should be better able to attend to it; 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.

Du Bois.-Campbell.- Theodore Hook. Mathews. - James and Horace Smith.-Fuseli.-Bonnycastle--Kinnaird, &c.

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 I 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 road-side, with a plash round it, was a bewitching sight.

Du Bois was one of those wits, who, like the

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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 teatotallers; 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. It 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

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walked half a dozen miles through the snow to spend an evening with; and I could no more do this with a penurious man than I could with a sulky one. I know but of one fault he had, besides an extreme cautiousness in his writings, and that one was national, a matter of words, and amply overpaid by a stream of conversation, lively, piquant, and liberal, not the less interesting for occasionally betraying an intimacy with pain, and for a high and somewhat strained tone of voice, like a man speaking with suspended breath, and in the habit of subduing his feelings. No man felt more kindly towards his fellow-creatures, or took less credit for it. When he indulged in doubt and sarcasm, and spoke contemptuously of things in general, he did it, partly, no doubt, out of actual dissatisfaction, but more perhaps than he suspected, out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive; which is a blind that the best men very commonly practise. He professed to be hopeless and sarcastic, and took pains all the while to set up a university (the London).

When I first saw this eminent person, he gave me the idea of a French Virgil. Not that he was like a Frenchman, much less the French translator of Virgil. I found him as handsome, as the Abbé Delille is said to have been ugly. But he seemed to me to embody a Frenchman's ideal notion of the Latin poet; something a little more cut and dry