of wild oats. His yearly expenses while on the Continent were less than three hundred pounds, though he employed one or two servants and several masters and bought many valuable curiosities.

His most constant companions while abroad were men like the studious Mr. Thicknesse, to whom he owed so much while at college; the highly cultivated Mr. Henshaw, with whom he traveled nearly a year, and who first inspired him with a taste for medals; the pure-hearted Lord Ossory, whose "dear eyes" he closed on his death in London, thirty years after their first meeting in the riding-school at Paris, where Lord Ossory and his companions did splendid feats of horsemanship "in noble equipage" before "a world of spectators and great persons, men and ladies," the exhibition ending with a collation. Evelyn describes him as one of the noblest, bravest, wisest, and most patriotic of men.

To Mr. Henshaw he wrote, fifty years after their student life at Padua: "I frequently call to mind the many bright and happy moments we have passed together at Rome and other places in viewing and contemplating the entertainments of travellers who go not abroad to count steeples, but to improve themselves: I wish I could say of myself so as you did; but whenever I think of the agreeable toyle we tooke among ruines and antiquitys and to admire the superbe buildings, visit the cabinets and curiosities of the virtuosi, the sweet walkes by the banks of the Tiber, the Via Flaminia, the gardens and villas of that glorious city, I call back the time, and methinks grow young again."

omitted," they not being in much reputation among the sober Italians. He also studied chemistry and took lessons on the lute.

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On the 22d of May, 1647, Evelyn for the first time mentions Mary Browne, only child of his Majesty's minister to the court of France, on whom he had "particularly set his affections;" and on the 27th of June they were married in Sir Richard Browne's chapel between the hours of eleven and twelve, some "few select friends being present." The ceremony was performed by Dr. Earle, one of the chaplains of the Prince of Wales, then residing at St. Germain. Evelyn mentions with pleasure the fact that, as the people of France were solemnly observing the feast of Corpus Christi, the streets of Paris were sumptuously hung with tapestry and strewed with flowers on his wedding day. He was a highly cultivated and unusually mature man of twenty-seven when he was married, and his bride was not fourteen, yet the marriage, which lasted fifty-nine years, was remarkably happy. Mrs. Evelyn had "many advantages of birth and beauty," and as she became "the grateful and docile pupil of her husband," who was one of the best and most accomplished men of his day, all her talents and graces received full and symmetrical development, and she was regarded by her friends as a woman equally lovely in person and character. She survived her husband three years, and says in her will, after expressing her wish to be buried at his side: "His care of my education was such as might become a father, a lover, a friend, and husband for instruction, tenderness, affection, and fidelity to the last moment of his life, which obligation I mention with gratitude to his memory, ever dear to me; and I must not omit to own the sense I have of my parents' care and goodness in placing me in such worthy hands."

She was unusually well educated, and

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familiar with many subjects that interested her husband; a lover of good books in her native tongue, and acquainted with the French and Italian languages. Yet she had the excellent taste, as her friend Bohun says, to use none but the purest English words and not a single foreign term in the letters and the "Characters" of friends and distinguished persons which she wrote, and which, though undertaken solely for the pleasure of relatives or intimate acquaintances, gave her some literary reputation. She described public and private affairs in an easy and eloquent style which never languished nor flagged," and there was "a peculiar felicity in her way of writing," whether consoling her widowed friend Lady Tuke, crisply reproving and advising her son, or pathetically expressing, yet with the sincerest patience and resignation, her affliction on the death of her idolized daughter, who was, she says, too great a blessing for her who never deserved anything, much less such a jewel; whether criticising Balzac, Dr. Donne, Voiture, Dryden, and other authors, or writing on domestic affairs or the diversions of the town and court. It might also have been said of her as she wrote of her daughter, that a thread of piety accompanied all her actions. No one had, we are told, a clearer insight into the characters of others, or judged them with more acuteness and discrimination, yet she never made harsh or censorious remarks, and was accordingly tenderly loved and admired by her associates. She talked well, and “ was the delight of all the conversations where she appeared," as her son's enthusiastic tutor, Bohun, says; and having lived five years in her house and corresponded with her for a longer time, he was a competent witness. He describes her as "the best daughter and wife, the most tender mother and desirable neighbor and friend, in all parts of her life." His praise of Mrs. Evelyn is as enthusiastic as Evelyn's eulogy of that dear

friend of himself and his wife, young Mrs. Sidney Godolphin. Like her husband, Mrs. Evelyn loved best a life of studious retirement, and pitied those who were obliged by high birth or office to squander their time in idle visits, talk and ceremonies, and the empty vanities of the city. Yet they were both fond of company, and received and made so many visits, and were so popular with all that was most agreeable or distinguished in London society, that but for their industrious and methodical habits they could have found no time for more important duties and pursuits.

Mrs. Evelyn was noted for her goodnature, self-denial, "charity and compassion to those who had disobliged her," and she had "no memory of past occurrences unless it were a grateful acknowledgment of some friendly office." She was usually cheerful, and no kind of trouble but one seemed "to interrupt the constant intention to entertain and oblige; but that is dolorously represented in many letters, which is the loss of children and friends," which she was often called upon to suffer. The children were as good, gifted, handsome, and charming in every way as their parents, which made the parting from them harder.

Mrs. Evelyn's house, nursery, servants, and poor neighbors did not suffer on account of her musical, literary, and artistic tastes, for she thought that "the care of children's education, observing a husband's commands, assisting the sick, relieving the poor, and being serviceable to our friends are of sufficient weight to employ the most approved capacities" among women. She was skilled in the art of etching, and the frontispiece of her husband's translation of Lucretius was designed by her. Evelyn tells us in the Diary that soon after the restoration of Charles II. "she presented the king with a copy in miniature of the Madonna of Oliver's painting after Raphael," which she "wrought with extraordinary pains and judgment," and

that Charles was so infinitely pleased with it that he caused it to be placed among his best paintings. The king treated Mrs. Evelyn with great condescension, on one occasion carrying her to salute the " queen his mother and the princesses, and leading her into his closet to show her with his own hand his curiosities." A few weeks later he offered to give her the honorable office of lady of the jewels to the future queen, promise which, very characteristically, he did not keep, notwithstanding the valuable and dangerous services her father and husband had rendered both himself and Charles I.

a

Evelyn's youth may be regarded as ending with his marriage. Though this paper deals professedly only with the first twenty-seven years of his history, it is in reality an epitome of his whole life. The various philosophical, literary, artistic, political, benevolent, religious, and social duties which occupied him in middle life and old age are briefly alluded to. But to treat these two periods with the fullness with which his youth has been described it would be necessary to write a second long article. It would be difficult to crowd a minute account of such a full life as his into one paper. Mary Davies Steele.

So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early reading and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature that the trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience, that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions. Those who have honored us with their confidence in this matter seem to have found their letters, as Sir Thomas Browne found his religion, "all pure profit." Edward E. Hale, for instance, has been "helped" by every imaginable writer, from Marcus Aurelius to the amiable authoress of The Wide, Wide World. Moncure D. Conway acknowledges his obligations to an infinite variety of sources. William T. Harris has been happy enough to seize instinctively upon those works which aroused his "latent energies to industry and self-activity;" and Edward Eggleston has gathered intellectual sustenance from the most unexpected quarters, the Rollo Books and Lindley Murray's Reader. Only Andrew

Lang and Augustus Jessop are disposed, with an untimely levity, to confess that they have read for amusement rather than for self-instruction, and that they have not found it so easily attainable.

Now when a man tells us that he has been really "helped" by certain books, we naturally conclude that the condition reached by their assistance is, in some measure, gratifying to himself; and, by the same token, I am disposed to argue that my own unsatisfactory development may be the result of less discreetly selected reading, lected reading, reading for which, in many cases, I was wholly irresponsible. I notice particularly that several persons who have been helped acknowledge a very pleasing debt of gratitude to their early spelling-books, to Webster's Elementary, and to those modest volumes which first imparted to them the mysteries of the alphabet. It was not so with me. I learned my letters, at the cost of infinite tribulation, out of a horrible little book called Reading Without Tears, which I trust has long since been banished from all Christian nurseries.

It was a brown book, and had on its cover a deceptive picture of two stout and unclothed Cupids holding the volume open between them, and making an ostentatious pretense of enjoyment. Young as I was, I grew cynical over that title and that picture, for the torrents of tears that I shed blotted them both daily from my sight. It might have been possible for Cupids, who needed no wardrobes and sat comfortably on clouds, to like such lessons, but for an ordinary little girl in frock and pinafore they were simply heart-breaking. Had it only been my good fortune to be born twenty years later, spelling would have been left out of my early discipline, and I should have found congenial occupation in sticking pins or punching mysterious bits of clay at a kindergarten. But when I was young, the world was still sadly unenlightened in these matters; the plain duty of every child was to learn how to read; and the more hopelessly dull I showed myself to be, the more imperative became the need of forcing some information into

me,

information which I received as responsively as does a Strasbourg goose its daily share of provender. For two bitter years I had for my constant companion that hated reader, which began with such isolated statements as "Ann has a cat," and ended with a dismal story about a little African boy named Sam; Mr. Rider Haggard not having then instructed us as to what truly remarkable titles little African boys enjoy. If, to this day, I am disposed to underrate the advantages of education, and to think but poorly of compulsory school-laws and the march of mind, it is because of the unhappy nature of my own early experiences.

Having at last struggled into some acquaintanceship with print, the next book to which I can trace a moral downfall is Sandford and Merton, left on the nursery shelves by an elder brother, and read many times, not because I espe

cially liked it, but because I had so little to choose from. Those were not days when a glut of juvenile literature had produced a corresponding indifference and a spirit of languid hypercriticism. The few volumes we possessed, even those of the most didactic order, were read and re-read, until we knew them well by heart. Now up to a certain age I was, as all healthy children are, essentially democratic, with a decided preference for low company, and a secret affinity for the least desirable little girls in the neighborhood. But Sandford and Merton wrought a pitiable change. I do not think I ever went so far as to dislike the Rev. Mr. Barlow after the very cordial and hearty fashion in which Dickens disliked him, and I know I should have been scandalized by Mr. Burnand's cheerful mockery; but, pondering over the matter with the stolid gravity of a child, I reached some highly unsatisfactory conclusions. It did not seem to me, and it does not seem to me now, exactly fair in the estimable clergyman to have refused the board which Mr. Merton was anxious to pay, and then have reproached poor Tommy so coldly with eating the bread of dependence; neither did it seem worth while for a wealthy little boy to spend his time in doing very inefficiently, I am sure the work of an under-gardener. Harry's contempt for riches and his supreme satisfaction with a piece of bread for dinner struck me as overdrawn ; Tommy's mishaps were more numerous than need be, even if he did have the misfortune to be a gentleman's son; and the complacency with which Mr. Barlow permitted him to give away a whole suit of clothes of clothes clothes which, according to my childish system of ethics, belonged, not to him, but to his mother- contrasted but poorly with the anxiety manifested by the reverend mentor over his own pitiful loaf of bread. Altogether, Sandford and Merton affected me the wrong way; and, for the first time, my soul