while they are in circumstances that enable them mutually to oblige and to assist each other, promises well and bids fair to be lasting. But they are no sooner separated from each other, by entering into the world at large, than other connexions and new employments in which they no longer share together, efface the remembrance of what passed in earlier days, and they become strangers to each other for ever. Add to this, the man frequently differs so much from the boy, his principles, manners, temper, and conduct, undergo so great an alteration, - that we no longer recognise in him our old play-fellow, but find him utterly unworthy and unfit for the place he once held in our affections." These sentiments he has also expressed in verse:

School-friendships are not always found,
Though fair in promise, permanent and sound;
The most disinterested and virtuous minds,
In early years connected, time unbinds;
New situations give a different cast

Of habit, inclination, temper, taste;

And he that seem'd our counterpart at first,
Soon shows the strong similitude reversed.
Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm,
And make mistakes for manhood to reform.
Boys are, at best, but pretty buds unblown,
Whose scent and hues are rather guessed than known;
Each dreams that each is just what he appears,
But learns his error in maturer years,
When disposition, like a sail unfurled,
Shows all its rents and patches to the world.

Disposition, however, is the one thing which
undergoes no other change than that of
growth in after life. The physical constitu-
tion, when any morbid principle is innate in
it, rarely alters; the moral constitution
(except by a miracle of God's mercy) —

never.

—Ανθρώποις δ' ἀεὶ

Ο μὲν πονηρός, οὐδὲν ἄλλο πλὴν κακός. "Believe, if you will," say the Persians, "that a mountain has removed from one place to another; but if you are told that a man has changed his nature, believe it not!"

The best of us have but too much cause for making it part of our daily prayer that we fall into no sin! But there is an original pravity which deserves to be so called

EURIPIDES.

in the darkest import of the term, -an inborn and incurable disease of the moral being, manifested as soon as it has strength to show itself; and wherever this is perceived in earliest youth, it may too surely be predicted what is to be expected when all control of discipline is removed. Of those that bring with them such a disposition into the world, it cannot be said that they fall into sin, because it is too manifest that they seek and pursue it as the bent of their nature. No wonder that wild theories have been devised to account for what is so mysterious, so awful, and yet so incontestable ! Zephaniah Holwell, who will always be remembered for his sufferings in the Black Hole, wrote a strange book in which he en deavoured to prove that men were fallen angels, that is, that human bodies are the forms in which fallen angels are condemned to suffer for the sins which they have committed in their former state. Akin to this is the Jewish fancy, held by Josephus, as well as his less liberalised countrymen, that the souls of wicked men deceased got into the bodies of the living and possessed them; and by this agency they accounted for all diseases. Holwell's theory is no doubt as old as any part of the Oriental systems of philosophy and figments; it is one of the many vain attempts to account for that fallen nature of which every man who is sincere enough to look into his own heart, finds there what may too truly be called an indwelling witness. Something like the Jewish notion was held by John Wesley and Adam Clarke; and there are certain cases in which it is difficult not to admit it, especially when the question of the demoniacs is considered. Nor is there any thing that shocks us in supposing this to be possible for the body, and the mind also, as depending upon the bodily organs. But that the moral being, the soul itself, the life of life, the immortal part, should appear, as so often it undoubtedly does, to be thus possessed, this indeed is of all mysterious things the darkest.

For a disposition thus evil in its nature it almost seems as if there could be no hope.

--

On the other hand, there is no security in a good one, if the support of good principles (that is to say, of religion of Christian faith-) be wanting. It may be soured by misfortunes, it may be corrupted by wealth, it may be blighted by neediness, it may lose "all its original brightness."

School friendships arise out of sympathy of disposition at an age when the natural disposition is under little control and less disguise; and there are reasons enough, of a less melancholy kind than Cowper contemplated, why so few of these blossoms set, and of those which afford a promise of fruit, why so small a proportion should bring it to maturity. "The amity that wisdom knits not folly may easily untie *;" and even when not thus dissolved, the mutual attachment which in boyhood is continually strengthened by similarity of circumstance and pursuits, dies a natural death in most cases when that similarity ceases. If one goes north in the intellectual bearings of his course in life, and the other south, they will at last be far as the poles asunder. If their pursuits are altogether different, and their opinions repugnant, in the first case they cease to think of each other with any warm interest; in the second, if they think of each other at all, it is with an uncomfortable feeling, and a painful sense of change.

The way in which too many ordinary minds are worsened by the mere course of time is finely delineated by Landor, in some verses which he designed as an imitation, not of a particular passage in a favourite Greek author, but of his manner and style of thought.

Friendship, in each successive stage of life,
As we approach him, varies to the view;
In youth he wears the face of Love himself,
Of Love without his arrows and his wings.
Soon afterwards with Bacchus and with Pan
Thou findest him; or hearest him resign,
To some dog-pastor, by the quiet fire,
With much good-will and jocular adieu,
His age-worn mule, or broken-hearted steed.
Fly not, as thou wert wont, to his embrace;
Lest, after one long yawning gaze, he swear
Thou art the best good fellow in the world,

But he had quite forgotten thee, by Jove! Or laughter wag his newly bearded chin At recollection of his childish hours.

But wouldst thou see, young man, his latest form,
When e'en this laughter, e'en this memory fails,
Look at yon fig-tree statue! golden once,

As all would deem it, rottenness falls out
At every little hole the worms have made;
And if thou triest to lift it up again

It breaks upon thee! Leave it! touch it not !
Its very lightness would encumber thee.
Come thou hast seen it: 'tis enough; be gone!

The admirable writer who composed these verses in some melancholy mood, is said to be himself one of the most constant and affectionate of friends. It may indeed safely be affirmed, that generous minds, when they have once known each other, never can be alienated as long as both retain the characteristics which brought them into union. No distance of place, or lapse of time, can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth. There are even some broken attachments in friendship as well as in love which nothing can destroy, and it sometimes happens that we are not conscious of their strength till after the disruption.

There are a few persons known to me in years long past, but with whom I lived in no particular intimacy then, and have held no correspondence since, whom I could not now meet without an emotion of pleasure deep enough to partake of pain, and who, I doubt not, entertain for me feelings of the same kind and degree; whose eyes sparkle when they hear, and glisten sometimes when they speak of me; and who think of me as I do of them, with an affection that increases as we advance in years. This is because our moral and intellectual sympathies have strengthened; and because, though far asunder, we know that we are travelling the same road toward our resting place in heaven. "There is such a pleasure as this," says Cowper, "which would want explanation to some folks, being perhaps a mystery to those whose hearts are a mere muscle, and serve only for the purposes of an even circulation."

SHAKESPEARE.

CHAPTER LXXXVI.

PETER HOPKINS.

REASONS FOR SUPPOSING

THAT HE WAS AS GOOD A PRACTITIONER

BEST.

THE FITTEST MASTER FOR DANIEL

Or all the persons with whom Daniel Dove associated at Doncaster, the one who produced the most effect upon his mind was his master and benefactor, Peter Hopkins. The influence indeed which he exercised, insensibly as it were, upon his character, was little less than that whereby he directed and fixed the course of his fortune in life. A better professional teacher in his station could nowhere have been found; for there was not a more skilful practitioner in the Three Ridings, consequently not in England; consequently not in Christendom, and by a farther consequence not in the world. Fuller says of Yorkshire that "one may call, and justify it to be the best shire in England; and that not by the help of the general katachresis of good for great, (as a good blow, a good piece, &c.,) but in the proper acceptation thereof. If in Tully's Orations, all being excellent, that is adjudged optima quæ longissima, the best which is the longest; then by the same proportion, this Shire, partaking in goodness alike with others, must be allowed the best." Yorkshire therefore being the best county in England, as being the largest, of necessity it must have as good practitioners in medicine as are to be found in any other county; and there being no better practitioner than Peter Hopkins there, it would have been in vain to seek for a better elsewhere.

As good a one undoubtedly might have been found;

whose peculiarities would have accorded so curiously with young Daniel's natural bent, and previous education. Hopkins had associated much with Guy, in the early part of their lives; (it was indeed through this connexion that the lad was placed at Doncaster); and, like Guy, he had tampered with the mystical sciences. He knew the theories, and views, and hopes

which set the Chymist on

To search that secret-ratured stone, Which the philosophers have told, When found, turns all things into gold; But being hunted and not caught,

Oh! sad reverse! turns gold to nought. †

This knowledge he had acquired, like his old friend, for its own sake,-for the pure love of speculation and curious inquiry, not with the slightest intention of ever pursuing it for the desire of riches. He liked it, because it was mysterious; and he could listen with a half-believing mind to the legends (as they may be called) of those Adepts who from time to time have been heard of, living as erratic a life as the Wandering Jew; but with this difference, that they are under no curse, and that they may forego their immortality, if they do not choose to renew the lease of it, by taking a dose of the elixir in due time.

He could cast a nativity with as much exactness, according to the rules of art, as William Lilly, or Henry Coley, that Merlinus Anglicus Junior, upon whom Lilly's mantle descended; or the Vicar of Thornton in Buckinghamshire, William Bredon, a profound Divine, and "absolutely the most polite person for nativities in that age; who being Sir Christopher Heydon's chaplain, had a hand in composing that Knight's Defence of Judicial Astrology; but withal

was so given over to tobacco and drink, that when he had no tobacco, he would cut the bell-ropes, and smoke them.

Peter Hopkins could erect a scheme either according to the method of Julius Firmicus, or of Aben-Ezra, or of Campanus, Alcabitius, or Porphyrius, "for so many ways are there of building these houses in the air; and in that other called the Rational Way, which in a great degree superseded the rest, and which Johannes Muller, the great Regiomontanus, gave to the world in his Tables of Directions, drawn up at the Archbishop of Strigonia's request. He could talk of the fiery and the earthly Trigons, the aerial and the watery; and of that property of a triangle-(now no longer regarded at Cambridge) whereby Sol and Jupiter, Luna and Venus, Saturn and Mercury, respectively become joint Trigonocrators, leaving Mars to rule over the watery Trigon alone. He knew the Twelve Houses as familiarly as he knew his own; the Horoscope, which is the House of Life, or more awfully to unlearned ears, Domus Vite; the House of Gain and the House of Fortune; - for Gain and Fortune no more keep house together in heaven, than either of them do with Wisdom, and Virtue, and Happiness on earth; the Hypogeum, or House of Patrimony, which is at the lowest part of heaven, the Imum Cæli, though it be in many respects a good house to be born in here below; the Houses of Children, of Sickness, of Marriage, and of Death; the House of Religion; the House of Honours, which, being the Mesouranema, is also called the Heart of Heaven; the Agathodemon, or House of Friends, and the Cacodemon, or House of Bondage. All these he knew, and their Consignificators, and their Chronocrators or Alfridarii, who give to these Consignificators a septennial dominion in succession.

He could ascertain the length of the planetary hour at any given time and place, anachronism being nowhere of greater consequence, for if a degree be mistaken in the scheme, there is a year's error in the prognostication, and so in proportion for any inaccuracy more or less. Sir Christopher

In quas Fortunæ leges quæque hora valeret ; Quantaque quam parvi facerent discrimina motus.* Peter Hopkins could have explained to a student in this art, how its astronomical part might be performed upon the celestial globe "with speed, ease, delight, and demonstration." He could have expatiated upon conjunctions and oppositions; have descanted upon the four Cardinal Houses; signs fixed, moveable, or common; signs human and signs bestial; semi-sextiles, sextiles, quintiles, quartiles, trediciles, trines, biquintiles and quincunxes; the ascension of the planets, and their declination; their dignities essential and accidental; their exaltation and retrogradation; till the hearer by understanding a little of the baseless theory, here and there, could have persuaded himself that he comprehended all the rest. And if it had been necessary to exact implicit and profound belief, by mysterious and horisonant terms, he could have amazed the listener with the Lords of Decanats, the Five Fortitudes, and the Head and Tail of the Dragon; and have astounded him by ringing changes upon Almugea, Cazimi, Hylech, Aphetes, Anacretes and Alcochodon.

"So far," says Fabian Withers, are they distant from the true knowledge of physic which are ignorant of astrology, that they ought not rightly to be called physicians, but deceivers: —for it hath been many times experimented and proved, that that which many physicians could not cure or remedy with their greatest and strongest medicines, the astronomer hath brought to pass with one simple herb, by observing the moving of the signs. There be certain evil times and years of a man's life, which are at every seven years' end. Wherefore if thou wilt prolong thy days, as often as thou comest to every seventh or ninth year (if

MANILIUS.

thou givest any credit to Marsilius Ficinus, or Firmicus), diligently consult with an astronomer, from whence and by what means any peril or danger may happen, or come unto thee; then either go unto a physician, or use discretion and temperance, and by that means thou mayest defer and prolong thy natural life through the rules of astronomy, and the help of the physician. Neither be ashamed to inquire of the physician what is thy natural diet, and of the astronomer what star doth most support and favour thy life, and to see in what aspect he is with the moon."

That once eminent student in the mathematics and the celestial sciences, Henry Coley, who, as Merlin junior continued Lilly's Almanac, and published also his own yearly Nuncius Sydereus, or Starry Messenger, the said Coley, whose portrait in a flowing wig and embroidered band, most unlike to Merlin, has made his Ephemeris in request among the Graingerites, he tells us it is from considering the nature of the planets, together with their daily configurations, and the mixture of their rays or beams of light and heat, that astrologers deduce their judgment of what may probably, not positively happen for Nature, he observes, works very abstrusely; and one person may be able to make a better discovery than another, whence arise diversities of opinion too often about the same thing. The physician knows that the same portion of either single or compound simples will not work upon all patients alike; so neither can the like portion and power of qualities stir up, or work always the same; but may sometimes receive either intention or remission according to the disposed aptness of the subject, the elements or elementary bodies not always admitting of their powers alike, or when they be overswayed by more potent and prevalent operations. For universal and particular causes do many times differ so as the one hinders the operation of the other; and Nature may sometimes be so abstrusely shut up, that what we see not may overpower and work beyond what we see."

Thus were these professors of a pseudo

science always provided with an excuse, however grossly their predictions might be contradicted by the event. It is a beautiful specimen of the ambiguity of the art that the same aspect threatened a hump-back or the loss of an eye; and that the same horoscope which prognosticated a crown and sceptre was held to be equally accomplished if the child were born to a fool's-cap, a bauble, and a suit of motley. "The right worshipful, and of singular learning in all sciences, Sir Thomas Smith, the flower in his time of the University of Cambridge," and to whom, more than to any other individual, both Universities are beholden; for when Parliament, in its blind zeal for ultra-reformation, had placed the Colleges, as well as the Religious Houses at the King's disposal, he, through Queen Katharine Par, prevailed upon Henry to preserve them, instead of dividing them also among the great court cormorants; and he it was who reserved for them the third part of their rents in corn, making that a law which had always been his practice when he was Provost of Eton:- this Sir Thomas used, as his grateful pupil Richard Eden has recorded, to call astrology ingeniosissimam artem mentiendi, — the most ingenious art of lying.

Ben Jonson's servant and pupil* has given some good comic examples of the way in which those who honestly endeavoured to read the stars might be deceived, - though when the stars condescended "to palter in a double sense" it was seldom in so good a humour.

One told a gentleman

His son should be a man-killer, and be hang'd for't;
Who after proved a great and rich physician,
And with great fame, in the University
Hang'd up in picture for a grave example!
Another schemist

Found that a squint-eyed boy should prove a notable
Pick-purse, and afterwards a most strong thief;
When he grew up to be a cunning lawyer,
And at last died a Judge!

* BROOME.