How it would please me and vex you, if he should, after all, turn Methodist preacher, or tutor of a Methodist academy-if Baptist, better still; instead of going to lose his conscience, and perhaps morals too, among a set of the most unprincipled fellows on the earth.

. There is little to be said about myself. For the last two or three months I have lost almost wholly, and I am now convinced finally, the use of one ear, from no known or conjecturable cause, and without any sort of pain. A cough which has continued as much as eight months, became five or six weeks since, so serious and even menacing in its symptoms, in consequence of a little cold, and again another little cold, with no due care taken about a remedy, that I have been compelled to take the character of a valetudinarian and patient during the last month, have rarely gone out of the house-have not ventured to Bristol for more than a month-have taken physic, a blister on the chest, and so forth. The evil is much mitigated, but not thoroughly removed. What is called "change of air" is strongly recommended, and accordingly I am going next week, if there be any tolerable alteration of this dolefully wet weather, on a short visit to Worcester, and thence probably to my medical brother-in-law at Bourton. Thence I must come to have the meeting with Dr. Marshman who will probably not be in this part of the country afterwards. His affair having occupied me during much the greater part of the year, during which I should otherwise have been about other work, and earning a little money in that way, which I want as much as my neighbours; so that I am most miserably in arrear with certain doings which I ought to have been about, and had pledged myself to do my best to perform long since. I am therefore under every kind of obligation to try to do what I can. during the descent of the year, after having been defrauded of the best and most genial part of it. Besides the usual grievance and distress which I always experience in any mental labour, there is the painful addition, that latterly

my eyes are in such a state of weakness and uneasiness, that I can read very little, and am all the worse off for even thinking. Every day, and almost every hour, I am forcibly reminded, that life is fast coming toward the dregs -and will, ere long, come to its conclusion. At the same time, I have less of the former complaint of the stomach. . . This impossibility of reading enough to be of any use (from the state of my eyes) exacerbates my mortification for the folly of having accumulated so many now useless books.

While writing the above, with the intention of despatching this sheet by to-day's post, I was somewhat chagrined by a note introducing a gentleman of the Caledonian kirk, a stranger from the neighbourhood of Stirling, but luckily a mortal foe to all episcopacy; a man of large information, of large travelling, and modest to the last degree. I have been much pleased with him, and now return to my writing.

. . Hall was lately saying that there must infallibly be, ere long, a great alteration in the constitution of the conference; among other things, that the laymen will either obtain an introduction into it, or will do their best to blow All this notwithstanding, I declare to you once again, that I am always glad to hear of the enlarging extension of the Methodists, from my uniform conviction that (with no small discount for harm) they are on the whole doing great good.

it up.

CXLVII. TO THE REV. JOSIAH HILL.

Sept. 13, 1828.

It would be an irrational presumption to reckon on it, that we and our two inestimable female associates, shall all be found on this earth at the end of the six years next to come. Within that period past there has gone away, from

each of our little families, one individual that was with us, but whom we shall see no more till after we also shall have passed the dark frontier. The mind sometimes makes an effort to pass that limit in thought, and look into the mysterious region, to descry the manner of existence of those who did so lately live with us, and in our own manner. But we are compelled to retire from the precincts of that scene, in hopeless inquisitiveness and unabated ignorance; but this ignorance will not last long; and meanwhile, how delightful is it to believe, that those our lost ones are in a far happier state than any of us inhabitants of the dust.

CXLVIII. TO JOHN PURSER, JUN., ESQ.

Sept. 30, 1828.

MY DEAR SIR,-I am just returned from an excursion of rather protracted duration in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, &c., recommended for the purpose of trying to escape from an obstinate and ill-omened cough. A day or two before I set out I began a letter to you, which I reckoned on sending before I went, but several matters came in the way, and the paper was laid aside, in an expectation of being back here in little more than a fortnight, instead of, as it happened, nearly three times that length of absence. A letter, received at Worcester from my wife, informed me, that a young gentleman, your son, had been here. I regretted having thus been prevented seeing him, and still more so, on now hearing her description of the intelligent and manly character apparent in the transient visitor.

But your son, a young man of mature age,—I seem to be unable to realize the fact; all my ideas fix on yourself, as a youth very much in minority of age, and I cannot carry on my imagination, through the succession of events from

that period, so long past, to the present state of your condition.

My dear friend, your shrewdness will have perceived, how I am contriving to slide into the letter, without accounting first for the long silence since I received yours, which, with your father's, gave me the most animated gratification. But for explaining-that cannot be, that is quite impossible, unless you could (and you cannot) shape to yourself a conception of such a disease of procrastination, as you never saw exemplified, in any equal degree, in any person whom you can have had within your habitual and prolonged observation. To be sure it is a moral disease, but it has clung to me with all the tenacity of a natural and constitutional one.

I will, however, repeat, with what a strong emotion of pleasure I received the communications from Dublin, a pleasure which I certainly intended to express without delay. Some mortification I acknowledge mingled with the pleasure. The warm kindness of my old friends had the effect of giving edge to my self-accusation; and this, in truth, however perversely, operated somewhat concurrently with the tendency of the disease of which I have been complaining; but now I am recognized as an old friend, and will gratefully take my position accordingly. I will try to place myself, as now an old man, near you, now a man in middle age, but appearing to me, whether I will or not, and however I may strive to change the aspect and situation, in the image of a youth of fifteen, nothing less than seeing you will set me right; and as my remembrance of you, and of our diversified intercourse at that time, are among the most distant of the things that remain with me from the long past, I am certain I should, in the event of seeing you, have to combat with a very strange confusion of ideas, and that the one person would very obstinately, for a long time, be two; indeed, perhaps always. It would, however, be very interesting to me to hear from you very minutely, as means of identification, the long

history of the progress of events during the blank interval of so large a breadth of time. I should recount, to see whether or how much you recollected in coincidence with me, a number of the particulars, the adventures, the debates, the juvenile fancies, which stand representative in my mind, of the young friend of a third part of a century back.

It would be highly interesting to me to see your family, and you in the midst of them, and Mrs. Purser, whom I so well recollect as Miss Allen, who did not much like me, at which I am far from wondering; and, indeed, think she was considerably in the right, for certainly I was a queer article in those times. I can recollect what an indifferent figure I cut in divers respects and situations. I should be much amused to recall some of them with her, if she had any marked remembrance of any of them. But, my good friend, neither did she, at that time, much like you; and it would have seemed an extremely improbable event, that you should ever have become united in the most intimate relation of life. I was pleased at hearing, last summer, that a thing so unlikely had actually come to pass, and am happy to believe I may most justly congratulate you both; and I most cordially wish you may very long contribute to each other's happiness.

It is gratifying that you appear to have cause for so much satisfaction in viewing your family; when I see so many parents, on every hand, afflicted with apprehension and sorrow on account of their children; insomuch that I have acquired a feeling which (tacitly perhaps) congratulates parents on the early removal of their children by death. This is not from any painful experience of my My eldest, who would now have been a young man of about nineteen, died of consumption two years since; and left the consolation of an assured hope that he is removed to a higher, happier region. He had previously been, though with very minor faults, an object of considerable solicitude, in consideration of what a world of tempta

own.

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