THE TABLE DEMOTE. 169 



vein might be sarcastic and capricious ; precipitate and prejudiced ; at 

 times atrabilarius ; but he never harboured rancour, never meditated 

 insult, far less slanderous malignity. The censure of the minor vices 

 and the greater follies was his object. Had he chosen his own character, 

 he would have selected that which the fortunate diction of Mr. Hazlitt, 

 with equal elegance and justice, gave to Gay " He was a satirist with- 

 out gall." He was candid almost to simplicity; and looked on ex- 

 piation as the most incumbent act of moral rectitude. He is now no 

 more, and thus much certainly is due to him ; the memory of such a 

 compound should exist of no ingredients but those which formed a part 

 of him. Little did he think that his effusions would appear in print ; 

 for had he destined them for publication, they would have been uttered 

 with his name. But he " affected not the author ;" though he had suffi- 

 cient scholarship and reading to penetrate the gossamer disguise of those 

 pretending scholiasts who deal in the disfigured thoughts of other 

 people, and astonish ignorance, at times, with the pedantic mummery of 

 their vocabulary studies. No he was none of those degraded and un- 

 principled panders to abuse, who imagine that laborious fingers, an 

 unfeeling heart, and worthless reputation, are the means and safeguard 

 of what is called, among the scrubs, a " literary character ;" he was no 

 dabbler in the filth of anonymous detraction, of subsidized invective; 

 none of the inferior " we ;" no paid hireling, who lived but 



" To laud the base, and vilify the good." 



His errors were his own they arose alike from prejudice and pre- 

 possession a wild scattering of intermingled faults and foibles the 

 vigorous and perishable produce of a warm, exuberant, but unregulated 

 heart. Among his characteristics as a youth, my uncle owned a striking 

 versatility of talent and inconstancy of purpose ; and this habit of his 

 mind (if habit ought so changeable may be defined) have left him, at 

 the age of forty, unsettled in pursuit as on the day when he emerged 

 from academic discipline. His after life was one of hopes and projects, 

 and in the numerous constructions of his chateaux en Espagne, he hit on 

 the experiment of one in France ; a country which, happily, is daily better 

 known to us, and in which the natural bounty of the soil is equitably 

 apportioned to the meritorious nature of its people. My uncle's nar- 

 rative of passing facts, though ludicrous, supplies a commentary on a 

 mind of mutability, and shows, with some effect, how many seeming 

 evils may be banished by a little patient meditation, and how easily a 

 state of captious disappointment may be converted into one of pure 

 quiescence and content. 



My uncle had been some time stationed in a fortified town, the resort 

 of many English, urged to emigration by the pressure of their circum- 

 stances : furthermore, allured by the opportunities extended to a family 

 of living in abundance on the residuarv pittance of a diminished fortune, 

 and of giving to its children that education, which would have been in 

 England utterly unattainable under such reduction of their means. As 

 judicious economists, they appreciated these advantages, and led a life 

 of great decorum, quietude, and happiness; in all, conforming to the 

 customs of their French acquaintance, and improving life by all the 

 numerous suavities, which no people can reciprocate with more agree- 

 able alacrity than our new associates on the other side la Manche. Not 

 so the random youths, who, owning the divine attraction of cheap wines 



