heel's breadth. I was quite thunderstruck, never having heard the least hint of his being so great a geometrician-in this sense of the word. I was, however, I must own, agreeably surprised by such a specimen of buoyant spirit and muscular strength in so venerable an old gentleman, and could not forbear from complimenting him on his revival of the ancient peripatetic ideas, about the necessity of cultivating the external as well as the internal energies, and of mixing the activity of the practical with that of the contemplative life. He took what I said with great suavity; and, indeed, I have never seen a better specimen of that easy hilarity and good humour, which sits with so much gracefulness on an honoured old age. I wish I could give you a notion of his face. It is not marked by any very striking features; but the unison of mildness of disposition, and strength of intellect in the expression, is too remarkable to be unnoticed even by a casual observer. His habits of profound thought have drawn some deep lines about his mouth, and given him a custom of holding his lips very closely shut, otherwise I suspect the whole countenance would have been nothing more than an amiable one; although the light eyes have certainly at times something very piercing in their glance, even through his spectacles. The forehead is very finely developed-singularly broad across the temples, as, according to Spurzheim, all mathematical foreheads must be; but the beauty in that quarter is rather of an ad clerum character, or, as Pindar hath it, μα προς το παν Ερμηνεων χατίζει. I, however, who really, in good earnest, begin to believe a little of the system, could not help remarking this circumstance; and more particularly so, because I found Mr L's skull to possess many of the same features-above all, that of the breadth between the temples. This other great mathematician is a much younger man than P; but his hair is already beginning to be grey. He is a very fat heavy figure of a man, without much more appearance of strength than of activity; and yet, although a bad leaper, by no means a slothful-looking person neither. He has very large eyes, in shape not unlike Coleridge's, but without the least of the same mysterious depth of expression. Altogether, his face is one which, at first sight, you would pronounce to be merely a coarse one; but in which, once informed to whom it belongs, you are at no loss to discover a thousand marks of vigorous intellect and fancy too. Of this last quality, indeed, his eyes are at all times full to overflowing. In the midst of the sombre gravity of his usual look, there are always little flashes of enthusiasm breaking through the cloud, and, I think, adorning it; and, in this respect, he forms a striking contrast to the calm, tranquil uniformity of Mr P's physiognomy and deportment. In thinking of this afterwards, I could not help recollecting a great many passages of richly-coloured writing in his scientific Essays in the Edinburgh Review, which I remember struck me at the time I first read them, as being rather misplaced. But this, perhaps, may be merely the effect of the sterile way of writing employed by almost all the philosophers of these late times, to which we have now become so much accustomed, that we with difficulty approve of any thing in a warmer taste, introduced into such kinds of disquisition. They managed these things better in Greece. By and bye, we were summoned to the drawing-room, where we found several ladies with Mrs J. She, you know, is an American, and J went across the Atlantic for |