morning-but hold-I will commence my journal regularly-after this assurance, that every delight I have experienced from sublime nature would have been doubled to me, had your quick perception and glowing enthusiasm been the companion of my matchless' way.

"On Sunday evening, 13th, I drank tea with the Storers, and proceeded through the gathering dusk, in shaded road, to spire-crowned Uttoxeter. No sooner had I alighted than I perceived a deficiency of that cash, which, like the vinegar of Hannibal, was to obtain me a passage amongst the towering Alps and Appenines of this country. Not without suspicion of having lost these necessary viaticums, Sam retraced his way to Lichfield at day-break, and having searched in vain the reading-desk and pulpit at Ridware, at last found the things needful in my study at Lacklane. Not small was the anxiety I suffered during his absence; and immediately on his return mounted my steed, and arrived at Cheadle after dark. This little town hangs upon the side of a vast hill; and the window lights, through the dusk as we approached, appeared like luminaries hung amidst the clouds.

"Tuesday morning, 15th, we set out for Belmont; and when I left the direct road to wind along the Churnet's edge, Sam was almost as much struck with the vast mountains, the gloom of woods descending to their base, and the lucid prattling waters beneath, as he has since been amidst our present far superior rocks, waters, and vales; indeed, the exquisite scenery of Belmont did not less enchant me at the second view, than on September 30th, 1794, it did at the first; it is yet almost unrivalled. No diminution of friendly welcome and attention appeared in my reception at Belmont. A high-bosomed lively girl was there, who, after the crate story, clung to me like a burr, nutted with me up the craggy steeps. Beneath this hospitable roof I staid till Thursday (17th), and then descending to the hill, that substitutes the residences of man for grassy verdure, I baited at Leek, and through a diversified and rich country proceeded to wide-spread, twotowered Macclesfield, whose entrance by the noble manufactory on one side, and a rapid stream on the other, is striking. From hence, detained only by the elegant house of Sir George Warren, and the expanded lake that skirts the road, 1 passed at dusk tumultuous and noisy Stockport, and reached Manchester about

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on

eight. Mr. Simmonds was my obliging conductor through the whole of Friday, (18th). Only noticing the palace-like infirmary, with a cheerful but imprisoned water in front, the venerable schools with their excellent library, and the numerous buildings private and public, my spirit anchored upon the inimitable paintings of Mr. Hardman-three rooms and the staircase contain them. Through the door-way of the largest is seen the Mother of Ruth,' preparing her lovely charge to visit their benefactor; she is stooping to bind the bracelets, and is only not alive. The Tigers,' of Rubens; the 'Banditti,' of Mortimer; the Falstaff,' of Fuseli; the 'Burgomaster,' of Rembrandt; the Birds,' of Elmer and Snyders; the various productions of Wright, particularly the 'Watch-tower on fire,' with the moon rising opposite, are all so exquisite, that their equal may sometimes and separately be seen, but their superiors NEVER. Clothed in the gray mantle of early morning, we left populous, commercial Manchester Saturday, 19th; a range of hills extended its huge side for many miles. About its centre two men appeared stationary; upon inquiry we learnt that they were two pyramidal stones, erected, in ages long past, to memorize two brothers, who, losing their way in a severe winter, perished in the frost, and were discovered the next day folded in each other's arms.' I hope this simple narrative will interest you as much as it did me. The end of this mountain is called Rivington Craig. We dined at Chorley a little way beyond Pipe Hall, and had a most pleasant ride (save and except the dust) to high situated Preston, which looks down upon the tide-swelling Rihble, crossed by many handsome bridges, and the interesting village of Walton, embosoming the handsome seat of Sir Harry Hoghton. I here made an acquaintance with the worthy vicar of the principal church, Humphrey Shuttleworth; did the whole duty twice on Sunday, and walked with him and his three daughters in the environs till night.

"Yesterday I dined at Garstong, and arrived at the brow of the hill which overlooks Lancaster, by noon. Here, and through this day, descriptive language can neither adequately inform you, or even outline, what I have seen. To the left, between twenty-one majestic hills, shone in full blaze the dazzling ocean, to which the shining and meandering Lune was hastening. Still to the left, in the wide-spread valley, ap

·

peared the noble castle with all its battlements, and the principal part of the front now rebuilding;-the lofty flagcrowned tower of the church immediately below it. The mass of the town, with its shipping sinking into a valley, on the right, the back-ground formed by our noble mountains faintly seen in distance. "It is nothing, that I went last night to the play, and saw young graceful Siddons-his very MOTHER: and now for this day, for aye to be remembered.' After crossing, with honest Kendal, the landlord of this signless house, Lancastria's beautiful bridge, we arrived, after four miles, where the sands commence. Ocean rolling to the left, and such a noble, diversified shore on the right as impoverishes_description. The huge mountain of Ingleborough, the Gibraltar of England, is at first the principal feature; and the divine Claude, on his own Tiber, never introduced more happily his favourite Soracte. To the first landing, we passed over sands for nine miles. In the hollows, fishermen were collecting their prey. Towards the termination of these first sands appeared the guide on horseback, at the side of the Eau, so admirably painted by Mrs. Radcliffe. At the end of this water we met the Lancaster coach. After six miles of land the Ulverston sands commence, and with them the story of this never to be surpassed ride. To the left, ships sailing in the main sea-the light-house of Peel Castle just discernible: in front, the Eden of this place, Conishead Priory, standing at the base of an immense hill curtained with forest. More to the left, at the foot of high mountains, stonebuilt Ulverston, with its bay and shipping and white-tower church; then, a bare and craggy mountain, at whose foot the eye enters a bay of inexpressible richness, with the stupendous alps of Westmorland and Cumberland in distant majesty, as sovereigns of the vale. To the right the numerous woods of Holker-hall, with the seat of Lord George Cavendish. Ulverston is lovelily situated, and I have dined upon just caught trout, fire-hot steaks, and delicious apple-pie, serenaded by a handorgan! The afternoon has been spent in the paradise of Conishead Priorythe roaring of a noble bull reverberated to the opposite shore; and I have stolen a dear little dog, now lying at my side. Farewell; God bless you! I dare not promise to write again, but if I do not it will be my misfortune not my fault.

"H. WHITE."

"Not one lake has been yet beheld, though I have seen the mountains that environ them. To-morrow morning early I purpose visiting Furness Abbey, the finest ruin in England, seven miles distant; and passing Coniston Lake in the evening, to the foot of Winander Mere. We passed an island this morning called Chapel Island, the window of the monastery only remaining, which is singularly picturesque, and has been unnoticed by all tourists; it is the property of the enviable possessor of Conishead Priory (Mr. Braddyll), one of the present members for Carlisle. At Preston I saw one of the governesses, who was told in her prison at Paris that she was sentenced to be drowned by Robespierre, but the tyrant died within the time. She still looks alarmed, and is in sad health.”

GREGORY HIPKINS, ESQ.

SURNAMED THE UNLUCKY.

THERE is a grave, respectable kind of nonsense talked by grave respectable persons, when the undoing of some dear friend is the subject, which is sure to make it out that "it was all his own fault." And a convenient aphorism it is, when they think it prudent to leave to their dear friend to get out of the difficulty, which, according to their amiable hypothesis, he has brought on himself.

But I, Gregory Hipkins the Unlucky, deny the doctrine. I assert, that in ten cases out of twelve, it is a man's LUCK that strands him on the sands and shallows of his existence. Individuals there are, whom nature, in her grand scheme, seems to have made the pegs whereon she hangs the evils requisite to complete it.

If Theophrastus had obliged us amongst the huge budget of characteristics he has left us, with those of an unlucky man, they would probably have run thus:-The Unlucky man is one who, hastening at the very last hour to give pledges of prosecution, meets on the way some one who detains him with a long story of a naval action, which has just reached the Piræus, till he is too late, and has to pay a thousand drachmas to his adversary-or one, who having purchased a new vestment to appear as a witness before the dicasts, on coming out of the bath, finds that a thief has walked off with it-or one, who turning into another street, to avoid an illfavoured acquaintance, perceives that he has thrust himself into a cul-de-sac,

whilst his creditor is waiting for him at the entrance.

But let us come to the real adversities of life. The same Gregory Hipkins maintains, that there are individuals who have been predestined to mishap from their birth upwards-gifted with an aptitude for misfortune-a proclivity to ill-tossed, the mere playthings of fortune, from one vexation to another. Let them sail on what tack they please, they will make no way. The tide that bears onwards their competitors for wealth or fame, stagnates the moment they tempt it-the gale slumbers, and their idle canvass shakes into tatters.

And a dismal voyage has it been to Gregory Hipkins the Unlucky. For ever has the current drifted him upon the unpropitious shoals and flats that lurked in his course, and at length left him in sorrow and seclusion, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot," unless a kind friend or two, like the philosophical neighbours of Job that visited his dunghill to read him moral and economical lectures upon the misery, comes now and then to prove to me that I have brought it all on myself. Admirable judges of the game when the cards are down on the table! Has not Gregory Hipkins been invariably doomed to play in the losing seat? Oracles of retrospective wisdom, has not ILL-LUCK dogged him from his cradle-hounding him as the Fury did Orestes? The earliest memorials of his childhood, are they not of floggings vicariously inflicted for offences he was guiltless of sums extorted for broken windows on the mere presumption of being seen near the locus in quo-pains and penalties suffered for plundering orchards, on no better proof than that of having passed close to the spot, or of an apple found in his pocket, however fairly purchased in market overt?

And in maturer life-what a serried phalanx of misadventures-minor calamities, petty mischances, you will perhaps tell me but on that account, good sir, not the more tolerable. The greater ones may call up the fortitude that breasts the surge, and rides in triumph over it; but patience itself will sink under a prolonged struggle with the lesser but more importunate troubles that make up their want of power to crush, by their efficacy to sting and lacerate. Ridiculous it may seem to class them as grievances. Yet in the Manichæan conflict of man's life, it is by means of such auxiliaries, that the evil principle con

trives to get the best of it. Repeatedly have I uttered the happiest impromptus, which some trifling accident of proximity has stifled-sometimes at their birth, by the sudden flap of a door, or the instantaneous yell of a vociferous minstrel in the street-in one instance, by an old lady, who sneezed so inopportunely that the wittiest of bon-mots fell still-born from my lips. Never shall I forget when dining with a party amongst whom I was particularly anxious to shine. a certain physician's making a forcible seizure of the best thing I ever said, and by mere jockeyship passing it off as his own-a fraud which the unlucky circumstance of his sitting next to me secured from detection. In the meanwhile, I had the luxury of hearing the applause with which it was received, though placed to the Doctor's credit, the feelings of a gentleman forbidding me to put in a claim to it. At another time urged to dine at a public meeting by some charitable feeling little in unison with the state of my pocket, what was my chagrin, whilst I was detaching the halfguinea I had destined for my subscription from two guineas which I had grasped along with it, to see them, by reason of a sudden jerk from an awkward booby who sat next to me, all tumbling into the plate together, to the great delight of the collector, who carried about the unlucky recipient of my unintentional munificence! At other times, if allured by the less laudable motive of partaking in delicacies not often in my reach, I paid my guinea at the Albion, or at some other temple of good fare. the last fragment of the choicest delicacy-the last spoonful of green peas in April for instance-was sure to vanish the instant I applied for it or as I was disjointing "a gnarled and unwedgeable fowl," a duty which its accursed proximity forced upon me— my plate was sure to return from its bootless mission to the vol au vent, or the bécasse, for which I had kept it in abeyance.

By this time you will suspect, from my thus scoring the words of proximity, that there is some specific Hipkinean theory relative to LUCK, which I have mustered these incidents to illustrate. And so there is. Accurately speaking, perhaps, luck, good or bad, is not predicable of any human occurrence; every change that happens to a thing, whether sentient or inanimate, being only explicable by the action of something

external upon it. But the doctrine of the true church respecting luck is thisthat your weal or woe depends on certain relative positions you hold involuntarily, or have chosen spontaneously, to that which is proximately the cause of that weal or woe. If, by your own free agency, your juxta-position to that which produces ill, has brought that ill upon you, you are the architect of your own misery. And of this, the world in its wonted tenderness to misfortune, will be sure to remind you. But if, wedged in by a coercive force of circumstances, which you could neither evade nor resist, you have been compelled into that disastrous proximity, you may call it, for want of a better term, ill-luck; it being the necessary disposition of things, to which your consent was never asked. And this is what, in all ages, mankind have understood by luck. It is the fate of Homer, the destiny that hunted down the house of Atreus-the necessity whose scythed chariot cuts down the hopes and prosperities of man-the irreversible decree, that went forth from the beginning, containing and controlling all things within its chain of adamant. This is the Hipkinean theory-nor has Hipkins the Unlucky found it without its uses. In sorrow, penury, the desertion of friends, and every circumstance of outward evil, he has called to mind the forced proximities of his lot, and derived comfort from the reflection.

In an evil hour, I chose the pursuit of the Bar. Without a friendly star, and guided only by the flickering taper of my own understanding, I scrambled over its rugged roads and through its deep sloughs from practice to doctrine from dry precedents and mishapen forms to some obscurely-perceived principle, that shot an uncertain ray on the chaos which they told me was the law of England. Happier circumstances would have given a happier direction, or at least more of system and regularity to my studies.

It is not true, oh ye assertors of general propositions, that poverty stimulates to exertion-it retards-it deadens exertion. It brings down the clear spirit from its ethereal aspirations to commune with gross and earthward

cares.

At length, however I reached the bar, the terminus a quo. Alas! the terminus in quem was dark and distant. The decease of the individual, two days after my call, who to that day had scantily supplied the indispensable expenses of my education from a stock which they had already exhausted, left me nearly in

the condition that suggested Jaffier's bitter thanksgiving to heaven, that he had not a ducat. He was not my parent, nor did I ever know that I had one. The want, however, of parental kindness I never felt, for he was in all other respects a parent, and all he had was expended upon my ill-starred ambition. On the 6th day of June, therefore, 1800, I awoke one fine morning in Trinity Term, with the sum of seven guineas in my pocket. It was a slender capital, but the last offices to my departed friend absorbed every reflection; nor was it till a week afterwards that I stared my actual situation in the face. In truth, it had a most repulsive look. I was drifting into deep water in a frail canoe, with scarce a pair of paddles to guide it ;-no being who cared for me, and no "revenue but my good spirits to feed and clothe me.'

This accursed profession too-requiring an outlay of money so far beyond my means, my dreams even, of obtainingbut it was my choice-a boyish choice, from which good advice might have diverted me. And here I cannot but recur to the first determination of my mind towards the bar, partly because it shews what paltry accidents, at a given period of our existence, irretrievably dispose of the rest of it, and partly because it is illustrative of the aforesaid theory of contiguities. Whilst yet a boy, I was on a visit to an old gentleman at Bedford, whose house was closely, nay, inconveniently contiguous to the town-hall, the noise and clamour of the assizes being heard distinctly in every apartment. This circumstance suggested to me, that I might as well hear the trial of a nisiprius case, which had excited great expectation. I therefore squeezed myself in, and began to take some interest in the proceedings. One of the leaders of the circuit was a prosy long-winded sergeant, whose powers in addressing the jury, and ease and impudence in puzzling and disconcerting an adverse witness, seemed, to my untutored apprehension, the perfection of forensic talent; and strange as it is, the voice and manner of this person retained their hold upon my judgment, long after it had become conversant with better models. sate near enough to him, moreover, to discern the number of guineas marked on his brief. My youthful emulation was instantly in a blaze; and, Corregiolike, I said, I too will be a barrister ! Thus I exclaimed in my foolishnessand thus my desires were blindly fixed

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upon the profession, that was the cornerstone of my evil fortunes.

Yet though I began under all the discouragements of penury. I abated not one jot of heart or hope. I prided my self upon an excellent classical education, and upon this I had grafted a respectable stock of municipal lore. Nor was I a stranger to some internal convictions, that even with such unequal chances, 1 ought and therefore should, distance the greater number of my competitors. It was a most defective syllogism. For though my attendance in the court was unremitted, term after term I sat amongst the undistinguished occupants of the back row. Term after term, I answered the usual question of the Chief Justice "Any thing to move, sir?" with "No, my Lord," and the usual bow. Term after term, I listened to the jests and playful allusions of my fellow-juniors, to our common want of success. Light of heart, and backed with the purses of friends and parents, they could afford to laugh. To me it was the bitterest of ironies. I lived I knew not how, and was alike ignorant how I should live on the morrow. Westminster Hall, chilly sepulchre of the hopes that blossomed in the paths of my early manhood! beneath thy cobwebbed roofs, how oft have breathed the sighs of plundered suitorsbut oftener still, the subdued and stifled sigh of the famished barrister pacing thy dreary pavement-the tear stealing down his cheek, as, with weariness of heart, he bethinks himself how he is to provide for the necessities of the day! Grave of my summer prospects, I have now left thee! but even now the pangs of that fevered state, half aspiration, half despair, (how much worse than fixed, assured indigence,) still recur to me as the legend of some fearful dream!

One afternoon (the morning had been consumed in one of those unrequited pilgrimages to Westminster Hall), I was broiling my dinner at the homeless fire of my chambers, when a double rap interrupted my culinary labours. Having risen to answer it, with no great alacrity indeed, for I had few visitors but duns, imagine my surprise, when an attorney's clerk, walking into my room, laid a brief on my table, and a fee of six guineas, with the usual supernumerary half crown for the clerk, and then hastily descended the staircase. Was it a dream, or, better late than never, had merit been discovered,- -or was it a mistake? The latter hypothesis was little to my mind, so I would not entertain it for a moment.

I pretend not to describe what I felt. The returning springtide of hope and joy rushed through my frame. Ye, who endeavour to form a conception of the feelings of a young barrister when his first brief greets his eyes,-abandon the task. They are not to be portrayed by any limner. Six guineas-precursors of hundreds more, hid in the prolific womb of the future-it was gladness even to ecstasy. My slenderness of purse had occasioned a long suspension of payment to my poor laundress, she herself struggling with the ills of poverty, and a brood of little ones. I flew across the square of the Inner Temple to her humble abode, reckless of the pots of porter I overturned in my way, and too rapid in my flight to hear the execrations of those whose equilibrium I had unsettled. I threw into her lap four of the pieces so auspiciously vouchsafed to me, feasted upon the gratitude with which she received them, and returned to my chambers to eat my meal, or rather to feed upon the folios of my brief, which I soon began to unfold, chinking at the same time the two remaining guineas, as they discoursed a music not the less eloquent to my feelings for the pleasing uses to which the four others had been applied. -Treacherous satisfaction!

In about an hour, a brisk knocking announced an apparition I would gladly have exorcised into the Red Sea. It was the attorney himself, to inquire about the brief which his clerk had delivered at my chambers, instead of the contiguous chambers, occupied by a barrister of some standing; but the youth had assured me he had been particularly directed to my chambers, and though there was no name of counsel on the back, it being no uncommon omission, I was satisfied that it had arrived at its right destination. When it was explained, however, by my new visitor, I made what I conceived every requisite apology, ingenuously avowing, as I placed the residue in his hand, the appropriation of four guineas, with a promise in a few days to repay him the deficiency. "Settle that matter," rejoined the churlish attorney, "with Mr. C I shall pay him the two guineas, and refer him to you for the rest." I did not quarrel with the proposal, assured that there was not a man of honourable feelings or decent manners at the English bar who would think harshly of me for an innocent error. I was deceived. The English bar contained many such persons, and no doubt does at this day. No