The good with the evil, the blessing and bane,
The Amazon rushing far into the main,
Until, from this skill'd combination of notes,
Bound earth to the heavens His overture floats!"

CHAPTER XXVII.

F.R.S.

A page or two about my connection with the Royal Society may have some
small interest. When my father (who had long been a Fellow) died in
1844, I wished to give to the Society his marble bust by Behnes as a
memorial of honour to him; but my mother preferred to keep it, as was
natural. Meanwhile, however, some of my father's friends, and in
particular his old patron, Lord Melbourne, then recently elected, put me
up as a candidate, and as I find recorded in my Archive-book, vol. ii.,
my certificate "was signed by Argyll, Bristol, Henry Hallam, Thomas
Brande, Dr. Paris, P.B.C.S., Sir C.M. Clarke, and Sir Benjamin Brodie:
in due time I was elected, and on the 8th of May 1845 was admitted by
Lord Northampton." At my election occurred this very strange and
characteristic incident. There was only one ball against me among
twenty-seven for me in the ballot-box; the meetings were then held at
Somerset House, the Society on a less numerous scale than at present,
and the elections easier and more frequent. When the President announced
the result, up jumped Lord Melbourne, begging pardon for his mistake in
having dropped his ball into the wrong hole!--an amusing instance of the
_laissez-faire_ carelessness habitual to that good-humoured Minister.

As I have now been more than forty years a Fellow, I ought to be ashamed
to confess that I never contributed a Paper to its learned Proceedings;
all of which as they come to me I give appropriately enough to the
famous Wotton Library, belonging to my excellent friend Evelyn, heir and
successor to the celebrated John Evelyn of the Sylva, one of the
Society's founders. That I have seldom even read them is also a pitiful
truth; for the mysterious nomenclature of modern chemistry, the
incomprehensibility (to my ignorance) of the higher mathematics, the
hopeless profundity of treatises on the tides, dynamics, electricity,
and microscopic anatomicals, are, I am free to avow, worse to me than
"heathen Greek," nay (for I _can_ in some sort tackle that), more
difficult than the clay tablets of Assyria or a papyrus of Rameses II.
So I must confess to being an idle drone among the working bees.

Only thrice have I ventured to ask questions of consequence, scarcely
yet a