In spite of the feelings of disappointment which oppressed him severely on some occasions, it must not be imagined that he was predominantly unhappy. Lord Jeffrey described him as “happy Charlie Bell;” Lord Cockburn wrote: “If I ever knew a generally and practically happy man, it was Sir Charles Bell.” Alexander Shaw said of him: “His mind was a garden of flowers and a forest of hardy trees. Its exercise in profound thought gave him high enjoyment; yet he would often avow his pleasure in being still a boy, and he did love life and nature with the freshness of youth. I therefore repeat—if ever I knew a happy man, it was Sir Charles Bell.” Yet, seeing that he was convinced, “that the place of a professor who _fills his place_ is the most respectable in life,” we may believe that a painful sense of ungratified desire was largely present if not continually expressed. In 1835 he writes: “My hands are better for operation than any I have seen at work; but an operating surgeon’s life has no equivalent reward in this world... I must be the teacher and consulting surgeon to be happy.” In 1831, in connection with the accession of William IV., the Guelphic order of knighthood was conferred on several distinguished men of science, among whom Charles Bell was included. His association with Herschel and Brewster in this honour was gratifying and appropriate. A complete school of medicine was now projected in connection with the Middlesex Hospital, in which he was to take a prominent part. It had not, however, passed through three complete months of its history, when the Town Council of Edinburgh elected Sir Charles[19] to the Chair of Surgery in the University, and the offer proved attractive enough to induce him to leave London. He had always cherished the idea of a return to Edinburgh at some future time, and it appeared to him that there was a possibility of a sphere of more elevated usefulness there, than he could now hope for in London. Moreover, his heart was in Scotland, in the streets of Edinburgh—in the theatre where Monro had lectured to him—in the society of his old friends Jeffrey, Cockburn, William Clerk, Adam Ferguson, and most of all his brother George. “London is a place to live in, but not to die in,” he said. “My comfort has ever been to labour for some great purpose, and my great object of study has been attained.... There is but one place where I can hope to fulfil the object of my scientific labour, and that is Edinburgh; and that is an experiment.”