In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these facesor rather masks-that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls-these "images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good nights with them--because they are black.

I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live with them." I am all over sophisticated—with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thonsand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited

"To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse."

The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar assumption, that they are more given to evasion and equivocating than other people. They naturally look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of committing themselves. They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth-the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, "You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth-oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances-is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value

indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You can have of him no more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for himself at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows that his syllables are weighed-and how far a consciousness of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self-watchfulness if it did not seem rather an humble and secular scion of that old stock of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge or accuser, under trials and racking examinations. "You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," said one of those upright Justices to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instances. I was travelling in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest nonconformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. guard came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money, and formally tendered it-so much for tea-I, in humble imitation, tendering mine-for the supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her demand. they all three quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the example of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously pronounced, became, after a time, inaudible—and now my conscience, which the whimsical scene had for awhile suspended, beginning to give some twitches, I waited in the hope that some justification would be offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their conduct. To my great surprise, not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sat as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of

The

So

little T. H. who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition-who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing

sure.

With the book, the objections and solutions gradually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me. But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seriously. That detestable picture!

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life-so far as memory serves in things so long ago-without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel-(Oh that old man covered with a mantle!) Iowe-not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy-but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sat upon my pillow-a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm -the hoping for a familiar voice-when they wake screaming and find none to soothe them-what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through candlelight and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams-if dreams they were-for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other

"Headless bear, black man, or ape-"

but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. It is not book or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear

at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity.

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimæras-dire stostories of Celano and the Harpies-may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition--but they were there before. They are transcripts, types-the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all?-or

Names, whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not." Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? Oh, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body-or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante-tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons-are they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him—

"Like one that in a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turn'd round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread."*

That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual-that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth-that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy--are difficulties, the solu tion of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.

My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflic tive. I confess an occasional night-mare; but I do not, as in carly youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings-cities abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon--their churches, palaces, squares, marketplaces, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible

*Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.

sense of delight-a map-like distinctness of trace -and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells-my highest Alps,-but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasurehouses for Kuhla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns,

"Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,"

to solace his night solitudes-when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light, it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor plastic power, such as it is within me, set to work to humour my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mount

ed high, with the customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I, myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river-motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe, and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace.

The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep, might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humourist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be,—"Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland landing.

MY RELATIONS.

I AM arrived at that point of life, at which a man may account it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have

5

not that felicity; and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in Brown's Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. "In such a compass of time," he says, "a man may have a close apprehension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see with what a face, in no long time, OBLIVION will look upon himself."

I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single blessedness had soured to the world. She often used to say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved; and, when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with mother's tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether approve. She was from morning till night poring over good books, and devotional exercises. Her favourite volumes were Thomas à Kempis, in Stanhope's Translation; and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the matins and complines regularly set down,-terms which I was at that time too young to understand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily concerning their Papistical tendency; and went to church every Sabbath, as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied; though, I think, at one period of her

life, she told me, she had read with great satisfacNobleman. Finding the door of the chapel in tion the Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Essex-street open one day-it was in the infancy of that heresy-she went in, liked the sermon, and tervals for some time after. She came not for the manner of worship, and frequented it at indoctrinal points, and never missed them. With some little asperities in her constitution, which I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old Christian. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mind—extraordinary at a repartee; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence-else she did not much value wit. The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was the splitting of basin of fair water. The odour of those tender French beans, and dropping them into a China vegetables to this day comes back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary operations.

Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none-to remember. By the uncle's side, I may be said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in sister, I never had any-to know them. A sister, both our infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, may I not have missed in her!-Bu. I have cousins sprinkled about in Hertfordshire-besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, and whom I may term cousins par excellence. These are James and Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten years; and neither of them scems

disposed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive any of the prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May they continue still in the same mind; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three years old, (I cannot spare them sooner,) persist in treating me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother!

James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, which not every critic can penetrate; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them. The pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could have drawn J. E. entire those fine Shandian lights and shades which make up his story. I must limp after in my poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talent. J. E. then-to the eye of a common observer at least-seemeth made up of contradictory principles. The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of prudence-the phlegm of my cousin's doctrine is invariably at war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new project in his brain, J.E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier down of every thing that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a hundred fine notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, he is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others; and, determined by his own sense in every thing, commends you to the guidance of common sense on all occasions. With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does or says, he is only anxious that you should not commit yourself by doing any thing absurd or singular. On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to say so for the world would think me mad. He disguises a passionate fondness for works of high art, (whereof he hath amassed a choice collection,) under the pretext of buying only to sell again that his enthusiasm may give no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral Dominichino hang still by his wall?-is the ball of his sight much more dear to him?-or what picture-dealer can talk like him?

Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their speculative conclusions to the bent of their individual humours, his theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his constitution. He is courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct; chary of his person, upon principle, as a travelling Quaker. He has been preaching up to me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing to the great-the necessity of forms, and manner, to a man's getting on in the world. He himself never aims at either, that I can discover, and has a spirit that would stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him discourse of patience-extolling it as the truest wisdom-and to see him during the last seven minutes that his dinner is getting ready. Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless piece of

workmanship than when she moulded this impetuous cousin—and Art never turned out a more elaborate orator than he can display himself to be, upon his favourite topic of the advantages of quiet, and contentedness in the state, whatever it be, that we are placed in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has you safe in one of those short stages that ply for the western road, in a very obstructing manner, at the foot of John Murray's street-where you get in when it is empty, and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath completed her just freight—a trying three-quarters of an hour to some people. He wonders at your fidgetness,-"where could we be better than we are, thus sitting, thus consulting ?"—" prefers, for his part, a state of rest to locomotion,"-with an eye all the while upon the coachman-till at length, waxing out of all patience, at your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at the fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he had professed, and declares peremptorily, that "the gentleman in the coach is determined to get out, if he does not drive on that instant."

Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophistry, he is incapable of attending you in any chain of arguing. Indeed he makes wild work with logic; and seems to jump at most admirable conclusions by some process, not at all akin to it. Consonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, upon certain occasions, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason; and wondereth how man came first to have a conceit of it-enforcing his negation with all the might of reasoning he is master of. He has some speculative notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not natural to him—when peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like Chanticleer. He says some of the best things in the world-and declareth that wit is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eaton boys at play in their grounds-What a pity to think, that these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will all be changed into frivolous Members of Parliament !

His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous— and in age he discovereth no symptom of cooling. This is that which I admire in him. I hate people who meet Time half-way. I am for no compromise with that inevitable spoiler. While he lives, J. E. will take his swing. It does me good, as I walk towards the street of my daily avocation, on some fine May morning, to meet him marching in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly handsome presence, and shining sanguine face, that indicates some purchase in his eye-a Claude-or a Hobbima-for much of his enviable leisure is consumed at Christie's, and Phillips'—or where not, to pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these occasions he mostly stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a person like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with business which he must do-assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy on his hands-wishes he had fewer