ty. He writes with simplicity and with a certain vivid
picturesqueness, rarely yielding to the rhetorical impulses which
governed the ordinary prose of his age. (E. G.)

CAVENDISH, HENRY (1731-1810), English chemist and physicist, elder son
of Lord Charles Cavendish, brother of the 3rd duke of Devonshire, and
Lady Anne Grey, daughter of the duke of Kent, was born at Nice in
October 1731. He was sent to school at Hackney in 1742, and in 1749
entered Peterhouse, Cambridge, which he left in 1753, without taking a
degree. Until he was about forty he seems to have enjoyed a very
moderate allowance from his father, but in the latter part of his life
he was left a fortune which made him one of the richest men of his time.
He lived principally at Clapham Common, but he had also a town-house in
Bloomsbury, while his library was in a house in Dean Street, Soho; and
there he used to attend on appointed days to lend the books to men who
were properly vouched for. So methodical was he that he never took down
a volume for his own use without entering it in the loan-book. He was a
regular attendant at the meetings of the Royal Society, of which he
became a fellow in 1760, and he dined every Thursday with the club
composed of its members. Otherwise he had little intercourse with
society; indeed, his chief object in life seems to have been to avoid
the attention of his fellows. With his relatives he had little
intercourse, and even Lord George Cavendish, whom he made his principal
heir, he saw only for a few minutes once a year. His dinner was ordered
daily by a note placed on the hall-table, and his women servants were
instructed to keep out of his sight on pain of dismissal. In person he
was tall and rather thin; his dress was old-fashioned and singularly
uniform, and was inclined to be shabby about the times when the
precisely arranged visits of his tailor were due. He had a slight
hesitation in his speech, and his air of timidity and reserve was almost
ludicrous. He was never married. He died at Clapham on the 24th of
February 1810, leaving funded property worth L700,000, and a landed
estate of L8000 a year, together with canal and other property, and
L50,000 at his bankers.

Cavendish's scientific work is distinguished for the wideness of its
range and for its extraordinary exactness and accuracy. The papers he
himself published form an incomplete record of his researches, for many
of the results he obtained only became