My dog had made a point on a piece of fallow-ground, and led the Curate and me two or three hundred yards over that and some stubble adjoining, in a breathless state of expectation, on a burning first of September.

It was a false point, and our labour was vain: yet, to do Rover justice, (for he's an excellent dog, though I have lost his pedigree,) the fault was none of his: The birds were gone; the curate shewed me the spot where they had lain basking, at the root of an old hedge.

I stopped, and cried Hem! The Curate is fatter than I; he wiped the sweat from his brow. There is no state where one is apter to pause and look round one, than after such a disappointment. It is even so in life. When we have been hurrying on, impelled by some warm wish or other, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left-we find, of a sudden, that all our gay hopes are flown; and the only slender consolation that some friend can give us, is to point where they were once to be found: And if we are not of that combustible race, who will rather beat their heads in spite, than wipe their brows with the curate, we look round and say, with the nauseated listlessness of the king of Israel, "All is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

I looked round with some such grave apophthegm in my mind, when I discovered, for the first time, a venerable pile, to which the inclosure belonged. An air of melancholy hung about it. There was a languid stillness in the day, and a single crow, that perched on an old tree by the side of the gate, seemed to delight in the echo of its own croaking.

I leaned on my gun, and looked; but I had not breath enough to ask the curate a question. I observed carving on the bark of some of the trees: 'twas indeed the only mark of human art about the place, except that some branches appeared to have been lopped, to give a view of the cascade, which was formed by a little rill at some distance.

Just at that instant I saw pass between the trees, a young lady with a book in her hand. I stood upon a stone to observe her; but the Curate sat him down on the grass, and, leaning his back where I stood, told me, "That was the daughter of a neighbouring gentleman of the name of Walton, whom he had seen walking there more than once.

told, but I was not then in the cure; though, if I had a turn for such things, I might know a good deal of his history, for the greatest part of it is still in my possession."

"His history!" said I. "Nay, you may call it what you please," said the Curate; "for indeed it is no more a history than it is a sermon. The way I came by it was this:-Some time ago, a grave, oddish kind of a man, boarded at a farmer's in this parish. The country people called him the ghost; and he was known by the slouch in his gait, and the length of his stride. I was but little acquainted with him, for he never frequented any of the clubs hereabouts. Yet, for all he used to walk a-nights, he was as gentle as a lamb at times; for I have seen him playing at tee-totum with the children, on the great stone at the door of our churchyard.

"Soon after I was made curate, he left the parish, and went nobody knows whither; and in his room was found a bundle of papers, which was brought to me by his landlord. I began to read them, but I soon grew weary of the task; for, besides that the hand is intolerably bad, I could never find the author in one strain for two chapters together; and I don't believe there's a single syllogism from beginning to end."

"I should be glad to see this medley," said I. "You shall see it now," answered the Curate, "for I always take it along with me a-shooting." "How came it so torn?"-""Tis excellent wadding," said the Curate. This was a plea of expediency I was not in a condition to answer; for I had actually in my pocket great part of an edition of one of the German Illustrissimi, for the very same purpose. We exchanged books; and by that means (for the Curate is a strenuous logician) we probably saved both.

When I returned to town, I had leisure to peruse the acquisition I had made. I found it a bundle of little episodes, put together without art, and of no importance on the whole; with something of nature, and little else in them. I was a good deal affected with some very trifling passages in it; and, had the name of a Marmontel, or a Richardson, been on the title-page,-'tis odds that I should have wept.

But

CHAP. XI.*

Of Bashfulness.-A Character.-His Opinion on that Subject.

THERE is some rust about every man at the beginning; though in some nations (among the French, for instance) the ideas of the inhabitants, from climate, or what other cause you will, are so vivacious, so eternally on the wing, that they must, even in small societies, have a frequent collision; the rust therefore will wear off sooner: But in Britain it often goes with a man to his grave; nay, he dares not even pen a hic jacet, to speak out for him after his death.

"Let them rub it off by travel," said the Baronet's brother, who was a striking instance of excellence, shamefully rusted. I had drawn my chair near his. Let me paint the honest old man; 'tis but one passing sentence to preserve his image in my mind.

He sat in his usual attitude, with his elbow rested on his knee, and his fingers pressed on his cheek. His face was shaded by his hand; yet it was a face that might once have been well accounted handsome; its features were manly and striking, and a certain dignity resided on his eye-brows, which were the largest I remember to have seen. His person was tall and well made; but the indolence of his nature had now inclined it to corpulency.

His remarks were few, and made only to his familiar friends; but they were such as the world might have heard with veneration; and his heart, uncorrupted by its ways, was ever warm in the cause of virtue and his friends.

He is now forgotten and gone! The last time I was at Silton-hall, I saw his chair stand in its corner by the fire-side; there was an additional cushion on it, and it was occupied by my young lady's favourite lap-dog. I drew near unperceived, and pinched its ears in the bitterness of my soul; the creature howled, and ran to its mistress. She did not suspect the author of its misfortune, but she bewailed it in the most pathetic terms; and, kissing its lips, laid it gently on her lap, and covered it with a cambric handkerchief. I sat in my old friend's seat ; I heard the roar of mirth and gaiety around me:-Poor Ben Silton! I gave thee a tear then; accept of one cordial drop that falls to thy memory now.

"Let them rub it off by travel."-" Why, it is true," said I," that will go far; but then it will often happen, that in the velocity of a modern tour, and amidst the materials through which it is commonly made, the friction is so violent, that not only the rust, but the metal too, will be lost in the progress."

"Give me leave to correct the expression of your metaphor," said Mr Silton; "this covering, of which you complain, is not always rust which is produced by the inactivity of the body on which it preys; such, perhaps, is the case with me, though indeed I was never cleared from my youth; but (taking it in its first stage) it is rather an encrustation, which nature has given for purposes of the greatest wisdom."

"You are right," I returned;" and sometimes, like certain precious fossils, there may be hid under it gems of the purest brilliancy."

"Nay, farther," continued Mr Silton, "there are two distinct sorts of what we call bashfulness; this, the awkwardness of a booby, which a few

steps into the world will convert into the pertness of a coxcomb; that, a consciousness, which the most delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove." From the incidents I have already related, I imagine it will be concluded, that Harley was of the latter species of bashful animals; at least, if Mr Silton's principle be just, it may be argued on this side; for the gradation of the first mentioned sort, it is certain, he never attained. Some part of his external appearance was mo◄ delled from the company of those gentlemen, whom the antiquity of a family, now possessed of bare £250 a-year, entitled its representative to approach: these, indeed, were not many; great part of the property in his neighbourhood being in the hands of merchants, who had got rich by their lawful calling abroad, and the sons of stewards, who had got rich by their lawful calling at home; persons so perfectly versed in the ceremonial of thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, (whose degrees of precedency are plainly demonstrable from the first page of the Complete Accomptant, or Young Man's Best Pocket Companion,) that a bow at church from them to such a man as Harley, would have made the parson look back into his sermon for some precept of Christian humility.

CHAP. XII.

Of Worldly Interests.

THERE are certain interests which the world supposes every man to have, and which, therefore, are properly enough termed worldly; but the world is apt to make an erroneous estimate: ignorant of the dispositions which constitute our happiness or misery, it brings, to an undistinguished scale, the means of the one, as connected with power, wealth, or grandeur, and of the other with their contraries. Philosophers and poets have often protested against this decision; but their arguments have been despised as declamatory, or ridiculed as romantic.

There are never wanting, to a young man, some grave and prudent friends to set him right in this particular, if he need it; to watch his ideas as they arise, and point them to those objects which a wise man should never forget.

Harley did not want for some monitors of this sort. He was frequently told of men, whose fortunes enabled them to command all the luxuries of life, whose fortunes were of their own acquirement; his envy was excited by a description of their happiness, and his emulation by a recital of the means which had procured it.

Harley was apt to hear those lectures with indifference; nay, sometimes they got the better of his temper; and, as the instances were not always amiable, provoked, on his part, some re

flections, which, I am persuaded, his good nature would else have avoided.

Indeed, I have observed one ingredient, somewhat necessary in a man's composition towards happiness, which people of feeling would do well to acquire-a certain respect for the follies of mankind; for there are so many fools, whom the opinion of the world entitles to regard, whom accident has placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he, who cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight, will be too often quarrelling with the disposal of things, to relish that share which is allotted to himself. I do not mean, however, to insinuate this to have been the case with Harley: on the contrary, if we might rely on his own testimony, the conceptions he had of pomp and grandeur served to endear the state which Providence had assigned him.

He lost his father, the last surviving of his parents, as I have already related, when he was a boy. The good man, from a fear of offending, as well as from a regard to his son, had named him a variety of guardians; one consequence of which was, that they seldom met at all to consider the affairs of their ward; and when they did meet, their opinions were so opposite, that the only possible method of conciliation was the mediatory power of a dinner and a bottle, which commonly interrupted, not ended, the dispute; and, after that interruption ceased, left the consulting parties in a condition not very proper for adjusting it. His education, therefore, had been but indifferently attended to; and, after being taken from a country-school, at which he had been boarded, the young gentleman was suffered to be his own master in the subsequent branches of literature, with some assistance from the parson of the parish in languages and philosophy, and from the exciseman in arithmetic and book-keeping. One of his guardians, indeed, who, in his youth, had been an inhabitant of the Temple, set him to read Coke upon Lyttelton; a book which is very properly put into the hands of beginners in that science, as its simplicity is accommodated to their understandings, and its size to their inclination. He profited but little by the perusal; but it was not without its use in the family; for his maiden aunt applied it commonly to the laudable purpose of pressing her rebellious linens to the folds she had allotted them.

There were particularly two ways of increasing his fortune, which might have occurred to people of less foresight than the counsellors we have mentioned. One of these was, the prospect of his succeeding to an old lady, a distant relation, who was known to be possessed of a very large sum in the stocks; but in this their hopes were disappointed; for the young man was so untoward in his disposition, that, notwithstanding the instructions he daily received, his visits ra

ther tended to alienate than gain the good will of his kinswoman. He sometimes looked grave when the old lady told the jokes of her youth; he often refused to eat when she pressed him, and was seldom or never provided with sugarcandy or liquorice when she was seized with a fit of coughing; nay, he had once the rudeness to fall asleep, while she was describing the composition and virtues of her favourite cholic-water. In short, he accommodated himself so ill to her humour, that she died, and did not leave him a farthing.

The other method pointed out to him was an endeavour to get a lease of some crown lands which lay contiguous to his little paternal estate. This, it was imagined, might be easily procured, as the crown did not draw so much rent as Harley could afford to give, with very considerable profit to himself; and the then lessee had rendered himself so obnoxious to the ministry, by the disposal of his vote at an election, that he could not expect a renewal. This, however, needed some interest with the great, which Harley or his father never possessed.

His neighbour, Mr Walton, having heard of this affair, generously offered his assistance to accomplish it. He told him, that though he had long been a stranger to courtiers, yet, he believed, there were some of them who might pay regard to his recommendation; and that, if he thought it worth the while to take a London journey upon the business, he would furnish him with a letter of introduction to a Baronet of his acquaintance, who had a great deal to say with the first lord of the treasury.

When his friends heard of this offer, they pressed him with the utmost earnestness to accept of it. They did not fail to enumerate the many advantages which a certain degree of spirit and assurance gives a man who would make a figure in the world; they repeated their instances of good fortune in others, ascribed them all to a happy forwardness of disposition; and made so copious a recital of the disadvantages which attend the opposite weakness, that a stranger, who had heard them, would have been led to imagine, that, in the British code, there was some disqualifying statute against any citizen who should be convicted of-modesty.

Harley, though he had no great relish for the attempt, yet could not resist the torrent of motives that assaulted him; and as he needed but little preparation for his journey, a day, not very distant, was fixed for his departure.

CHAP. XIII.

The Man of Feeling in Love.

THE day before that on which he set out, he went to take leave of Mr Walton.-We would conceal nothing;-there was another person of

the family to whom also the visit was intended, on whose account, perhaps, there were some tenderer feelings in the bosom of Harley, than his gratitude for the friendly notice of that gentleman (though he was seldom deficient in that virtue) could inspire. Mr Walton had a daughter; and such a daughter! we will attempt some description of her by and by.

Harley's notions of the xaλov, or beautiful, were not always to be defined, nor indeed such as the world would always assent to, though we could define them. A blush, a phrase of affability to an inferior, a tear at a moving tale, were to him, like the cestus of Cytherea, unequalled in conferring beauty. For all these, Miss Walton was remarkable; but as these, like the above-mentioned cestus, are perhaps still more powerful, when the wearer is possessed of some degree of beauty, commonly so called, it happened, that, from this cause, they had more than usual power in the person of that young lady.

She was now arrived at that period of life, which takes, or is supposed to take, from the flippancy of girlhood those sprightlinesses, with which some good-natured old maids oblige the world at threescore. She had been ushered into life (as that word is used in the dialect of St James's) at seventeen, her father being then in parliament, and living in London; at seventeen, therefore, she had been a universal toast; her health, now she was four-and-twenty, was only drank by those who knew her face at least. Her complexion was mellowed into a paleness, which certainly took from her beauty; but agreed, at least Harley used to say so, with the pensive softness of her mind. Her eyes were of that gentle hazel colour, which is rather mild than piercing; and, except when they were lighted up by good-humour, which was frequently the case, were supposed by the fine gentlemen to want fire. Her air and manner were elegant in the highest degree, and were as sure of commanding respect, as their mistress was far from demanding it. Her voice was inexpressibly soft; it was, according to that incomparable simile of Otway's,

"like the shepherd's pipe upon the mountains, When all his little flock's at feed before him."