lling up notice after notice, of all the providential
deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long and innocent
life. Sitting up in my couch--my couch which, naked and void of
furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered,
shall be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and henceforth
be a state-bed at Colebrooke,--he discoursed of marvellous escapes--by
carelessness of nurses--by pails of gelid, and kettles of the
boiling element, in infancy--by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs,
in schoolboy frolics--by descent of tiles at Trumpington, and of
heavier tomes at Pembroke--by studious watchings, inducing frightful
vigilance--by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings
of the learned head.--Anon, he would burst out into little fragments
of chaunting--of songs long ago--ends of deliverance-hymns, not
remembered before since childhood, but coming up now, when his
heart was made tender as a child's--for the _tremor cordis_, in the
retrospect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger,
acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tenderness, which
we should do ill to christen cowardice; and Shakspeare, in the latter
crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon,
and to mutter of shallow rivers.

Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton--what a spark you were like to have
extinguished for ever! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now
near two centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a
moment washing away. Mockery of a river--liquid artifice--wretched
conduit! henceforth rank with canals, and sluggish aqueducts. Was
it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that
Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your
tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through
green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks?--Ye have no swans--no
Naiads--no river God--or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend
tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius
of your waters?

Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some consonancy
in it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist
sepulture?--or, having no _name_, besides that unmeaning assumption
of _eternal novity_, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and
henceforth to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN?

And could such spacious virtue find a grave
Beneath the imposthumed bubble