(2 of 2)
Where shines the lake amid the cultur'd ground.
Darwin had taken the lines, almost word for word, from Anna Seward, and after the poem was published, the Seward-Darwin cat correspondence ended. But The Botanic Garden was so popular that otherwise sober critics judged Darwin a greater poet than Milton.
All told, Erasmus Darwin had 14 children by two wives and one long-suffering mistress. Only one son, Robert, survived to become a doctor, and his lackluster career was a persistent disappointment to his father. But Robert became the father of Charles and Charles made the family name famous. When he advanced his theory of evolution in Origin of the Species, Charles relied partially on his grandfather's investigation of gene mutations described in the treatise Zoonomia.