"A capital notion; I'll do it, Reuben, but I must see more of him. Is there a chance of his asking me to dinner again?”

"A very good chance, indeed," replied Reuben.

A note from Mrs. Wyndham within half an hour verified the prediction. The young men dined a second time with the Dean at his hotel, and Primrose had ample opportunities of studying the subject of his intended sketch in the bosom of private life. Hyacinth made rapid way in his favour, and in the graces of Mrs. Mountjoy also. On his return to his chambers he made some notes of the most remarkable things that fell from Doctor Wyndham. Among them was the following:

Primrose had ventured flatteringly to allude to the bishopric which had not yet been conferred upon the Dean, though so long expected by his family, and which, in some respects, would have been only a just tribute to his talents and character as a Church

man.

“I'll tell you a tale of a prebend out of old Burton," said the Dean, "and you may apply it to a bishopric if you think it will fit."

The company were all curiosity and attention to hear the story, which the Dean related very nearly as it may be found in Burton's chapter on "repulses, injuries, disgraces, and contempts."

"In Moronia Pia, or Moronia Felix, I know not whether, nor how long since, nor in what cathedral-church, a fat prebend fell void. Many suitors were up in an instant. The first had rich friends and a good purse: every man supposed he would carry it. The second was my Lord Bishop's Chaplain, in whose gift it was: he thought it only his due. The third was nobly born, and he meant to get it through his great relations and allies. The fourth was the deceased Prebendary's son: his father died in debt (for the prebend, as it was said,) left a wife and many poor children. The fifth stood upon fair promises which had been formerly made to his friends for the next preferment in his Lordship's gift. The sixth had married a kinswoman of the Bishop, and he sent his wife to sue for him. There were several more, but the twelfth and last was a right honest man, an excellent scholar, a pious minister, and a painful preacher; but he had neither means nor money; besides he hated such courses; he could not speak for himself, neither had he any friends to solicit his cause, and therefore he made no suit, could not expect, neither did he hope for, or look after it. The good Bishop, perplexed among so many competitors, and not yet resolved what to do, at length of his own

accord, mere motion, and bountiful nature, gave it freely to the excellent, pious scholar, altogether unknown to him but by fame. The news was no sooner published abroad, but all good students rejoiced, though some would not believe it, and some said it was a miracle. One among the rest thanked God for it, and said, 'Nunc juvat tandem Deo integro corde servire.' You have heard my tale of a prebend; but, alas, it is but a tale-a mere fiction; 'twas never so, and never like to be."

The Dean invited the young men again for the following day, but when the time came he had gone up to London on business, and Mrs. Wyndham and Mrs. Mountjoy remained to entertain the company. That was no difficult matter; but when the day was over, Mr. Primrose had his thoughts more engaged with Mrs. Mountjoy than with her father; in fact, he gave Reuben distinctly to understand that nothing could prevent his falling over head and ears in love with his aunt but her immediate departure from Cambridge. That event took place, however, sooner than he wished, for the Dean sent for his wife to join him in London, and Mrs. Mountjoy went up to town with her, having some law business there, and intending soon to go abroad, for she was a free British widow, might go where she pleased, and had made up her mind to use her liberty. She did not take leave of Reuben without the tenderest of adieus, giving him many useful little hints of the kind that women alone can give, and making him at the same time such a substantial present as her comfortable circumstances enabled her to afford, while those of Reuben made it most agreeable to him to accept. As to Mr. Primrose, if she had any sentiments towards him beyond those which most engaging young men inspire upon a short acquaintance, Mrs. Mountjoy kept them perfectly private, and they were not of a nature to alter her purpose of leaving England.

Twelve months elapsed before Hyacinth executed his purpose of sketching the character of Dean Wyndham for the Gallery of Eminent Living Divines, in the "Cambridge Miscellany." Probably his admiration of Mrs. Mountjoy, and the desire to please her, made him take unusual pains with this portrait, for it was done with great spirit and graphic ability, and made a considerable noise at the University and in the literary circles of London. The Dean was not long before he found out who the author was, and though a few of his faults were touched on, yet the censure was so adroitly mingled with praise, that upon the whole it gratified him extremely, and gave Primrose the first place in his favour,

of all the young men at Cambridge. Reuben sent it to his aunt Mountjoy at Paris, where it was copied into Galignani's Messenger, a circumstance which added to the satisfaction of the Dean enormously.

CHAPTER V.

A NEW EMPLOYMENT.

BUT what was Reuben to do? His grandfather left Cambridge without taking the thought or the trouble of advising or instructing him upon that head. In fact, the old gentleman had enough of business on his hands, between his books and his bricklayers, without taking on himself the office of standing counsel to his grandson, and the only wonder was that he interfered in his affairs at all, even in the hasty, intemperate way that has been described.

But Reuben was too young to be left so much as he was, at this critical period of his life, to his own ingenious devices, or those of his friend Primrose. The Church was, in one respect, a most unfortunate choice for him. It left two or three years upon his hands, a space of time which it seemed impossible to fill up with mere theological studies, and which he was therefore only too much inclined and too much encouraged to fritter away in a variety of trifling and irrelevant pursuits. It seemed always time enough to sit down to study for ordination; and besides, until the time drew near, how could he be assured, upon anything like good grounds, that he was morally justified in entering a profession which, much to his credit, he had not brought himself to regard in the secular way in which he saw it regarded by most of the men about him. Thus, if he put aside the law, it was not so much to embrace divinity in its stead, as to give himself up to alternate fits of total indolence, or activity of a not much more profitable kind. He did not even cultivate literature with the energy of Primrose, who acquired not only character, but money, by his contributions to several periodicals. Reuben was too fastidious, too slow, and too uncertain, to produce with the rapidity indispensable to a journalist, or the punctuality of which only an editor knows the importance. At several intervals during these

years he tried his hand at grinding, not knife-grinding, but grinding the edges of blunt intellects. This was lucrative, but it pleased his father more than it did his mother, and he did not stick to it very long; in fact, he discovered (no doubt with the aid of his mother's spectacles) that, whatever faculties he might possess for sublimer things, he was "little better than a dunce at grinding."

These were his own words in one of his letters home. The next day a letter from the Dean at Westbury informed him most unceremoniously, that he was nominated private tutor to a noble family in a northern county. His grandfather had settled all the preliminaries, the terms, the duties, the quando and the quid pro quo, in short everything; Reuben had only to pack his portmanteau and book himself for Westmoreland-an obedience which he rendered much against the grain, though he was not nearly so much hurt as his mother was by the arbitrary fashion in which an arrangement was made, in itself sufficiently distasteful.

The life, however, which Reuben led for several months with his pupils, Lord Appleby and Mr. Portly, was as easy a form of existence as can possibly be imagined. Their father, the Earl of Whitehaven, was a widower, resident abroad; and his sons, more studious of the pleasures of the chase and the table, than of those higher delights to which their preceptor would have led them, paid every attention to Reuben, except attention to his lectures. They left him in undisturbed possession of a good library during the day, and when the critical hour of dinner arrived, they took the best possible care of him, initiated him in many mysteries of the kitchen, and for gastronomic reasons, never imposed on him the duty of carving. The only way in which Reuben found it practicable to instil any classical taste into his noble pupils was by awakening their curiosity on the methods of hunting and cooking in use among the ancients. They were equally astonished and delighted to learn that there existed treatises on hunting and fishing by Greek and Latin authors, and that Mrs. Glasse and Dr. Kitchiner were not without their types and parallels in Rome and Athens. Upon these topics, and upon ancient wines, they would even draw their tutor out, and lead him to expatiate at breakfast or dinner.

When Reuben mentioned that the great Xenophon had written a work on sporting dogs, and another on horses, Lord Appleby would smile, and cry "indeed!" But though there was an English translation of the work on horses in the library, he never went so far as to take it down. Mr. Portly was partial to

anecdotes of Apicius and Lucullus, and when Reuben told of those wonderful dishes of nightingales' tongues patronised by ancient epicures, the brothers invariably wondered whether there were nightingales enough in their neighbourhood to make a pie or a fricassee.

Reuben made no illiberal use of his own tongue in Westmoreland, but there was this excuse for him, that he had generally to find talk for the whole party, particularly during the labours of dinner, and after the fatigues of the chase. It was probably now that he first acquired the habit of lecturing in company, and considering a party collected round the dinner-table, or a group in a drawing-room, as an audience which it was his proper function to address, entertain, or enlighten. It was now likewise, that he devoted himself for the first time systematically to the study of words and phrases, independently of ideas and information. He began to keep a MS. book in which he gradually accumulated a prodigious stock of metaphors, similes, images, allegories, tropes, figures and allusions, taken from every work that fell in his way, and classified after a plan of his own, so as to have them ready for use upon every occasion, like the arms in a magazine. He made another book of quotations, marshalled according to subjects, and provided with an index for easy reference; nor was he content with any of the existing collections of synonymes, but commenced the formation of a very extensive one for his private purposes, so as to qualify himself (we may presume) to express everything he might possibly have to say in every form in which it was capable of being expressed; no doubt considering it a shabby thing in a speaker to have but one or two suits to clothe a thought in, although they should happen to fit it ever so well, and exhibit it to the best advantage.

Occasionally the disciples would leave their master for weeks together, to join a shooting-party in Scotland, or on some other excursion of pleasure. During one of these lonely intervals our opal-minded student devoted himself to a little course of reading in heraldry, a subject upon which the library at Appleby contained some very quaint and rare books.

Reuben commenced taking extracts from the works now at his command, originally with a view to illustrate the armorial bearings of the different English bishoprics; but his ideas extended as he advanced, and before his labours were over, his papers contained materials for a curious essay on heraldic zoology. This paper saw the light very soon after it was written; for, happen