which produces that coldness of heart, suspicion, and reservedness now exercised so generally between man and man. But Friendship, real actual Friendship, is not a feeling of common minds. It is something that no man can truly enjoy but him of warm passions and delicate tastes. Nice honour was surely thy sire, Soft sympathy call'd thee her child, Sensibility nursed thee-and smiled. In Greece temples have been built and statues erected to the honour of Marathon ; but if we raised one monument to Friendship which had not these qualities for its foundation, it would * Mr. Herries, of the firm of Herries, Farquhar, Halliday, & Co., Bankers, St. James's Street, London. be every hour in danger of falling. There is no stability but in goodness-no honour without virtue-no sympathy in selfishness. Yes-I sympathize with those who have endured the rod of persecution, having had it laid on myself without any just cause. When prejudices are imbibed by him who is naturally of a proud and malicious disposition, it is astonishing with what facility he invents evil, and perverts every thing according to his wishes. His magic wand is brought into exercise, and virtue is metamorphosed into vice. The enamelled floweret watered by the dew of Hermon is stripped of all its beauty, and made as deadly as the aconite. Frankness is turned into dissimulation, disinterestedness into selfishness, industry into idleness, and the fruit of perseverance and talent into the reward of imposture, trickery, and cunning, while sobriety and morality are regarded as the playthings of a fool, or as the coverings of some species of deception and intrigue. It has always seemed to me that such base misconstructions are the stripes of some monster employed by the chastening and correcting hand of God. We can be at no mistake to learn that the malignant prejudices of the human heart, which always spring from pride and envy, the most fiendish of all qualities, are always found in a persecutor, cradled up as the darling passions of the breast. Let every person view the calumnies of his enemy in the light of corrections, which they, perhaps, always are, and he will be taught to bear them with patience, even with pleasure. The mercies of God are often bestowed in disguise; and the condition of him who passes through life without encountering buffetings, scorn, and persecution from the world is not to be envied, for he would not appear to be of that family whom Jehovah finds it necessary to chastise. The persecuted should learn to cry with the Royal Psalmist in the sixty-fourth and one hundred and twentyfourth Psalms, which will afford him a consolation, and teach him to exercise a forbearance that the stoicism of cold philosophy could never furnish. PHRENOLOGY AND FATALISM.* THE greatest obstacle to the progress of phrenology is the idea that the system it embraces leads to fatalism. At a cursory glance I grant that such appears to be its tendency; but am yet certain that a due consideration of the subject will undermine the foundation of any preconceived notion of this kind. Of all objections to phrenology this is certainly the most prevalent; and, were it true, would no doubt form a very serious one. There can be no question that all men, from the time of Adam, have possessed the same kind of mental constitution; that the nature of all minds is, in effect, alike; but that the differences in intellect, in morality, in physical propensities in different men, are owing simply to different directions or operations of their minds, occasioned by the various causes which, agreeably to the laws of association in the government of the world, operate upon the mind, influencing its manifestations. I mean to say by this, that men need not have different minds, or, rather, different innate faculties, in order to have different ideas and inclinations; those ideas and inclinations being elicited according to the circumstances in which men are placed. We are, in this case, led to conclude that these differences are not attributable to the minds of different parties being more or less replete with faculties, or even to such faculties being innately or naturally more or less energetic and capacious, but to circumstances apart from mind, which yet * Some notice was taken of this subject in the thirty-first page of the Second Colloquy, with a promise that it should be adverted to again. The matter being one of importance, I am unwilling to close this volume without doing so, which, on second thoughts, I think will be received best in this form. |