on equal terms; and they learned many a valuable lesson from his conversation, while they fancied themselves only amused. He had an excellent library, which before his death was nearly exhausted in presents to his youthful friends. Of this I had some years ago a very gratifying proof, on visiting a Spanish gentleman, in the island of Majorca, who unexpectedly to me opened a little cabinet filled with the best English authors, which my father had given him when a student in London. The fireside, on a winter evening, was a scene highly picturesque, and worthy of the pencil of Wilkie. The veteran sat in his easy chair, surrounded by his children, A few grey hairs peeped from beneath his hat, worn somewhat awry, which gave an arch turn to the head, which it seldom quitted. The anchor button, and scarlet waistcoat trimmed with gold, marked the fashion of former times. Before him lay his book, and at his side a glass prepared by the careful hand of a daughter, who devoted herself to him with a tenderness peculiarly delightful to the infirmities of age. The benevolent features of the old man were slightly obscured by the incense of a "cigárre" (the last remnant of a cock-pit education) which spread its fragrance in long wreaths of smoke around himself and the whole apartment. A footstool supported his wounded leg, beneath which lay the old and faithful Newfoundland dog stretched on the hearth. Portraits of King Charles the First and Van Tromp (indicating the characteristic turn of his mind) appeared above the chimney-piece; and a multitude of prints of British heroes covered the rest of the wainscot. A knot of antique swords and Indian weapons garnished the old-fashioned pediment of the door; a green curtain was extended across the room, to fence off the cold air, to which an old sailor's constitution is particularly sensitive. Such was the picture. The servants, who reverenced his peculiarities, served him with earnest affection. Even his horse confided in his benevolence as much as the rest of the household; for when he was of opinion that the morning ride was sufficiently extended, he commonly faced about, and as my father generally rode in gambadoes, (not thẻ most convenient armour for a conflict with a self-willed steed,) he generally yielded to the caprice of his horse. The chief personage in his confidence was old Boswell, the self-invested minister of the extraordinaries of the family, who looked upon the footman as a jackanapes, and on the female servants as incapable of "understanding his honour." Boswell had been in his time a smart young seaman, and formerly rowed the stroke-oar in the captain's barge. After many a hard gale and long separation, the association was renewed in old age, and to a bystander had more of the familiarity of ancient friendship, than of the relation of master and servant. "Has your honour any further commands?" said Boswell, as he used to enter the parlour in the evening, while, throwing his body into an angle, he made his reverence, and shut the door with his opposite extremity at the same time. "No, Boswell, I think not, unless indeed you are disposed for a glass of grog before you go." your honour pleases," was the established reply. A word from my father soon produced the beverage, at the approach of which the old sailor was seen to slide a quid into his cuff, and prepare for action. "Does your honour remember when we were up the Mississippi, in the Nautilus sloop of war?" "Ay, my old friend, I shall never forget it, 'twas a happy trip, the poor Indians won all our hearts." Ah, but your honour, there was worse company than they in the woods there. Mayhap you recollect the great black snake that clung about the serjeant of marines, and had well nigh throttled him?" "I do, I do, and the poor fellow was obliged to beat its head to pieces against his own thigh. I remember it as though it was but yesterday." "And the rattle-snake too, that your honour killed with your cane, five and forty feet." "Avast, Boswell!" cried my father, "mind your reckoning 66 "As there, 'twas but twelve, you rogue, and that's long enough in all conscience." These scenes were highly amusing to our occasional visitors, and are still remembered with delight by those of his familiar friends who yet survive him. If benevolence was the striking feature of his disposition, religion was the guide of his conduct, the anchor of his hope, the stay of all his confidence. There was an habitual energy in his private devotions, which proved the firm hold which Christianity had obtained over his mind. Whether in reading or in conversation, at the name of God he instantly uncovered his head, by a spontaneous movement of religious feeling. Nothing but illness ever kept him from church. His example there was a silent reproof to the idle and indifferent. I see him still in imagination, kneeling, unconscious of all around him, absorbed in earnest prayer, and though his features were concealed, the agitation of his venerable head indicated the fervour of his supplications. The recollection has often quickened my own indolence. Such was the man whose memory was endeared to all who knew his worth, affording us a beautiful example of a true old English officer. Dec. 26, 1822. 88. THE NUT-BROWN MAID. [IN a singular book, first printed about 1502, called 'Arnold's Chronicle,' the strangest medley of the most prosaic things-appears, for the first time, as far as we know, the ballad of 'The Nut-Brown Maid.' Upon this ballad Prior founded his poem of 'Henry and Emma.' Thomas Warton, in his 'History of English Poetry,' truly says that Prior "paraphrased the poem without improving its native beauties;" and he adds, "there is hardly an obsolete word, or that requires explanation, in the whole piece." Prior spoilt the story, enfeebled the characters, and utterly obliterated the simplicity of his original. The reader will bear in mind that the poem, after the first sixteen lines, is conducted in dialogue. We distinguish the beginning and end of each speech by inverted commas.] Be it right or wrong, these men among, on women do complain, Affirming this, how that it is a labour spent in vain To love them well, for never a deal they love a man again; For let a man do what he can their favour to attain, Yet if a new do them pursue, their first true lover than* Laboureth for nought, for from her thought he is a banished man. But, nevertheless, right good witness in this case might be laid, To their own shame, women to blame, and causeless them accuse; Mine own heart dear, with you what cheer? I pray you tell anon, Walter Raleigh, who was as trenchant with his pen as his sword, hailed the 'Faerie Queene' of his friend Spenser in verses in which he said that "Petrarch" was henceforward to be no more heard of; and that, in all English poetry, there was nothing he counted" of any price" but the effusions of the new author. Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter; and Shakspeare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well have said that myrtles and oaks were to disappear because acacias had come up. It is with the Poet's creations as with Nature's, great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets; whether in Homer's epic or Gray's 'Elegy' in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the 'Schoolmistress' of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself, who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who calls upon us to admire all her productions; not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect. I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three memorable words of Milton; who has said, that poetry, in comparison with science, is "simple, sensuous, and passionate." By simple, he means imperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the context seems to me to necessitate those before us. quote, however, not from the original, but from an extract in the 'Remarks on Paradise Lost' by Richardson. What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth ;—what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be "in earnest at the moment." His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. "I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings," says Coleridge, in the Preface to his Poems; "and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.”—Pickering's edition, p. 10. 66 Poetry," says Shelley, lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others: the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause."-Essays and Letters, vol. i. p. 16. I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these; but as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is termed useful knowledge, it may be as well to add, that if the poet may be allowed to pique himself on any one thing more than another, compared with those who undervalue him, it is on that power of undervaluing nobody, him by the very faculty of They do not see that their No man recognises the and no attainments different from his own, which is given imagination they despise. The greater includes the less. inability to comprehend him argues the smaller capacity. worth of utility more than the poet: he only desires that the meaning of the term may not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities of his fellowcreatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance, with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad, as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as the greatest two-idead man who varies that single idea with hugging himself on his "buttons" or his good dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens, of the steamengine itself, thundering and fuming along like a magic horse; of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idead man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe, perhaps to the displacement of war itself and certainly to the diffusion of millions of enjoyments. "And a button-maker, after all, invented it!” cries our friend. Pardon me-it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent, and a very poetical man too, and yet not have been the first man visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical bit of science. It was a nobleman who first thought of it—a captain who first tried it—and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher, Bacon, who said that poetry had "something divine in it," and was necessary to the satisfaction of the human mind. 84. THE INDUSTRY OF A GENTLEMAN. BARROW. [ISAAC BARROW, a great mathematician, a learned divine, a man of the most exemplary private life, was born in 1630, and died at the early age of forty-seven. It is stated that he was a negligent boy, and more than commonly addicted to fighting with his schoolfellows. His negligence was probably the result of the quickness of his capacity; at any rate it very readily gave place to the most unwearied industry: his pugnacious habits were soon transformed into an energy that enabled him to accomplish the many great things which distinguished his short life. His disinterestedness was amongst the most remarkable of his characteristics. He resigned his Lucasian professorship at Cambridge to make way for his pupil, Isaac Newton; he resigned his small living, and a prebend of Salisbury Cathedral, when he was appointed Master of Trinity College. In this position his most earnest labours were devoted to the formation of the library of that noble institution. The great object of his life -and it was an object that had the highest reward-was to benefit his fellow-creatures. Barrow's sermons furnish abundant evidence of the comprehensiveness and vigour of his mind.] "Not slothful in business."-JAMES i. 26. I have largely treated on the duty recommended in this precept, and urged the observance of it in general, at a distance: I now intend more particularly and closely to apply it in reference to those persons who seem more especially obliged to it, and whose observing it may prove of greatest consequence to public good; the which application may also be most suitable and profitable to this audience. Those persons are of two sorts; the one gentlemen, the other scholars. I. The first place, as civility demandeth, we assign to gentlemen, or persons of eminent rank in the world, well allied, graced with honour, and furnished with wealth: the which sort of persons I conceive in a high degree obliged to exercise industry in business. This, at first hearing, may seem a little paradoxical and strange; for who have less business than gentlemen? who do need less industry than they? He that hath a fair estate, and can live on his means, what hath he to do, what labour or trouble can be exacted of him, what hath he to think on, or trouble his head with, but how to invent recreations and pastimes to divert himself, and spend his waste leisure pleasantly? Why should not he be allowed to enjoy himself, and the benefits which nature or fortune have freely dispensed to him, as he thinketh best, without offence? Why may he not say with the rich man in the gospel, "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years: take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry Is it not often said by the wise man, that there is "nothing better under the sun, than that a man should make his soul to enjoy good" in a cheerful and comfortable fruition of his estate? According to the passable notion and definition, “What is a gentleman but his pleasure?" י? If this be true, if a gentleman be nothing else but this, then truly he is a sad piece, the most inconsiderable, the most despicable, the most pitiful and wretched creature in the world: if it is his privilege to do nothing, it is his privilege to be most unhappy; and to be so will be his fate if he will according to it; for he that is of no worth or use, who produceth no beneficial fruit, who performeth no service to God or to the world, what title can he have to happiness? What capacity thereof? What reward can he claim? What comfort can he feel? To what temptations is he exposed? What guilts will he incur? But, in truth, it is far otherwise; to suppose that a gentleman is loose from business is a great mistake; for, indeed, no man hath more to do, no man lieth under greater engagements to industry than he. He is deeply obliged to be continually busy in more ways than other men, who have but one simple calling or occupation allotted to them; and that on a triple account; in respect to God, to the world, and to himself. 1. He is first obliged to continual employment in respect to God. He, out of a grateful regard to divine bounty for the eminency of his station, adorned with dignity and repute, for the plentiful accommodations and comforts of his life, for his exemption from those pinching wants, those meaner cares, those sordid entertainments, and those toilsome drudgeries, to which other men are subject, is bound to be more diligent in God's service, employing all the advantages of his state to the glory of his munificent Benefactor, to whose good providence alone he doth owe them; for "who maketh him to differ" from another? And what nath he that he did not receive from God's free bounty? In proportion to the bulk of his fortune, his heart should be enlarged with a thankful sense of God's goodness to him; his mouth should ever be filled with acknowledgments and praise; he should always be ready to express his grateful resentment* of so great and peculiar obligations. He should dedicate larger portions of that free leisure which God hath granted to him, in waiting on God, and constant performances of devotion. He, in frequently reflecting on the particular ample favours of God to him, should imitate the holy Psalmist, that illustrious pattern of great and fortunate men; saying after him, with his spirit and disposition of soul, "Thou hast brought me to great honour, and comforted me on every side; therefore will I praise thee and thy faithfulness, O God." 66 'Lord, by thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong:" ::" "Thou hast set my feet in a large room:" "Thou preparest a table before :” “Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over:" "To the end that my glory may sing praise unto thee, and not be silent:" "The Lord is the portion * Resentment is used by old writers in the sense of strong feeling in general. Its limitation to angry feeling is a modern use of the word. me:" |