past, present, or to come; and finally, my own superiority, provided I stayed at home, over every one of my fellow villagers, the rector only and the justice excepted. A great deal was likewise to be said upon outlandish airs, foreign fooleries, and gew-gaws, dogs of Frenchmen, Pope and Popery, English beef and knives, and the glory and grandeur of her Church and churchmen. Once a week, indeed, when I dined with the curate and the family over a sirloin, which was as large as our pew, and a plumb-pudding hardly to be equalled by any barrow in the neighbourhood, I confessed I often thought that my aunt was a sensible woman, and there was nothing like home and the Thirty-nine Articles. Perhaps I might have continued to think so still, could it have been explained to me that home was not less home, because I was away from it, in France, nine months out of the twelve, or I less orthodox, or a more sincere lover of the Church, or an abhorrer of Popery, because, of the Thirty-nine Articles which formed. my faith, I did not quite believe nine. But I was simple, and my aunt old; neither of us anticipated the improvements which were destined to come in, with gas, and steam-boats, and, instead of fattening like the favoured ox in a stall, I turned out like an ass to starve upon brambles and lean heath. Yet let me not say that thereof I repent: every thing was for the best, as my father said when he broke his leg; nor in my comfortable three-roomed lodging at Florence, whatever haps may have come between, have I ever ceased to say the same. In my fifteenth year it was thought necessary to send me to college: a small fund which fortunately fell to my father's lot, though he was the twentieth in remainder, and which for ten days gave him a complete vindication of the ways of Providence over the repinings of my mother, furnished the means. I was provided with a black suit and portmanteau, well stored, not with linen, but a small library of the newest tracts, and sent up as pale, and full of grace, as any lately chosen vessel of the word, to Cambridge. The day of my departure was a day of bitterness, a day of weeping and gnashing of teeth for every one but myself. The whole collection of my aunt's blue pocket-handkerchiefs was exhausted ;-my father almost forgot his smile, and my mother wailed and railed alternately at my father. She wept. over my approaching departure as if it had been my dissolution; and now and then so lamentably, that, notwithstanding the rambling instinct within me, Nature asserted her pre-eminence and privilege, and kindly extracted a parting tear. But what real traveller, albeit he hath never yet tasted of its delights, can resist the cheering sound of coachwheels rattling over a village pavement, and a cracking whip, and a cry from all the servants at once, that every thing is at last ready, and the nursery is about to give up its supremacy to the public school. I could - ill disguise the pleasure within me, though I believe it was very wrong, and for some moments felt the pains of parting to the quick. Nor to this hour, can I blot from my memory, the last view which I took of my home, my father weeping for the first time, my mother rushing back to the house, and my aunt, with both her hands upraised, and the tears streaming down her face, invoking the God of Abraham to protect me. I soon arrived at Cambridge-but a confirmed traveller: a few hundred miles had developed the propensity within me. No man of genius has ever shown it with the consent of his parents. I had as little encouragement, and perhaps as much daring in that way as others. My stay at the University was measured by weeks and months. I studied, at least read, ate, drank, and served, like others: came away nearly as I went, and left most of the Latin, and all the Greek, with my old clothes, behind me. I passed, and my servant said, with distinction :-my Divinity lectures had been counted:-I was weighed in the balance-found heavy, (my fees being duly paid,) and thrown in with the crowd. A degree crowned the hopes of the family— the day of ordination approached—the vineyard and its good things opened upon my fantasy, but man proposes and God disposes; the resolves of the prudent in their generation, are often but as chaff before the wind. The general habit of my body and mind fitted me eminently for the highest clerical functions; few and gentle cares, good living, a certain comfortable Beotian crassitude in the air, had still farther rounded and dignified my proportions. There was a calm philosophic rubicundity about my features, and an imposing adipose in my figure which was the envy of all the younger candidates for holy orders. I had changed completely in my person; and from the meagre postulant which I was on my first appearance at the University, was now considered as one of the most pious, corpulent, and serious-tongued young men whom Alma Mater had for many years presented to the rejoicing arms of the |