a grazier. The cattle, therefore, were not sold, and the bailiff remained in attendance."

The elegance of Tremaine's breakfast did not tempt him to eat; but this he laid upon his feverish night, without much inquiry how he came by it. He said, however, he would read it off, and enjoy himself immediately in that learned retirement, for which in London he had so long sighed. He therefore proceeded to the library.

Arrived in the library, Tremaine feasted his eyes with the sight of all the admirable contrivances of desk, cushion, &c., by which men who profess reading endeavour to court themselves into a liking for what they profess. He had done this for some time, and given much praise to his upholsterer, as well as his bookseller, before he recollected that he had made a small omission, in not having settled any particular subject to which he might give his mind. But as he was in no very good humour with the world, moral philosophy was his ostensible aim; and the ancient philosophers, in splendid editions, all lying before him, with a sensation of some pleasure he opened a Laertius.

"It is delightful," said he, "to pursue the varieties in which these men displayed their wisdom; to contemplate and unravel with them the nature of man!"' He turned over the pages for some time, and read something of several very contending systems: but

though occupied, and therefore comparatively happy, he hurried over, rather than examined, the tenets that were explained; found fault, as he had done an hundred times, with all that was said of virtue or developed of nature, by Pythagoras, or Plato, or Epicurus; thought Aristotle not sufficiently precise ; and ended, as he had often done before, in the satisfaction of scepticism.

His conclusion was not pleasant, though he had taken such pains to come to it. "Arcesilaus, and closing the book,

Carneades, and Cicero," said he,

66

were certainly right, and the only true thing on earth is, that there is no such thing as truth." At the same time, it did not escape him that he had not quite consumed three hours in coming to this conclusion, and that the systems which he then condemned remained exactly in the same state of superficial examination in which he had left them many a time before, promising his own mind to return to them when he had more leisure. In particular, it did not escape him that all the modern theories, founded on a more exact knowledge of nature, and a more clear revelation of all that is held sacred by man, had been entirely, and almost purposely avoided. His eye grew a little bilious as he thought of this, and glanced cursorily over the volumes of Boyle, Butler, Sherlock, and Clark, which were ranged in their places on his ample shelves."I have not

time at present," said he, " to push this subject, but I shall have full leisure for it while in this happy reLeisure? (continued he, looking at a Milton that lay open before him) yes!' retired leisure'

treat.

That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.'

This room is, after all, too dark, and the weather is close. Give me sweet poetry and a garden! these are at least more certain in their impressions. I will pass the rest of the morning in the alcove!" At these words he left the house by a private way, with a Milton under his arm; meaning, as he said, not merely to read, but to study the greater poem of that author once more; a thing he had not done for fifteen years. His finger, however, remained at the passage in the Penseroso, which had involuntarily, as it were, caused his last sensation. It was therefore by no means unnatural, before he underwent the task of taxing his imagination in heaven or heil, to rest a little in the sweet fields of familiar description, which first brought the author to his mind. In a word, he had read over the Penseroso, and part of the Allegro, when he found, though his faculties of vision read, his thoughts wandered, and instead of the tale of the shepherd, the song of the lark, and Thestyllis and Phillis, both his eye and his ear were in the House of Commons.

"Strange!" said he, "that what once could

please, even to rapture, should not please again! Whence is it, that in London, surrounded by a vexatious crowd, I sighed for such a retreat as this, where I might suspect no man's sincerity, and study nature in her most pleasing attire; and here, where I have her, and can compare the delightful original with the copy, that the banquet should fail. Alas! how has every banquet failed me through life!" His brow clouded, he left the alcove, and striking into a covered walk, seemed lost in no pleasing meditation; when he beheld at the end of it several of his servants in noisy mirth, from sheer and absolute want of employment. "The boors!" said he, "they and their amusement are fitted for one another; and very fit it is they should not know more happiness than is their present lot." He did not, however, interrupt their occupations, but turned to a gate which led to some fields.

They were pleasant fields, and in the full joy of the harvest; but on the same principle he avoided these also; observing to himself, that what belonged to the mere animal man was not what he had come to seek. Yet the cheerfulness they presented in the troops of labourers of both sexes, many of whom sang as they loaded the wains with the subsistence of the coming year, might have unbent a mind less sensitive than his.

At one time, indeed, he had nearly entered one

of the fields, (no great condescension in its master, one would think!) when he turned off, murmuring something of "riot, and ill-managed merriment, stirred up among loose, unlettered hinds," and justified his want of interest in this simple scene, by asking himself why he had made these lawns, these private glades, if, after all, he was to pace the rough uneven fields ?

""The dull swain' (said he),

"Treads on them daily with his clouten shoon!

Thus wandered, and thus seemed lost, Tremaine, in a paradise of his own creating.

His eye now moved to the lofty scite of Belmont, and at first he was pleased with its grandeur; but observing that its white buildings glared too much in the sun, which was not sufficiently softened by the extensive, but young plantations which immediately surrounded it, "It would have been better, perhaps," said he,. " if I had built lower down in the old wood."

That thought was not pleasant either, for thousands had been spent in enlarging a seat originally small, and where the family, as we have said, had never regularly lived.

The soil on the summit was of sand, and bore nothing but pines; and some naked rock, upon which pines refused to grow, gave it thus early a very