and here go I for assistance to one, whose pupil I am proud to account myself

"I willingly confine

My narrative to subjects that excite
Feelings with these accordant; love, esteem,
And admiration; lifting up a veil,

A sunbeam introducing among hearts
Retired and covert; so that ye shall have
Clear images before your gladdened eyes,
Of nature's unambitious underwood,

And flowers that prosper in the shade. And when
I speak of such among my flock as swerved,
Or fell, them only will I single out,
Upon whose lapse or error something more
Than brotherly forgiveness may attend:
To such will we restrict our notice; else
Better my tongue were mute."

I am about to write of myself and of my associates, to lay before my readers the analysis of an individual mind, perhaps somewhat strangely constituted; to speak of all the workings and misworkings of a complicated piece of machinery, not altogether constructed upon false principles, but exhibiting many errors in the detail, which have impeded its full operation and marred the general unity of the design.

I never see a little child in all the beauty of its primitive innocence without endeavouring - yet

Wordsworth's Excursion.

how vain the endeavour!-to recall some of my earliest sensations-to feel as I once felt ere time's contaminating fingers had soiled the purity of my young mind. What a blank, almost unchequered, is all that I can remember of those years. There are dim recollections floating in my brain of wide nurseries and many attendants, and crimson cushions, whereon I used to roll, and of toys almost innumerable, and of a carriage, and a large square with tall dingy houses on each side, and swarms of people walking before them. Little else does my memory body forth of the first five years of my existence. My earliest associations are connected with huge brick houses and teeming thoroughfares, for I was born in the metropolis of England.

In the great city

"I was reared.

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars."

My father was a London merchant, and he failed when I was five years old. I have heard it said that he was an indifferent man of business; but I am quite sure that he was a honest one. He was of a sanguine, speculative nature, very easily imposed upon, and stone deaf to the warnings of experience. I do not think that great speculators are often men of integrity; but my

S. T. Coleridge.

father was an exception to the general rule, risking no man's money but his own, and paying twenty shillings in the pound shortly after his name appeared in the gazette. He was sadly shocked by the mischance of his bankruptcy, never having calculated the probabilities of such an untoward event, and having always, for he was of an indolent habit, shrunk from any thing like an investigation, he became acquainted with the embarrassment of his affairs just in time to know that it was hopeless. Then he bestirred himself, and looked about him, and found that he was a ruined man.

It is probable that if my father's mind had been differently constituted, he might even then have saved himself at the eleventh hour. But he was utterly destitute of decision; there was no force, no energy in his character. When the prospect before him was cheering, he was sanguine, even to exuberance; but the first glimmering of adversity, the first, I mean, of which he was sensible, for he was eminently short-sighted,plunged him into the slough of despondency so deeply, that he never could extricate himself. And thus it was, that upon the present occasion, it did not for one moment occur to him that, by making a stand against the difficulties he saw approaching, he might probably repel them altogether. When the clouds of adversity gathered

over him, his heart died within him, and his only desire was to betake himself into solitude, if possible, with an unblemished reputation.

"Take all that I have," said my father, "my lands, my tenements, my all. Strip my house of its furniture, nay, take the very books from my shelves! but leave me, leave me to my repose."

And so it happened, that they did take his lands, and his tenements, and his furniture, and his books, every one of which was a drop of blood from his heart; and the world said that he was an honest man; and when they had made him a poor one, then they left him to his repose.

He was not sorry to leave the metropolis behind him. Quiet was now the one thing needful to my father. His health was gone, and he was utterly without hope, and well content would he have been to have drawn his cloak over his face, and to have laid himself down to die.

But I am writing in a melancholy strain, and as I would not that this sombre tinting should disfigure more than a tittle of my canvass, I will cease to speak of my afflicted father, for I cannot dwell upon the circumstances of his life, or analyse the morbid constitution of his mind, acted upon as it was by the evil influences of

"

Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty,"

with any other than most painful feelings, which I

would not willingly communicate at the very outset of my narrative to the reader, Let me speak, then, of other members of my family.

My mother was the only child of an Indian officer, who was slain at the taking of Seringapatam. She had a settlement of about four hundred a-year, upon which, with the trifling addition of a small annuity belonging to my poor father, we were now destined to live; the collective pronoun including my parents and four children, of which I was the penultimate; for although we were in reality five in number, my elder brother, whose name was Walter, had fortunately been gazetted a few months before my father, not indeed as a bankrupt, but as an ensign in a marching regiment, so that at the period of our exode from the metropolis, there were, as I have said, four of us, male and female, equally divided.

My brother Walter was the eldest of the family; him I have disposed of in the army: then came my two sisters, whose names were Laura and Fanny, and then, longo intervallo, myself, whom they christened Gerard, and little Arthur, who was the pet and the plaything, and certainly the fairest flower by far in our human garden.

And thus reader, I have introduced thee, one and all, to the Doveton family. We six left the city behind us, and turned our faces towards the West.