of many noble qualities. There is no evil unmixed with, or unproductive of, good. It could not, in the nature of things, exist. Antagonism itself prevents it. But nature incites us to the diminution of evil; and while it is pious to make the best of what is inevitable, it is no less so to obey the impulse which she has given us towards thinking and making it otherwise.

With respect to the charge of republicanism against the Examiner, it was as ridiculous as the rest. Both Napoleon and the Allies did, indeed, so conduct themselves on the high roads of empire and royalty, and the British sceptre was at the same time so unfortunately wielded, that kings and princes were often treated with less respect in our pages than we desired. But we generally felt, and often expressed, a wish to treat them otherwise. The Examiner was always quoting against them the Alfreds and Antoninuses of old. The "Constitution," with its King, Lords, and Commons, was its incessant watchword. The greatest political change which it desired was Reform in Parliament; and it helped to obtain it, because it was in earnest. As to republics, the United States, notwithstanding our family relationship, were favourites with us, owing to what appeared to us to be an absorption in the love of money, and to their then want of the imaginative and ornamental; and the excesses of the French Revolution we held in abhorrence.

With regard to Church and State, the connection was of course duly recognized by admirers of the English constitution. We desired, it is true, reform in both, being far greater admirers of Christianity in its primitive than in any of its subsequent shapes, and hearty accorders with the dictum of the apostle, who said that the "letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." Our version of religious faith was ever nearer to what M. Lamartine has called the "New Christianity," than to that of Doctors Horsley and Philpotts. But we heartily advocated the mild spirit of religious government, as exercised by the Church of England, in opposition to the bigoted part of dissent; and in furtherance of this advocacy, the first volume of the Examiner contained a series of Essays on the Folly and Danger of Methodism, which were after

wards collected into a pamphlet. So "orthodox" were these essays, short of points from which common sense and humanity always appeared to us to revolt, and from which the deliverance of the Church itself is now, I believe, not far off, that in duty to our hope of that deliverance, I afterwards thought it necessary to guard against the conclusions which might have been drawn from them, as to the amount of our assent. A church appeared to me then, as it still does, an instinctive want in the human family. I never to this day pass one, even of a kind the most unreformed, without a wish to go into it and join my fellow-creatures in their affecting evidence of the necessity of an additional tie with Deity and Infinity, with this world and the next. But the wish is accompanied with an afflicting regret that I cannot recognize it, free from barbarisms derogatory to both; and I sigh for some good old country church, finally delivered from the corruptions of the Councils, and breathing nothing but the peace and love befitting the Sermon on the Mount. I believe that a time is coming, when such doctrine, and such only, will be preached; and my future grave, in a certain beloved and flowery cemetery, seems quieter for the consummation. But I anticipate.

For a short period before and after the setting up of the Examiner, I was a clerk in the War Office. The situation was given me by Mr. Addington, then prime minister, afterwards Lord Sidmouth, who knew my father. My sorry stock of arithmetic, which I taught myself on purpose, was sufficient for the work which I had to do; but otherwise I made a bad clerk; wasting my time and that of others in perpetual jesting; going too late to office; and feeling conscious that if I did not quit the situation myself, nothing was more likely, or would have been more just, than a suggestion to that effect from others. The establishment of the Examiner, and the tone respecting the court and the ministry which I soon thought myself bound to adopt, increased the sense of the propriety of this measure; and, accordingly, I sent in my resignation. Mr. Addington had fortunately ceased to be minister before the Examiner was set up; and though I had occasion afterwards to differ extremely with the

measures approved of by him as Lord Sidmouth, I never forgot the personal respect which I owed him for his kindness to myself, to his own amiable manners, and to his undoubted, though not wise, conscientiousness. He had been Speaker of the House of Commons, a situation for which his figure and deportment at that time of life admirably fitted him. I think I hear his fine voice, in his house at Richmond Park, goodnaturedly expressing to me his hope, in the words of the poet, that it might be one day said of me,—

66

Not in fancy's maze he wander'd long,
But stoop'd to truth, and moralized his song."

The sounding words, "moralized his song," came toning out of his dignified utterance like "sonorous metal." This was when I went to thank him for the clerkship. I afterwards sat on the grass in the park, feeling as if I were in a dream, and wondering how I should reconcile my propensity to versemaking with sums in addition. The minister, it was clear, thought them not incompatible: nor are they. Let nobody think otherwise, unless he is prepared to suffer for the mistake, and, what is worse, to make others suffer. The body of the British Poets themselves shall confute him, with Chaucer at their head, who was a "comptroller of wool" and "clerk of works."

"Thou hearest neither that nor this"

(says the eagle to him in the House of Fame);—

"For when thy labour all done is,

And hast made all thy reckonings,
Instead of rest and of new things,

Thou goest home to thine house anon,
And all so dumb as any stone
Thou sittest at another book,

Till fully dazed is thy look."

Lamb, it is true, though he stuck to it, has complained of

"The dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood:"

and Chaucer was unable to attend to his accounts in the month of May, when, as he tells us, he could not help passing whole days in the fields, looking at the daisies. The case, as in all other matters, can only be vindicated, or otherwise, by the consequences. But that is a perilous responsibility; and it involves assumptions which ought to be startling to

the modesty of young rhyming gentlemen not in the receipt of an income.

I did not give up, however, a certainty for an uncertainty. The Examiner was fully established when I quitted the office [in 1808]. My friends thought that I should be better able to attend to its editorship; and it was felt, at any rate, that I could not with propriety remain. So I left my fellow-clerks to their better behaviour and quieter rooms; and set my face in the direction of stormy politics.

CHAPTER X.

LITERARY ACQUAINTANCE.

JUST after this period I fell in with a new set of acquaintances, accounts of whom may not be uninteresting. I forget what it was that introduced me to Mr. Hill, proprietor of the Monthly Mirror; but at his house at Sydenham used to meet his editor, Du Bois; Thomas Campbell, who was his neighbour; and the two Smiths, authors of The Rejected Addresses. I saw also Theodore Hook, and Mathews the comedian. Our host was a jovial bachelor, plump and rosy as an abbot; and no abbot could have presided over a more festive Sunday. The wine flowed merrily and long; the discourse kept pace with it; and next morning, in returning to town, we felt ourselves very thirsty. A pump by the roadside, with a plash round it, was a bewitching sight.

Du Bois was one of those wits who, like the celebrated Eachard, have no faculty of gravity. His handsome hawk's eyes looked blank at a speculation; but set a joke or a piece of raillery in motion, and they sparkled with wit and malice. Nothing could be more trite or commonplace than his serious observations. Acquiescences they should rather have been. called; for he seldom ventured upon a gravity, but in echo of another's remark. If he did, it was in defence of orthodoxy, of which he was a great advocate; but his quips and cranks were infinite. He was also an excellent scholar. He, Dr. King, and Eachard would have made a capital trio over a table, for scholarship, mirth, drinking, and religion. He

was intimate with Sir Philip Francis, and gave the public a new edition of the Horace of Sir Philip's father. The literary world knew him well also as the writer of a popular novel in the genuine Fielding manner, entitled Old Nick.

Mr. Du Bois held his editorship of the Monthly Mirror very cheap. He amused himself with writing notes on Athenæus, and was a lively critic on the theatres; but half the jokes in his magazine were written for his friends, and must have mystified the uninitiated. His notices to correspondents were often made up of this by-play; and made his friends laugh, in proportion to their obscurity to every one else. Mr. Du Bois subsequently became a magistrate in the Court of Requests; and died the other day at an advanced age, in spite of his love of port. But then he was festive in good taste; no gourmand; and had a strong head withal. I do not know whether such men ever last as long as teetotallers; but they certainly last as long, and look a great deal younger, than the carking and severe.

They who knew Mr. Campbell only as the author of Gertrude of Wyoming, and the Pleasures of Hope, would not have suspected him to be a merry companion, overflowing with humour and anecdote, and anything but fastidious. These Scotch poets have always something in reserve. is the only point in which the major part of them resemble their countrymen. The mistaken character which the lady formed of Thomson from his Seasons is well known. He let part of the secret out in his Castle of Indolence; and the more he let out, the more honour it did to the simplicity and cordiality of the poet's nature, though not always to the elegance of it. Allan Ramsay knew his friends Gay and Somerville as well in their writings as he did when he came to be personally acquainted with them; but Allan, who had bustled up from a barber's shop into a bookseller's, was "a cunning shaver;" and nobody would have guessed the author of the Gentle Shepherd to be penurious. Let none suppose that any insinuation to that effect is intended against Campbell. He was one of the few men whom I could at any time have walked half a dozen miles through the snow to spend an evening with; and I could no more do this with a penurious