on the ambitious and worldly-minded, to render them indisposed to search after Gospel truth? Let the experience of ages give the answer.

But, even were this admitted, has it ceased to be the fact, that the spirit of this world is totally at variance with the spirit of genuine Christianity? Have its honours, and its emoluments, its splendour, and its amusements, in the lapse of two thousand years, entirely changed the nature of their influence? Do they now lead the mind to look beyond them, to stretch forward from "those things which are seen and temporal, to those which are unseen and are eternal ?" to endure privations, calumny, and reproach, rather than renounce opinions, and comply with practices, inimical to the developement and future progress of important truth? If these things are not affirmed, then it must be admitted, that in proportion as an academical Institution is free from the contagion of these debasing, misleading influences, in in that proportion must be its real importance and intrinsic value.

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CHAPTER 48.

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The events of life not more afflictive than necessary.. .The effects of great prosperity exemplified in the history and fate of a celebrated beauty, the Author's contemporary.... Striking coincidence between the dictates of experience and the principles of the Gospel.

WHATEVER reception this Memoir may meet with from the public, in which however, the writer can have no personal interest, one useful inference, I earnestly hope, cannot fail to be drawn ; an inference which appears to my own mind of so much importance, that I ardently wish I possessed the power, as I do the desire, of fixing the attention of the reader steadily upon it. It is this: That afflictive as may have been many of the principal events of my past life, yet no other disposition of circumstances would have been equally salutary.-Having originally an aspiring temper, a great love of society, and a desire of figuring in it; had I possessed an attractive person, an affluent, or even an easy fortune, such merely as my entrance into life seemed to promise, there might have been no bounds to my ambition or vanity; but the confluent smallpox destroyed all pretensions to the one, and the early death of my father, and of our kind relation and friend, Sir Rowland Winn, together with the visionary turn of my unfortunate brother, effectually deprived me of the other.

Great prosperity often proves a snare; and that it would have done so, to a temper like mine, is highly probable; and I must beg leave here, as a case in point, to produce the instance of a young lady, my contemporary, whose original situation, although different from, (for her father was a merchant) did not in fact, rank higher than my own, and whose talents were probably about the same class.

Possessing a singularly fine person, and a handsome face, she was admired abroad, and worshipped at home; every thing she said or did, was praised; and this general encouragement so exhilirated her spirits, which were naturally lively, that she became yet more celebrated for her wit, and the charms of a peculiarly animated style of conversation, than for her beauty. The vanity of her parents was not less flattered than her own; and there was not a place of fashionable resort, within the neighbouring districts, where the enchanting, elegant Hannah, was not the theme of every tongue.

When I first saw her at her father's house, she was about nineteen; ascending rapidly towards the zenith of her fame, and pointing directly, in the estimation of her friends, and probably also in her own, towards a coronet. I was then seventeen, and possessing none of these attractions, it was scarcely known by any of the gay company, that one so insignificant as myself, was in the room; or, if perchance an eye did glance towards me, it was merely in the humiliating way of contrast. I was fully conscious of this,

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and it so lowered the tone of my spirits, that if I had been spoken to, which however did not usually happen, I should with difficulty have returned an answer: I did not feel envious, for that was not my temper, yet unquestionably a wish was secretly breathed, that without injuring her, I might have participated in her triumphs.

Sometime after this, having "borne the bell" in Yorkshire, the sphere of her influence was extended to circles yet more splendid, and she was not denied a place in the first ranks of fashion, even in the metropolis. The late duke of York, so celebrated for his taste in female beauty, was numbered among her admirers; which, if it could not excite the hope of princely elevation, gave additional lustre and eclat to her far-famed celebrity. Among her admirers, there were doubtless many who aspired to her hand, but it so happened, that she never married.

Eventually estranged from her family, by the taste she had acquired for more brilliant society, and probably unable to sustain the wretched ennui of a mere domestic circle, she resided principally for some years, in the house of a late eminent lawyer, who rose at length, through the various gradations of his lucrative profession, to the dignity of lord chancellor, and whose lady was her relation and friend. Here she was continually in the first society; but her health and beauty soon began to decline, and her spirits sunk in proportion. Still, however, by keeping quiet the whole day, and by the assistance of strong

soups, of ether, or of opium, she could grace with her presence, and enliven by her delightful conversation, the splendid midnight supper. But at length, even this became impracticable; and she retired to a small house of her own, which she fitted up with the greatest taste and elegance, in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, and where she died not long after: the newspapers sounding forth her praise, as of one who had ornamented and embellished the first and most enchanting society.

I made an excursion in my return out of Kent, in the year 1806, to visit a relation in Surrey, where I was asked if I did not remember the beautiful and accomplished Miss Mines? "Most certainly, and I remember also how much I admired her." "I dined yesterday," rejoined my friend, "with an acquaintance, who has taken a ready-furnished house at ; over the chimney-piece in the dinner-room, is a charming picture of a very fine woman, whose face I thought I recollected, taken in a masquerade-dress; and upon inquiring whose it was, my acquaintance coldly answered, that he really did not know; he conjectured however, as the furniture together with the house, belonged to the female servant of a lady recently dead, that probably it might be the picture of her late mistress, a Miss M. of Wakefield in Yorkshire." My friend, who had known this lady as the arbitress of taste and fashion, when figuring in the plenitude of power, was exceedingly struck and affected. "Alas," he involuntarily exclaimed, "not only dead, but