BOOKS.

JOSEPH LOCKE AND HIS BIOGRAPHY.* IT is said that when Major-General Pope first took the command of the army of the Potomac to advance on Richmond, he decorated the locomotive of his baggage train with a profusion of ribbons and rosettes. The effect must have been not unlike the effect produced by this biography on the mind of the reader.

Mr. Devey had a man of no common strength of character and understanding for his theme. Ho has understood his subject so little as to write his life in a style which tries to combine the pomp of Gibbon with the antithesis of Macaulay. If it were within the resources of grand writing to conceal from us how useful, sensible, and sagacious a career is really marked out by the gaudy streamers of this vulgar rhetoric, Mr. Devey would have effected it.

Fortunately for Mr. Locke and the public it was not possible, though Mr. Locke is not, of course, improved by his biographer's execrable taste. Major-General Pope's locomotive must have looked far from impressive with a draggled favour at its safety- valve, smoky ribbons dangling round the chimney, and pendent banners at its wheels ; but they did not probably stand much in the way of the engine, though they marked its course with a certain flutter of absurdity. So Mr. Devey has not obscured the vigour and common-sense of his hero, though he has accompanied it with as feeble and flatulent a strain of oratory as ever served to drown a reputation. Mr. Locke was, perhaps, a more remark- able embodiment of the greater English qualities than any engi- neer of whom we can boast, partly because in him they were not exposed to the perturbations of what is commonly called genius.

Shrewdness, grasp, and clear business sense he had in even a greater degree than his master George Stephenson, though he certainly had not in any great degree the creative faculty, and cannot be compared for a moment in the latter respect to Sir Isambard Brunel. The finance of engineering was his strongest province.

was less an original mechanician than a man of clear sense and strong purpose, who knew enough of the mechanical and all cognate sciences to make the economy of capital his principal object in all the lines he undertook. This, at least, Mr. Devey understands, and has in his own pedantic way made evident to his readers ; but instead of writing the life of a business man in homely business English, he has attempted to floe away the substantial personality of Mr. Locke into a transparency through which we may see and admire the grander personality of Mr.

Devey. In this, of course, he does not succeed, and spoils a good subject by patching a very remarkable narrative of vigorous transactions with the very insignificant record of melodramatic meditations. We write these remarks without having the least n Alen who Mr. Joseph Devey may be,—never having heard of him, indeed, except on the title-page of this book,—in sincere disgust at the disastrous literary results of his conceit ; and we proceed to justify the apparent severity of our criticism. The magniloquent nonsense begins at the* beginning, and goes on to the end, and is seemingly kept down by nothing short of actual quotation and figures ;—the only vacuum which Mr. Devey's literary nature abhors being a page exhausted of all magniloquence. Here is the description of the home of Mr. Locke's childhood, near Sheffield ; we should add, to make the facetious allusion in one of the sentences intelligible, that Mr. Locke's father was devoted to his garden :—

"When, six months or so back, we visited it, we seemed, even on arrival, scarcely to have escaped beyond the steel-dust and irksome clamour of an offensive town. The snow was still white on the Derby- shire hills. In the Sheffield ways it was deep dirty sludge. And the first home of Joseph Locke, then untenanted, looked little like as though it had ever been the abode of neat thrifty industry, or the birth- place of aspiring and successful talent. Yet a slight acquaintance with its past and the ways of those who once inhabited it, eked out by a little imagination, enabled us to see that, sixty years ago, it must have been a pleasant spot enough for those to whom porticos and palatial gardens are not a condition of existence. Below were but two sitting- rooms, above but three bed-rooms ; without, was rather less than an acre of inclosed ground. But the grand old gardener and his wife, be- tween them, we may be sure, made the best of both. Around them was a common, circumscribed by fat fields, broken by loan strips of wander- ing lanes ; and only in the distance was the inappreciable moan of the surly streets."

The last sentence may be, perhaps, an imitative study in Mr.

Ruskin's school. The "common circumscribed by fat field;, broken by lean strips of wandering lanes," is a graphic metaphor, but suggests rather the cross section of a flitch of bacon than a landscape of any kind ; and the mystical spirit of the last

line jars upon this very defined metaphor. Is the distant 1 TM Lye qf Joseph Locke, Cihil Engineer, .11:P. By Joseph Vevey. Bentley: "moan of the surly streets" "inappreciable" in value, or in what other way ? Surely Mr. Devey does not mean that it is altogether inapprehensible, or he would scarcely expect us to include it in the conception of 111r. Locke's first home. Possibly be means something that affects sensation but not distinctly enough to be referred to any specific cause until more closely investigated ; but this is a view of the word which is sug- gested by the context rather than by the expression itself, —and it strikes us as a defect in style when, as often happens in this book, we have to appreciate the value of words chiefly by the general drift of the eloquence whose channel they are. Had we continued our extract a few lines further, we should have learned that Mr. Locke's birth was not attende,1 by any mytho- logical marvels,—that no portents "played about his cradle,"—that though he constructed works, "vast and far more important than the walls of Thebes," he did not effect them by breathing through a reed ; nay, that it would be false to assert that he was "the offspring of a sunbeam, or the foster-boy of a wolf." After this stroke of humour we come on the subject of coal, a valuable material, on which we might hope to escape eloquence. But Mr. Devey has an eye for the great opportunities of an unpromising subject. He rises to the emergency of coal. He stalks the Barnsley coal pits, as Gibbon walked beneath the acacias of Lausanne :—" The price was but a shilling per ton. Coals are now sold at the pit mouth for four, five, and even six times that amount. Thousands of tons are daily hewn out and brought up to the surface. The consumption, instead of being confided within the district, is affected neither by the fitful turbulence of the English Channel, nor the settled sweep of the Atlantic Sea. Barnsley coal is burnt in the smelting-furnaces which tempered the good blades that flashed at Solferino, It speeds the Sardinian paddles through the waves of the inconstant Mediterranean. It will soon propel a locomotive within earshot of the Vatican." That is a fine "blast," as the Scotch clergy say, out of coal. Who would have ever thought of getting out of it the picturesque characteristics of the Channel, and the Atlantic, and the Medi- terranean, and the battle of Solferino ; as well as an allusive contrast between the Vatican and the secular civilization of a railway age?

It would be an endless task to show bow windy is Mr. Devey's eloquence, and how vulgar his notion of effect. He can seldom get rid of a weak yearning after the ring of Macaulay's anti- thesis. He justifies the London and South-Western railway by saying that " the argosies of the Indies" would make use of the railway "for the conveyance to London of the jewels of Delhi and the silks of Cashmere." It is a great rhetorical artifice, no doubt to justify a railway by the weight of Delhi jewels which are unladen at Southampton; but we fear that they might all of them be carried in the waistcoat-pocket of a passenger, and would not pay extra fare at all. We are sorry to interpose horrid facts like these, but even the "silks of Cashmere" annually imported could scarcely take two trains a-year. The total imports of all Indian silks may be perhaps 200 tons annually.

• There is scarcely any piece of grandiloquence too imbecile for Mr. Devey. 'When Mr. Stephenson's relation to the Railway King is mentioned, Mr. Devey hits on the grand idea of calling Mr. Stephenson the " Faust to Mr. Hudson's Mephistopheles;" his only idea being to indicate that Mr. Hudson was the tempter and Mr. Stephenson the ternptee; and he might with exactly equal propriety have represented Mr. Stephenson as the Eve to Mr. Hudson's serpent. When it is narrated that Mr. Locke, as a boy, in a period of great unhappiness, went into the fields and cried like a child, we are indulged with the remark, "'Beware of the man,' says Bulwer Lytton, who boasts that he has never wept.' There are some tears more potent even than those of Helen ; and even from them sprang a plant whose leaves cured the bite of serpents." But in spite of their efficacy as tears, we are carefully taught that,—as Dr. Johnson said, when lie heard his mother's spirit cry three times, " Sam— Sam- Sarn,"—" Nothing came of it." The observation was only made because it had a classical air; and to connect Mr. Locke and the Spartan Helen looked so ingenious. Every oratorical trick is put into requisition in turn. When Mr, Brassey is to be eulogized he is always mentioned by his proper name. After describing the ideal contractor, the climax is, "Such a one was Thomas Brassey :" and the rhetorical adjective "Thomas,"—for it clearly is an oratorical adjective rather than a proper name,—is employed with much effect throughout. Here is a noble passage about him :—

" But time that brings slackened pace, and wealth that brings com- parative love of leisurely ease to most men, have failed to stop or enervate Thomas Brassey. He is still the very Ashuerus of contractors. Men swear they have seen him at different places at times so little removed, that they doubt each other's accuracy. There is not a leading hotel in any leading town in continental Europe where letters are not lying for him. To.day he is in Genoa ; before the week is out he will be at Madrid. Seek him there, he has gone off to Russia. He knows no rest."

Is Ashuerus meant for Ahasuerus the wandering Jew ? That would appear to be the meaning ; though how far complimentary to "Thomas Brassey" we leave to him. The following will teach us bow to narrate a shareholders' meeting in the style of Mr. G. P. R. James. "The travel-stained stranger of courtly bearing" is a novelty in these regions:—

" One morning, in the autumn of the same year, the directors of the South-Western Railway held their usual quarterly meeting for the con- sideration of their accounts. It had been a bad season, and they could hardly make ends meet. While revising the accounts of an impoverished exchequer in their usual humdrum fashion, the advent of a stranger was announced. He was travelled-stained (sic), but of courtly bearing, and spoke English with a slight French accent. His was no idle mission. He came to talk to them of fields in which they might realize all the golden visions which the fairy suggested to Aladdin, or which Venus pictured to /Eneas and his companions' as awaiting their arival in Ansonia. That stranger was no less than Mr. Charles Lafitte, the chief of the eminent banking firm of that name in Paris, and his errand was to invite English capital and English skill no rehabilitate the railway system, which had become so discredited in France."

Perhaps the worst of all Mr. Devey's oratorical performances is the passage in which he paints the triumphal career of Mr. Locke's corpse over his own railways, on its way to its last resting-place,-- a passage too atrociously false in taste and feeling for extract, but which almost deserves preservation in books on English composition, as an effective scare-crow to young composers against the vices of "fine writing." To teach them that, if they indulge gaudy and ambitious tastes, they may some day come to that, would exert at least as preventive an effect as any penalty in the penal code.

Mr. Devey's faults are not even limited to matters of style and personal taste. That he should take Mr. Locke's part against Stephenson is right enough, nor does he do so on the whole in an objectionable manner. It would have been in better taste had he avoided scoffing at Mr. Locke's broad-guage rival, AL-. Brunel. But it is as foolish as it is ungenerous to introduce a per- fectly needless sneer at a man of indefinitely higher creative genius than either of these eminent men, Sir Mark Isambard Brunel. The following is meant, we suppose, for a scoft at the Thames Tunnel :—

" We laugh at folks buying a purse with their last shilling, just as the Spaniards have a joke about bridges over rivers run dry. But we have had the thing done in our day, not by melancholy knights-errant, but by men of science, with a dozen decorations, and twenty initials at the end of their names. What do these pets of learned societies desire ? A pyramid containing half-a-dozen dead kings is quite as satisfactory a work of art as a tunnel containing half-a-dozen live tourists."

Mr. Locke's reputation was deservedly great, but it would not be enhanced by any comparison with the genius of the elder Brunel. No doubt he had a far more cautious judgment, a far wiser appreciation of risks, a far keener instinct for budgets than the French engineer, but the two men must be judged by a totally different standard,—Mr. Locke by what he did, Sir Isambard Brunel by what he was. The one is measured by his practical efficiency "for such crea- tures as we are, in such a world as the present ;" the other, by the new light he cast in every direction on the resources of mechanical science, and by the wonderful magnanimity and fortitude of his spirit. Even in mere saving to the country, Sir lsambard Brunel's inventions are now worth far more than it has lost by his one great practical failure and scien- tific success, the Thames Tunnel. But that was not the main advantage to England of his prolific mind. No one who reads the life of Sir M. I. Brunel can endure to see the reputation of a more genuinely English species of ability founded on injustice to - him. The elder Brunel was a much greater man than Mr. Locke, though the works actually executed by the latter may, at the present moment, be the more important of the two.

A man of taste and judgment might have made a very striking, though short volume of this life. Mr. Locke's powers were essentially those of a lucid, thorough understanding, and broad judgment, applied to economize the capital of the country in engineering. He seldom missed a point in husbanding capital and effort. Mr. Devey has given us three—only three—instruc- tive chapters, one on the causes of the quarrel with Stephenson, the second on Mr. Locke's reasons for preferring the steep gradients by Shap Fell, the last on the lecture delivered by Mr. Locke on the Freuch and English railway systems. In all these chapters

Yet it was not merely in detail that he excelled, but in detail in its proper subordination to the whole end in view. When others were discussing the waste of power required to get a locomotive up a steep gradient, be reminded people not only of the gain of power in the descent, but of the chronic expense attendant on keeping a long circuitous rail- way route in permanent repair. And this power of clearly comprehending all the circumstances, and this rigid subordination of them to his great end—the economy of capital, was his charac- teristic as an engineer. We agree with Mr. Devey that he would have made an admirable president of the Board of Works, and much regret that the post was not given to him. But even on this, the strongest side of Mr. Locke's character, Mr. Devey does not give us half enough of illustrative comment, and, on the whole, we close the life with the impreasion that a subject of massive, though modest interest, was never more hopelessly buried in ignorance, arrogance, and conceit. the singular lucidity of Mr. Locke's mind in grasping details, and yet comprehending them in a broad view of the whole practical question, comes out very strongly. The importance of his know- ledge of detail we cannot better illustrate than by the following remarkable statement :—

" The discrepancies between the calculations made jointly by George Stephenson and his assistant, and those made by the tendering con- tractors, were in some instances enormous. The discrepancies in the one instance, when taken into consideration with the absence of discre- pancies in the other, could be accounted for only on the supposition that the specifications were exact and intelligible in the second case, inexact and unintelligible in tho first. The justness of this supposition they resolved to test. They ordered Locke to prepare fresh specifica- tions for those portions of the Birmingham division in which the dis- crepancies occurred. These instructions he complied with. The discrepancies between the calculations of engineer and contractor dis- appeared, and the works were let. One instance will justify both the directors and their engineer of the Liverpool division. The Penkridge viaduct, tendered for under the original specification, was estimated by the contractor at £26,000. When Locke had revised the specification, the very same contractor tendered for it at .£6,000, and made by it a considerable profit."