THE CONVERSAZIONE,

ON THE LITERATURE OF THE MONTH.

The Doctor. “ The Life of Edward Jenner, M.D.”—Two very handsome volumes contain the memoirs of the celebrated discoverer of vaccination, written by his friend Dr. Burrow. The writer's personal opportunities and professional knowledge gave him the amplest qualifications for the subject, and he has accordingly produced a work which will be valuable, not merely to the physician, but to the philosopher, a noble tribute to the merits of one of the greatest benefactors that the world has ever seen.

The Rector. Jenner's life is one of the instances of a fortunate conception operating on a vigorous mind. It is also one of the examples of the seeming chances which have secured some of the noblest discoveries to the world. If Jenner had not been a country physician, or had been a physician anywhere but in the vale of Berkeley, he would never have found out vaccination; or if he had died at an age long before which three-fourths of mankind are in ihe grave, the world would have never possessed it, for he was seven-and-forty before he performed his first operation with the vaccine.

The Barrister. Jenner was born in the paternal vicarage of Berkcley, in Gloucestershire, in 1749. His family were wholly clerical, for both his uncles were in the church, and his grandfather was one of the prebendaries of Bristol. Why Jenner did not follow the family impulse is probably to be explained by a passion for natural history, which was so early that it almost amounted to an instinct. Before he was nine years old he had made himself a fossilist: from natural history to physiology is an easy step, and the progress finished with his becoming à pupil to the most zealous naturalist and most distinguished surgeon of his age, John Hunter.

The Rector. Hunter was in every sense a memorable man, a profound thinker, an indefatigable experimentalist, a daring and original inquirer. He had one of those vivid, original, and persevering minds, of which any man would predict that they were made to give a large impulse to the

progress of human knowledge. He had a menagerie, too. But not for the equally foolish and cruel purpose of exhibiting animals to holiday crowds, without regarding the miseries of confinement to creatures whose whole existence is activity, whose life is in the open air, and who in the state of nature have the forest and the desert to range at their will. Hunter kept them for the purpose of investigating their habits, and chiefly to ascertain by their various diseases the origin and nature of disease in man. His study in this point was the comparative anatomy of disease.

The Doctor. On Jenner's return to Berkeley to commence his profession he was offered a valuable appointment in the East Indies. This was a strong temptation to a youth of twenty, with the world before him. But home fortunately had too strong attractions, and he remained to establish a distinguished name.

The Colonel, Philosophy does not always secure its worshippers from casualties of other kinds. In the midst of his most zcalous researches into nature, Jenner was entrapped into a violent passion for a lady in the neighbourhood, who finally jilted him, and left him to write in this style to his friend Gardner :-"I am jaded almost to death. The fatigue of the body I must endure; but how long I shall be able to bear that of the mind, I know not. Still the same dead weight hangs upon my heart. Would to heaven I could drag it from its unhappy mansion!” He writes again, and with still more romance—" As for myself, the same stream of unhappiness is still flowing in upon me. Its source seems inexhaustible. But there is a soothing consolation in it; all little disquietudes are washed away. I feel their influence no more,' Werter was never more pathetic or more unhappy.

The Doctor. John Hunter's homeliness of soul takes his friend's sorrows in the most characteristic manner. He treats them as he would a regular case of amputation. He had been busy with Jenner about this time in investigations into animal heat, in the course of which they had been practising on hedgehogs. “I own,” says Hunter in his letter of condolence, “ I was at a loss to account for your silence, and I was sorry for the cause. I can easily conceive how you must feel, for you have two passions to cope with, that of being disappointed in love, and that of being defeated. But both will wear out; perhaps the first the soonest. I was glad when I heard that you were married to a woman of fortune. But let her go, never mind her. I shall employ you with hedgehogs; for I do not know how far I may trust mine. I want you to get a hedgehog in the beginning of winter, and weigh him," &c. The hedgehogs were evidently the much more important matter in the eyes of the learned professor, and, if John Hunter's heart could have palpitated, it would evidently have been not for the failure of the experiment with the fair one, but with the hedgehog. But his prediction was true. Jenner got over the disaster, and continued to labour as the naturalist long after he had ceased to talk sentiment as the lover.

The Barrister. The testimonies adduced to Jenner's discovery on its being brought before parliament were among the most honourable that were ever given to an individual. The witnesses examined before the committee were of the highest respectability in the medical profession, and their evidence was a continual panegyric. Sir Walter Farquhar said that Dr. Jenner's was the greatest discovery that was made for many years, and that, if he had kept it secret, he might have made ten thousand a-year. The celebrated surgeon Cline said that he considered it the greatest discovery ever made in medicine.

Dr. Bradley said that two millions of people had been already vaccinated in the world, and that not one was known to have died in consequence of the operation. Dr. Sims considered it the most useful discovery ever made in medical science, and that, if Jenner had kept it secret, he might have died the richest man in the British empire. The well-known Dr. Bailey declared, that in his judgment, vaccination formed a perfect preservative when properly performed, and gave it as his opinion that it was the most important discovery ever made in medicine. The house voted him ten thousand pounds, a very honourable testimony, though a very inadequate reward for labours which had occupied his life, on which he had expended his income, and which had conferred the most extensive benefits on his country and on mankind. The numbers who died in England alone of the disease which vaccination was intended to conquer, amounted to 45,000 a-year.

The Rector. But England is never unjust. Honours, from all her public societies, rapidly flowed in upon Jenner. In 1806 a second application to parliament was made, which was answered by a grant of 20,0001. Foreign diplomas, to the amount of twenty-five; eight medals from various public bodies at home and abroad, among the rest the Napoleon medal ; diplomas from the principal medical societies at home; the freedom of the cities of London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Glasgow; the degree of doctor of medicine from the University of Oxford ; and the appointment of physician extraordinary to the King of Great Britain, were among the honours which rewarded his great discovery. He died on the 26th of January, 1823, at the age of seventy-four.

The Colonel. “Count Cagliostro.”—The famous affair of the diamond necklace, the intrigue of Madame Lamotte, and the dupery of the Cardinal de Rohan, formed one of the most well-known and singular episodes of that time of alarm—the commencement of the French Revolution. The unfortunate Queen, always an object of Parisian malignity, was of course involved in the general charge of swindling; and, in the virulence of the time, this charge, false as it was, tended strongly to the ruin of the royal family. In those transactions a charlatan figured under the name of Count Cagliostro, and, probably, under twenty other names. The Count is the hero of the present tale, and the tale itself is an elucidation of the manners which prevailed in a court and a country, whose profligacy was speedily urging them both to ruin.

The Rector. The condition of society in France during the last quarter of the eighteenth century was vitiated beyond all example. The pompous gallantries of Louis the Fourteenth, which had made him ridiculous to all Europe; the vulgar grossnesses of Louis the Fifteenth had made him disgusting. Thus, at the beginning of Louis the Sixteenth's reign the Court was a scene of intolerable wickedness, to which the city answered by alternate contempt and turbulence, and the country by alternate imitation and rebellion. Then came the final outburst, which changed the torrent of public profligacy into carnage, and swept away a feeble dynasty and a libertine nobility. As the crime wa national, so was the punishment; and France suffered, through another quarter of a century, agonies which no other people, since the fall of Rome, could rival.

The Barrister. The story of the novel turns on the development of those principles in the fashionable life of the capital which scandalized the world fifty years ago. A marchioness, of wit distinguished in the petits soupers; a young and bewildered beauty; an old, selfish nobleman; and the inscrutable Italian charlatan, form the principal performers. The drama ends with the destruction of the chief actors, whose morals undoubtedly deserved no better catastrophe.

The Barrister. “ Notes on Naples,” by a Traveller.-A lively preface deprecates the idea, that, because Italy has been roamed over by all the tourists of Europe, the subject is exhausted. No subject is exhaustible which appeals so largely as Italy to the eye and to the mind; which, at every step, recalls some powerful feature of the past, or displays some striking beauty of nature; which represents the ancient majesty of the greatest of empires, and possesses in its landscape the richest diversity of romantic mountain, lovely lakc, luxuriant forest, and productive plain, that embellishes any soil of Europe, .

The Doctor. Vesuvius has within the last month employed itself in giving proof of that glowing loyalty which now so exorbitantly inflames everything Italian for everything royal The accouchement of the young Queen of Naples was not more sedulously announced by the fireworks of the city, or the roar of the Lazzaroni, than by the flames and bellowings of the mountain. The rejoicings for the royal safety naturally brought the tribe of rambling sight-hunters from all quarters; but, for one that the rockets and catherine-wheels summoned, the potent voice of Vesuvius from his pavilion of cloud, and his throne of fire, brought a thousand; and, if anything can fix a half-French, half-Spanish, and Austrian-supported dynasty on an Italian throne, it will be this adhesion of Vesuvius, this pledge of allegiance in the blazing monarch of the Campi Phlegræi, this superb expenditure of sulphur, steam, and lava, in honour of the national festivities.

The Rector. Byron, in his scarcastic dandyism, called Vesuvius a hackneyed height. He, probably, laughed at his own coxcombry the moment after: but it certainly has the misfortune to be too well known to the citizen portion of the earth; and, since its introduction into the Surrey Zoological Gardens, has little chance of honour beyond that of the giants in Guildhall. It is, unquestionably, inferior in height, in magnificence, and in mischief, to a hundred others of the same fiery family. The South American volcanoes look down upon it with scorn, Hecla flings out twice its bulk in every eruption, and Etna, within sight, disdainfully covers it with smoke and ashes. But the grand merit of Vesuvius is that which constitutes the grand merit of three-fourths of all things in this world-position. It stands the chief lion in the most showy spot of all Europe. What can rival the luxuriance of the landscape that surrounds it, the brilliant azure of the sea that bathes its feet, the classic recollections of every glowing hill-top and cool valley, and mossy rock, and held purple with the vine and the fig-tree, within the circuit over which this most picturesque of all volcanoes casts his glance? Its mightier brethren stand in deserts, on the shores of inhospitable oceans, or in the haunts of savages. But Vesuvius stands, like one of the fire palaces of the Arabian tales, in the midst of royal pomp and natural loveliness; a pavilion, where the genius of fire, in his idle hours, disports himself by Alinging his arrows among the clouds to astonish the wondering world below; sometimes, when sullen, wraps up his royalty in vapours thick as night; and, sometimes, when he is disposed to be mischievous, puts on the majesty of Eblis himself, and roars, thunders, spouts flames a league high, shoots up fiery rocks, and opens the floodgates of his lava to frighten the souls out of the bodies of the hundred thousand loungers of Naples, and turn half-a-dozen little towns each into a new Pompeii, embalmed in carbonic gas, and coftined in sempiternal cinders.

The Colonel. The volume is lively, and contains some very spirited descriptions of the country, the public manners, and the popular shows. The anecdote of the late king, of shooting memory, is capital. Ferdinand was an athletic idler, whose whole conception of kingly duties was comprehended within the delights of shooting birds every day, and all day long. He was evidently not a sage; but his innocent and homely manners made him a favourite with a people who think that the man who can swallow the largest quantity of maccaroni is the greatest man in the world. The King could swallow half a yard more than any other man in his dominions. His title was, therefore, unanswerable; and, in a period of all but universal insurrection in Europe, the Neapolitans no more thought of removing their King than of removing their mountain. The Queen died; etiquette required that his Majesty should remain at home for a few days ; but, after the first half-hour of seclusion, his Majesty was found stealing out with a gun on his shoulder. He was remonstrated with, so far as courtiers can ever venture to remonstrate with a king, and especially a king with a gun on his shoulder. His Majesty admitted the heinousness of the proceeding, in case of his having pursued his usual sport; but said that nobody could object to it in that instance, as he intended to shoot “only very little birds."

The Rector. " Letters on Paraguay.”—The intrigues of France and the perpetual ambition of America are now turning the public eyes on those vast provinces which once formed the Spanish colonies. Thus even the atrocities of human ambition, and few things can be more atrocious, bring vast regions before us, which would be neglected under a quicter condition of things. To Louis Philippe we shall probably soon owe a dozen topographies of Mexico; as, to the desperate seizure of Texas by those friends of equal rights and apostles of national justice, the Republicans of the United States, we already owe more knowledge of the frontiers of Montezuma's empire than we might have obtained in a hundred years of honest neighbourhood.

The Colonel. It is sufficiently curious that, in an age sovereigns, but two have retained power with any show of permanency. The Napoleon family have vanished like a vapour, and, of all the kings made by Napoleon, Bernadotte alone retains a throne, if even he can be said to have owed his throne to Napoleon. The chiefs of the South American Republics, who, under the name of presidents, have more than the power of kings, succeed each other with less than the brief sovereignty of Lord Mayors of London ; yet one had the skill to fix himself in power, and to retain it, and that one was the dictator of Paraguay, Dr. Francia. He has now also put the chance of his dispossession out of the question, for the last intelligence is, that he has just died in his eightieth year.

The Barrister. Francia and Bernadotte, the two great exceptions to the law of revolutionary change, had some resemblance in attainments, conduct, and character. It is true that Bernadotte was a soldier, and Francia a civilian, but they were alike men of talent, alike distinguished for moral respectability in their early career, and alike placed in situations which enabled them to govern not on republican principles, but on monarchical. Nothing can be clearer than that, as their personal

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