"Having thus far prepared you with an apprehension of the needfulness of the thing, I will now show you how it is to be done without abruption and absurdness.

"First, (as abovesaid) it may be that discourse may take off the remembrance of the last key in which you played, or some occasion of a leaving off for some pretty time, by a string breaking or the like; or if not, then (as commonly it happens) there may be a need of examining the tuning of your lute, for the strings will alter a little in the playing of one lesson, although they have been well stretched. But if lately put on, or have been slacked down by any mischance of pegs slipping, then they will need mending, most certainly.

"I say some such occasion may sometimes give you an opportunity of coming handsomely to your new intended key; but if none of these shall happen, then you ought, in a judicious and masterly way, to work from your last key which you played upon, in some voluntary way till you have brought your matter so to pass that your auditors may be captivated with a new attention, yet so insinuatingly, that they may have lost the remembrance of the foregoing key they know not how; nor are they at all concerned for the loss of it, but rather taken with a new content and delight at your so cunning and complete artifice.”

With strict propriety then may it be said of these my chapters, as Wordsworth has said of certain sonnets during his tour in Scotland and on the English border, that they

Have moved in order, to each other bound
By a continuous and acknowledged tie
Though unapparent, like those shapes distinct
That yet survive ensculptured on the walls
Of Palace, or of Temple, 'mid the wreck
of famed Persepolis; each following each,
As might beseem a stately embassy
In set array; these bearing in their hands
Ensign of civil power, weapon of war,
Or gift to be presented at the Throne
Of the Great King; and others as they go
In priestly vest, with holy offerings charged,
Or leading victims dressed for sacrifice.

For an ordinary book then the ordinary division into chapters might very well have

Hath not the Quarterly Review - that Review which among all Reviews is properly accounted facile Princeps, — hath not that great critical authority referred to it Kaт' tox as "the extraordinary book called the Doctor"? Yes, reader

All things within it

Are so digested, fitted and composed
As it shows Wit had married Order.*

And as the exceptions in grammar prove the rule, so the occasional interruptions of order here are proofs of that order, and in reality belong to it.

Lord Bacon (then Sir Francis) said in a letter to the Bishop of Ely upon sending him his writing intitled Cogitata et Visa, "I am forced to respect as well my times, as the matter. For with me it is thus, and I think with all men in my case: if I bind myself to an argument, it loadeth my mind; but if I rid my mind of the present cogitation, it is rather a recreation. This hath put me into these miscellanies, which I purpose to suppress if God give me leave to write a just and perfect volume of philosophy."

That I am full of cogitations, like Lord Bacon, the judicious reader must ere this time have perceived, though he may perhaps think me not more worthy on that score to be associated with Bacon, than beans or cabbage, or eggs at best. Like him, however, in this respect I am, however unlike in others; and it is for the reader's recreation as well as mine, and for our mutual benefit, that my mind should be delivered of some of its cogitations as soon as they are ripe for birth.

I know not whence thought comes; who indeed can tell? But this we know, that like the wind it cometh as it listeth. Happily there is no cause for me to say with Sir Philip Sydney,

If I could think how these my thoughts to leave;
Or thinking still, my thoughts might have good end;

If rebel Sense would Reason's law receive,

Or Reason foiled would not in vain contend; Then might I think what thoughts were best to think, Then might I wisely swim, or gladly sink.

B. JONSON.

they bear, to denote that they are no more a necessary and essential part of this opas, than the voluntary is of the church service.

Εισὶν δὲ περὶ τοῦ ;

Περὶ ̓Αθηνῶν, περὶ Πύλου,

Περὶ σοῦ, περὶ ἐμοῦ, περὶ ἁπάντων πραγμάτων. Η

A Chapter is, as has been explained, both procreated and procreative: an Interchapter is like the hebdomad, which profound philosophers have pronounced to be not only παρθένος, but ἀμήτωρ, a motherless as well as a virgin number.

Here, too, the exception illustrates the rule. There are at the commencement of the third volume four Interchapters in succession, and relating to each other, the first gignitive but not generated; the second and third both generated and gignitive, the fourth generated but not gignitive. They stand to each other in the relation of Adam, Seth, Enoch, Kenan. These are the exceptions. The other chapters are all Mel

chizedekites.

The gentle Reader will be satisfied with this explanation; the curious will be pleased with it. To the captious one I say in the words of John Bunyan, "Friend, howsoever thou camest by this book, I will assure thee thou wert least in my thoughts when I writ it. I tell thee, I intended the book as little for thee as the goldsmith intended his jewels and rings for the snout of a sow!"

If any be not pleased, let them please themselves with their own displeasure. Je n'ay pas enterpris de contenter tout le monde: mesme Jupiter n'aggrée à tous.†

CHAPTER CIX.

INCIDENTAL MENTION OF HAMMOND, SIR EDMUND KING, JOANNA BAILLIE, SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE, AND MR. THOMAS PEREGRINE COURTENAY. PETER COLLINSON AN ACQUAINTANCE of mr. AlliSON'S. HOLYDAYS AT THAXTED GRANGE.

And sure there seem of human kind
Some born to shun the solemn strife;
Some for amusive tasks design'd

To soothe the certain ills of life,
Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose,
New founts of bliss disclose,

Call forth refreshing shades and decorate repose.
SHENSTONE.

DR. HAMMOND says he had "heard say of a his farewell of his son, and considering what man who, upon his death-bed, being to take course of life to recommend that might secure his innocence, at last enjoined him to

spend his time in making verses, and in dressing a garden; the old man thinking no temptation could creep into either of these employments." As to the former part of this counsel, a certain Sir Edmund King Watts in his youth, he said to him, "Young was of a different opinion; for meeting with

man,

advise you never to do it but when you I hear that you make verses! Let me can't help it." If there were ever a person who could not help it, Joanna Baillie would have said nothing more than what was strictly true, when she observed that "surely intoxication in it, and can turn a sensible writing verses must have some power of man into a fool by some process of mental alchemy."

Gardening," says Mr. Courtenay, in his Life of Sir William Temple, "is a pursuit peculiarly adapted for reconciling and combining the tastes of the two sexes, and indeed of all ages. It is, therefore, of all amusements the most retentive of domestic affection. It is, perhaps, most warmly pursued by the very young, and by those who are far advanced in life, - before the mind is occupied with worldly business, and after it has become disgusted with it. There is nothing in it to remind of the bustle of political life; and it requires neither a

sanguine disposition nor the prospect of a long life, to justify the expectation of a beautiful result from the slight and easy care which it exacts. Is it too much to say that the mind which can with genuine taste occupy itself in gardening, must have preserved some portion of youthful purity; that it must have escaped, during its passage through the active world its deeper contaminations; and that no shame nor remorse can have found a seat in it."

Certainly it is not too much to say this of Sir William Temple; nor would it be too much to say it of his biographer, whether he occupy himself, or not, in gardening as well as in literature, after many laborious years honourably passed in political and official life.

Peter Collinson, whose pious memory ought to be a standing toast at the meetings of the Horticultural Society, used to say that he never knew an instance in which the pursuit of such pleasure as the culture of a garden affords, did not either find men temperate and virtuous, or make them so. And this may be affirmed as an undeniable and not unimportant fact relating to the lower classes of society, that wherever the garden of a cottage, or other humble dwelling, is carefully and neatly kept, neatness and thrift, and domestic comfort, will be found within doors.

When Mr. Allison settled at Thaxted Grange, English gardens were beginning generally to profit by the benevolent and happy endeavours of Peter Collinson to improve them. That singularly good man availed himself of his mercantile connexions, and of the opportunities afforded him by the Royal Society, of which he was one of the most diligent and useful members, to procure seeds and plants from all parts of the world, and these he liberally communicated to his friends. So they found their way first into the gardens of the curious, then of the rich, and lastly, when their beauty recommended them, spread themselves into those of ordinary persons. He divided his time between his counting-house in Gracechurch Street and his country.

house and garden, at Mill Hill, near Hendon; it might have grieved him could he have foreseen that his grounds there would pass, after his death, into the hands of a purchaser who, in mere ignorance, rooted out the rarest plants, and cut down trees which were scarcely to be found in perfection anywhere else in the kingdom at that time.

Mr. Collinson was a man of whom it was truly said that, not having any public station, he was the means of procuring national advantages for his country, and possessed an influence in it which wealth cannot purchase, and which will be honoured when titles are forgotten. For thirty years he executed gratuitously the commissions of the Philadelphian Subscription Library, the first which was established in America; he assisted the directors in their choice of books, took the whole care of collecting and shipping them, and transmitted to the directors the earliest accounts of every improvement in agriculture and the arts, and of every philosophical discovery.

Franklin, who was the founder of that library, made his first electrical experiments with an apparatus that had been sent to it as a present by Peter Collinson. He deemed it therefore a proper mark of acknowledg ment to inform him of the success with which it had been used, and his first Essays on Electricity were originally communicated in letters to this good man. They were read in the Royal Society, "where they were not thought worth so much notice as to be printed in their transactions ;" and his paper in which the sameness of lightning with electricity was first asserted, was laughed at by the connoisseurs. Peter Collinson, however, gave the letters to Cave for the Gentleman's Magazine; Cave forming a better judgment than the Royal Society had done, printed them separately in a pamphlet, for which Dr. Fothergill wrote a preface; the pamphlet by successive additions swelled to a volume in quarto which went through five editions, and, as Franklin observes, "cost Cave nothing for copy money."

What a contrast between this English

Quaker and Monsieur Le Cour (observe, reader, I call him Monsieur, lest you should mistake him for a Dutchman, seeing that he lived at Leyden,) who, having raised a double tuberose from the seed, and propagated it by the roots, till he had as many as he could find room to plant, destroyed the rest as fast as they were produced, that he might boast of being the only person in Europe who possessed it. Another French florist of the same stamp, M. Bachelier was his name, kept in like manner some beautiful species of the anemone to himself, which he had procured from the East Indies, and succeeded in withholding them for ten years from all who wished to possess them likewise. A counsellor of the Parliament, however, one day paid him a visit when they were in seed, and in walking with him round the garden, contrived to let his gown fall upon them; by this means he swept off a good number of the seeds, and his servant, who was apprised of the scheme, dexterously wrapt up the gown and secured them. Any one must have been a sour moralist who should have considered this to be a breach of the eighth commandment.

Mr. Allison was well acquainted with Peter Collinson; he and his sister sometimes visited him at Mill Hill, and upon their removal into Yorkshire they were supplied from thence with choice fruit trees, and fine varieties of the narcissus and polyanthus, which were the good Quaker's favourite tribes. The wall-fruits were under Mr. Allison's especial care; he called himself, indeed, First Lord of the Fruit Department; and if the first lords of certain other departments had taken as much pains to understand their business, and to perform it, the affairs of the state would have been better managed than they were in his days, and than they are in ours. Some part also he took in directing the business of the kitchen-garden; but the flowers were left entirely to Betsey and her aunt.

The old poet who called himself Shepherd Tonie, and whom Sir Egerton, with much likelihood, supposes to have been Anthony Munday, gives in his Woodman's Walk an

unfavourable representation of provincial morals, when, after forsaking the court and the city, because he had found nothing but selfishness and deceit in both, he tried the country.

There did appear no subtle shows,

But yea and nay went smoothly:
But Lord! how country folks can glose
When they speak most untruly!
More craft was in a buttoned cap
And in the old wives' rail,
Than in my life it was my hap

To see on down or dale.
There was no open forgery,

But underhanded gleaning,
Which they call country policy,

But hath a worser meaning.
Some good bold face bears out the wrong,
Because he gains thereby ;

The poor man's back is crackt ere long,
Yet there he lets him lie:
And no degree among them all

But had such close intending,
That I upon my knees did fall

And prayed for their amending.

If the author of these verses, or any one who entertained the same opinion, had been a guest of Mr. Allison's at Thaxted Grange, and had remained under his roof long enough to see the way of life there, and the condition of the hamlet, he would have gone away with a very different persuasion. It was a remark of Bishop Percy's that you may discern in a country parish whether there is a resident clergyman or not, by the civil or savage manners of the people. The influence of the clergyman, however exemplary he may be, is materially impaired if his benefice is so poor and his means so straitened that his own necessities leave him little or nothing to spare; but when such a parish priest as Mr. Bacon has for his neighbour such a resident landholder as his friend at the Grange, happy are-not the cottagers only, but all who live within their sphere.

There was no alehouse in the hamlet, and as the fashion of preserves had not yet been introduced, there were no poachers, the inhabitants being thus happily exempted from two of the great temptations with which in our days men of that class are continually beset. If a newspaper ever found its way among them, newspapers were at that time harmless; and when a hawker came he had no pestiferous tracts, either seditious or sec