winds and currents to be encountered, and all the contingencies and perils of the sea. How often has it been seen that sons, not otherwise deficient in duty toward their parents, have, in the most momentous concerns of life, taken the course most opposite to that in which they were trained to go, going wrong where the father would have directed them aright, or taking the right path in spite of all inducements and endeavours for leading them wrong! The son of Charles Wesley, born and bred in Methodism and bound to it by all the strongest ties of pride and prejudice, became a papist. This indeed was but passing from one erroneous persuasion to another, and a more inviting one. But Isaac Casaubon also had the grief of seeing a son seduced into the Romish superstition, and on the part of that great and excellent man, there had been no want of discretion in training him, nor of sound learning and sound wisdom. Archbishop Leighton, an honour to his church, his country, and his kind, was the child of one of those firebrands who kindled the Great Rebellion. And Franklin had a son, who notwithstanding the example of his father (and such a father!) continued stedfast in his duty as a soldier and a subject; he took the unsuccessful side - but

-nunquam successu crescat honestum.*

No such disappointment was destined to befal our Daniel. The way in which he trained up his son was that into which the bent of the boy's own nature would have led him; and all circumstances combined to favour the tendency of his education. The country abounding in natural objects of sublimity and beauty (some of these singular in their kind) might have impressed a duller imagination than had fallen to his lot; and that imagination had time enough for its workings during his solitary walks to and from school morning and evening. His home was in a lonely spot; and having neither brother nor sister, nor neighbours near enough in any degree to supply their place as playmates, he became his father's com

* LUCAN.

panion imperceptibly as he ceased to be his fondling. And the effect was hardly less apparent in Daniel than in the boy. He was no longer the same taciturn person as of yore; it seemed as if his tongue had been loosened, and when the reservoirs of his knowledge were opened they flowed freely.

Their chimney corner on a winter's evening presented a group not unworthy of Sir Joshua's pencil. There sate Daniel, richer in marvellous stories than ever traveller who in the days of mendacity returned from the East; the peat fire shining upon a countenance which weather-hardened as it was, might have given the painter a model for a Patriarch, so rare was the union which it exhibited of intelligence, benevolence and simplicity. There sate the boy with open eyes and ears, raised head, and fallen lip, in all the happiness of wonder and implicit belief. There sate Dinah, not less proud of her husband's learning than of the towardly disposition and promising talents of her son,

twirling the thread at her spinning-wheel, but attending to all that past; and when there was a pause in the discourse, fetching a deep sigh, and exclaiming, "Lord bless us! what wonderful things there are in the world!" There also sate Haggy, knitting stockings, and sharing in the comforts and enjoyments of the family when the day's work was done. And there sate William Dove;-but William must have a chapter to himself.

born with one of those heads in which the thin partition that divides great wits from folly is wanting. Had he come into the world a century sooner, he would have been taken nolens volens into some Baron's household, to wear motley, make sport for the guests and domestics, and live in fear of the rod. But it was his better fortune to live in an age when this calamity rendered him liable to no such oppression, and to be precisely in that station which secured for him all the enjoyments of which he was capable, and all the care he needed. In higher life, he would probably have been consigned to the keeping of strangers who would have taken charge of him for pay; in a humbler degree he must have depended upon the parish for support; or have been made an inmate of one of those moral lazarhouses in which age and infancy, the harlot and the idiot, the profligate and the unfortunate are herded together.

William Dove escaped these aggravations of calamity. He escaped also that persecution to which he would have been exposed in populous places where boys run loose in packs, and harden one another in impudence, mischief and cruelty. Natural feeling, when natural feeling is not corrupted, leads men to regard persons in his condition with a compassion not unmixed with awe. It is common with the country people when they speak of such persons to point significantly at the head and say 'tis not all there;words denoting a sense of the mysteriousness of our nature which perhaps they feel more deeply on this than on any other occasion. No outward and visible deformity can make them so truly apprehend how fearfully and wonderfully we are made.

William Dove's was not a case of fatuity. Though all was not there, there was a great deal. He was what is called half-saved. Some of his faculties were more than ordinarily acute, but the power of self conduct was entirely wanting in him. Fortunately it was supplied by a sense of entire dependence which produced entire docility. A dog does not obey his master more dutifully than William obeyed his brother; and in

this obedience there was nothing of fear; with all the strength and simplicity of a child's love, it had also the character and merit of a moral attachment.

The professed and privileged fool was generally characterised by a spice of knavery, and not unfrequently of maliciousness: the unnatural situation in which he was placed, tended to excite such propensities and even to produce them. William had shrewdness enough for the character, but nothing of this appeared in his disposition; ill-usage might perhaps have awakened it, and to a fearful degree, if he had proved as sensible to injury as he was to kindness. But he had never felt an injury. He could not have been treated with more tenderness in Turkey (where a degree of holiness is imputed to persons in his condition) than was uniformly shown him within the little sphere of his perambulations. It was surprising how much he had picked up within that little sphere. Whatever event occurred, whatever tale was current, whatever traditions were preserved, whatever superstitions were believed, William knew them all; and all that his insatiable ear took in, his memory hoarded. Half the proverbial sayings in Ray's volume were in his head, and as many more with which Ray was quainted. He knew many of the stories which our children are now receiving as novelties in the selections from Grimm's Kinder und Haus-Marchen, and as many of those which are collected in the Danish Folk-Sagn. And if some zealous lover of legendary lore, (like poor John Leyden, or Sir Walter Scott,) had fallen in with him, the Shakesperian commentators might perhaps have had the whole story of St. Withold; the Wolf of the World's End might have been identified with Fenris and found to be a relic of the Scalds and Rauf Collyer and John the Reeve might still have been as well known as Adam Bell, and Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslie.

unac

William had a great fondness for his nephew. Let not Protestants suppose that Nepotism is an affection confined to the dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church. In

its excess indeed it is peculiarly a Papal vice, — which is a degree higher than a Cardinal one; but like many other sins it grows out of the corruption of a good feeling. It may be questioned whether fond uncles are not as numerous as unkind ones, notwithstanding our recollections of King Richard and the Children in the Wood. We may use the epithet nepotious for those who carry this fondness to the extent of doting, and as expressing that degree of fondness it may be applied to William Dove: he was a nepotious uncle. The father regarded young Daniel with a deeper and more thoughtful, but not with a fonder affection, not with such a doting attachment. Dinah herself, though a fond as well as careful mother, did not more thoroughly

delight to hear

Her early child mis-speak half-uttered words ;*

and perhaps the boy, so long as he was incapable of distinguishing between their moral qualities, and their relative claims to his respect and love and duty, loved his uncle most of the three. The father had no idle hours; in the intervals when he was not otherwise employed, one of his dear books usually lay open before him, and if he was not feeding upon the page, he was ruminating the food it had afforded him. But William Dove, from the time that his nephew became capable of noticing and returning caresses seemed to have concentred upon him all his affections. With children affection seldom fails of finding its due return; and if he had not thus won the boy's heart in infancy, he would have secured it in childhood by winning his ear with these marvellous stories. But he possessed another talent which would alone have made him a favourite with children, the power of imitating animal sounds with singular perfection. A London manager would have paid him well for performing the cock in Hamlet. He could bray in octaves to a nicety, set the geese gabbling by addressing them in their own tongue, and make the turkey-cock spread his fan, brush his wing

* DONNE.

against the ground, and angrily gob-gobble in answer to a gobble of defiance. But he prided himself more upon his success with the owls, as an accomplishment of more difficult attainment. In this Mr. Wordsworth's boy of Winander was not more perfect. Both hands were used as an instrument in producing the notes; and if Pope could have heard the responses which came from barn and doddered oak and ivied crag, he would rather, (satirist as he was,) have left Ralph unsatirised, than have vilified one of the wildest and sweetest of nocturnal sounds.

He was not less expert to a human ear in hitting off the wood-pigeon's note, though he could not in this instance provoke a reply. This sound he used to say ought to be natural to him, and it was wrong in the bird not to acknowledge his relation. Once when he had made too free with a lass's lips, he disarmed his brother of a reprchensive look, by pleading that as his name was William Dove it behoved him both to bill and to coo.

CHAPTER XI. P. I.

A WORD TO THE READER, SHOWING WHERE
WE ARE, AND HOW WE CAME HERE, AND
AND
WHEREFORE ;
WHITHER WE ARE
GOING.

'Tis my venture On your retentive wisdom.

BEN JONSON.

READER, you have not forgotten where we are at this time: you remember I trust, that we are neither at Dan nor Beersheba; nor anywhere between those two celebrated places; nor on the way to either of them : but that we are in the Doctor's parlour, that Mrs. Dove has just poured out his seventh cup of tea, and that the clock of St. George's has struck five. In what street, parade, place, square, row, terrace or lane, and in what town, and in what county; and on what day, and in what month, and in what year, will be explained in due time. You cannot but remember what was said in the second

chapter post initium concerning the importance and the necessity of order in an undertaking like this. "All things," says Sir Thomas Brown, "began in order; so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order, and mystical mathematics of the City of Heaven:" This awful sentence was uttered by the Philosopher of Norwich upon occasion of a subject less momentous than that whereon we have entered, for what are the mysteries of the Quincunx compared to the delineation of a human mind? Be pleased only at present to bear in mind where we are. Place but as much confidence in me as you do in your review, your newspaper, and your apothecary; give me but as much credit as you expect from your tailor; and if your apothecary deserves that confidence as well, it will be well for you, and if your credit is as punctually redeemed, it will be well for your tailor. It is not without cause that I have gone back to the Doctor's childhood and his birth-place. Be thou assured, O Reader! that he never could have been seated thus comfortably in that comfortable parlour where we are now regarding him, never by possibility could have been at that time in that spot, and in those circumstances;-never could have been the Doctor that he was, - nay, according to all reasonable induction, all tangible or imaginable probabilities, — never would have been a Doctor at all,—consequently thou never couldst have had the happiness of reading this delectable history, nor I the happiness of writing it for thy benefit and information | and delight,—had it not been for his father's character, his father's books, his schoolmaster Guy, and his Uncle William, with all whom and which, it was therefore indispensable that thou shouldst be made acquainted.

A metaphysician, or as some of my contemporaries would affect to say a psychologist, if he were at all a master of his art bablative (for it is as much an ars bablativa as the law, which was defined to be so by that old traitor and time-server Serjeant Maynard)

a metaphysician I say, would not require more than three such octavo volumes as

those of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population, to prove that no existing circumstance could at this time be what it is, unless all preceding circumstances had from the beginning of time been precisely what they were. But, my good reader, I have too much respect for you, and too much regard for your precious time, and too much employment, or amusement (which is a very rational kind of employment) for my own, to waste it in demonstrating a truism. No man knows the value of time more feelingly than I do!

Man's life, Sir, being

So short, and then the way that leads unto

The knowledge of ourselves, so long and tedious,
Each minute should be precious.*

It is my wish and intention to make you acquainted with a person most worthy to be known, for such the subject of this history will be admitted to be: one whom when you once know him it will be impossible that you should ever forget: one for whom I have the highest possible veneration and regard; (and though it is not possible that your feelings towards him should be what mine are) one who, the more he is known, will and must be more and more admired. I wish to introduce this person to you. Now, Sir, I appeal to your good sense, and to your own standard of propriety, should I act with sufficient respect either to yourself or him, if, without giving you any previous intimation, any information, concerning his character and situation in life; or in any way apprising you who and what he was, I were to knock at your door and simply present him to you as Doctor Dove? No, my dear Sir! it is indispensable that you should be properly informed who it is whom I thus introduce to your acquaintance; and if you are the judicious person that I suppose you to be, you will be obliged to me as long as you live. "For why," as old Higgins hath