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In Sir David Brewster's review of Mrs. Somerville's first work, “The Mechanism of the Heavens” after a passing allusion, scarcely to be avoided under the circumstances, to the current prejudice against learned ladies, he proceeds:--" There is this remarkable circumstance in the case,--that when we find a real and thorough acquaintance with these branches of human knowledge, acquired with comparative ease, and possessed with unobtrusive simplicity, all our prejudices against such female acquirements vanish." We are reminded of the phrase because the volume of Mrs. Somerville's “Personal Recollections,”* written during the last two or three years of her life, is characterized by exactly those qualities of case and simplicity with which her old friend and reviewer was chiefly impressed. There is the same unconcerned, straightforward way of proceeding to the matter in hand which, in scientific works might seem to be the result of the choice of subject, but in writings of the nature of an Autobiography is doubly characteristic, as at once explaining and illustrating the peaceful arts by which her European reputation was conquered. She was fifty-one when "The Mechanism of the Heavens" was published in 1831, and her other works represent the hora subsecivoe of an elderly lady, borrowed, by an energetic inclination from such more ordinary avocations and accomplishments-the education of daughters, domestic economy, painting, arranging flowers or a cabinet of minerals, and visiting with a large circle of attached friends, scientific and otherwise,-- as would wholly occupy the leisure of most people. The following passage is nearly the only one in which the writer condescends to notice the trivial difficulties which would have been seriously vexatious, if not insuperable, to a less amiable or less single- minded student. After having consented, at Lord Brougham's request, to write an account of Necanique Celeste for the Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge,--" I rose early and made such arrangements with regard to my children and family affairs that I had time to write afterwards; not, however, without many interruptions. A man can always command his time under the plea of business, a woman is not allowed any such excuse. At Chelsea I was always supposed to be at home, and as my friends and acquaintances came so far out of their way on purpose to see me, it would have been unkind and ungenerous not to receive them. Nevertheless, I was sometimes
* “Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville.” Edited by her Daughter. Murray, 1874.
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In spite of, perhaps because of, a complete absence of the ordinary arts of literary composition, and of the peculiar egotism which makes the charm of ordinary autobiographies, we gather from this volume as clear and quite as attractive a picture of the writer's character as habits of introspection or psychological self-analysis could have enabled her to give. The child-like simplicity and singleness of purpose which so often mark the character of men of science were combined in her case also with one special gift, which, considering the circumstances under which it was developed, must be held to amount to genius, and a facility for the acquisition of all kinds of exact knowledge, which may in some degree have injured her fame by distracting her attention from the only line of thought in which she was likely to have produced valuable original results. It is scarcely possible to allude to Mrs. Somerville's achievements in science without some reference to her sex, and the question of its actual or possible capacities, because her name has been taken in vain on both sides--by some who argue that a woman who can understand Newton and La Place is capable of any intellectual feat, and by others who, accepting Mrs. Somerville as representing the high-water mark of feminine intellect, argue that since Mrs. Somerville was content to interpret without originating, it is practically decided that no woman will ever originate in science. Tile above sketch of her life, however, makes it sufficiently evident that, whatever. may be the case with the sex in general, her own productions are a very inadequate measure of her powers, New discoveries certainly require a power of another quality than such as may suffice for the mere acquirement of knowledge discovered by others, but even the intuitions of genius must have some starting-point of acquisition. The terms in which a problem is stated must have been learnt before the solution of the problem can be conceived, much less realised. Mrs. Somerville's mathematical education did not reach this point till she was several years older than, for instance, Professor Adams, when, on the suggestion of a passage in her “Connection of the Sciences,” he began the researches ending in his discovery of the planet Neptune. The first ardour of youth was spent, and the interested curiosity, the passionate preference for certain lines of inquiry which may lead to precocious originality, had faded away before she had an elementary knowledge of the
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mere catalogue; and in the portion of the work which deals with the “Holland House” of literature, not the brick and stone edifice, but the social centre, the place where Addison died, where Fox lived, where Macaulay talked, and Lady Holland snubbed the wits, we cannot but suspect that a more4bopious use of the materials collected by Sir James Mackintosh for N.N history of Holland House, that was, to be, would have added to the general interest and perhaps to the value of the work. As it is, the family history of the Foxes is the thread upon which anecdotes and achaeology are strung together, but the different phases of social life corresponding to the different generations of illustrious guests which clustered round the Fox or Holland of the day, partly because the family was famous, partly because the house was hospitable, and grateful to the aesthetic appetites which have little nourishment in London, are hardly more than hinted at, the author professing a modest reluctance to venture on so wide and arduous a theme. A complete history of the society of Holland House would be both brilliant and interesting; and the present volumes, though not without interest, are very much the- reverse of brilliant. The writer indulges in little passages of moral reflection, which have an old-world, eighteenth-century sound, and are from that point of view perhaps appropriate; but if they could have been a little less trite, without detriment to the “keeping” of style and tone, the modern reader would have been more favourably and more justly impressed by the last echoes of a state of things already belonging to the past.
Comparatively few of the anecdotes given are new; and the point of one old one--Burke's remark on Fox, “Yes, he is like a cat, fond of the house, though the family be gone”--is spoilt for the want of the application; it was said when his attachment to France was the subject of animadversion. An amusing chapter is devoted to the history of Lady Sarah Lennox, and what might very easily have been turned into a serious attachment on the part of George III to her beauty, good temper, and straightforwardness. She herself took the advances of her royal admirer very coolly, and when his marriage with the Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg was arranged, according to her brother's account, 11 the sickness of her squirrel immediately took up all her attention, and when, in spite of her nursing it died, I believe it gave her more concern than H. M. ever did. That grief, however, soon gave way to the care of a little hedgehog that she saved from destruction in the field, and is now her favourite." The concern which the king manifested when Lady Sarah's leg was broken by a fall from her horse, touched her more than his sufficiently clumsy admiration of her beauty and the "spirit" which made her propose to ride to London on the horse that threw her, to clear him of blame for the accident. These particulars are taken from memo-
