le his whole air bespoke at once the gentleman
and scholar. Those who have seen his fine Spanish countenance, dark
eyes, and rich clustering hair,--the whole communicating dignity,
grace, and interest to his natural melancholy,--will not soon efface
his imposing image from their remembrance. His talents were of a
highly-diversified order. He was a first-rate Grecian and had he
turned his attention exclusively to that language might have contested
the palm with Porson himself; nor do those who are best qualified to
judge hesitate to place him upon an equality with Burney, Young
or Parr. He was also an excellent Latinist, and had a profound
acquaintance with geometry, and the other branches of mathematical
science. For knowledge of the various eastern tongues he was no
unequal match for Lee, of Cambridge; while his acquirements in natural
philosophy, political economy, and metaphysics, were such as
would have fairly entitled him to prelect on these subjects in any
university in Europe. Besides this, he had an exquisite poetical
genius; and, in his very first contest, succeeded in carrying off the
prize of poetry, to the utter discomfiture of many formidable rivals.

But, with all these high acquirements, he was not a happy man. He had
been baptized in the waters of melancholy; and a circumstance which
occurred in the fifth year of his curriculum had a baleful and,
ultimately, a fatal effect upon him, dethroning reason from its lofty
seat, and plunging not him only, but another estimable individual,
in the deepest distress. This circumstance, painful as it is, we
must relate; and, on perusing it, the reader will see that the noble
aspirations, the keen susceptibilities, of the mind do not always lead
to happiness; for, alas! it was such an excess of susceptibility in
his intellect which disturbed so sadly the current of his ideas, and
made him an inmate of St. Luke's.

The weather at the period we speak of was truly melancholy. It was
in the gloomy month of November,--that month in which it is said
the suicidal propensities of the English nation are most strongly
in force. The air was either filled with dull, sluggish, unwholesome
fogs, which hung upon it like a nightmare, or soaked in a constant
drizzle of small, annoying, contemptible rain-drops, which, without
possessing the energy and dignity of a shower, were infinitely more
disagreeable, and found their way to the flesh in spite of all the
protective armoury of gre