himself into contact with people all widely
differing from each other, but all extraordinary; his reluctance to
settle down to the ordinary pursuits of life; his struggles after moral
truth; his glimpses of God and the obscuration of the Divine Being to his
mind's eye; and his being cast upon the world of London by the death of
his father, at the age of nineteen. In the world within a world, the
world of London, it shows him playing his part for some time as he best
can, in the capacity of a writer for reviews and magazines, and describes
what he saw and underwent whilst labouring in that capacity; it
represents him, however, as never forgetting that he is the son of a
brave but poor gentleman, and that if he is a hack author, he is likewise
a scholar. It shows him doing no dishonourable jobs, and proves that if
he occasionally associates with low characters, he does so chiefly to
gratify the curiosity of a scholar.

In his conversations with the apple-woman of London Bridge, the scholar
is ever apparent, so again in his acquaintance with the man of the table,
for the book is no raker up of the uncleanness of London, and if it gives
what at first sight appears refuse, it invariably shows that a pearl of
some kind, generally a philological one, is contained amongst it; it
shows its hero always accompanied by his love of independence, scorning
in the greatest poverty to receive favours from anybody, and describes
him finally rescuing himself from peculiarly miserable circumstances by
writing a book, an original book, within a week, even as Johnson is said
to have written his "Rasselas," and Beckford his "Vathek," and tells how,
leaving London, he betakes himself to the roads and fields.

In the country it shows him leading a life of roving adventure, becoming
tinker, gypsy, postillion, ostler; associating with various kinds of
people, chiefly of the lower classes, whose ways and habits are
described; but, though leading this erratic life, we gather from the book
that his habits are neither vulgar nor vicious, that he still follows to
a certain extent his favourite pursuits, hunting after strange
characters, or analysing strange words and names. At the conclusion of
Chapter XLVII., which terminates the first part of the history, it hints
that he is about to quit his native land on a grand philological
expedition.

Those who read this book with attention--and the author begs to observe
that it would be of little utili