laid over the top of the wheelbarrow served us for a table. Our dining-room was a root-house, lined with moss and ivy. At six o'clock the servants, who had dined under the great elm, upon the ground, at a little distance, boiled the kettle, and the said wheelbarrow served us for a table."

JULY 13TH.

In the cumbersome edition of the works of Parr, among many dull letters of dull people, is one of interest from Bennet, Bishop of Cloyne, describing the episcopal residence, where Berkeley, the accomplished friend of Pope, formerly dwelt. A few traces of him are preserved. The garden abounded in strawberries, of which Berkeley was very fond. But its most singular feature was a winding walk, nearly a quarter of a mile in length, enclosed for a considerable part of the distance by a myrtle hedge, six feet high, planted by Berkeley himself, each plant having a large ball of tar at the root.

The tar-epidemic spread far and wide. Gray tells Dr. Wharton :-" Mr. Trollope and I are in a course of tar-water; he for his present, I for my future distempers. If you think it will kill me, send away a man and horse directly, for I drink like a fish." But the myrtle hedge of Cloyne was, doubtless, the earliest instance of this medical treatment applied to trees.

Of Berkeley little is remembered. Bennet told Parr that "he made no improvement to the house; yet the part of it he inhabited wanted it much; for it is now only good enough for the upper servants. My study is the room where he kept his apparatus for tar-water." Indeed, the gifted enthusiast was too busy and happy to be anxious about refinements of accommodation. With a wife

A MUSICAL FAMILY.

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who painted gracefully, sang like a nightingale, and appreciated her husband; with children who resembled their parents in all the

he sigh for? The dismallest room in Cloyne must have been full of sunlight. Never was seen a domestic interior of tenderer beauty and affection; and in the bishop's letters we catch an occasional glimpse of it—" The more we have of good instruments the better; for all my children, not excepting my little daughter, learn to play, and are preparing to fill my house with harmony against all events, that if we have worse times we may have better spirits." Berkeley was the Christian gentleman of his age—the Philip Sidney of Theology. The same fine poetical colour enriched the complexions of both; and the apostle of the Bermudas, like the hero of Zutphen, would have ploughed up life and re-sown it for Arcadia.

JULY 14TH.

EVERY one has heard of Gray's wish to lie undisturbed on a sofa, and read new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon. I was surprised to find an Archbishop of York expressing a similar partiality. Dr. Herring writes to W. Duncombe, November 3, 1738: "I cannot help mentioning a French book to you, which I brought in the coach with me-Le Paysan Parvenu. It is a book of gallantry, but very modest; the things which entertained me were the justice of some of the characters in it, and the great penetration into human nature." Mr. Green, of Ipswich, speaks of the same novel with more caution and judgment. He admires the scene painting, but censures the moral that animates it. Herring, and Stone, Primate of Ireland, were the only persons of rank or consideration who praised Hume's History of England on its first appearance, as the writer tells us with pardonable complacency.

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But Marivaux has won golden opinions in later times. When a living scholar entered the library of Mr. Wyndham, soon after the death of that accomplished person, he saw upon his table the Marianne of Marivaux. There is another story-teller in Latin, and not much better known, who delighted the most unhappy of our poets. Cowper found his Marivaux in Barclay, whose romance of Argenis he thought the best that ever was written; in the highest degree interesting, rich in incident, full of surprises, with a narrative free from intricacy, and a style not unworthy of Tacitus. Barclay was the son of a Scottish lawyer; he went to Rome in the beginning of the 17th century, and was buried near Tasso-and, I believe, under the same oak.

JULY 15TH.

MOST people know the soothing influence of a walk

where

Beneath th' umbrageous multitude of leaves,

The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard.

It was the only rural sensation which Johnson acknowledged. But there is another woodland pleasure to which he would have been insensible; that of stooping in calm reverie over a running brook, and watching the reflection of the trees in the water. I have spent the sunny fragments of a sweet afternoon in this visionary enjoyment, not without endeavouring to moralize what I saw. These leaves on the stream seemed to be images of slight circumstances in life-little things that influence our hopes, successes, consolations, and pains.

We are not only pleased, but turned by a feather. The history of a man is a calendar of straws. If the nose of Cleopatra had

S

been shorter, said Pascal in his brilliant way, Antony might have kept the world. The Mohammedans have a tradition, that, when