cock in 1790, the future poet having no fixed object in view, continued visiting about among his friends," which may have tended to render habits naturally careless, still more unsettled and irregular. Occasionally he is said to have assisted his brother in his school, the only return in his power to make for unintermitted protection and friendship; but to one of his temperament, an effort of no ordinary resolution. To this first initiation into the drudgery of teaching, was probably owing that disgust to the exercise of a profession honourable in itself, which he ever afterwards felt and hesitated not to avow, although compelled to resort to it as the means of subsistence when thrown upon his own resources. At Lissoy he likewise spent a considerable portion of time, entering into the rural sports and occupations of his brother-in-law with the usual ardour of a young and unoccupied mind. Through life he preserved the fondest attachment to this spot; often revisiting it, as he said, in imagination, although restrained by circumstances he could not control, from realising in person what memory delighted to retrace; and indeed a man of warm affections looks back upon few things with more satisfaction than the scenes and the friends of his youth. One of his subsequent letters enters strongly into these feelings he remembers his acquaintance and country, he says, with the strongest affection,-yet stops to ask why this is, when from the one he experienced no more than common civility, and from the other brought nothing away but his brogue and

his blunders? On the same occasion he alludes, in a strain of fond recollection, to the scenery around Lissoy, presenting, he warmly says, "the most pleasing horizon in nature."

Under the influence of similar feelings and nearly in the same language as in these letters, he commences one of his Essays; the locality though not expressly named, will be immediately obvious to the reader:

"When I reflect on the unambitious retirement in which I passed the earlier part of my life in the country, I cannot avoid feeling some pain in thinking that those happy days are never to return. In that retreat all nature seemed capable of affording pleasure: I then made no refinements on happiness, but could be pleased with the most awkward efforts of rustic mirth; thought cross-purposes the highest stretch of human wit; and questions and commands the most rational way of spending the evening. Happy could so charming an illusion still continue ! I find that age and knowledge only contribute to sour our dispositions. My present enjoyments may be more refined, but they are infinitely less pleasing. The pleasure the best actor gives, can no way compare to that I have received from a country wag who imitated a quaker's sermon. The music of the finest singer is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairy-maid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong's last Good Night, or the cruelty of Barbara Allen." *

* See Works, vol. i., Bee, No. II.

In conversation he has been known to refer to this spot with something of pride as his family residence; and in his writings, on more than one occasion, felt pleasure in recalling a scene where his father had fed the hungry, and sometimes lodged the houseless. The "Deserted Village" points to the exertion of this benevolence in several points of view; while the "Vicar of Wakefield," in describing his abode and the inmates to whom it formed an occasional home, is made to advert to it in others; the resort of idle and poor relatives, or of those who claim to be such, to families raised a little above them in condition, will be familiar to all acquainted with Ireland, in the following sketch :

"As we lived near the road, we often had the traveller or stranger visit us to taste our gooseberry wine, for which we had great reputation; and I profess, with the veracity of an historian, that I never knew one of them find fault with it. Our cousins, too, even to the fortieth remove, all remembered their affinity without the help of the herald's office, and came very frequently to see us. Some of them did us no great honour by these claims of kindred; as we had the blind, the maimed, and the halt amongst the number. However, my wife always insisted that, as they were the same flesh and blood, they should sit with us at the same table. So that if we had not very rich, we generally had very happy friends about us; for this remark will hold good through life, that the poorer

the guest, the better pleased he ever is with being treated; and as some men gaze with admiration at the colours of a tulip, or the wing of a butterfly, so I was by nature an admirer of happy faces.

"However, when any one of our relations was found to be a person of very bad character, a troublesome guest, or one we desired to get rid of, upon his leaving my house I ever took care to lend him a riding coat, or a pair of boots, or sometimes a horse of small value; and I always had the satisfaction of finding he never came back to return them. By this the house was cleared of such as we did not like; but never was the family of Wakefield known to turn the traveller or the poor dependant out of doors." *

* See Works, vol. iii. Vicar of Wakefield, chap. i.

EDINBURGH.- MR. LACHLAN MACLEANE.

GOLDSMITH's family, desirous of securing a respectable profession as well as provision for one without either, wished him to take orders under the belief that they could advance him in the church; but to this he felt a settled repugnance. "For the clerical profession," said Mrs. Hodson, "he had no liking; having always a strong inclination for visiting foreign countries.”

The real motives, judging from sentiments expressed in future life, and which he probably did not now think proper to disclose, appear to have been conscientious conviction of being unfitted by temperament for the sacred office, and a consequent dislike to undertake the performance of duties which he knew he wanted the requisite inclination to fulfil. All men, even such as are estimable in many respects, are not necessarily fitted for clergymen; they should be naturally disposed toward the calling, and not the calling made matter of convenience to their families or to themselves. So high an opinion had he formed of the purity of conduct necessary to such as attempted to admonish or