his age who was equally learned on all subjects connected with the
history and literature of astronomy.
Professor Rigaud was a man of most amiable character, and of singularly pleasing manners and person. The warmth of his affections, his modesty, gentleness, and love of truth, as well as the great variety of his acquirements and accomplishments, had secured him the love and the respect of a large circle of friends, not merely in his own university, but amongst men of science generally. He died in London in March last, after a short but painful illness, which he bore with a fortitude and resignation which might have been expected from his gentle, patient, and truly Christian character.
Mr. Wilkins, Professor of Architecture to the Royal Academy, became a member of Caius College, Cambridge, in 1796, and took the degree of B.A. in 1800, his name standing sixth on the mathematical Tripos. He was soon afterwards nominated one of Wort's Travelling Bachelors, and also a fellow of his college, and passed four years in Greece and Italy, studying the architectural remains and monuments of those countries with great diligence, preparatory to the practice of his profession as an architect, which his father had followed with credit, and for which his great skill as a draftsman particularly qualified him. The study of those matchless creations of ancient art would appear to have exercised a powerful influence on his taste, and to have led him to prefer the purer forms of Grecian architecture to the more varied imitations and adaptations of them which appeared in the works of the Romans or in those of the great masters of modern Italy and more particularly of Palladio;—and the influence of these predilections was sufficiently visible in his designs for the East India College at Haileybury, and for Downing College, Cambridge, and is more or less easily traceable in most of his subsequent works. In 1807, he published his "Antiquities of Magna Græcia," a magnificent work, containing descriptions, views, measurements, and restorations of the chief remains of Syracuse, Agrigentum, Ægesta, and Pæstum. At a subsequent period he published "Atheniensia," or Remarks on the Buildings of Athens, in which he ex- pressed opinions unfavourable to those commonly entertained respecting the rank which the Elgin marbles, which had been only recently purchased by the nation, should be considered to hold when viewed as works of art: he was likewise the author of a trans- lation of the Civil Architecture of Vitruvius, including those books which relate to the public and private edifices of the Ancients, which was preceded by a learned introduction on the history of the Rise and Progress of Grecian Architecture, a work which was chiefly designed to show that the precepts of Vitruvius referred to Grecian and not to Roman buildings.
The publication of these works and of some essays in the Archæologia, which showed a profound knowledge of the principles both of Grecian and Gothic architecture, led to very extensive professional engagements, particularly in the University of Cambridge, where he rebuilt Corpus Christi and King's colleges, and made extensive additions to Trinity College: he was likewise the >
