Page:Biographia Hibernica volume 1.djvu/137

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126 BOYD. tion, his Embassy to Candy" but owing to a want of taste wholly unaccountable, the subscription did not increase quite so rapidly as might bave been expected. He, however, unappalled by this adverse circumstance, undertook the work with zeal, and confidently hoped to finish it within six months, but this hope (unfortunateljy for posterity) was never realised, on account of his decease, which occurred on the 19th of October, 1794, and he was interred in the new buryiag ground at Madras. "Of his person," we are told, " he was tall and graceful, formed with the most exact symmetry, his mien noble and elevated, his countenance animated and commanding, and his deportment exceedingly elegant." t ,Such is the life of Boyd, as written by Laurence Camp- bell, and we would have made a few more extracts from it, had we not arrived at a chapter on his "Intellectual Elements" (as his biographer is pleased to term them), we therefore thought it high time to close the volume, with the belief, that if any element resided in his intellect, it was-air. o That Boyd was an author possessed of some ingenuity, we are not disposed to deny, but that he was any thing more would be somewhat difficult to prove; and we beg the reader (if he imagines we have treated Boyd with undue levity) to remember, that this sketch is taken from a life written by one of his most intimate friends, every line of which renders both conspicuously ridiculous.no Boyd's Political Tracts were reprinted in one octavo volume, with a view to establish an assertion, that Almon is supposed to have been the first to have made, purporting Mr.Boyd to be the author of Junius.-We certainly have heard the letters of Junius attributed to several individuals, whose incomparable vacuity of head seemed their only claim to the distinction; but never before Boyd was mentioned did we see a feeble imitator mistaken for an original writer