will come flying through my open window when I would rather be alone, or alight, like some swallow in our old world, upon my roof, and twitter and chirrup there, of course most divinely, for the hour together; or — he is a thought too prosy, and bores me a little with philosophy; or — he is too knowing, and has been here too long to enable me to understand him fully; he is always recurring to that little tour he made of the universe fifty thousand years ago; orhe is too much of a virtuoso for my taste, and is full of that inimitable collection of cockle-shells, flies, and the sixty thousand species of amaranth which he has gathered from two thousand different worlds; or- - he is too much of a Public Angel for me. He is always for dragging me to great 'assemblies' and New Jerusalem 'gatherings,' when I would rather spend half my time in some quiet nook of the 'everlasting hills,' and muse alone." All this I say I can imagine; I can imagine that even in heaven" tastes differ;" but the beauty of the place will be that tastes shall give no offence, for no one will be offended with you for not sympathising with them. Yeswill you, can you believe it? you may actually stop angel A in his singing, at the hundredth stanza, and he won't take any offence at it. You may say that you do not altogether sympathise with angel B's dearest friend, and he won't think the worse of you for it. Pray take the hint.

Yes! my dear friend; perfect congeniality in all moral tastes, perfect sincerity, and perfect superiority to offence, will be heaven itself; but depend on it there will be varieties of other tastes, and therefore degrees of sympathy, and therefore degrees of intimacy, there as here; and so (which is not least to be prized), I shall have the precious privilege of my solitary, but no longer morose, humours; of sometimes being for whole days quite alone; and not as you, with your more jovial and musical tastes, imagine, always in a crowd, chirping, singing, twanging harp-strings, clapping wings, and performing celestial" sonatas." But I grant all will be good whether in company or solitude and that will be heaven; it is not flat uniformity, identity of feeling, monotony of employment. There is truth, I firmly believe, in the

heaven and earth. the divine

poem
?

conceptions of our great bard as to unexpected analogies between Nay, is it not Raphael himself who speaks in Milton is but his "Reporter."

Yours truly,

R. E. H. G.

LETTER LXIV.

To the Same.

July 29th, 1849.

My dear Friend,

I little thought when I wrote to you last that I should so soon see the counterpart of the litigious deaf Scotchman I mentioned. Surely, however possessed with the spirit of controversy and contradiction, he could hardly surpass a travelling companion I met with the other day on the top of a coach—there are few such now between Grantham and Melton Mowbray. My positive friend broke in with doubt or flat contradiction, no matter what was said, not exactly like the Scotchman, without hearing, but, what comes to much the same thing, whether he understood what was said or not. What an odd humour it is, and yet a not unfrequent trait of character.

On finding how egregiously this humour of opposition possessed him, and that nothing could be started but he threw himself into a pugilistic attitude, I could not resist the temptation to play a little on his foible by gently giving the conversation a curve when he had made some strong assertion, and so coming round to an appearance of agreeing with him; no sooner done, than I immediately found he was quite as ready to maintain nearly the opposite of his former position. In short, his tongue, like the point of a weathercock, boldly veered round, and faced the prevailing wind, no matter what quarter it might blow from.

It was some time before I discovered this ingenious method of making him agree with himself and me too, and so relieving our journey of that annoyance which a perpetual wrangle between two people who cannot run away from one another must needs

occasion.

We talked of the weather (of course), of the crops (of course too), of the Russian interference in the affairs of Hungary, of the Queen's projected visit to Ireland and Scotland, of the cholera, but I found that whatever I said I must necessarily be in the wrong.

In very weariness I thought it advisable sometimes to nod a seeming acquiescence in what he said; and I almost think he would have quarrelled with my nod, if he could; but whenever I attempted to modify his statements into something near what I could agree with, I was favoured with a defence (not very valid, I admit) of my own formerly expressed opinions. Among other things, I happened to remark that I thought it curious that after such immense researches, in all parts of the world and among the most sagacious of the medical profession, into the nature and causes of the cholera, so little light had been thrown on the subject. He, of course, did not think it at all strange; and said (what was true enough) that the real causes of almost all diseases are difficult to ascertain. I admitted the justice of the remark ; and said that, perhaps, considering that, we ought to wonder rather that medicine had made so much progress than that it had made no more; he was disposed to doubt that observation, and thought that "considering their long and patient researches" (just what I had started with in relation to a particular case!) much more might have been done by the unlucky doctors.

I said that it must be very difficult to form a correct diagnosis of disease, considering the complex and evanescent phenomena to be observed, and remarked that the very representations of the patient himself might often mislead. I have heard, said I, laughing, physicians affirm that they would rather attend a baby that could not speak, than an adult-whose very absorption in his own sensations, and his exaggeration of them, might put medical

sagacity on a false scent! I told him (what was true enough), that I had seen a Latin Essay, written by a young physician on taking his diploma, which expressly maintained this paradoxical thesis. He thought at once that a physician must be a blockhead to say so; for surely it must be of great advantage to be able to get an articulate answer to his questions - instead of listening only to inarticulate cries. I admitted it, and said that doubtless, on the whole, a patient must be allowed to be a pretty good judge of his own sensations, and in general would give a tolerably accurate account of his symptoms. He was not so sure of that, and declared that a wise physician should trust very little to his patient's information, and treat him much as if he were a child!

Now there is a sense, no doubt, in which all these observations may be true enough under certain limitations and modifications. They are among the "antitheta" (as Bacon would say) which will furnish rhetorical common-places on both sides. The drollery was to see how eagerly my acquaintance always took the opposite.

Thus delightfully, my dear friend, did we go on in this pleasant game of conversational seesaw. I cannot give you any idea of the manner of Mr. Positive; it was prompt and absolute "decisive and clear, without one if or but as if his speeches had been expressly framed on this principle: "Whatever you say now, I will contradict it; and if you agree with me, I will contradict myself! Only let me hear you say anything that I will not contradict !" and except you had told him that he was a very wise man, in which case you would have told a great fib, I scarcely think you could have found the proposition in which he would have agreed with you. His very image was the Irishman, who, despairing of a shindy at a fair, — everything threatening to end in unwelcome and unwonted tranquillity, took off his coat, and trailing it in the mud, said, "And by St. Patrick, wouldn't I like to see the boy that would tread on that same !"

I think I have met with men equally fond of contradiction, of taking the other side, but they in general wonderfully soften and disguise the humour by polite periphrases and delicate circumlocutions. "Pardon me, but I really think "-"I should

agree with you entirely, but ”.

"I acknowledge there is a great deal of force in that observation, only ""I am surprised to hear a person of your evident good sense It is astonishing how much better these things sound than "I do not think so "I am of quite a different opinion"—" that is a mistake." But it is an odd humour at the best; more odd, though scarcely more agreeable, than an opposite trait of character-I mean the timid vacillation which defers to every opinion. These two sets of characters ought by rights to go always together, for their reciprocal annoyance, - one subjected to the humiliation of perpetual assent, the other to the equal misery of never encountering an antagonist!

I was reminded, in the neighbourhood of Muston, of Crabbe. I was anxious, if it might be, to catch a glimpse, as we rode along, of the house he used to live in. I asked the coachman of his "whereabouts." He looked thoughtfully for a moment, and then said, "Crabbe- Crabbe—I never heerd on him, sir; I don't know of no such person in these parts." "The poet - said I, "the poet!" He shook his head, and then turning to a farmer behind, said, “This gentleman wants to know where one Mr. Crabbe lives." Ye gods! one Mr Crabbe, as if there were a dozen! The farmer was not more enlightened. Only think of it; Crabbe, dead not yet twenty years; barely thirty since he last lived in that neighbourhood; and yet, though his name has traversed England and America, it may be unknown, it seems, at his own threshold. "A prophet is not without honour save in his own country and his own house."

Much the same answer I got from a worthy farmer of whom I inquired, in a pilgrimage many years ago to Chalfont St. Giles,

"Which was Milton's cottage?" He replied that he did not know of any man of that name thereabouts; but that he might live in one of the new houses a little further on; some strangers had come lately! By the way, I fear the little room over the porch in which the blind poet wrote (it is said) the "Paradise Regained," during the plague of London, exists no longer.

Yours ever affectionately,

R. E. H. G.