twice detected her having imparted them to the servants, and to her play-fellows.

She betrayed an averseness to the study of books, and of the rudiments of science, which gave little promise of ability, that should, one day, be responsible for the education of youths, who were to emulate the Gracchi.

Mr. Day persisted in these experiments, and sustained their continual disappointment during a year's residence in the vicinity of Lichfield. The difficulty seemed to lie in giving her motive to exertion, self-denial, and heroism. It was against his plan to draw it from the usual sources, pecuniary reward, luxury, ambition, or vanity. His watchful cares had precluded all knowledge of the value of money, the reputation of beauty, and its concomitant desire of ornamented dress. The only inducement, therefore, which this lovely artless girl could have to combat and subdue the natural preference, in youth so blossoming, of ease to pain, of vacant sport to the labour of thinking, was the desire of pleasing her protector, though she knew not how, or why he became such. In that desire, fear had greatly the ascendant of affection, and fear is a cold and indolent feeling.

Thus, after a series of fruitless trials, Mr. Day renounced all hope of moulding Sabrina into the

being his imagination had formed; and ceasing to behold her as his future wife, he placed her at a boarding school in Sutton-Coldfield, Warwickshire. His trust in the power of education faltered; his aversion to modern elegance subsided. From the time he first lived in the Vale of Stowe, he had daily conversed with the beautiful Miss Honora Sneyd of Lichfield. Without having received a Spartan education, she united a disinterested desire to please, fortitude of spirit, native strength of intelect, literary and scientific taste, to unswerving truth, and to all the graces. She was the very Honora Sneyd, for whom the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre's inextinguishable passion is on poetic, as his military fame and hapless destiny are on patriot, record. Parental authority having dissolved the juvenile engagements of this distinguished youth and maid, Mr. Day offered to Honora his philosophic hand. She admired his talents; she revered his virtues; she tried to school her heart into softer sentiments in his favour. She did not succeed in that attempt, and ingenuously told him so. Her sister, Miss Elizabeth Sneyd, one year younger than herself, was very pretty, very sprightly, very artless, and very engaging, though countless degrees inferior to the endowed

and adorned Honora. To her the yet love-luckless sage transferred the heart, which Honora had with sighs resigned. Elizabeth told Mr. Day she could have loved him, if he had acquired the manners of the world, instead of those austere singularities of air, habit, and address.

He began to impute to them the fickleness of his first love; the involuntary iciness of the charming Honora, as well as that for which her sister accounted. He told Elizabeth, that, for her sake, he would renounce his prejudices to external refinements, and try to acquire them.. He would go to Paris for a year, and commit himself to dancing and fencing masters. He did so; stood daily an hour or two in frames, to screw back his shoulders, and point his feet; he practised the military gait, the fashionable bow, minuets, and cotillions; but it was too late; habits, so long fixed, could no more than partially be overcome. The endeavour, made at intervals, and by visible effort, was more really ungraceful than the natural stoop, and unfashionable air. The studied bow on entrance, the suddenly recollected assumption of attitude, prompted the risible instead of the admiring sensation; neither was the showy dress, in which he came back to his fair one, a jot more becoming.

Poor Elizabeth reproached her reluctant but insuppressive ingratitude, upon which all this labour, these sacrifices had been wasted. She confessed, that Thomas Day, blackguard, as he used jestingly to style himself, less displeased her eye than Thomas Day, fine gentleman.

Thus again disappointed, he resumed his accustomed plainness of garb, and neglect of his person, and went again upon the continent for another year, with pursuits of higher aim, more congenial to his talents and former principles. Returning to England in the year 1773, he saw, that spring, Miss Honora Sneyd united to his friend Mr. Edgeworth, who was become a widower; and, in the year 1780, he learned that his second love of that name, Miss Elizabeth Sneyd was also, after the death of Honora married to Mr. Edgeworth.

It was singular that Mr. Day should thus, in the course of seven years, find himself doubly rivalled by his most intimate friend; but his own previously renounced pursuit of those beautiful young women, left him without either cause or sensations of resentment on their account.

From the year 1773 this hitherto love-renounced philosopher resided chiefly in London, and amid

the small and select circle which he frequented there, often met the pretty and elegant Miss Esther Mills of Derbyshire, who, with modern acquirements, and amongst modish luxuries, suited to her large fortune, had cultivated her understanding by books and her virtues by benevolence. The again unpolished stoic had every charm in her eyes,

"She saw Othello's visage in his mind.”

But from indignant recollection of hopes so repeatedly baffled, Mr. Day looked with distrust on female attention of however flattering semblance; nor was it till after years of her modest, yet tender devotion to his talents and merit, that he deigned to ask Miss Mills, if she could, for his sake, resign all that the world calls pleasures; all its luxuries, all its ostentation. If, with him, she could resolve to employ, after the ordinary comforts of life were supplied, the surplus of her affluent fortune in clothing the naked, and feeding the hungry; retire with him into the country, and shun, through remaining existence, the infectious taint of human society.

Mr. Day's constitutional fault, like poor Cowper's, seemed that of looking with severe and disgusted eyes upon those venial errors in his species which are mutually tolerated by mankind. This