IT.] ilELAXCHOLY KOUES. 33( 



MELANCHOLY HOURS.— Xo. H. 



" But (uel-a-day) who loves the Pluses now ? 

 Or hel{ie3 the climber of the sacred hyll ? 

 Kone leane to them, but strive to disalow 

 All heavenly dewes the goddesses distill." 



"Wm. Browne's Shepheard^s Pipe. Eg. 5. 



It is a melancholy reflection, and a reflection which 

 jften sinks heavily on my soul, that the sons of Genius 

 generally seem predestined to encounter the rudest storms 

 of adversity, to struggle, unnoticed, with poverty and mis- 

 fortune. The annals of the world present us with many 

 corroborations of this remark ; and, alas ! who can tell 

 how many unhappy beings, who might have shone with 

 distinguished lustre among the stars which illumine our 

 hemisphere, may have sunk unknown b&neath the pres- 

 sure of untoward circumstances ; who knows how many 

 may have shrunk, with all the exquisite sensibility of ge- 

 nius, from the rude and riotous discord of the world into 

 the peaceful slumbers of death. Among the number of 

 those whose talents might have elevated them to the first 

 rank of eminence, but who have been overwhelmed with 

 the accumulated ills of poverty and misfortune, I do not 

 hesitate to rank a young man whom T once accounted it 

 my greatest happiness to be able to call my friend. 



Charles Waxeley was the only son of an humble 

 village rector, who just lived to give him a liberal educa- 

 tion, and then left him, unprovided for and unprotected, 

 to struggle through the world as well as he could. "With 

 a heart glowing with the enthusiasm of poetry and ro- 

 mance, with a sensibility the most exquisite, and with 

 an indignant pride which swelled in his veins, and told 

 him he was a man, my friend found himself cast upon 

 the wide world, at the age of sixteen, an adventurer, 

 without fortune and without connexion. As his inde- 

 pendent spirit could not brook the idea of being 3. 



