Decayed Musicians and the Westminster Hospital; £6000 to the former, and £1000, to the latter. Such was the success of this great enterprise, that similar performances, increasing each year in magnitude, took place annually till the period of the French Revolution, when the state of public affairs did not encourage their longer continuance.

As a composer, Handel was great in all styles— from the familiar and airy to the grand and sublime. His instinctive taste for melody, and the high value he set on it, are obvious in all his works; but he felt no less strongly the charms of harmony, in fulness and richness of which he far surpassed even the greatest musicians who preceded him; and had he been able to employ the variety of instruments now in use, some of which have been invented since his death, and to command that orchestral talent, which probably has had some share in stimulating the inventive faculty of modern composers, it is reasonable to suppose that the field of his conceptions would have expanded with the means at his command. Unrivalled in sublimity, he might then have anticipated the variety and brilliance of later masters.

Generally speaking, Handel set his words with deep feeling and strong sense. Now and then he certainly betrayed a wish to imitate by sounds what sounds are incapable of imitating; and occasionally attempted to express the meaning of an isolated word, without due reference to the context. And sometimes, though not often, his want of a complete knowledge of our language led him into errors of accentuation. But these defects, though great in little men, dwindle almost to nothing in this "giant of the art:" and every competent judge, who contemplates the grandeur, beauty, science, variety, and number of Handel's productions, will feel for him

that admiration which Haydn, and still more Mozart, was proud to avow, and be ready to exclaim in the words of Beethoven, "Handel is the unequalled master of all masters! Go, turn to him, and learn, with such scanty means, how to produce such effects!"

THE parents of this eminent discoverer in optics, to whom we are chiefly indebted for the high perfection of our telescopes, were French Protestants resident in Normandy, whence they were driven by the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685. With many others of their class, they took up their residence in Spitalfields, where John Dollond, the subject of this memoir*, was born June 10, 1706. It has been supposed, and among others by Lalande, that the name is not French: if we were to hazard a conjecture, we should say that it might have been an English corruption of D'Hollande. While yet very young, John Dollond lost his father, and he was obliged to gain his livelihood by the loom, though his natural disposition led him to devote all his

For the details of this life we are mostly indebted to the Memoir of Dr. Kelly, his son-in-law, from which all the existing accounts of Dollond are taken. This book has become very scarce, and we are indebted for the opportunity of perusing it to the kindness of G. Dollond, Esq.

leisure hours to mathematics and natural philosophy. Notwithstanding the cares incumbent upon the father of a family (for he married early) he contrived to find time, not only for the above-mentioned pursuits, but for anatomy, classical literature, and divinity. He continued his quiet course of life until his son, Peter Dollond, was of age to join him in his trade of silk-weaving, and they carried on that business together for several years. The son, however, who was also of a scientific turn, and who had profited by his father's instructions, quitted the silk trade to commence business as an optician. He was tolerably successful, and after some years his father joined him, in 1752.

The first improvement made by the elder Dollond in the telescope was the addition of another glass to the eye-piece, making the whole number of glasses in the instrument (the object-glass included) six instead of five. This he communicated to the Royal Society in 1753, through his friend James Short, well known as an optician and astronomer, who also communicated all his succeeding papers. By his new construction an increase in the field of view was procured, without any corresponding augmentation of the unavoidable defects of the instrument. In May, 1753, Dollond communicated to the Royal Society his improvement of the micrometer. 1747 Bouguer proposed to measure the distance of two very near objects (the opposite edges of a planet, for example) by viewing them through a conical telescope, the larger end of which had two objectglasses placed side by side, the eye-glass being common to both. The distance of the objects was determined by observing how far it was necessary to separate the centres of the object-glasses, in order that the centre of each might show an image of one of the objects. Mr. Dollond's improvement consisted

In

ingly turned his attention entirely to the reflecting telescope.

In 1747 Euler, struck by the fact that the human eye is an achromatic combination of lenses, or nearly so, imagined that it might be possible to destroy colour by employing compound object-glasses, such as two lenses with an intermediate space filled with water. In a memoir addressed to the Academy of Berlin, he explained his method of constructing such achromatic glasses, and proposed a new law of refrangibility, different from that of Newton. He could not, however, succeed in procuring a successful result in practice. Dollond, impressed with the idea that Newton's experiment was conclusive, objected to Euler's process in a letter to Mr. Short; which the latter persuaded the author to communicate, first to Euler, and then, with his answer, to the Royal Society. Assuming Newton's law, Dollond shows that Euler's method would destroy all refraction as well as dispersion. The latter replies, that it is sufficient for his purpose that Newton's law should be nearly true; that the theory propounded by himself does not differ much from it; and that the structure of the eye convinces him of the possibility of an achromatic combination. Neither party contested the general truth of Newton's conclusion.

A new party to the discussion appeared in the field in the person of M. Klingenstierna, a Swedish astronomer, who advanced some mathematical reasoning against the law of Newton, and some suspicions as to the correctness of his experiment. The latter being thus formally attacked, Mr. Dollond determined to repeat it, with a view of settling the question, and his result was communicated to the Royal Society in 1758. By placing a prism of flint glass inside one of water, confined by glass planes, so that the refractions from the two prisms should