so often commended.' We know that Dr. Paley held it in high esteem,—so much so that when the Bishop of Durham asked him when his great work would be finished, he answered innocently, as if fly-fishing and not philosophy were the business of his life, 'My Lord, I shall work steadily at it when the fly-fishing season is over!' And we know that glorious old Christopher North has written a book of wonderful idylls upon the craft of which he was so great a professor. Who are you, then, who dare to ridicule the vocation which prophets and apostles, which bishops, and poets, and philosophers, have held in honour? *

Then, of course, there are innumerable other methods of consuming time. The tide rises to the drawing-room window, so that Ardarnan is an admirable place for boating; and all day long the water is covered with tiny craft, manned (if I may use the word) by angelic beings in crinolines and wideawakes, who stir the echoes of the lonely hills

With silken murmurs and elastic sounds
Of lady-laughters light.

A turf that is softer than velvet and 'greener than emeralds newly broken,' is (as Dante observes) peculiarly suited for croquet; and that seductive pursuit

* Not to mention the genial and able editor of the Scotsman, one of the best of fishers, whose little book on The Natural Listory of the Salmon is a fine specimen of bright, rapid, and vigorous logic, a solid and weighty argument, stated with judicial precision and impartiality, if sometimes perhaps with more than judicial liveliness.

which seems to have been beneficently invented to invite public attention to a neat ankle; for a pretty foot under an artfully tucked-up petticoat, never looks prettier than when placed on a croquet-ball-occupies the hour after breakfast and the hour before dinner very judiciously. Then besides the sea-trout in the burn, and the grouse and ptarmigan on the mountains (from the top of which the view over the distant Atlantic is glorious beyond words) there is a famous hill-side seamed by alder and fern-fringed glenlets, adown whose pebbly bottoms the purest water in the world gushes, where a shot at an old black-cock may be had of an autumn afternoon. Did you ever shoot a patriarchal black-cock? If you have, go down on your knees and thank the gracious Immortals; for few joys in this bad world are more ravishing than the spectacle of an 'heroic black-a-moor' (to use the words in which Sir Charles Napier commemorated his enemy, Hoche Mohamed Seedee) wrestling with death in mid-air, and then descending, with a mighty thud, on the heather. Such a joy was vouchsafed to the present writer not many days since; and it is needless to add that, having bathed his face in the clear stream (for the day was oppressively sultry), he laid his victim out in tender state at his feet, and smoked a pipe of thanksgiving over the illustrious dead. A day whose characters are traced in gold! And then-as he went home that evening down the woody glen and across the lake-what magical blues and purples and violets upon the mountain peaks, behind which the sun had newly sunk, and what a glory

of mystical light-mystical as the light in the Morte d'Arthure, the light with which poets and painters have invested Arthur, and Guenevere, and Lancelot-upon the mountain sides! And then-when the other shore was reached-what welcome from friends, old and new, who waited him on the beach!—foremost among them, of course (Scotch blue-bells twisted through the sashes of their bonnets, and their hands filled with brilliant sea-shells), two twin maidens six years old—the daintiest little angels out of heaven,-whose blessing rests continually on that happy innocence and spotless purity. Cannot we recover the blameless life? Is there no Bethesda pool in which to bathe the stained soul and the wearied body? Let us lie down, my pets, on this grassy bank, and you shall teach me the innocent secret of childhood. In vain: in vain. Even the great and wise Paracelsus, who was uncorrupted by the logic of the schools, did not believe that such a cure could heal. A spotless child sleeps on the flowering moss'Tis well for him; but when a sinful man, Envying such slumber, may desire to put His guilt away, shall he return at once To rest-by lying there?

Such are the autumn days of the sportsman; but if you are not a sportsman, sit down by the autumnal sea, and muse over the autumnal moralists. There are a set of books that I always keep for autumn, that harmonise well with the yellow fields, and the ripe berries, and the noise of rooks 'that gather in the waning woods.' Some writers never grow old. They have discovered

that elixir vitæ for which the Alchemist strove more eagerly than he did for gold. Sydney Smith was one of them. He enjoyed perpetual youth. The letters written by him in advanced years are as bright and buoyant as those he wrote when at college. His animal spirits never flagged-his boyish spring and abandon never wearied. The same may be said of the tender and whimsical humanity of Charles Lamb. Lamb does not age. All his life he is like a boy in a man's coat. It would seem, in fact, as though there were some ethereal quality in wit which embalms the faculties, and prevents decay. These wise witty men-Thomas Hood, Lamb, Sydney Smith (and Sydney Smith was as wise as he was witty, being, in truth, one of the shrewdest and soundest thinkers of his day)-are perennial springs which do not dry up. There are other virtues, no doubt, which keep one young. We cannot fancy Charlotte Brontë, for instance, growing old; nor is it easy to associate that keen, bright, eager, passionate, anxious, inquiring spirit with grey hairs and a wrinkled brow. The soul would have retained its youth. The blade would have remained sharp and luminous to the last, whatever became of the scabbard.

I know scarcely any letters more delightful than those written by some of those wonderfully witty people to children and grandchildren. They do not unbend for the nonce; were they to unbend the charm would depart; but they do not need to unbend, for they are children at heart, and the language of childhood is their native tongue. The trenchant faculty is seen at play

like sheet lightning, which carries no bolt or sting, and whose flashes do not hurt. I fancy that a certain great legendary historian must have written many such letters, kind, wise, happily and quaintly nonsensical; but until the time for publication arrives (may it be long deferred!), we must be content with those we have already stored.* But Thomas Hood was the master of the craft. Have we even yet rendered full justice to Thomas Hood? There was an element in his geniusa severe and almost tragic element-which renders him somewhat out of place in the throng of witty and ingenious idlers. Not that he was deficient in the lighter graces and accomplishments that are there imperatively required. On the contrary, for happy and apparently inexhaustible wit, many of his poems are quite unrivalled. But through the pleasant irony of his lighter humour, there runs a vein of exquisite and disguised pathos, as though the strong genius of the satirist were never altogether wanting in earnest tenderness. I love Hood as the brave and honest gentleman, the upright and unaffected reformer, the enemy, to the death, of malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness; but he is never more entirely lovable than when 'babbling o' green fields' to the children of his friends. His daughter has published half-a-dozen of these charming letters, addressed to Dr. Elliot's boys and girls-instinct with fun, tenderness, good-nature, and a lovely purity and uprightness. I promised you a letter,' he writes to May,

* W. M. T. Obiit 24 December, 1863.