In undertaking this task, however, I feel myself agitated by mingled emotions of sorrow and complacency as friends of science, you, gentlemen, will more especially participate in those regrets, which the community in general ever suffers, from a privation of the usefulness and example of an eminent citizen while good and enlightened men universally, derive a pleasing gratification from recognising merit, and doing honour to the memory of departed worth. Yet, being honoured by your invitation, gentlemen, to render the homage of this respectable society, to the genius and talents of one of its most conspicuous and eminent members, whose loss we have so recently had occasion to deplore, I enter upon the duty assigned to me, with the less diffidence. Standing, as I do, in the near relationship of a nephew, to the late professor Barton, I cannot be insensible of my being placed in a situation of considerable delicacy. Not, gentlemen, that I would hazard the vain, the empty, nay, the untrue assertion, that science has no votaries left in this country,-but, that her genius and talents exist at this epoch of our history, in the younger portion of our scientifick population, is a position I feel neither the fear of contradiction in advancing, nor the apprehension of disappointment, in cherishing with the warmest enthusiasm. I shall now proceed, gentlemen, after requesting your pardon for this trespass on your time, to the performance of the task with which you have honoured me, on the threshold of which I have been arrested by the preceding reflections-a task which, while it affords me an opportunity of speaking, in the plain language of truth, of the merits of a departed son of science-gives me not the pleasure of adding, that the chasm in the science of our country which his exit from this world, to him a world of troubles and of pain, has left-is likely to be immediately filled by any remaining sojourner in the temple he so long inhabited, and of which he was one of the most distinguished ornaments. And though two of these were, in the paths whither their peculiar talents directed their labours and their zeal, the brightest figures in the history of our country's science-yet I cannot add, that the spirit of the comments I have given on the words of Mark Antony, has been either conceived or applied in relation to their memories. During this span of time, it has been my fate to see four of five professors, who were my teachers when I entered the university, pay the debt of nature. I have been seduced into these reflections, by a retrospect of the last ten years. The first annunciation therefore of a great man's death, should be the watch-word to seal the history, or, if possible, the recollection of his frailties-the countersign to facilitate their passage, along with the mortal remains of the human fabrick they inhabited, into perennial oblivion. Genius, gentlemen, is too frequently accompanied by morbid sensibility and the high-wrought powers of the human mind, rarely shine with unsullied lustre. ![]() ![]() On the other hand-does it not admonish us, while we are parsimonious of our praise, to be niggards also, of our censure? Does it not whisper to the moral ear this truth-that humanity is frail? And how artfully does it not insinuate, that if Cæsar had faults, his funeral dirge ought not to be the vehicle of their publicity, but contrived rather as a sacred seal, to preserve them from the eye of malice, or the finger of scorn.ĭoes it not too inculcate the moral duty of investing the frail, the spotted portion of a great man's memory, with a shroud of charitable forgetfulness and does it not do all this with the evangelick spirit in which the poet has given us the benevolent caution to "tread lightly o'er the ashes of the dead."
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