his public life and the portrait he gives us of himself in his works, are nevertheless extremely interesting, and cannot be left unnoticed in a Life of Harvey.
“In person,” Aubrey informs us, “Harvey was not tall, but of the lowest stature; round faced; olivaster (like wainscot) complexion; little eye, round, very black, full of spirit; his hair black as a raven, but quite white 20 years before he died.” The portrait we have of Harvey by Cornelius Jansen, in the library of the Royal College of Physicians, as well as of one, we presume by Bemmel, now in the possession of Dr. Richard Bright, corresponds with this account: the temperament is nervous-bilious; the forehead is compact and square, and of greater width than usual between the temples; the expression is highly intellectual, contemplative, and manly.
“In temper,” Aubrey says, “he was like the rest of his brothers, very choleric, and, in his younger days, he wore a dagger, as the fashion then was, which he would be apt to draw out upon every occasion.” We cannot suppose that this was offensively, but merely in the way of gesticulation, and to lend force to his words; for in his public and literary life, Harvey showed everything but a choleric nature: he seems, indeed, at all times to have had his temper under entire control. The way in which Harvey himself speaks of the robbery of his apartments and the destruction of his papers, has nothing of bitterness or acrimony in it. With the opportunity presenting itself to him—as when he sends Nardi the books on the Troubles in England—he is not tempted to utter even a splenetic word against the party which had been all along opposed to his friends, and by which he had suffered so severely. Harvey was, probably, a marked man by Cromwell and his adherents; but had he been so disposed he could have indulged in a little vituperation without risk of molestation. The government of England in the Protector’s time was still no tyranny.
Harvey appears not to have esteemed the fair sex very highly. He would say, that “we Europeans knew not how to order or govern our women, and that the Turks were the only people who used them wisely.” But, indeed, if Aubrey may be trusted, he did not think very much of mankind in general: he was wont to say, that “man was but a great mischievous baboon.” Harvey, however, wived young, and in his age he seems still to have thought that the old man was best tended by the gentle hand of a woman not too far stricken in years.[68]
Harvey, in his own family circle, must have been affectionate and kind—characteristics of all his brothers—who appear as we have said to have lived together through their lives in perfect amity and peace. But our Harvey’s sympathies were not limited to his immediate relatives: attachment, friendship was an essential ingredient in his nature. His will from first to last is a piece of beautiful humanity, and more than one widow and helpless woman is there provided for. He seems to have been very anxious to live in the memory of his sisters-in-law and of his nephews and nieces, whose legacies are mostly given to the end that they may buy something to keep in remembrance of him. To Dr. Ent he was much attached, and, besides his bookcases, there are ‘five pounds to buy a ring.’ Dr. Scarborough, who also stood high in Harvey’s favour, has his ‘silver instruments of surgery and his best velvet gown.’
We cannot fancy that Harvey was at any time very eager in the pursuit of wealth. Aubrey tells us that, “For twenty years before he died, he took no care of his worldly concerns; but his brother Eliab, who was a very wise and prudent manager, ordered all, not only faithfully, but better than he could have done for himself.” The effect of this good management was that Harvey lived, towards the end of his life, in very easy circumstances. Having no costly establishment to maintain, for he always lived with one or other of his brothers in his latter days, and no family to provide for, he could afford to be munificent, as we have seen him, to the College of Physicians, and at his death he is reported to have left as much as 20,000l. to his faithful steward and kind brother Eliab, who always meets us as the guardian angel of our anatomist, in a worldly and material point of view. Honoured be the name and the memory of Eliab Harvey for his good offices to one so worthy!
Though of competent estate, in the enjoyment of the highest reputation, and trusted by two sovereign Princes in succession, Harvey never suffered his name to be coupled with any of those lower-grade titles that were so freely conferred in the time of both the First and Second Charles. When we associate Harvey’s name with a title at all, it is with the one he fairly won from his masters of Padua: by his contemporaries he is always spoken of as Dr. Harvey; we in the present day rightly class him with our Shakespeares, and our Miltons, and speak of him as Harvey. Harvey, indeed, had no love of ostentation or display. The very buildings he erected, were built “at the suggestion and under the auspices” of others.
Harvey’s mind was largely imbued with the imaginative faculty: how finely he brings in the classical allusion to “the Sicilian sea, dashing among the rocks around Charybdis, hissing and foaming and tossed hither and thither,” in illustration of those who reason against the evidence of their senses, (p. 130.) And then what unbounded confidence he has in Nature (p. 153), and how keenly alive he is to her beauties in every sphere: Nature has not been sedulous to deck out animals only with ornaments; she has further thrown an infinite variety of beautiful dyes over the lowly and insensate herbs and flowers. (p. 426.)
In Harvey the religious sentiments appear to have been active; the exordium to his will is unusually solemn and grand. He also evinces true and elevated piety throughout the whole course of his work on Generation, and seizes every opportunity of giving utterance to his sense of the immediate agency and omnipotence of Deity. He appears, with the ancient philosophers, to have regarded the universe and its parts as actuated by a Supreme and all-pervading Intelligence. He was a great admirer of Virgil, whose works were frequently in his hands, and whose religious philosophy he seems also, in a great measure, to have adopted. The following beautiful and often-quoted passage of his favorite author may be said to embody his ideas on this subject, as they appear repeatedly in the course of the work on Generation:—
“Principio cœlum ac terras camposque liquentes,
Lucentemque globum lunæ, Titaniaque astra,
Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.”
—The heavens and earth, and ocean’s liquid plains,
The moon’s bright orb, and the Titanian stars,
Are fed by intrinsic spirit: deep infused
Through all, mind mingles with and actuates the mass.
Upon the purely Deistic notions of antiquity, however, Harvey unquestionably ingrafted the special faith in Christianity. In connexion with the subject of the “term utero-gestation,” he adduces the highest recorded examples as the rule, and speaks of “Christ, our Saviour, of men the most perfect;”[69] in the will he farther “most humbly renders his soul to Him that gave it, and to his blessed Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus.”
Harvey was very inquisitive into natural things and natural phenomena. When he accompanied the Earl of Arundel, we have seen that he would still be wandering in the woods, making observations on the strange trees and herbs, and minerals he encountered. His industry in collecting facts was unwearied, and the accuracy with which he himself observed appears in every page of his writings; though we sometimes meet him amiably credulous in regard to the observations of others—as in that instance where he suffers himself to be imposed upon by the traveller’s tale of the “Genus humanum caudatum”—the race of the human kind with tails.[70] Harvey was the first English comparative anatomist; in other words, he was the first physiologist England produced whom superiority of natural endowment led to perceive the relations between the meanest and the highest of created things, and who made the simplicity of structure and of function in the one, a means of explaining the complexity of structure and of function in the other. “Had anatomists,” he says, “only been as conversant with the dissection of the lower animals as they are with that of the human
