not of dull men, but the contrary; and have so close a connection with history, nay, with philosophy itself, that they must partake a little of what they are related to so nearly. Besides, tell me, have you ever made the attempt? Are you sure, if Coke had been printed by Elzevir and bound in twenty neat pocket volumes, instead of one folio, you should never have taken him for an hour, as you would a Tully, or drank your tea over him? I know how great an obstacle ill spirits are to resolution. Do you really think, if you rid ten miles every morning, in a week's time you should not entertain much stronger hope of the Chancellorship and think it a much more probable thing than you do at present? To me there hardly appears to be any medium between a public life and a private one; he who prefers the first, must put himself in a way of being serviceable to the rest of mankind, if he has a mind to be of any consequence among them. Nav, he must not refuse being in a certain degree even dependent upon | some men who are so already. If he has the good fortune to light on such as will make no ill use of his humility, there is no shame in this; if not, his ambition ought to give place to a reasonable pride, and he should apply to the cultivation of his own mind those abilities which he has not been permitted to use for others' service. Such a private happiness (supposing a small competence of fortune) is almost always in 66 every one's power. Gray himself nominally entered upon the study of the law; but only nominally; his choice was very soon made in favor of private happiness" and the "cultivation of his own mind." And, if in this early letter, his bias seems to be somewhat in favor of the law and a public career, twenty years later it had become as distinctly the other way. We find him say ing to Wharton: Greek alphabet, we can only hold our breath in silent awe when we are told that Gray had not only thoroughly read and digested the books that made up the literature of the world, but was also a really dent of the history of architecture, a piolearned archæologist, an enthusiastic stu neer to some extent by his chronological tables in the systematic study of Greek history, a cultivated and even learned amateur in music, and what is most astonishing of all to us, an acute, patient, and genuinely scientific observer of natural phenomena. His careful lists, kept from day to day, of the direction of the wind, of the heat his thermometer registers, of the singings and flowerings of birds and plants, would have delighted the heart of the Meteorological and Botanical Societies of the present day. Take one day - April 20, 1760 — from a long list he sends Wharton. April 20. Therm. at 60°. Wind S. W. Skylark, chaffinch, thrush, wren, and robin singing. Horse-chestnut, wildbriar, bramble, and sallow, had spread their leaves. Hawthorn and lilac had formed their blossoms. Blackthorn, doubleflowered peach, and pears in full bloom; anemones, single wallflowers, and auriculars in flower. In the fields, dog violets, daisies, buttercups, and shepherd's purse. One wonders that more of our leisured country gentlemen do not realize what a delightful occupation it is to be the daily witness and companion of that eager, onward march to meet the summer which the birds and flowers make every spring! No one could devise a more innocent occupation; and it is not one of the least useful. A man may enjoy quiet observation of this kind, too, even if he have none of the genuine ardor of the gardener. Gray thought he had this too, but he never had much opportunity of putting his enthusiasm to the proof. To find oneself business (I am persuaded) is the great art of life; and I am never so angry, as when I hear my acquaintance wishing they had been bred to some poking profes sion, or employed in some office of drudgery, as if it were pleasanter to be at the command of other people, then at one's own; and as if And so you have a garden of your own, they could not go, unless they were wound up. and you plant and transplant, and are dirty Yet I know and feel, what they mean by this and amused; are not you ashamed of your. complaint: it proves that some spirit, some- self? Why, I have no such thing, you monthing of genius (more than common) is re-ster, nor ever shall be either dirty or amused quired to teach a man how to employ himself. Whatever other genius Gray had, there is no doubt he was remarkably possessed of this genius of self-employment. He likes talking of his laziness, as every student does, but his labors must have been immense. Nowadays that we are all specialists, and a man who knows anything of physics is indignant at the supposition of his having had at any time to learn his as long as I live! My gardens are in the window, like those of a lodger up three pair of stairs in Petticoat Lane or Camomile Street, and they go to bed regularly under the same roof that I do; dear, how charming it must be to walk out in one's own garden, and sit on a bench in the open air with a fountain, and a leaden statue, and a rolling stone, and an arbor! That his interest in gardening was genuine and serious is proved by his procuring ise you. now the mention, in one of Count Algarotti's | have finished the Peloponnesian war, much to books, of a recognition of our English my honor, and a tight conflict it was, I prom skill in the matter of landscape gardening, I have drank and sung with Anacbeing anxious, as he says, to "save to our reon for the last fortnight, and am nation the only honor it has in matters of feeding sheep with Theocritus. Besides, to taste, and no small one, since neither Italy quit my figure (because it is foolish) I have run over Pliny's Epistles and Martial ex nor France have ever had the least notion Tapépyou; not to mention Petrarch, who, by of it, nor yet do at all comprehend it when the way, is sometimes very tender and natu they see it. ral. I must needs tell you three lines in Anacreon, where the expression seems to me inimitable. He is describing hair as he would have it painted. Ελικας δ ̓ ἐλευθέρους μοι The picking out of these three lines is heart? But, if West brings out Gray's love of books, Wharton will produce for us the lighter side of his character. Who would not like to have received such a letter as The great charm of a collection of letters is, that it lets us see a man in nearly all his moods, and as he actually was at the moment of writing. As long as the letters are spread over a fairly wide period, and are addressed to a fairly wide circle of correspondents, they can hardly fail to tell us their tale, even when most unwilling. Insincerity, with letters as with a journal, must almost always fail, so long as they remain as originally written. When touched up, they of course become autobiographies, which may easily be very successful frauds. But give us what a man, however insincerely, wrote at a particular moment of his life, and we know, if not what he was, at least what he wished to appear, and that is, after all, no bad key to what he really was, especially when it can be applied frequently to almost every year of his life. It has been said by Mr. Goldwin Smith, perhaps in an unnecessarily off-hand way, that " Gray's letters are manifestly written for publication." I can see no sign of this, with regard to the great bulk of them, except that when he has described anything carefully and well in one letter, he is apt to MY DEAR WHARTON, - This is only to enuse the same phrases in another, and that, treat you would order mes gens to clean out I suppose, we all do, unconsciously if not the apartments, spread the carpets, air the consciously. But in any case, with so beds, put up the tapestries, unpaper the many letters and so different, I do not see frames, etc., fit to receive a great potentate, how any one can doubt that we know the who comes down in the flying coach, drawn real Gray as he actually was in life. The by green dragons on Friday, the 10th instant. As the ways are bad, and the dragons a little variety of correspondence is a great safe-out of repair, it will probably be late when he guard in a matter of this kind. A man lands, so he would not choose to be known, naturally writes of what he knows will in- and desires there may be no bells, nor bonterest his correspondent. And so we fires. But as persons incog. love to be seen, might have never been able to realize, to he will slip into the coffee-house. Is Mr. the full extent, Gray's affectionate study Trollope among you? Good luck, he will of the classics if we had lost the letters to pull off my head for never writing to him. West, the only one of his friends who was Oh, Conscience, Conscience! anything like his equal as a scholar. It would be an impossible stretch of affectation to write a letter like the following to any one who was not well read in his Greek and Latin authors. You see, by what I send you, that I converse as usual with none but the dead; they are my old friends, and almost make me long to be with them. You will not wonder, therefore, that I, who live only in times past, am able to tell you no news of the present. I this, and gone down in obedience to it to Here is another letter that must have made a breakfast go down very comfortably. I suppose it is the only contemporary account of the opening of the British Museum; anyhow it is the best. London, July 24, 1759. I am now settled in my new territories com. manding Bedford Gardens, and all the fields as far as Highgate and Hampstead, with such a concourse of moving pictures as would astonish you; so rus-in-urbe-ish, that I believe collection advertised and set to auction. 66 one would think, carry on a successful rivalry with the fatiguing productions of our inexhaustible lady novelists. If any one has a fancy to amuse himself with society and politics, Horace Walpole will give him duchesses and countesses and secretaries of state, and real ones too, to his heart's content. If his taste be country life and quiet humor, he will not find them anywhere in greater perfection than in Cowper. If, like some men and many women, I believe, he reads novels to teach himself how to behave in polite society, Lord Chesterfield is the acknowledged authority in such matters, and has no objection to go into details. Or, if he be possessed of larger interests, or have an ear which asks for a lightness of hand and We were, first, a man that writes for Lord Royston; secondly, a man that writes for Dr. Burton of York; thirdly, a man that writes for the Emperor of Germany, or Dr. Pocock, for he speaks the worst English I ever heard; fourthly, Dr. Stukely, who writes for himself the very worst person he could write for; and lastly, I, who only read to know if there sureness of touch, a power of writing Enbe anything worth writing, and that not with-glish, in fact, not at present possessed by out some difficulty. I find that they printed more than one of our novelists, let him go one thousand copies of the Harleian Cata- to Gray, and the shy little poet of the logue, and have only sold fourscore; that Elegy may prove as interesting as they have £900 a year income and spend many of the heroines of his previous ac£1,300, and are building apartments for the quaintance. At any rate his clear, pointed, underkeepers, so I expect in winter to see the vigorous language, as pure as it is firm and crisp, cannot fail of its charm. Everybody In another letter he finishes up with: enjoys the spell of a genuine and original "The university (we hope) will buy," an personality, which lives its own life and anticipation which may cause some amuse-goes its own way; and Gray was that, at In mind and charment in Great Russell Street, as may also least, if nothing else. his account of the early amenities shown acter, as in trees and plants, the surest by the keepers to each other. sign of life is growth; and Gray never ceased to grow up to the very end. He was always breaking up the fallow ground, and filling in the vacant spaces all his life. "The mind has more room in it than most people seem to think, if you will but furnish the apartments," he says in one place; and in another: "The drift of my present studies is to know, wherever I am, what lies within reach that may be worth seeing, whether it be building, ruin, park, garden, prospect, picture, or monument; to whom it does, or has belonged, and what has been the characteristic and taste of different ages." He is all eager for travel, and sees that it always adds something worth having to a man. "Do not you think a man may be the wiser (I had almost said the better) for going a hundred or two of miles?" And his travelling was not only the fashionable progress through the Continental capitals; he may be called the discoverer of the mountains. When he came back from the Highlands, he said: "The Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year. A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen that have not been among them ;" and neat and particular little man When I call it peaceful, you are to understand it only of us visitors, for the society itself, trustees and all, are up in arms like the fellows of a college. The keepers have broke off all intercourse with one another, and only lower a silent defiance as they pass by. Dr. Knight has walled up the passage to the little house because some of the rest were obliged to pass by one of his windows in the way to it. I think I have quoted enough to show how very readable Gray's letters are, both in themselves and in the pictures they give of the man and of his times. It is really not too much to say that he never wrote a dull letter. His mind is so fresh and alert, he is so open to impression from every side, so alive to see and note whatever of interest is going on about him, that his letters nearly always have about them a certain spring and motion which is peculiarly delightful. There may possibly be a few people who have grown weary of the languor and insipidity of the ordinary novel, and do not know where to go for light reading. Have they ever tried our English letter writers? Letters cannot, no doubt, claim a very high place as serious literature, but they might fairly, גז as he was, he was not afraid when he was | In the highlands of Scotland, on the fifty-two to make a walking tour alone in the lakes, doing three hundred miles in seventeen days, if Mr. Gosse's interpretation of a passage in one of his letters is to be trusted. The journal which he wrote for Wharton records his delight in the scenery, as well as the adventures he went through. Here is one which shows how indefatigable he was: Dined by two o'clock at the Queen's Head, and then straggled out alone to the Parsonage; fell down on my back across a dirty lane, with my glass open in one hand, but broke only my knuckles; stayed nevertheless and saw the sun set in all his glory. The next day after this was one of his happiest; I must find room for a bit of what he says about it. October 3. Wind at S.E., a heavenly day. Rose at seven, and walked out under the conduct of my landlord to Borrodale. The grass was covered with a hoar frost, which soon melted and exhaled in a thin bluish smoke. Our path tends to the left, and the ground gently rising, and covered with a glade of scattering trees and bushes on the very margin of the water, opens both ways the most delicious view that my eyes ever beheld. Behind you are the magnificent heights of Walla-Crag; opposite lie the thick hanging woods of Lord Egremont and Newland valley, with green and smiling fields embosomed in the dark cliffs; to the left the jaws of Borrodale, with that turbulent chaos of mountain behind mountain, rolled in confusion; beneath you, and stretching far away to the right, the shining purity of the Lake, just ruffled by the breeze, enough to show it is alive, reflecting rocks, woods, fields, and inverted tops of mountains, with the white buildings of Keswick and Skiddaw for a background at a distance. Oh, Doctor! I never wished more for you! The enthusiasm which could carry a gouty man the wrong side of fifty through all this would be rare in our own day; in Gray's it was quite unique, and points to a real originality of character in him. Intellectual acuteness was common enough in those days; qualities of soul, among which a love of mountain scenery may without extravagance be ranked, were not never indeed are common. To feel, of oneself and by oneself, and not at second hand, that God's voice is audible among the mountains in an altogether special way, to him who has but ears to hear it, is what does not come to every man, does not come indeed to any man, who has not a more than common soul. But that is just what Gray habitually felt. common Grande Chartreuse, in the roads that wind though the English lakes, it is everywhere the same; he feels that the presence of the mountains is the presence of God. His more than English reserve as to his inner life is apt to make us remember nothing of him but the variety and fascination of his intellectual gifts. But, by doing so, we lose a most real and characteristic side of his character. The same man, whose mental versatility was such that he was equally at home in pointing out to one correspondent the difference between a Lepisma and an Adenanthera, or giving another the names of the inkfish in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, with its place in the order of Mollusca; who made real contributions to the studies of English metre and Greek chronology; who at one moment occupies himself in compiling tables of the weather and the crops, and at another in annotating his large collection of manuscript Italian music, and whose comprehensive powers of appreciation found_Socrates 'divine," and the Comédie Française "beyond measure delightful," was all the while as simple as a child in the things of the inner life. He talks little about religion, and we know nothing of his views about details of doctrine, but his religious feeling was deep, genuine, and unshaken. "No very great wit, he believed in a God," is his own account of himself; and, when any of those things which unlock the secrets of every man's heart- a sorrow, an illness, a death come upon him or his friends, we find him always the same, speaking the same simple language, breathing the same quiet spirit of resignation and hope. He knows the value of 66 sorrow. Methinks I can readily pardon sickness and age and vexation for all the depredations they make within and without, when I think they make us better friends and better men, which I am persuaded is often the case. I am very sure I have seen the best-tempered, generous, tender young creatures in the world, that would have been very glad to be sorry for people they liked when under any pain, and could not, merely for the want of knowing rightly what it was themselves. And his warning to his young friend Bonstetten against the dangers of pleas ure, is that of a man deeply, even anx iously, in earnest. You do me the credit- and false or true it goes to my heart-of ascribing to me your love for many virtues of the highest rank. J. C. BAILEY. Would to heaven it were so; but they are in- | that he is to be remembered, not only for 66 And he adds incidentally: "Poor Mrs. Bonfoy (who taught me to pray) is dead." Still more clearly do his feelings come out in the actual presence of death: He who best knows our nature," he says on one such occasion, "by such afflictions recalls us from our wandering thoughts and idle merriment, from the insolence of youth and prosperity to serious reflection, to our duty, and to himself." And his letter to Mason, written just when his wife lay dying, is one of the most beautiful ever written at such a moment. I must allow myself to give it in full. MY DEAR MASON, I break in upon you at a moment when we least of all are permitted to disturb our friends, only to say that you are daily and hourly present to my thoughts. If the worst be not yet passed, you will neglect and pardon me; but if the last struggle be over, if the poor object of your long anxieties be no longer sensible to your kindness or to her own sufferings, allow me (at least in idea, for what could I do were I present more than this), to sit by you in silence, and pity from my heart, not her who is at rest, but you who lose her. May He who made us, the Master of our pleasures and our pains, preserve and support you. Adieu! From The Gentleman's Magazine. LIFE ON A SUGAR PLANTATION. BARBADOS, the most easterly of the Lesser Antilles or Caribbean islands, is the surface of the earth. It is about the one of the most highly cultivated spots on size of the Isle of Wight, and has been aptly described as a huge allotment garden, for the fields are not large and there are no fences. The whole island is parsmaller holdings, nearly every acre is cultivated, and, except in the immediate neighborhood of dwellings, little else is grown besides sugarcane. celled out into small estates and still The three most prominent characteris. tics of Barbados, the objects that meet you at every turn, are coral-rock, sugarcane, and "colored "people. The island is girt with coral-reefs and six-sevenths of its whole surface consists of coral rock, ancient reefs that have been raised from time to time above the sea and now rise in broad terraces or plateaux, tier above tier, to a height of eleven hundred feet above the sea-level. It is to the labors of the coral polypes in bygone ages that Barbados owes its great fertility and its present prosperity; for the coral rock everywhere supplies an excellent soil, a deep red loam on the higher level, and a rich black earth on the lower plains; and it is only in the area which is not covered by this rock that any barren tracts are found. Sugar is king of Barbados, the whole commerce of the island depends upon the cultivation of sugarcane; in summer time the island is clothed in a mantle of bright green cane, in crop time the fields are cut and the mills are at work, and every available cart, mule, and ox is engaged in drawing the cane from the fields to the mills. Last but by no means least, as a special growth of Barbados, are the colored folk, black and brown of various hues. They So touching a letter raises the man, for are the workmen and laborers of the colwhose sorrow Gray's reserve could be so ony, and consequently they form the beautifully broken, into something more greater part of the population; by their than poor Mason has been commonly labor the cane is planted, tended, and thought to have been; and for Gray, even | finally cut; by them, under white superif it stood alone in its kind, it would prove intendence, the sugar and molasses are |