the fashion with the public as an author,
though the coteries cried him up and the reviewers adored him--and
the ladies of quality and the amateur dilettanti bought and bound his
volumes of careful poetry and cadenced prose. But Cleveland had high
birth and a handsome competence--his manners were delightful, his
conversation fluent--and his disposition was as amiable as his mind was
cultured. He became, therefore, a man greatly sought after in society
both respected and beloved. If he had not genius, he had great good
sense; he did not vex his urbane temper and kindly heart with walking
after a vain shadow, and disquieting himself in vain. Satisfied with an
honourable and unenvied reputation, he gave up the dream of that higher
fame which he clearly saw was denied to his aspirations--and maintained
his good-humour with the world, though in his secret soul he thought
it was very wrong in its literary caprices. Cleveland never married: he
lived partly in town, but principally at Temple Grove, a villa not far
from Richmond. Here, with an excellent library, beautiful grounds, and
a circle of attached and admiring friends, which comprised all the more
refined and intellectual members of what is termed, by emphasis, _Good
Society_--this accomplished and elegant person passed a life perhaps
much happier than he would have known had his young visions been
fulfilled, and it had become his stormy fate to lead the rebellious and
fierce Democracy of Letters.

Cleveland was indeed, if not a man of high and original genius, at
least very superior to the generality of patrician authors. In retiring,
himself, from frequent exercise in the arena, he gave up his mind
with renewed zest to the thoughts and masterpieces of others. From a
well-read man, he became a deeply instructed one. Metaphysics, and some
of the material sciences, added new treasures to information more light
and miscellaneous, and contributed to impart weight and dignity to a
mind that might otherwise have become somewhat effeminate and frivolous.
His social habits, his clear sense, and benevolence of judgment, made
him also an exquisite judge of all those indefinable nothings, or little
things, that, formed into a total, become knowledge of the Great World.
I say the Great World--for of the world without the circle of the great,
Cleveland naturally knew but little. But of all that related to that
subtle orbit in which gentlemen and ladies move in elevated and ethereal