[2] Soon after the days of Gibbons, the art of ornamental carving in wood began to decay, and it may now be considered as nearly lost. Its decline may be attributed to two causes. In the first place, to the change of taste in fitting up the interior of our mansions; and in the next, to the introduction of composition for the enrichment of picture-frames and other objects of ornament. "Robert Davy," says a correspondent, "has been considered in this neighbourhood as the LAST OF THE CARVERS, and from his small size, was generally called _The little Carver_." I am not able to discover that he was remarkable for any peculiarity of intellect; he passed through life without bustle, and quitted it with the usual regrets of friends and relatives. The habits, however, generally imputed to him were certainly not such as would have induced us to anticipate a high degree of steadiness in the son. His wife, whose maiden name was Grace Millett, was remarkable for the placidity of her temper, and for the amiable and benevolent tendency of her disposition: she had been adopted and brought up, together with her two sisters, under circumstances of affecting interest, by Mr. John Tonkin, an eminent surgeon and apothecary in Penzance; a person of very considerable natural endowments, and whose Socratic sayings are, to this day, proverbial with many of the older inhabitants. To withhold a narrative of the circumstances that led Mr. Tonkin to the adoption of these orphan children, would be a species of historical fraud and literary injustice, by which the world would not only lose one of those bright examples of pure and disinterested benevolence, which cheer the heart and ornament our nature, but the medical profession would be deprived of an additional claim to that public veneration and regard, to which the kind sympathy of its professors has so universally entitled it. The parents of these children, having been attacked by a fatal fever, expired within a few hours of each other: the dying agonies of the surviving mother were sharpened by her reflecting on the forlorn condition in which her children would be left; for, although the Milletts were originally aristocratic and wealthy, the property had undergone so many subdivisions, as to have left but a very slender provision for the member of the family to whom she had united herself. The affecting appeal which Mrs. Millett is said to have addressed to her sympathising friend, and medical attendant, was not made in vain: on her decease, Mr. Tonkin immediately removed the three children to his own house, and they continued under the guardianship of their kind benefactor, until each, in succession, found a home by marriage.