ppy fortune to have
been received on terms of intimate friendship by the accomplished family
of Mr. Baring, who was then member for Exeter, and beneath whose roof he
passed a great portion of the period of nearly three years during which
he remained in Devonshire.

The illness of my father was relieved, but not removed, by this change
of life. Dr. Downman was his physician, whose only remedies were port
wine, horse-exercise, rowing on the neighbouring river, and the
distraction of agreeable society. This wise physician recognised the
temperament of his patient, and perceived that his physical derangement
was an effect instead of a cause. My father instead of being in a
consumption, was endowed with a frame of almost super-human strength,
and which was destined for half a century of continuous labour and
sedentary life. The vital principle in him, indeed, was so strong that
when he left us at eighty-two, it was only as the victim of a violent
epidemic, against whose virulence he struggled with so much power, that
it was clear, but for this casualty, he might have been spared to this
world even for several years.

I should think that this illness of his youth, and which, though of a
fitful character, was of many years' duration, arose from his inability
to direct to a satisfactory end the intellectual power which he was
conscious of possessing. He would mention the ten years of his life,
from twenty-five to thirty-five years of age, as a period very deficient
in self-contentedness. The fact is, with a poetic temperament, he had
been born in an age when the poetic faith of which he was a votary had
fallen into decrepitude, and had become only a form with the public, not
yet gifted with sufficient fervour to discover a new creed. He was a
pupil of Pope and Boileau, yet both from his native impulse and from the
glowing influence of Rousseau, he felt the necessity and desire of
infusing into the verse of the day more passion than might resound from
the frigid lyre of Mr. Hayley. My father had fancy, sensibility, and an
exquisite taste, but he had not that rare creative power, which the
blended and simultaneous influence of the individual organisation and
the spirit of the age, reciprocally acting upon each other, can alone,
perhaps, perfectly develope; the absence of which, at periods of
transition, is so universally recognised and deplored, and yet which
always, when it does arrive, captivates us, as it were, by surprise. H