when we have had easy access to it. To become quite independent of it is such an attainment that even I, who have many dispositions tending to solitude, and those dispositions confirmed by habit, have not yet quite reached such a state of mind. If I could fully have had my will, however, I should, since I came to this place, have been very much of a recluse. And, indeed, on the whole, I have been so. Long spaces of time during the last months have been passed in a more solitary manner than any former part of my life; and I have deemed it a piece of good fortune when I have passed a number of days without going out of the house, and without any one calling on me. Indeed I am very seldom called on, for I never invite any one, except two sisters of great worth in this town, and they have only called once. The time that I spend with the family in whose house I lodge is extremely little. I systematically make it as little as possible, because I have my own affairs. I have been a rather assiduous student since I came into this house; though still there is great room to mend. It is most melancholy to review my life,

and see the habitual indolence which has made it barren.

.... What are the feelings with which you meet another spring? Are you still as insulated from acquaintance? Do you continue to enjoy the consolations of religion? I have no doubt, you still feel the same detachment, happy detachment I may most justly call it, from an anxious love of life. Think, my dear friend, what a noble point of superiority this is to the state of the persons around you, however gay, young, or pros perous, who yet would feel horror-struck at the idea of death. Let this great concern of being ready, habitually ready for death, be our foremost every day and every hour, and then life may take its chance. How little has he to fear, who does not fear to die! Be this, then, always the first and foremost, and then let the other matters come as they may, or as they please. I say, let them come as they may; and I say this with a much better grace than if all were gay and prosperous in my own life and prospects; but I was born with an unchangeable tendency to melancholy, and shall probably never want actual causes for it. As for instance, though my eyes have for the last year and more been more easy and sound than several years before, yet the infallible symptoms that they will at length be darkened, gradually and steadily, and of late more perceptibly increase. Before I left Chichester a slight streak began to pass before them. This cloud has been increasing in size ever since, and by enlarging still a few years more, will bring on a total eclipse. It is entirely beyond the reach of any medical application. I have this darkness, therefore, fully in prospect. Again, two or three years since the gland in front of my neck began to swell; it has continued to swell in spite of every remedy, and very rapidly since I came to this town, in consequence of the greater effort necessary to speak within wide walls; if during a few months more I find it still increase, it will be absolutely necessary to give over preaching, and that for ever; for every professional man agrees that the complaint cannot, in a person of my age, be cured; all that can

be done will be to endeavor to check its progress, and I have now scarcely any hope that this can be done while I continue to preach. I have therefore the expectation, that not long hence, I must lose this mean of doing some little good, and this source of support. As to my matrimonial hopes, if this threatened event take place, those hopes are deferred indefinitely, and perhaps for ever; unless the business of authorship should prove more lucrative than I have any clear right to expect. . . . . Thus you see, I make out some right to talk to you in the strain of consolation. I say to you again, Let us live for God and eternity, and then let Time do as it pleases. But yet, even as to time, with all its evils, if we are really the servants of the Almighty, he will make all things work together for our good, and we shall one day thank him with emotions of rapture for all the pains which he has mingled in our lot. . . . .

....

LIV. TO THE REV. JOHN FAWCETT.

Frome, May 23, 1805.

MY DEAR FRIEND,—It is altogether in vain to attempt any excuse for answering a letter from a friend fifteen or sixteen months after it was received. I can only wish that the condemnation may fall on the right point of the character, and that excessive indolence, or anything else, may be imputed, rather than the want of a sincere and ever-constant regard. I own it rests simply on my assertion that this has not been the cause of my long silence, which would in no part of the world be deemed a proof of friendship. But I have my own consciousness that the permanence of friendly regard depends in my mind on the estimates of my judgment, and that you hold the same place in my judgment now, when the delusions of youth are passed away. The valued associate of some of the most interesting years of my life will be very often recalled to thought and affection, even to its, latest periods. And I trust that both our lives, through whatever scenes they may separately pass, will be distinguished by that piety which will conduct them to close in the same point, an entrance into the kingdom of social and eternal felicity. It appears to me a very long time since our walks and conversation at Brearley; the memory however of that period is still extremely vivid, and I am persuaded will always remain so. How many particular moments, places, incidents, and dialogues, I could recount. If I were with you I should feel it very interesting to spend a few hours in comparing our recollections, especially in a visit to the very places to which those recollections would refer. It is not improbable that I, though my memory is a very defective one, should have the stronger traces of those conversations and incidents, from this cause, that a person who leaves a place, and who has consequently no later associations with it to obliterate the earlier ones, looks back through a clearer medium, so to speak, to a former period, and to the circumstances of the place where

he then lived. In that direction of his thoughts nothing seems to stand between him and the distant object. You, on the contrary, have passed through a long series of events and social communications in the same neighborhood, and these would be found to occupy and crowd the latter part of your retrospect so much, as probably to render the remoter circumstances much less distinct. I wonder which of us feels to have undergone the greater change by the course of time. It seems to me hardly possible that you should more emphatically feel yourself a different person from what you were twelve or fourteen years since, than I do. And yet one great circumstance in your situation which is not in mine, your domestic relation, would seem sufficient of itself to change almost the whole economy of feeling. In this great article I find it quite impossible to imagine to myself the nature of the new order of sentiments, and the manner in which they must take place of what was the general habit of feeling before. I can, however, very easily conceive your tender relations to form an estimable source of happiness, on which I can cordially congratulate you, while I think of you as passing your life habitually with a friend who loves you, and whom you love, and surrounded by a number of rising beings (how many?) in whom you are destined to take a most affectionate interest to the last moment of your life. How far does your happiness, with the aid of these interests, exceed what you can imagine it possible to have attained without them? May I suppose that you are twice as happy as you could have been in the insulated state to which I am still condemned? But even a lower supposition than this will give me cause to commiserate my own destiny, thus far. When that destiny may change is beyond even conjecture. My situation in this respect would be altered in a very short time, if worldly circumstances gave me any prospect of competence; but slender and precarious means, in times like the present, doom a man to bear his solitude as well as he can. I have a thousand times felt a vain regret on this subject, not only on account of being precluded from one of the capital means of felicity, and even of improvement, but also on account of the effect which I can perceive this exclusion to have on my character. It assists a very strong tendency which I feel to misanthropy.

I have long been taught and compelled by observation to form a very bad opinion of mankind; this conviction is irresistible; but at the same time I am aware of the Christian duty of cultivating a benevolence as ardent as if the contrary estimate of human character were true. I feel it most difficult to preserve anything like this benevolence; my mind recoils from human beings, excepting a very few, into a cold, interior retirement, where it feels as if dissociated from the whole creation. I do not, however, in any degree approve this tendency, and I earnestly wish and pray for more of the spirit of the Saviour of the world.

Of my studies I cannot give you any account. As far as I have attended to anything which could at all deserve that name, it has been

in the most desultory manner imaginable. I have never yet succeeded in forming or adhering to any kind of plan or system. For many years past I have read comparatively but little,―a neglect which I feel daily and hourly cause to regret, and which very lately I have begun in some degree to remedy, or rather to reform. Observation of facts and of the living world, has perhaps, on some subjects, given me the feeling of having better materials for forming opinions than books could supply; but on very many of the greatest subjects books must be the principal instructors. I often mix together in the most confused manner the reading of books of quite opposite quality. As for instance, I lately read at the same time, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and Baxter's Account of his own Life and Times. The work of Gibbon excites my utmost admiration; not so much by the immense learning and industry which it displays, as by the commanding intellect, the keen sagacity, apparent in almost every page. The admiration of his ability extends even to his manner of showing his hatred of Christianity, which is exquisitely subtle and acute, and adapted to do very great mischief, even where there is not the smallest avowal of hostility. It is to be deplored that a great part of the early history of the Christian church was exactly such as a man like him could have wished. There is no doubt that in his hands, Fathers, Councils, and the ancient contests and mutual persecutions of Christian parties, take their worst form; but after every allowance for this historian's malignity, it is impossible not to contemplate with disgust and reprobation a great part of what the Christian world has been accustomed to revere.

I have lately begun to read the works of Charles Leslie. Happening to see the old volumes in the library of an acquaintance, I recollected the very strong manner in which Dr. Johnson once spoke of this writer. I intend to read a large proportion of him with the most careful attention. From what I have seen thus far, I doubt if there be in our language a theological writer of greater talents in the field of argument. I am gratified in the extreme degree by his most decisive reasonings against the Deists. A great part of his work seems to be against the Deists, Socinians, and Jews. Some of them are in defence of the established church, which of course it is now very needless to read. He was very fierce against dissenters.

Your life, I have been informed, is most completely filled with employment, and I rejoice that the employment will be of high utility. . . I hope the consciousness of this utility and, I may add, the temporal advastage will alleviate, and in some imperfect [degree reward] the toil. For the supreme reward you must wait till another period.

may

I

would express to your father in the strongest terms, the grateful [sense] which I shall never lose, of the advantages I derived from being his pupil. Each review of the progress of my mind (as far as I be allowed to regard that progress as a course of improvement) recalls him to my memory as a wise and friendly preceptor, of whom I shall never cease to think with affection and veneration.

I am ashamed to revert to the old subject of authorship. It seems you had heard more than a year since, that I was going to print a number of essays. I supposed so myself, as I had written enough at that time for a moderate volume. But on consideration I felt, that one very long essay (on the subject of the Metropolis) would not be exactly the thing to appear in a first publication. I had therefore a good deal more to write to make a reasonable quantity; and when I began the critical revision (now as much as eight or nine months since) of the whole mass, I was confounded at the crudeness, feebleness, or inelegance, that met my sight in every page, and almost every paragraph. The revision and correction cost me, I really believe, as much labor as the whole previous composition, though composition is a task in which I am miserably slow. At length two volumes, 12mo., are nearly through the press, and would have been finished some time since, but for a general refusal of the printers to work without higher wages. I am not very sanguine of success; for one thing, because there are other reasons than those of pure criticism, why no review will probably praise me. successful, and if I become disabled for personal public devote myself entirely to the business of writing. whom the letters which make the essays, were addressed, is the female friend to whom my affections are irrevocably devoted.

If I should be services, I shall The person to

LV. TO MRS. GOWING.

Frome, August, 1805

MY DEAR FRIEND,-.

...

I have numberless times wished to hear

about you, and should have solicited you to write, but from knowing how much you dislike the task. I expected to have seen you before this time, and am amazed to think, that almost four months have elapsed since my last visit. How have you been, and what have you been doing since then? How strange it feels to me, that I who have lived years in your house and daily society, should not now be certain, whether you are in health, whether you have any determinate plans, whether the girls are with you, whether you are reconciled, for the time, to your house, and all the other things which I used so lately to know habitually, and which it would be at this moment an animated pleasure, or at least interest (for it would partly depend for being pleasure or not, on your being happy or not), to be able to learn. My dear friend, I feel that time does not at all lessen my regard for you; in every instance, in my past experience, I have found a very little time of absence and distance from those with whom I had associated to be a very complete test of the kind and degree of my interest in them; if that interest has been slight, and caused merely by having associated with them, I have always found it sink away after a very short time; much less than a year's absence would annihilate it. But I retain for you as cordial a friendship as on the pensive day that I