men.

A DESERVING CLASS.

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calculates and speculates wildly, because he is quite out of his element. Society bears hardly on such It has a cause, indeed; that cannot be denied. It does not like being charged with the maintenance of deserted families. It does not like lending money and never seeing it again. It does not like paying other people's debts. It does not like what it is pleased to call ingratitude, when a man, overwhelmed with present troubles, wholly forgets how, or by whom, he was relieved from the past.

But what is to be done for a class which is as much a fact as any normal class of a thoroughly business-like character? What provision can be made for them? It must not be too ample and too hospitable, or all the world will press for a share, and gaiety will be the rule, work the exception. The world is not constituted for a perpetual picnic, an endless conversazione, an uninterrupted succession of brilliant dinner-parties, or a constant alternation of balls and private theatricals. It cannot take all its bodily exercise at lawn-tennis or on the cricketground. It cannot be always talking, however cleverly and agreeably. When the world is asked for its 'works,' like Charles Lamb, it has to point sadly to long rows of ledgers. These are its works; the other things are its play.

Yet they that amuse and cheer the world, that fill up its gaping voids and brighten its overcast hours, are surely doing as good work in their way as the more business-like men who give it meat, drink, clothes, houses, locomotion, physic, laws, and other supposed necessaries of life. But while we are main

VOL. I.

S

taining hospitals and asylums for every infirmity, cannot there be some suitable relief to those whose very weaknesses are, after all, so great an addition to our social happiness?

Another name I must mention, though none would wonder more than the owner, were he living. It was he who gave the decisive impulse to my envy, jealousy, ambition, or what not. This was Madeley, son of a tape manufacturer, who came towards the end of my time at Higginson's. It was impossible I should like him; impossible I should not admire him. He was a Swedenborgian, which I then thought a very low thing and a very wrong thing in comparison with the Church of England, though I now think that Church has not quite so much reason to accuse Dissenters of will worship, or of 'preaching another gospel,' as I then thought.

He

Madeley beat me at every point, that is, in my own self-estimation, for I never came near actual competition with him. I thought I knew a good deal. seemed to know everything. I thought I had good ideas and high imaginings. He soared above me, in what direction I know not. He read essays in school which to me were marvellous, as far as language could make them. One day he brought a bull's eye to school, and with his penknife dissected it, and explained the optical theory to an admiring circle. I did not envy him the task, but I was not the less astonished. This prodigy, as he seemed to me, became a very considerable personage in Derbyalderman, mayor, and so forth. It has always been a puzzle to me how people resting much on science

ART

LECTURES IN ART AND SCIENCE.

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should attach value to a dreamy and very speculative religious faith. The Swedenborgians had at one time two chapels in Derby. One is now a warehouse, I believe; the other occupied by some description of Methodists.

It is frequently asked what instruction there was in the arts and sciences in those days. The advisableness of such instruction was energetically maintained by a school of politicians and writers; but as they laboured under a certain suspicion both as to their loyalty and as to their faith, they had not the weight they certainly deserved. My own evidence as to facts is as follows. I attended three courses of lectures, if not more. Mr. Wood lectured on Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture, with striking illustrations, in a large room at the back of the Royal Hotel, to, it might be, a hundred young people and their friends. I was very much taken with them, and made some rather gushing remarks on the subject in my weekly letter to Mr. Higginson. Dr. Sampson read the letter, which I still possess, and was sufficiently amused by my enthusiasm to urge my parents to send me to Charterhouse.

I also attended with much interest a course of lectures, I think by a Mr. Longstaff, on astronomy, with the usual illustrations. The readers of 'The Vicar of Wakefield' will remember that astronomy went with the musical glasses in the last century, possibly with an occult reference to the music of the spheres, which I confess never to have heard myself, but which the Dean of Leighlin, Lady Doneraile's brother, stoutly maintained he had heard frequently. I used

to hear that Mr. Adam's orrery and lectures were rather a joke at Eton. He or another gave lectures and good illustrations at the Adelphi in Lent, relieved not with musical glasses, but with sacred and solemn music.

I attended a course of lectures on chemistry, and saw some pretty experiments, but, beyond learning a few names, I doubt if I acquired any addition to my very scanty knowledge of the subject. There were plenty of exhibitions and performances of a less ambitious character in those days-paper work, fantoccini, magic lanterns, feats of strength and dexterity. I remember seeing a man walk across the ceiling of the theatre at Derby, with his head downwards, and seeming quite at home in his very awkward and dangerous position. I believe it had on me the effect Johnson claimed for such performances; it enlarged my ideas of human capability.

One exhibition I remember seeing with very great interest. It was Bonaparte's carriage captured at Waterloo, and a good many other trophies of Napoleon. The carriage was not very heavy, for those days, but it had arrangements for reading, including a miniature library, for writing, for cooking, and for sleeping. One other carriage I remember almost as full of contrivances, and more cumbrous. This was Mr. W. Strutt's, sold at an auction after his death. There was no bid. At last somebody offered five pounds. 'Why, the glass is worth more than that,' somebody else said. My father took up the bidding, and it was knocked down to him at ten pounds. For a long time it stood in our ample coach-house at the Friary,

the subject of as much amusement as Moses Primrose's gross of green spectacles. Some one of us chancing to go into the coach-house found the carriage gone, and reported it to the family circle. My father observed a profound silence. No one ever heard what became of that carriage. I suspect my father paid some one to take it a long way off and say nothing about it.

CHAPTER XLIII.

AN ACCIDENT.

THE year 1819 was no slight epoch in our family circle. In January my eldest sister went to Mrs. Parish, at Kensington. At Midsummer, my brother Arthur had recently come into the world, and my mother required change. The Wardwick house wanted a good deal doing to it. So a large party was made for Brighton, including my eldest sister, and the two sisters of the 'Duke's tenant' I have described above. The younger members of the family were to pass the summer holidays in a pretty Gothic cottage at Quarndon, three miles from Derby, at the foot of the range of hills beginning at that town and reaching to Scotland.

We were all in ecstasies at the prospect before us. I was amusing myself with leaping across a little pit to the top of the brick stove that heated our greenhouse. My old Gainsborough nurse stood by