Dear as his memory is to me, yet I cannot but own that his character had its imperfect side. It was not only that he allowed himself to be mastered by his theories. There was, moreover, a want of thoroughness in much that he did. He never could satisfy himself that he had done all which could be done, and so he rarely brought anything to completion. He was readier to conceive than firm to execute. He worked slowly, and was too much inclined to put off to another day any piece of business which he much disliked. He lived, indeed, with great simplicity; but, owing in part to his own bad management of business matters, he was never able to shake himself free from a burden of debt till his sons came to his help. It is, perhaps, not wonderful that he took the world somewhat easily, as he had from nature such a happy constitution, that the more he was troubled, the longer and the more soundly he could sleep. His, indeed, was a temperament that wins a man happiness, but refuses him fame. He had little ambition and few wants. His utmost wishes scarce travelled beyond a simple house, a sufficiency of homely fare and clothing, a good library, and a set of philosophical and astronomical instruments. “Never be cast down,” he wrote to one of his sons; “moderate success is nearly a certainty, and more is not worth a wish.” It was not that he lived the sour life of an anchorite. Few men had a heartier relish of all honest pleasures. He was even famed for his love of apple-pie. “My dear,” I have heard him say after the simplest of meals, when asked by his daughter whether he had enjoyed his food, “My dear, I only hope the Queen has had half as good a dinner.” Such hospitality as he could afford he at all times delighted in showing. Who that partook of his Sunday morning breakfasts could ever forget the charming courtesy and the warmth of affection that make the aged man’s simple parlour live in the memory like a landscape of Claude’s? The love that he had ever borne his fellow-men came to the relief of the sufferings of his last hours. As he was dying, the gloom that had covered the world during so much of his manhood seemed to him at last to have been cleared away. The Great Exhibition of 1851 had just been opened. “Thank God! thank God!” he said, “for living to see this day!... This real peace meeting. I cannot join them with my voice, but I can in my heart. ‘All people that on earth do dwell, Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.’ I leave the world bright with hope. Never, surely, has God’s government of the world been so clear as at the present period.” The day before his death he insisted that one of his sons and his doctor should breakfast in his room, as, though he was himself unable to eat, he took pleasure in seeing others eat and refresh themselves. “And still to love, though pressed with ill, In wintry age to feel no chill, With me is to be lovely still.”