CHAPTER XLVII.

FLYING.

A lecture which I gave at the Royal Aquarium on September 28, 1883, on the Art of Human Flight, attracted at the time a good deal of newspaper notice; my friend Colonel Fred. Burnaby being in the chair, supported by several other aeronautical notables.  From a rough copy by me I have thought fit to preserve the exordium here, just as spoken.

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“’Tis sixty years since,”—­as the title-page to Waverley has it,—­’tis sixty years since a little Charterhouse schoolboy of thirteen called on one Saturday afternoon (his half-holiday) at a shabby office up a court in Fleet Street, with a few saved-up shillings of pocket-money in his hand.  His object was secretly to bribe a balloon agent to give him a seat in the basket on the next flight from Vauxhall:  however as, either from prudential humanity or commercial greed, the clerk stated that five pounds was the fixed price for a place, and as the aforesaid little gentleman could only produce ten shillings, the negotiation came to nothing,—­and I, who had coveted from my cradle the privilege that a bird enjoys from his nest, was fortunately refused that juvenile voyage in the clouds:  whereof when I told my excellent mother, her tearful joy that I had not made the perilous ascent affectionately consoled my disappointment.

So it is that, as often happens throughout life, and I am a living proof of it, our Failures prove to be the best Successes:  for certainly if my boyish whim had been granted, and I had thereafter taken habitually to such aeronautical flights, at once perilous and unsettling, that young Carthusian would scarcely have stood before you this day as an ancient Proverbial Philosopher.

However, let that pass:  I only acted—­as oftentimes I since have longed to act—­on the desire we all feel to have “the wings of a dove, and fly away and be at rest,”—­floating afar from the dross and dust of earth into the blue expanse of the heavenly ether:—­a thing yet to be accomplished!—­or I will confess to be no prophet:  in these days of electricity, concentrated and accumulative after the fashion of M. Faure, aided perhaps by some lighter gas, some condensed form of tamed dynamite,—­these elevating and motive powers being helped by exquisite mechanism either as attached to the human form (if the flier be an athlete) or quickening a vehicle with flapping wings impelled by electricity, in which he might sit (if said flier is as burdened with “too solid flesh” as some of us)—­these mixed potencies, I say, of electricity and gas, ought at this time of the day to be so manipulated by our chemists and mechanicians as to issue—­very soon too—­in the grand invention than would supersede every other sort of locomotion,—­human flight.

I once met at Baltimore, and since elsewhere, a clever young American mathematician and engineer, Henry Middleton by name, who showed me, at his father’s place in South Carolina, parts of a model energised by the motive-powers of gas and electricity, which he hoped would successfully solve the problem of flying; but the Patent Office at Washington was burnt down soon after, and in it I fear was his machine.  At all events I have heard nothing of his project since.