church? No,' said he, 'I never have time; on a Sunday our house is always full. I never was at Fulham but once, and that was when I was married; and many people say that was once too often, though my husband was as good a man as ever broke bread-God rest his soul !""

66 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO."

This "Gothic story" was first published, in the year 1764, by Horace Walpole, anonymously, as a work found in the library of an ancient Roman Catholic family in the north of England, and printed at Naples, in black letter, in 1529. "I wished it to be believed ancient," said Walpole, "and almost everybody was imposed upon." The ancient romances have nothing more incredible than a sword which required a hundred men to lift it; or a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a courtyard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; yet the locality is real, and is a massive fortress at Otranto, situated at the southern extremity of the kingdom of Naples. Walpole has described, with his characteristic minuteness, the several portions of the Castle, and the tourist halts to admire the splendid gateway, and, perchance, is spell-bound in the courtyard, where the gigantic helmet appeared. Such is the veritable "Castle of Otranto.'

In a letter to the Rev. William Cole, Walpole confesses how the story was suggested to him :

"When you read of the picture quitting its panel, did not you recollect the portrait of Lord Falkland, all in white, in my gallery? Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning, in the beginning of last June, from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story), and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening, I sat down, and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it-add, that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics. In short, I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning, when my hand and fingers were so weary, that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a paragraph.'

PROGRESS OF METHODISM.

Walpole was an intolerant hater of Methodism. He delights in recording this bon mot of my Lady Townshend. We were talking

of the Methodists; somebody said, "Pray, Madam, is it true that Whitfield has recanted ?" "No, sir, he has only canted."

Again, he says: "Lady Fanny Shirley-the Fanny blooming fair, of Chesterfield and Sir Charles Williams, and to whom Pope addressed a copy of verses on receiving from her a standish and two pens-has chosen this way of bestowing the dregs of her beauty; and Mr. Lyttleton is very near making the same sacrifice of the dregs of all those various characters which he has worn. The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper subjects to work upon; and, indeed, they have a plentiful harvest. I think what you call flagrancy was never more in fashion. Drinking is at the highest wine-mark, and gaming joined with it so violent, that at the last Newmarket meeting, in the rapidity of both, a bank-bill was thrown down, and nobody immediately claiming it, they agreed to give it to a man that was standing by."

MISS SEWARD AND MR. HAYLEY.

Reciprocal flattery is rarely so amusingly portrayed as in the following jeu d'esprit upon the praises the above votaries used to bestow

on each other :

When General Wolfe and his comrades lay in "Wolfe's Cove," about to attack Quebec, he repeated, in a low voice, to the other officers in his boat, the beautiful elegy written in a country churchyard, by Gray. One noble line,

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave,"

must have seemed, at such a moment, fraught with mournful meaning. At the close of the recitation Wolfe added, "Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec." This anecdote is related by Professor Robinson, of Edinburgh, who was then a midshipman, and was in the boat with Wolfe.

66

THE CURSE IN TRISTRAM SHANDY."-STERNE'S DEATH. Towards the close of the sixteenth century, Thomas Chaloner (afterwards Sir Thomas), while travelling in Italy, examined some

alum-works of the Pope's, and finding that it was only want of experienced workmen which prevented his working the alum on his estate near Guisborough, in Yorkshire, he endeavoured to persuade some of the Pope's workmen to accompany him to England. He succeeded; and, in order to smuggle them away, he put two or three of them into casks, and in this manner conveyed them to a ship which was ready to sail. The enraged Pope then thundered a curse against him, which curse is to be found in Charlton's History of Whitby, word for word the same as that read by Dr. Slop. Sterne also used continually to stay with his friend John Hall Stephenson (the liegeman of his story) at Skelton Castle, near Guisborough, and there of course became well acquainted with the curse in question, which is familiarly known to everybody in the neighbourhood.Spectator.

Edward Malone gives the following circumstantial account of the strange exit of the humorist :

*

"The celebrated writer, Sterne, after being long the idol of this town, died in a mean lodging, without a single friend who felt interest in his fate except Becket, his bookseller, who was the only person that attended his interment. He was buried in a graveyard near Tyburn, belonging to the parish of Marylebone, and the corpse being marked by some of the resurrection men (as they are called), was taken up soon afterwards, and carried to an anatomy professor of Cambridge. A gentleman who was present at the dissection, told me he recognised Sterne's face the moment he saw the body."

DAVID HUME, "THE ATHEIST."

When Hume was writing his History of Great Britain, he was living in Edinburgh. He is described by Dr. Carlyle, in his Autobiography, as a man of a social and benevolent temper, and truly the best-natured man in the world. He was branded with the title of an atheist, on account of the many attacks on revealed religion that are to be found in his philosophical works, and in many places of his history. When Mr. Robert Adam, the celebrated architect, and his brother, lived in Edinburgh with their mother, an aunt of Dr. Robertson's, she said to her son, "I shall be glad to see any of your companions to dinner, but I hope you will never bring the atheist here to disturb my peace." But Robert soon fell on a method to reconcile her to him, for he introduced him under another name, or

* Sir James Prior's Life of Malone. The burial-ground referred to is that of the chapel-of-ease in the Bayswater-road, where a head-stone was set up by two Freemasons; and many years after was restored by a shilling subscription.

concealed it carefully from her. When the company parted, she said to her son, "I must confess that you bring very agreeable companions about you, but the large jolly man who sat next me is the most agreeable, of them all," "This was the very atheist," said he, "mother, that you are so much afraid of." "Well," said she, "you may bring him here as much as you please, for he is the most innocent, agreeable, facetious man I ever met with.” "This," says Dr. Carlyle, "was truly the case with him; for though he had much learning and a fine taste, and was professedly a sceptic, though by no means an atheist, he had the greatest simplicity of mind and manner, with the utmost facility and benevolence of temper of any man I ever knew. His conversation was truly irresistible, for while it was enlightened, it was naïve almost to puerility."

Dr. Carlyle never believed that Hume's sceptical principles had laid fast hold on his mind, but thought that his books proceeded rather from affectation of superiority and pride of understanding and love of vain glory. Carlyle was confirmed in this opinion after Hume's death by the following incident related to him by the Hon. Patrick Boyle. When Hume and he were both in London, at the period when David's mother died, Mr. Boyle, hearing of it, soon after went into his apartment-for they lodged in the same housewhen he found him in the deepest affliction and in a flood of tears. After the usual topics of condolence, Mr. Boyle said to him, “My friend, you owe this uncommon grief to your having thrown off the principles of religion; for if you had not, you would have been consoled by the firm belief that the good lady, who was not only the best of mothers, but the most pious of Christians, was now completely happy in the realms of the just." To which David replied, Though I threw out my speculations to entertain and employ the learned and metaphysical world, yet in other things I do not think so differently from the rest of mankind as you may imagine." To this Mrs. Carlyle was a witness.

Dr. Carlyle relates an instance or two of Hume's good-natured pleasantry. Being at Gilmerton, where Hume was on a visit, Sir David Kinlock made him go to Athol-Staneford Church, where Carlyle preached for John Home. When they met before dinner, "What did you mean," said Hume to Carlyle," by treating John's congregation to-day with one of Cicero's academics? I did not think that such heathen morality would have passed in East Lothian." On Monday, when they were assembling to breakfast, Hume retired to the end of the dining-room, when Sir David entered: "What are you doing there, Davy?-come to your breakfast." "Take away the enemy first," said David. The baronet thinking it was

the great fire that kept David in the lower end of the room, rang the bell for a servant to take some of it off. It was not the fire that scared David, but a large Bible that was left on a stand at the upper end of the room, a chapter of which had been read at the family prayers the night before. Add to this, John Home saying to him at the Poker Club, when everybody wondered what could have made a clerk of Sir William Forbes run away with 9007.-" I know that very well," said John Home to David; "for, when he was taken, there was found in his pocket your Philosophical Works and Boston's Fourfold State of Man.”

66

Hume was heard to say that Baron Montesquieu, when asked if he did not think there would soon be a revolution in France favourable to Liberty, answered, "No, for their noblesse had all become poltroons." He said that the Club in Paris (Baron Holbach's) to which he belonged, were of opinion that Christianity would be abolished in Europe by the end of the eighteenth century; and that they laughed at Andrew Stuart for making a battle in favour of a future state, and called him L'ame immortelle.

David Hume had no discernment at all of characters. The only two clergymen whose interests he espoused, and for one of whom he provided, were the two silliest fellows in the Church.

ORIGIN OF DARWIN'S "BOTANIC GARDEN."

Dr. Darwin, one of the "Lichfield luminaries," earned his celebrity by his odd views; but the work which is most inseparably associated with his name, is his "Botanic Garden," the origin of which was as follows:

About the year 1777, he purchased a little wild umbrageous valley, a mile from Lichfield, which he improved by widening and varying the course of a brook that ran through it, and embellishing it with various plants. Miss Seward wrote a short poem upon it, which pleased the Doctor so much, that he said "it ought to form the exordium of a great work. The Linnean System," he added, "is unexplored poetic ground, and a happy subject for the Muses. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed. Ovid made men and women into flowers, plants, and trees. You shall make flowers, plants, and trees into men and women. I," continued Darwin, "will write the notes, which must be scientific, and you shall write the verse. e." Miss Seward observed that, besides her want of botanic knowledge the plan was not strictly proper for a female pen; but that she felt how eminently it was adapted to the efflorescence of his own fancy. He objected the professional danger of coming forward an acknowledged poet.