if the above statement is correct, was his pupil.
In January 1812 the Comet, a thirty-ton boat, built by Wood & Co., of Glasgow, and driven by an engine of three-horse power made by Bell, commenced to ply from Glasgow to Greenock; she continued running till 1820, when she was wrecked. Many erroneous statements have been made about this vessel. She was by far from being the first vessel moved by steam, but she was the first practical steamship which regularly worked on any European river.
Though Bell's claims were generally acknowledged, he reaped but little reward. The river Clyde trustees gave him a pension of 50l., afterwards increased to 100l.; Mr. Canning gave him 200l.; and a subscription was got up for him at Glasgow and elsewhere near the close of his life.
Besides his efforts in the cause of steam navigation he was interested in several other engineering enterprises, and is credited with the invention of an important improvement in the process of calico printing, the 'discharging machine.' He died at Helensburgh in 1830, and was buried in the churchyard of Row parish, two miles from Helensburgh.
[There is a life of Bell by Edward Morris (Glasgow, 1844), but the information it gives is meagre. An account of him also appears in Chambers's Biog. Dict. of Eminent Scotsmen.]
BELL, HENRY GLASSFORD (1803–1874), sheriff, was the eldest son of James Bell, advocate. He was born in Glasgow 8 Nov. 1803, and received the rudiments of his education in the High School of that city. On the family removing to Edinburgh, he passed through the regular university course there, and, while beginning to study law, exhibited his love of letters in a series of precocious criticisms in the columns of the ‘Observer.’ Those on the actors and acting of the day, under the signature ‘Acer,’ attracted the attention of some of the leaders in the then brilliant literary society of the place, and are said to have had some influence in raising the tone of the stage—an institution in which he continued to the last to take a keen interest. A privately printed volume of poems (1824) testifies to his scholarship, early command of verse, and his share in the Byronic enthusiasm for the Greeks. In 1827 Bell was present and spoke at the famous dinner of the Edinburgh Theatrical Fund, at which Sir Walter Scott publicly acknowledged the authorship of the ‘Waverley Novels.’ In 1828 he started and conducted the ‘Edinburgh Literary Journal,’ which numbered among its contributors Thomas Aird, L. E. L., Mrs. Hemans, Thomas Campbell, Christopher North, the Ettrick Shepherd, Delta (Moir), Allan Cunningham, G. P. R. James, Sheridan Knowles, and others of scarce inferior note. The youthful editor maintained for the publication a position of steadily increasing influence; but at the expiration of three years it passed into other hands, and was ultimately merged in the ‘Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle.’ Some of the most salient of his own contributions were afterwards collected by Bell, and republished in two volumes: ‘Summer and Winter Hours’ (1831), containing the most widely known of his poems, the panoramic scenes from the life of Mary Stuart, so familiar to elocution; and ‘My Old Portfolio’ (1832). Three of the prose pieces in the latter collection deserve special mention: ‘The Marvellous History of Mynheer von Wodenblock,’ which, as afterwards popularised in the doggerel song, ‘The Cork Leg,’ has travelled over England and through Germany; ‘The Dead Daughter’ and ‘The Living Mummy,’ from which Edgar Poe seems to have taken the hint of two of his most famous fantasies. Meanwhile, at the request of the publisher Constable, he had (1830), in compiling his elaborate defence of the Queen of Scots, entered the lists as champion of the cause which he espoused through life with an almost religious zeal. The book was at the time a swift success. The first edition being exhausted, a second was called for within the year; it was translated into French and pirated in America. In 1831 Bell married Miss Stewart, only daughter of Captain Stewart of Sheerglass, Glengarry, by whom he had six children. In the following year he passed as advocate, and henceforth devoted himself mainly to his legal pursuits; but advancement in the ranks of a profession then adorned by the competing talents of Jeffrey, Clark, Cockburn, Hope, Macneil, Rutherfurd, Maitland, Ivory, Robertson, Inglis, and Moncreiff, was, even if sure, necessarily slow, and the cares of an increasing family induced him to accept an appointment as one of the substitutes of the sheriff of Lanarkshire, whose attention had been attracted to the young counsel by his appearance (1838) at the cotton spinner's trial. Bell entered upon this office in 1839, and for twenty-eight years discharged his duties, yearly increasing in extent and responsibility, with a conscientiousness, judgment, and tact, which exceeded expectation and arrested cavil. When, in 1852, it was believed that Sheriff Alison was to become a lord of session, the Glasgow faculty of law memorialised the lord advocate to pro-
