Romney, by thus withdrawing from society, necessarily narrowed the circle of his acquaintance, so that his partizans were generally those who admired his pictures without knowing the man.

Mr.

• Perfection does not belong to human nature. Our excellence is only comparative, and they are the best, who have the fewest defects. Romney undoubtedly had his share of infirmities; but his errors were rather the offspring of circumstance, than originating from any corrupt principle. He was the dupe of his feelings, but exempt from all gross propensities. His honour and his honesty were naturally pure; and he harboured no malevolent passions in his breast. He was free from the debasing influence of avarice, which has been imputed to Sir Joshua. Mr. Cumberland, indeed, has said, that" he had no dislike to money;" but his reflection is as unkind as it is uncandid. Mr. Romney, from having had to struggle for so many years with poverty, had, perhaps, contracted some little habits of parsimony, but the mind had no participation in them. Can a man be said to be fond of money who had the generosity to advance his brother six hundred pounds, to fit him out for India, which was all the money he had in the world, and which he had saved in the preceding year? But this Mr. Romney did, and at that period of his life too (aged forty-two) when it became highly expedient that he should lose no time in providing for himself. Mr. Cumberland ought to have remembered, that when he himself was in need, after his return from Spain, Mr. Romney advanced him five hundred pounds in the most liberal manner. Being a man of tender feelings, he was ever alive to applications for charity; and the readiness with which he gave, made those applications frequent. He felt every disposition, also, to succour young artists of talent; and whenever he heard of any such impeded by poverty, his purse was open for their assistance. He might truly have said, in the words of Dido,

Non ignara mali, miseris succurere disco.

It was not in the want of generosity, but in the misapplication of it that his fault lay. When a man makes his feelings his guide, he follows an ignis fatuus, which may lead him into bogs and quagmires. There was

a fibre about Mr. Romney's heart, which the artful and designing knew well how to touch, and make subservient to their own base views and advantage. Whatever errors he committed they mainly sprang from this source.'-pp. 176–178.

Nevertheless with such habits it appears certain that he had studied Milton with the greatest attention, and had selected from Paradise Lost a series of subjects, some of them probably not unlike those which Martin is giving to the world with such matchless success. Writing to his son in 1794, he says:-" I have made many grand designs, I have formed a system of original subjects, moral, and my own-and I think one of the grandest that has been thought of-but nobody knows it.-Hence it is my view to wrap myself in retirement, and pursue these plans, as I begin to feel I cannot bear trouble of any kind." This letter bears evidence of that morbidness of feeling which Hayley attributed to Romney, and which is admitted to have grown upon him in the decline of life. The love of retirement,' says his son, combining its influence with this diseased state of his mind, soon began to generate

6

visionary and expensive schemes, which, instead of ministering to his comfort, aggravated his infirmities. He had lived so long in peculiar habits, that he had lost the just conception of that happiness, which results from retirement; its impressions, however, still remained on his memory, but distorted and exaggerated by the influence of a distempered imagination.' His latter days were chiefly spent in building schemes of a ruinous description. He erected at Hampstead a picture gallery, into which his paintings were removed before the walls were dry. In consequence of this many of them were destroyed. Several were also stolen.

In 1798 he was attacked by a paralytic stroke, which induced him to retire to Kendal, where he purchased the place in which his Biographer now resides. It is painful to add that for some time before his death, which took place on the 15th of November, 1802, his reasoning faculties had wholly deserted him, and George Romney left the world as much a child as when he entered it.

The Memoir of Peter Romney, given in the Appendix, deserves no particular notice. He appears to have been possessed of considerable genius, and a tolerably good portrait painter, but a restless hair-brained fellow, who brought on a premature dissolution by habits of intoxication.

ART. II.-The Library of Entertaining Knowledge-Insect Transformations. 12mo. pp. 420. London: Knight, 1830.

THE only books really pregnant with "entertaining knowledge," which have yet emanated from what may be called Mr. Brougham's Society, are those compiled by Mr. Rennie upon the inexhaustible history of insects. There is no poetry about the man. He is a mere matter of fact observer and collector. He has the happy tact of arranging his intellectual treasures, whether acquired from his own researches, or those of others, in the most lucid order, and in an easy, popular style. His industry is indefatigable. His love of every subject connected with the works of nature is boundless. He seems to feel particular delight in exposing the mistakes, the prejudices, and credulity of the naturalists of the olden time, that is to say, of those who wrote before the establishment of the 'Diffusion Society,' with whose members he most cordially agrees in opinion, that until they were incorporated into a body, and subdivided into committees, chaos and night held rule over the human mind. This feeling, though it sometimes approach too near to flippancy, is venial and even beneficial. It urges us to shake off old errors, and if it occasionally plunge us into new, nevertheless the useful habit of distrusting mere assertion is betimes engendered, and that is doing a great deal towards the amelioration of mankind.

The volume on "Insect Architecture," we have already noticed.

We have remarked, too, the inconvenience of treating the history of these interesting objects of study, in the way which Mr. Rennie has adopted. His subject was not naturally divisible into the branches which he has given to it; one of them is perpetually touching or coinciding with the other, and we are teazed either with repetition or endless reference. The fault is palpable in the volume now before us; in almost every second or third page of which, after the first fifty, we find a note. (See "Insect Architecture,” p.—.) In the chapter, for instance, which describes the eggs of insects, a topic properly belonging to the head of Transformations,' we are desired to see two of these eggs (of spiral form) in "Insect Architecture." Much is said here of the effect of heat upon the eggs of insects; but this is not deemed enough without sending us back to a particular page of "Insect Architecture." There is a very singular analogy pointed out by Swammerdam, between the embryo of the butterfly in the caterpillar and that of the plant in the seed; the difference, apparently, being that the former is fed through the mouth of the caterpillar, while the latter derives nutriment from the leaf scales which surround it. In order to have a complete idea of the mode in which nature has provided for the embryo butterfly, it is necessary that we should be acquainted with the construction of the caterpillar's stomach and intestines; but for this knowledge we must have recourse to "Insect Architecture!"

The muscular strength of insects forms a topic, perhaps, properly belonging to that of their transformation. But if we wish to know the construction of the caterpillar's claw or the spider's leg, we must leave the page before us and go again over three or four pages of Insect Architecture." A question, highly interesting to agriculturists, is discussed, viz., whether a particular tribe of insects is herbivorous or carniverous; that is to say, whether they live upon other tribes found upon corn, or whether they devour the corn itself; for in the one case their preservation would be looked to, in the other their destruction. The subject is partially gone through, and for the rest we must look to "Insect Architecture." 'Similar errors,' observes the author, will come under our notice, as we proceed, not more defensible than that of the old soldier coursing caterpillars in France.' We suppose that the remainder of this sentence we are to find in "Insect Architecture," for we do not meet with it in the volume now before us. The authorities differ widely as to the modes of various insects emerging from their pupa cases. The doctrine of Professor Peck with respect to the extrication of the locust moth from its cocoon, is quoted in the book under review, but for observations upon that doctrine we are to consult "Insect Architecture," pages 316, 317, and-318, is it?-noand 195. Thus we go forward and backward; we find one patch of insect history in one work, one in another; a leg, as it were, here, and an eye there; one half of the body in one volume, and

VOL. XV.

the other in another: the two books, by the way, having no indispensible connection with each other, as they are not even called vol. 1, vol. 2. They are put forth by the Society as two separate publications, having no titular relation one to the other. It may happen, and, doubtless, in many cases it will happen, that parties may be possessed of Insect Transformations, who have never seen "Insect Architecture." In order to understand the former, they must purchase the latter. They must do more, they must be contented to compare the two constantly together; to pick up one idea. here and another there; to learn from one book how a wasp builds his nest, from another how he secures it; from one how a bee is produced, and from another how he collects his honied store; from one how a gnat is housed for the winter, and from another how, in summer, he becomes a chorister or a dancer! This breaking up and separation of almost every subject treated in the two volumes, will, we suspect, try the patience of some readers, and exhaust that of many. For our own parts, nothing could induce us to engage in splitting hairs in this way, had not Mr. Rennie's fulness of matter, his agreeable diction, and the fascination of the subject, beguiled us on from page to page.

Every schoolboy is acquainted with Virgil's famous scheme for creating a swarm of bees out of a dead bullock. The idea is not even yet dispelled from the world, that insects derive their origin. from the mere putrefaction of matter. Kircher, certainly one of the most learned men of the seventeenth century, very confidently gave a friend of his a recipe for the manufacture of snakes. " Take, says he, "some snakes of whatever kind you want, roast them and cut them in small pieces, and sow those pieces in an oleaginous soil; then, from day to day, sprinkle them lightly with water from a watering-pot, taking care that the piece of ground be exposed to the spring sun, and in eight days you will see the earth strewn with little worms, which, being nourished with milk diluted with water, will gradually increase in size till they take the form of perfect serpents. His friend tried the experiment, with what success we need hardly say. Maggots he produced in abundance, but as for the snakes, he might have watered his oleaginous soil for a century, before one of them would have made its appearance. Amongst ourselves, there are many who believe-and, in our youthful days, we ourselves might have been classed amongst the number-that a horse's hair thrown into a brook, will, in due time, be converted into an eel. Nothing is now better ascertained in natural history, than the fact that all insects are produced from eggs. Appearances may, and do often, deceive even close observers. The belief is almost universal, that insects are born of what is called the blight, "an easterly wind attended by a blue mist," as that ingenious gardener, Mr. Main, of Chelsea, defines it. Dr. Mason Good, one of the most philosophical naturalists of his day, was of opinion that, on such occasions, the atmosphere was freighted with myriads

of eggs, which, as soon as they fell upon congenial spots, were almost instantaneously hatched into life. The reasoning of Mr. Rennie on this subject appears to us to be founded on the most irrefragable principles. Every known species of eggs being much heavier than the air, how is it possible that they could be wafted about in it? Besides, the parental instinct of insects is altogether incompatible with the notion that they would commit their progeny to the uncertainty of the winds, and that, too, from the time they are dropped, about the end of summer, until the commencement of the ensuing spring, when the young broods appear. It seems to be well ascertained, that not only are all insects produced from eggs, but that the eggs are, according to the usual course of things, deposited with the utmost care, exactly in those places in which the young generations are most likely to obtain the greatest abundance of the food which is most suitable to their wants.

The physiology of insects' eggs forms one of the most curious chapters in natural history. The causes or objects of the variety of colours which are given to them, have never been satisfactorily explained, or even conjectured. In some cases, it is evident that the colour is intended for concealment, being scarcely distinguishable from that of the plant upon which it is deposited; but this resemblance is far from being universal. Insects' eggs differ widely in form from those of birds; they are of all sorts of shapes, cylindric, prismatic, angular, square, &c, the cause most probably being connected with the diversified forms of the beings which they contain. The ostrich, the eagle, and the wren, for example, differ much more in size than in their general form; but the ear-wig, the garden-spider, butterflies, beetles, and grasshoppers, differ much more in form than in size, and consequently require eggs of varying forms to contain their progeny.' It is confessed, however, that the mathematical causes of these different forms cannot always be traced, since considerable varieties sometimes occur in the eggs even of the species of the same genus. Here, again, human speculation has been baffled.

The fecundity of insects is another wondrous theme. One aphis may be, according to Reaumur, the progenitor of 5,904,900,000 descendants during its life; the female, during the summer months, is said to produce about twenty-five a day, and it is supposed that in one year there may be twenty successive generations! The queen of the warrior white ants, according to Smeathman, lays an egg every second, or 31,536,000 in a year; and, as every one of these must be removed to proper nurseries suitable to the season, by the queen's attendants, we may suppose that her majesty gives them no little trouble. The comparative view, quoted from Dalyell, of the fecundity of the animal kingdom in general, is truly astonishing.

"Compared with the rest of animated nature," says Dalyell, "infusion animalcula are surely the most numerous: next are worms, insects,