agreeably; and struck with De Vere's manners, his erect carriage, and intelligent as well as ingenuous countenance, he added, "I should have been sorry if Gorblestone had known me so little as to suppose I would deny hospitality to any one who wanted it. But in this instance I shall owe him thanks. From your account, however, it should seem that you have at least been in this country before."

De Vere was not slow to tell his host who he was, and expressed his wonder at having passed the whole summer at his uncle's without seeing him at the castle, or at least in his frequent rides discovering his mansion.

"As to my mansion," said the gentleman, "you see it is so far out of high roads, that unless you sought it on purpose, it is not easily discovered; and as to myself, from my habits I go so little into company, that probably if I had been here I should not have attended the castle party; but I was in fact absent in a distant county during almost the whole summer, and autumn too.”

CHAPTER X.

THE MAN OF CONTENT.

This night he dedicates

To fair content and you.-SHAKSPEARE.

We will have a last year's pippin of my own grafting, with a dish of caraways, and so forth, and then to bed.-Ibid.

THE master of Okeover showed no change in his behaviour on learning the quality and connexions of his guest. He received the intimation of them with seeming pleasure, but no surprise; and De Vere was pleased to find himself, though so strangely introduced, in company with a man of natural and acquired good breeding, which a seemingly long retirement had scarcely been able to affect, much less to eradicate. The supper was simple but delicate. Gorblestone, who commanded in the larder as well as every where else, had laid a virgin cloth, on which he had served up a cold chicken, with young pease of the greenest hue, a bowl of new milk, a cream cheese,

and butter which, as Gray says of his landlady's in Bor rowdale, Sisera would have jumped at.

During the repast, they were waited upon by the attentive Mr. Gorblestone; for attentive he was, not merely to their table wants, but to every word of their conversation; in which, though he never departed from the sort of affectionate respect he showed his master, he more than once seemed not indisposed to join. For like Davy he served his master for good uses; "he was his serving-man and his husbandman:" nor would we swear, but for the presence of De Vere, that there would not have been a regular dialogue between master and man about "sowing the headland with wheat," or a "new link to the bucket." We will not go on to say that Mr. Gorblestone would have thought he had a right, once or twice in a quarter, to bear out a knave against an honest man with his worship." But as to conversation, he once or twice ventured to give his opinion, particularly when his master commended to his guest some ale of John's own brewing, and enlarged afterward, as the discourse led to it, upon the happy interest of a person who had all things within himself. John coincided heartily with his master; and observed it was better than to be a king, who had every thing to buy.

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"I remember," said De Vere, perceiving that a little colloquy with this favoured domestic would not be taken amiss, "you told me you could not abide ships or trade.”

For trade

"I only meant," said Gorblestone, bowing and hoping no offence, "ships and trade from over sea. in barges along our own rivers is all right. It is the ships that have made so many upstarts in the country, which my poor first master knew to his cost, for it was the new people that brought in the new king."

Here the good host looking grave, as if he gave no encouragement, Gorblestone discontinued, and asked leave to make a bowl of cup, observing that the new lemons were remarkably juicy, and the burrage this year remarkably fragrant. At the same time, he wished, for the honour of England, that lemons could grow in an English garden, or that cup could be made without them.

De Vere, somewhat amused, asked what he would do for sugar?

"There is nothing, your honour," replied John, holding the door in his hand, as he was about to retire, "like

the good old English sugar called honey. We have the finest show of bees this year ever remembered."

When he had quitted the room, De Vere observing upon his intelligence and zeal, his master expressed his hope that he would forgive his officiousness.

"In truth," said he, "it is much my own fault, as he is not only clever in his various stations, but I believe sincerely attached to me; and as he never makes his familiarity disrespectful, I find him sometimes a companion not unamusing to the solitude of my life. It is fit I should tell you he has one very decided cast of character, now fast wearing out in this country; for he is one of the few thorough-paced jacobites whom the virtues of the family on the throne have not yet been able to win from the Stuarts. Indeed, he has more than ordinary calls upon his heart for this, and may be forgiven: for he set out, in 1745, as a groom to the unfortunate Townley, with whom he was taken at Preston, and with whom he was tried and condemned in London. He was pardoned from his insignificance; but the death of his master he has never forgotten, and never will forgive. Whiggism, therefore, is his abomination, and as commercial people are generally whigs, they and commerce itself are equally out of favour. In other respects he is an excellent creature, and I could, perhaps, even as an humble companion, ill exchange him for many a better-bred person."

De Vere was moved with this picture, and said he could almost envy him.

"Almost as much," added he, "as I am disposed to envy the quiet of his master's solitude, even at my time of life, when, as is supposed, the world has, or ought to have, a right to all our interests."

“That is no more than true," returned the gentleman, "and I should hope (though you have too much pensiveness on your brow for your age) that you have no disposition to renounce these interests. I assure you, though I live out of the world, I am by no means out of humour with it, and seem to return to it with pleasure whenever a man like yourself comes to visit me."

De Vere bowed, and observed, that with the occupations which evidently employed him, his solitude could never be dull; he only wondered that, knowing the world as he seemed to do, and not angry with it, as he had just professed, he should have so soon quitted it. VOL. II.-6

"I am not so young as you take me for,” replied the gentleman, "but health and a contented disposition will do much for a man. I thank God, I love my species, collectively and individually; nor do I think, that because there are some knaves among them, the majority are not honest or benevolent."

De Vere drew his chair closer to the table, and was all attention at this speech. It forboded, as he hoped, something that might fall in with those speculations on mankind which, young as he was, had lately so absorbed

him.

"If it were not the most impertinent thing in the world," said he, "and could I encourage myself to hope for it, from the frankness and kindness you have shown me, it would complete the gratification I have met with to-night, could I be favoured with the reasons which have inclined you to a way of life, at least_uncommon, if not unaccountable. At any rate, I hope I may know the name of the person who so much obliges me."

"I have no secrets," replied the gentleman, “nor is there a reason against a formal compliance with your request, except the total want of incident in my, I fear, useless life; useless to others, though, if I have avoided the temptations of the world by it, it has not been so to myself. My name is Flowerdale, and if you know a baronet of that name in London you are acquainted with my brother."

De Vere blessed himself as in surprise, intimating that he knew Sir William Flowerdale extremely well, and that he even felt under many obligations to him.

"At the same time," said he, "I should have studied long before I could have discovered you to be relations, from any family resemblance. There seems as little similarity of tastes, or, if you will allow me to say so, of character. You are, at least, greatly his junior."

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By ten years," answered the host.

"I should have said

99 more.'

"That is because the smoky place which he inhabits, and chooses to prefer to these breezy hills, to say nothing of the care and fatigue of waiting on other men's looks, have, I suppose, oldened him. But I have not seen him these fifteen years, and it is five more since I have been in London. In other respects we are good brothers: he writes me sometimes the news of the town, regularly supplies me with the Gazette, and I supply him with

game. I believe, however, he thinks me a mere country put, and as he will indubitably die in harness himself, is convinced that nobody can live happily out of it."

De Vere thought he did not by any means do justice to Sir William, who, he said, was a gentleman of great prudence, and highly esteemed by all parties.

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Why, ay," said Flowerdale, "it is that prudence that always gave, or seemed to give, him the advantage over me, even more than his age. Our friends used to wish I could take a lesson from him, when I called London a prison which I should not like, though the king were my jailer."

"But if he like it," observed De Vere.

"I am answered," said Mr. Flowerdale: "a man can but be pleased, and we cannot, indeed ought not, to be all like. And yet I cannot help sometimes thinking that we are not made to be wedded for better for worse to a toilsome office; nor do I wish to suppose that, as age advances, we may not be something better than one of those old politicians, who

'Chew on wisdom past,

And totter on in business to the last.'

Yes! yes! we are made for better things than this." "And yet," said De Vere, "as far as I have observed, (even already), it is a nice question whether a man of what we call trammels, when once fixed, can change for the better; at least he may make an ill exchange for a liberty which he does not know how to use."

"That observation," said Flowerdale, looking at him, "is, with submission, what ought to be beyond your experience. But if true (which I fear it is), that happiness is little more than merely mechanical, there is this difference between the man who shakes off trammels to enjoy his mind, and him who 'totters on in business to the last,'-that the one consults the dignity of his nature, and acts up to it, while the other reduces himself, at best, to contented mechanism. Take, for example, the man who makes his leisure busy by contemplation, and him who lives in such constant business as to have no leisure but for bodily refreshment. Each may be happy, but whose happiness is the nobler of the two? The one lives and converses with his God;-the other with his club."

De Vere by no means disliked a sentiment to which,