morning of the 8th he died. "Sir M. Tier- | power; I will try no other course; and I am ney felt his pulse, thought for a second that sanguine enough to believe that this course, he was gone, but he still breathed. In a few though not perhaps the quickest, is the surseconds there ceased to be any sign of breath- est." Mr. Canning wrote those words in ing. He passed away so quietly that the ex- 1801; and it is because we believe that they act moment could not be ascertained, but it illustrate his career that we are grateful to was between twelve and ten minutes before Mr. Stapleton for his recollections of the man four." Almost the last intelligible words he who used them. The book is a very interestuttered were " This may be hard upon me, ing one; it contains an admirable selection but it is harder upon the king." of Mr. Canning's letters, memoranda, and And so he died. official despatches; and the author's com

"My road must be through character to mentary is concise and graphic.

SHIRLEY.

DISINFECTANT.-A medical discovery of much value, destined to effect a great amelioration in the treatment of ulcers, .bscesses, flesh wounds, etc., has lately been made, by two former internes or house surgeons of the Hospice de la Charite, and by them generously offered to the world, without fee or reward. At the last sitting of the Academy of Sciences, the celebrated Dr. Velpeau demanded permission to make an important communication, and announced that the two young practitioners in question, Messrs. Corme and Demeaux, had paid him a visit for the purpose of presenting to his notice their discovery, and explaining to him its results. Messrs. Corme and Demeaux have found a process for the complete and instantaneous disinfection of animal matter. The action of the disinfecting agent arrests the progress of decomposition, and effectually prevents the generation of insects. The substance prepared for use, costs here about one franc for a hundred pounds, and the expense in America would probably be still less. The following is the formula, as given by the inventors themselves:

mediate. In the latter case, that is to say, placing the composition directly in contact with the sore, no pain whatever is produced; on the contrary, the salve has a detersive action, cleanses the sore and favors cicatrization.

In the course of his remarks, Dr. Velpeau, mentioned the case of a patient at the Charite, to whom the new process had been applied with perfect success. This person was afflicted with a frightful abscess in the thigh, from which exuded a purulent matter of a most infectious odor, rendering the operations of the surgeon both painful and difficult. This matter, mixed with a powder held in readiness by the two experimentalists, was disinfected in one minute, touched with impunity by the spectators, and applied beneath their noses, without leaving a trace of unpleasant odor.

As has been seen, the elements of this composition are of the simplest character, and though intelligence of the discovery could not have reached the medical faculty of the United States in advance of this letter, your own surgeons will doubtless receive, by the same mail which carries this, every corroborating particuPlaster of commerce, reduced to a fine powder, lar. My desire is to make known the event one hundred parts; coal tar, one to three parts. throughout our country, and I sincerely hope The mixture of the two substances is effected this paragraph may be widely copied by your with ease by the aid of a mortar, or by any exchanges. As Dr. Velpeau himself observed other appropriate mechanical means. The ap- at the close of his observations before the Acadplication of this composition to the dressing of emy, too much publicity cannot be given to so sores or wounds requires a particular prepara- valuable a discovery, as well as the disinteresttion. A certain quantity of the powder, pre-edness of its authors. In their own report, pared according to the formula, is diluted with olive oil to the consistency of a paste or ointment. This species of paste or salve is of a dark brown color, has a slightly bituminous odor, and may be kept in a closed jar for an indefinite period. The oil unites the powder without dissolving it, and the composition has the property of absorbing infectious liquids the instant it is applied to the sore which produces them. The application may be mediate or im

Messrs. Corme and Demeaux state that the composition may be applied in the form of a poultice, or cotton, and laid on the wound. They demonstrate that their mode of dressing possesses the double property of disinfecting morbid products and of absorbing their liquids. This last circumstance entirely obviates the necessity of lint-which is one of the most important features of the discovery.-Cor. N. Y. Express.

THE young men at the opening of the present century who were to become its great men have nearly all passed from among us. Among the politicians of this class, the veterans Lyndhurst and Brougham are still in their place. But the stream has carried away nearly all beside. The two great ex-chancellors lift their heads almost alone. Among our literary men, representatives of the same period, Rogers and Leigh Hunt had outlived nearly all their fellows, and with the late Sir James Stephen the last of the race may be said to have disappeared.

Master in Chancery, father to the truly eminent and estimable man of whom we wish to speak in this place with the respect and affection due to his memory. The late Sir James Stephen was some ten years older than Lord Macaulay, but the friendship which had bound the sires to each other descended to their sons. Sir James was not wanting in reverence towards the great historian, but we still hear, and have no wish ever to forget, those affectionate tones in which he sometimes spoke of him as " dear Tom."

Sir James Stephen was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and took his degree of B.A. in 1812. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, and practised as a Chancery barThe days with which those men of the past rister from 1812 to 1823. During nearly all had been familiar were memorable days. The those years he had been connected officially courtier conventionalities of the preceding with the public service as Counsel of the Colcentury had come to an end. The outburst onial Department. On retiring from the bar in France was felt everywhere as a great dis- in 1823, he retained this office during the turbing power. Antagonism at home and next ten years, conjointly with that of Counwar abroad grew up in all directions. Those sel of the Board of Trade. He subsequently men could remember the invasion of Egypt became Assistant Under-Secretary, and soon by the first Napoleon; had seen mail-coaches afterwards permanent Under-Secretary, for rush through towns and cities, decorated with laurels and blue flags, bringing news about the siege of Acre and the battle of the Nile, and had listened many a time to the half muffled bells which told so often how victory and death went together. In his later lifetime, Napoleon spoke of the Englishman who had defeated his policy at Acre, as the man who had "marred his destiny;" and the Englishmen about Sir James Stephen in his schoolboy days believed as much.

But brave men get no harm from a sense of danger. Perilous times render them wakeful, stimulate them to action, and show what is in them. In the early years of this century, the great death-struggle to which all Europe became committed, was allied with a struggle in this country, hardly less determined, in behalf of great principles-principles of freedom and humanity. Negro emancipation was one of the many questions which Englishmen, with such a war upon their hands, took up, and could prosecute with a strength of purpose which we may be sure would not have been so great had they been men with no other work to do. The great coadjutors of Wilberforce in that controversy, were Mr. Zachary Macaulay, father of the nobleman who has since done so much honor to that name; and Mr. James Stephen,

the Colonies, and he continued in that position until 1847. On his retirement from the Colonial Office he received the honor of knighthood, and in 1849 was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. The facts especially observable in his history are-the combination, on a scale so large and so successful, of the man of business with the man of letters; and still more, the combination with those qualities, of a religious culture, so broad, so deep, and so refined, as may be traced, in part, in his writings, and as was more fully known to those who had a place within the circle of his friendships.

The experiences of our Colonial Office must often have been not a little ungenial to a man of such a temperament and of such habits. Our countrymen who seek their fortune in the colonies consist largely of two classes— officials whose selfishness generally takes the form of indolence and avarice; and adventurers whom the same feeling prompts to rashness and insubordination-so that the negli gence and wrong are likely to be the greatest, where the disposition to submit to them is sure to be the least. Hence, the storms so often coming up in colonial history. We all know that the most restless blood of the mother country commonly finds its way to

the extremities. And here is a man with the the magnates connected with the Edinburgh clearest perception of the ethical relations of Review were well known to him. He once things, and the most trained and sensitive ventured, in after-dinner talk with the said feeling in regard to them, having specially to magnates, to complain of the cavalier style do with a department the least likely to be in which they were wont to dispose of religobservant of such distinctions, or even to un-ion whenever it happened to come in their derstand them. To say that the Under-Sec- path. The sinners pleaded that they were retary was eminently successful is to say that he must have had many enemies. The name of "King Stephen," cast at him as expressive of the sway which he long exercised, was the highest compliment that could be paid to that ceaseless labor, and scientific skill, with which he mastered, not only the great elements, but the smallest details, relating to our vast and varied colonial empire. To be abreast with all that was doing, he often burnt his lamp far into the night-or lighted it long before the world about him was afoot; and only thus could he have been what he was. When a field-day approached in either house on a colonial question, heavy was the demand made on the Under-Secretary for the needful ammunition. As round after round came off within the ring, the lookers-on rarely suspected how much of the flooring that took place was due to the bottleholder who had been so attentive to his duties in the lobby.

With all this stress of occupation, Sir James Stephen was a domestic man, and su apportioned his time, that when certain hours of the evening came, he might generally be found at the fireside with his family. The friend who dropped in upon him at such times often saw him at his best. The topics of the day were sure all to interest him, if not from the ordinary point of view, from some point of his own; and he not only spoke concerning them as few men could have spoken, but he discoursed, delivered essays upon them. Indeed, it was a fault of his conversation when the listeners were few, that it ran so much into this form. As a friend of our own once said of Coleridge, it was versation, not conversation; and mild, intelligent, and often beautiful as it was, you sometimes felt it would have been more satisfactory if larger space had been left for interrogation, if not for exception.

It was at such moments that you became aware how much this man, living as amidst a pyramid of memorials and despatches, was a man of reading in all sorts of literature, and a man of exquisite literary taste. Some of

not conscious of their sin, and challenged their censor to join their confederacy, and to show them how to mend their ways. Suffice it to say, that in 1838 Mr. James Stephen began to write in the Edinburgh; and from that time the old scoffing spirit of the buff and blue may be said to have been exorcised. The attraction which the genius of Mr. Macaulay had given to the Review for many years previously, was in a great degree perpetuated, for some years to come, by the genius of his friend. The writings of the two contributors, indeed, possessed only a limited resemblance. Both are largely historical, but there is a marked difference between them. Lord Macaulay's convictions have respect almost exclusively to what is true in literature and politics. Sir James Stephen's are concerned mainly with what is true in religion and philosophy. The one, accordingly, was a fitting successor to the other, as covering ground further in advance.

But even Sir James has left room for a successor. It was impossible not to admire the largeness and candor with which he habitually looked on men, on parties, and on principles. He had his own way of seeing something to commend almost everywhere. He appeared to see all error as having relation to some truth, and seemed inclined to deal softly and cautiously with it for the sake of that truth. This disposition gave a singular amiability to his character as a man, but it in a great measure disqualified him for the work of a reformer. It was at times a strange, almost a perplexing thing, to see in the same mind, so strong an adhesion to great principles, with so little of a tendency to do real battle for them. He could admire energy, decision, even the work of destruction, when perpetrated by others—as in the case of a Luther or a Knox, but always seemed to feel that his own vocation did not lie in that direction. Hence, he never brought the force and thoroughness to the side of religion and philosophy, which Lord Macaulay has never failed to bring to the side of literature and politics.

Mr. Glad

We are satisfied, however, that his modesty, | under-secretary for the colonies and the presalong with the kindliness of his nature, had ent chancellor of the exchequer. much to do with this peculiarity. As a man But here the resemblance ends. of letters, he had come too late into the field, stone's faith in the fixedness of the machinery and it was in accordance with his notions of of the church, and in the sin of schism as good taste that he should bear his faculties consequent on a departure from it, had no meekly. As an ecclesiastical historian, too-place in the mind of Sir James Stephen. He for it was in such history that he found what believed that the religious truth of which the was most congenial to him-he never seemed New Testament is the record, and the religto forget that he was a layman whose life had ious heart as there delineated, were designed been largely given to the world's business, to be perpetual, and will so be to the world's and not a man whose days had been separated end. But he found nothing more in that to such studies. These considerations, act-book of which so much might be said. The ing on one of the most benevolent of hearts, broils between churches, accordingly, were to taught him to judge leniently as a critic; and his mind only so much evidence of the weakwhen he did take upon him something of the ness of human nature. This was the root of function of the divine, he was disposed by his large religious charity. He reverenced such recollections to do so most reverentially. the lawn which, to use his own words, "was When we call to mind what is being done without a spot," and he could reverence the every day through our periodical press by the man no less, whom he knew to be equally merest novices in literature; and the manner pure, though no lawn had ever been seen upon in which men wholly incompetent to concern his person, and though it would not have been themselves with religious subjects are con- accepted had it been tendered to him. stantly meddling with them, such refinements of feeling seem hardly to belong to our sort of world.

On the whole, the mind of Sir James Stephen bore a nearer resemblance to the mind of Mr. Gladstone than to that of Lord Macaulay. But here again the likeness is with a strong difference. Mr. Gladstone is both statesman and scholar-a man capable of hard secular work, while possessing genuine literary sympathies. He is also especially influenced by Christian forms of thought. The great and good men of Christian history are so present to his imagination, amidst the shadows of the past, that he is always prepared to uncover before them and to do them homage. Their sanctity, their learning, their humane influences, when contrasted with what is around them, and would come into their place if they were absent, raise them, in his view, almost to the place of incarnations of wisdom and goodness. In all these respects the resemblance is strong between the late

It is not a common mind, therefore, that has passed from among us. What a model to the official man is presented in such a life. What a rebuke does it administer to the multitudes who plead the pressure of occupation as an excuse for the utter neglect of mental culture. What a chasm separates between the temper of such a critic and our tomahawk school of literature. What an elevation in such views of religious and Christian life, compared with the narrow bigotries, the fanaticism without bowels, still so prevalent among us!

From Once a Week. THE LAST VOYAGE OF SIR JOHN FRANKLIN.

BY CAPTAIN SHERARD OSBORN, R.N.

line of America by the Hudson-Bay Company's servants, Dease and Simpson, caused the attention of the nation to again revert to its old channel-the North-west Passage. "THERE is yet one thing left undone, Anno Domino 1844 found England with a whereby a great mind may become notable," surplus revenue, a vast body of naval officers wrote worthy Master Purchas-that one deed begging for employment, and eager for any was the discovery of a north-west passage to opportunity of winning honors and distincthe Indies. Many long years afterwards, tion; and the Erebus and Terror, safe and the words of the good dean of St. Paul's sound from the perils of Antarctic seas, riding sounded like a trumpet-call to his country-at anchor off Woolwich. All was most promen, and many an aspiring spirit essayed to pitious for carrying out the darling object of do that deed whereby bright honor and im- the then venerable secretary of the admiralty. mortality were to be won. The veil which A mind like that of Sir John Barrow's, hid from human ken the mysteries of the richly stored with the records of his country's Arctic zone was not to be rent by one bold glories in the exploration of every quarter of stroke; it was to be the test of British perse- the globe, was keenly alive to the importance verance, patience, and hardihood. The frozen of keeping her still in the vanguard of geonorth would only reveal its wonders slowly graphical discovery; and it must be rememand unwillingly to the brave men who de-bered that he had lived in a century when voted themselves to the task. The dread men, in spite of a long and terrible war, were reaims of frost and silence were only to be almost yearly excited by the world-wide fame penetrated by the labors of two generations of the discoveries of Anson, Cooke, Flinders, of seamen and travellers. The consumma- and Mungo Park. Was it not natural, theretion of the discovery of the north-west pas-fore, that he, and such as he, should desire sage was to be obtained but by the self-sacri- to add to those triumphs the achievement of fice of a hundred heroes. the greatest problem man ever undertook to solve.

From 1815 to 1833 England sent forth her sons to the north in repeated expeditions by How simple an undertaking it appeared to sea and land. The earnestness of many emi-connect the water in which Parry had sailed nent public men, members of the Royal Soci- to Melville Island, in 1819, with Dease and ety-such as Sir John Barrow and Sir Fran- Simpson's easternmost position off the coast cis Beaufort-kept general interest directed of America in 1838. to those regions, in which Frobisher, Baf- The summer of 1844 saw many an eager fin, Davis, and Fox had so nobly ventured. face poring over that Arctic chart. WhisThere were no falterers; every call for volun-perings were heard that Sir John Barrow, teers was nobly responded to by officers of Beaufort, Parry, Sabine, Ross, and Franklin the royal navy; and John Franklin, Richard- himself, had expressed strong opinions in son, John and James Ross, Parry, Back, and favor of another effort. The Royal Society, King, with much devotion, toil, and suffering, through its president, the Marquis of Northforced open the portals beyond which the ampton, was known to have urged the reElizabethan school of discoverers had not sumption of Arctic exploration upon the been able to penetrate, and added much to government and admiralty. Many an enthuour knowledge of the geography and physical siastic officer strove hard by zeal and interest condition of the Arctic zone between Green- to insure being one of those selected for the land and Behring's Straits. Fifteen years of glorious work. Then it was that Fitzjames, labor had failed, however, to solve the ques- and such men as Graham Gore, Fairholme, tion as to the actual existence of a water Hodgson, and Des Voeux, succeeded in encommunication between the Pacific and At-rolling themselves on the list of the chosen lantic. Repeated disappointment had damped few who were next year to sail for the far public zeal. Just at this juncture, between north-west. We see them now, as they told 1838 and 1843, the success of Captain Sir us so, and with glistening eye prophesied James Ross in an expedition to the Antarc- their own success. Gallant hearts! they now tic Pole with H.M.S. Erebus and Terror, as sleep amidst the scenes of their sore trial, but well as the completion of the northern coast- triumphant discovery.