and silent evening lights, few have equalled, and fewer excelled him. JUNE 18.-Adam Smith draws an agreeable portrait of his friend Hume; but constant smoothness and ease of character are neither winning nor truthful-like Cowper's ice-palace, it smiles, and it is cold. In great men, the mingling beams and shades of mirthfulness and melancholy compose a mellow twilight of feeling far more delightful. "Is not that naïveté and good humour which his friends celebrate in him," Gray asked Beattie, "owing to this that he has continued all his days an infant, but one who has unhappily been taught to read and write?" No zeal, no virtue, no hope; what a character! Warburton showed his resemblance to Bolingbroke. In fact, Hume took possession of the atheistical house which Pope's friend had erected; and, possessing more taste and caution, he fitted it up to receive the genteel families of unbelief. He was a 66 decorator" of infidelity, and had a long run of patronage. Let us hope that he and his furniture are now going out of fashion. JUNE 20th. Reading the Heart of MidLothian this morning, I noticed a remarkable coincidence of thought, with a splendid senti ment in the Essay on Man: Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd, And now a bubble burst, and now a world. The passage of Scott occurs in the description of the storm which surprised Staunton and Butler, as they were crossing the Gare-loch. "There is something solemn in this delay of the storm," said Sir George: "it seems as if it suspended its peal till it solemnized some important event in the world below." "Alas!" replied Butler, "what are we, that the laws of nature should correspond in their march with our ephemeral deeds or sufferings! The clouds will burst when surcharged with the electric fluid, whether a goat is falling at that instant from the cliffs of Arran, or a hero expiring on the field of battle he had won." The melody of the prose, with its dying fall, is most grand and affecting. There is a little scene in the same story which always strikes me as exceedingly delicate and tender: I mean the meeting of the sisters in the Tolbooth:-" The unglazed window of the miserable chamber was open, and the beams of a bright sun fell upon the bed where the sufferers were seated. With a gentleness that had something of reverence in it, Ratcliffe partly closed the shutter, and seemed thus to throw a veil over a scene so mournful." I remember an incident in the life of Swift that is not unworthy of being mentioned in connexion with Scott. Lady Ashburnham, daughter of the Duke of Ormond, was one of the Dean's favourites, and he appears to have lamented her death with real grief. His account of a visit to her bereaved father is given in a letter to Mrs. Dingley (Jan. 4, 1712): "He bore up as well as he could; but something happening accidentally in discourse, the tears were just falling out of his eyes, and I looked off, to give him an opportunity (which he took) of wiping them with his handkerchief. I never saw anything so moving, nor such a mixture of greatness of mind, and tenderness, and discretion." What a leveller the heart is! The keeper of the Tolbooth closes the shutter, to conceal the anguish of the sisters; and the biographer of Gulliver turns aside, that a father may dry his tears for a daughter. JUNE 22nd. This pleasant edition of Our Village ought to find its way into every parlour window, and wherever there is hay-carrying, or Maying, or nutting, or other rural occupation and amusement. But to feel the full charm of the book, the reader should live in the country it describes : "This pretty Berkshire of ours, renowned for its pastoral villages, its picturesque interchange of common and woodland, and small enclosures divided by lanes, to which thick borders of hedge-row timber give a character of deep and forest-like richness." And again: "This shady yet sunny Berkshire, where the scenery, without rising into grandeur, or breaking into wildness, is so peaceful, so cheerful, so varied, and so thoroughly English." Gray considered the four most beautiful counties in England to be Worcester, Shropshire, Gloucester, and Hereford; to these he added Monmouth, in South Wales. One might have expected him to include Kent, of which he has given such charming sketches; especially of its river-views, the Medway and shipping, with the sea breaking on the eye, and mingling its white sails and blue waters with the deeper and brighter green of the woods and corn. By way of contrast and shade, compare the counties of Warwick, Northampton, Huntingdon, Cambridge, and Bedford. With the excep tion of Cambridgeshire, which, in its own "quiet ugliness," is unapproachable, Northampton has the least interest for the poet, painter, or admirer of scenery. Dr. Arnold's lamentation over his own nook in it is expressive; no woods, only one copse, no heath, no down, no rock, no ruin, no clear stream, and scarcely any flowers. It seems an image of cultivated desolation. Yet, out of the wilderness, the meditative fancy of Clare gathered flowers, gentleness, and beauty. So just is the saying of Mr. Keble Give true hearts but earth and sky, And some flowers to bloom and die; To certain minds, the absence of grandeur is a recommendation. Cowper, among the downs of Eartham, sighed for the grassy walks of Weston; and Constable, in the hills and solitudes of Westmoreland, felt a weight on his spirit. He looked around in vain for churches, farm-houses, or scattered hamlets, and considered flat, agricultural Suffolk to be a delightfuller country for the artist. This feeling explains the remark of Schlegel, that a landscape-painter often finds the dullest spots the most suggestive. Little things make H |