culcated by the great Mr. Locke and his disciples. But never hast thou seen that doctrine so richly and so entirely exemplified as in this great history, the association of ideas being, in oriental phrase, the silken thread upon which its pearls are strung. And never wilt thou see it so clearly and delightfully illustrated, not even if the ingenious Mr. John Jones should one day give to the world the whole twelve volumes in which he has proved the authenticity of the Gospel History, by bringing the narratives of the four evangelists to the test of Mr. Locke's inetaphysics. "Desultoriness," says Mr. Danby, " may often be the mark of a full head; connection must proceed from a thoughtful one." CHAPTER VI. P. I. A COLLECTION OF BOOKS, NONE OF WHICH ARE INCLUDED AMONG THE PUBLICATIONS OF ANY SOCIETY FOR THE PROMOTION OF KNOWLEDGE RELIGIOUS OR. PROFANE-HAPPINESS IN HUMBLE LIFE. Felix ille animi, divisque simillimus ipsis, POLITIAN, HAPPY for Daniel, he lived before the age of magazines, reviews, cyclopædias, elegant extracts, and literary newspapers, so that he gathered the fruit of knowledge for himself, instead of receiving it from the dirty fingers of a retail vender. His books were few in number, but they were all weighty either in matter or in size. They consisted of the Morte d'Arthur in the fine black-letter edition of Copland; Plutarch's Morals, and Pliny's Natural History, two goodly folios, full as an egg of meat, and both translated by that old worthy, Philemon, who, for the service which he rendered to his contemporaries and to his countrymen, deserves to be called the best of the Hollands, without disparaging either the lord or the doctor of that appellation. The whole works of Joshua Sylvester; (whose name, let me tell thee, reader, in passing, was accented upon the first syllable by his contemporaries, not as now upon the second ;) Jean Petit's History of the Netherlands, translated and continued by Edward Grimeston, another worthy of the Philemon order; Sir Kenelm Digby's Discourses; Stowe's Chronicle; Joshua Barnes's Life of Edward III.; "Ripley Revived, by Eirenæus Philale. thes, an Englishman styling himself Citizen of the World," with its mysterious frontispiece representing the Domus Nature, to which, Nil deest nisi clavis: the Pilgrim's Progress; two volumes of Ozell's translation of the Rabelais; Latimer's Sermons; and the last volume of Fox's Martyrs, which latter book had been brought him by his wife. The Pilgrim's Progress was a godmother's present to his son: the odd volumes of Rabelais he had picked up at Kendal, at a sale, in a lot with Ripley Revived and Plutarch's Morals: the others he had inherited. Daniel had looked into all these books, read most of them, and believed all that he read, except Rabelais, which he could not tell what to make of. He was not, however, one of those persons who complacently suppose everything to be nonsense which they do not perfectly comprehend, or flatter themselves that they do. His simple heart judged of books by what they ought to be, little knowing what they are. It never occurred to him that anything would be printed which was not worth printing, anything which did not convey either reasonable delight or useful instruction: and he was no more disposed to doubt the truth of what he read, than to question the veracity of his neighbour, or any one who had no interest in deceiving him. A book carried with it to him authority in its very aspect. The Morte d'Arthur, therefore, he received for authentic history, just as he did the painful chronicle of honest John Stowe, and the Barnesian labours of Joshua the self-satisfied: there was nothing in it indeed which stirred his English blood like the battles of Cressy, and Poictiers, and Najara; yet, on the whole, he preferred it to Barnes's story, believed in Sir Tor, Sir Tristram, Sir Lancelot, and Sir Lamorack as entirely as in Sir John Chandos, the Captal de Buche, and the Black Prince, and liked them better. Latimer and Du Bartas he used sometimes to read aloud on Sundays; and if the departed take cognizance of what passes on earth, and poets derive any satisfaction from that posthumous applause which is generally the only reward of those who deserve it, Sylvester might have found some compensation for the undeserved neglect into which his works had sunk, by the full and devout delight which his rattling rhymes and quaint collocations afforded to this reader. The silver-tongued Sylvester, however, was reserved for a Sabbath book; as a weekday author Daniel preferred Pliny, for the same reason that bread and cheese, or a rasher of hung mutton, contented his palate better than a sillabub. He frequently regretted that so knowing a writer had never seen or heard of Wethercote and Yordas caves; the ebbing and flowing spring at Giggleswick, Malham Cove, and Gordale Scar, that he might have described them among the wonders of the world. Omne ignotum pro magnifico is a maxim which will not in all cases hold good. There are things which we do not undervalue because we are familiar with them, but which are admired the more the more thoroughly they are known and understood; it is thus with the grand objects of nature and the finest works of art-with whatsoever is truly great and excellent. Daniel was not deficient in imagination; but no description of places which he had never seen, however exaggerated, (as such things always are,) impressed him so strongly as these objects in his own neighbourhood, which he had known from childhood. Three or four times in his life it had happened that strangers, with a curiosity as uncommon in that age as it is general in this, came from afar to visit these wonders of the West Riding, and Daniel accompanied them with a delight such as he never experienced on any other occasion. But the author in whom he delighted most was Plutarch, of whose works he was lucky enough to possess the worthier half: if the other had perished, Plutarch would not have been a popular writer, but he would have held a higher place in the estimation of the judicious. Daniel could have posed a candidate for university honours, and perhaps the examiner too, with some of the odd learning which he had stored up in his memory from these great repositories of ancient knowledge. Refusing all reward for such services, the strangers to whom he officiated as a guide, though they perceived that he was an extraordinary person, were little aware how much information he had acquired, and of how strange a kind. His talk with them did not go beyond the subjects which the scenes they came to visit naturally suggested, and they wondered more at the questions he asked, than at anything which he advanced himself: for his disposition was naturally shy, and that which had been bashfulness in youth assumed the appearance of reserve as he advanced in life; for having none to communicate with upon his favourite studies, he lived in an intellectual world of his own, a mental solitude as complete as that of Alexander Selkirk or Robinson Crusoe. Even to the curate, his conversation, if he had touched upon his books, would have been heathen Greek; and to speak the truth plainly, without knowing a letter of that language, he knew more about the Greeks than nine tenths of the clergy at that time, including all the dissenters, and than nine tenths of the schoolmasters also. Our good Daniel had none of that confidence which so usually and so unpleasantly characterizes self-taught men. In fact, he was by no means aware of the extent of his acquirements, all that he knew in this kind having been acquired for amusement, not for use. He had never attempted to teach himself anything. These books had lain in his way in boyhood, or fallen in it afterward; and the perusal of them, intently as it was followed, was always accounted by him to be nothing more than recreation. None of his daily business had ever been neglected for it; he cultivated his fields and his garden, repaired his walls, looked to the stable, tended his cows, and salved his sheep, as diligently and as contentedly as if he had possessed neither capacity nor inclination for any higher employments. Yet Daniel was one of those men who, if disposition and aptitude were not overruled by circumstances, would have grown pale with study, instead of being bronzed and hardened by sun, and wind, and rain. There were in him undeveloped talents which might have raised him to distinction as an antiquary, a virtuoso of the Royal Society, a poet, or a theologian, to whichever course the bias in his ball of fortune had inclined. But he had not a particle of envy in his composition. He thought, indeed, that if he had had grammar learning in his youth like the curate, he would have made more use of it; but there was nothing either of the sourness or bitterness (call it which you please) of repining in this natural reflection. Never, indeed, was any man more contented with doing his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him. And well he might be so, for no man ever passed through the world with less to disquiet or to sour him. Bred up in habits which secured the continuance of that humble but sure independence in which he was born, he had never known what it was to be anxious for the future. At the age of twenty-five he had brought home a wife, the daughter of a little landholder like himself, with fifteen pounds for her portion; and the truelove of his youth proved to him a faithful helpmate in those years when the dream of life is over, and we live in its realities. If at any time there had been some alloy in his happiness, it was when there appeared reason to suppose that in him his family would be extinct: for though no man knows what parental feelings are till he has experienced them, and Daniel therefore knew not the whole value of that which he had never enjoyed, the desire of progeny is natural to the heart of man; and though Daniel had neither large estates nor an illustrious name to transmit, it was an unwelcome thought that the little portion of the earth which had belonged to his fathers time out of mind, should pass into the possession of some stranger, who would tread on their graves and his own without any regard to the dust that lay beneath. That uneasy apprehension was removed after he had been married fifteen years, when to the great joy of both parents, because they had long ceased to entertain any hope of such an event, their wishes were fulfilled in the birth of a son. This their only child was healthy, apt, and docile, to all appearance as happily disposed in mind and body as a father's heart could wish. If they had fine weather for winning their hay or shearing their corn, they thanked God for it; if the season proved unfavourable the labour was only a little the Their stations secured more, and the crop a little the worse. them from want, and they had no wish beyond it. What more had Daniel to desire? The following passage in the divine Du Bartas he used to read with peculiar satisfaction, applying it to himself: "Oh thrice, thrice happy he, who shuns the cares And, serving Ceres, tills with his own team Never pale Envy's poisony heads do hiss For sweet ambrosia, deadly arsenic; His hand's his bowl, (better than plate or glass,) Milk, cheese, and fruit, (fruits of his own endeavour,) False counsellors, (concealers of the law,) But cheerful birds chirping him sweet good-morrows His wandering vessel, reeling to and fro To summon timely sleep, he doth not need Drum, fife, and trumpet, with their loud alarms, |