O London-with-the-many-sins!--for these
may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!"

And again to Wordsworth, in 1830,--"Let no native Londoner imagine that
health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse
sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than
altogether odious and detestable."

Does any weak-limbed country-liver resent this honesty of speech? Surely
not, if he be earnest in his loves and faith; but, the rather, by such
token of unbounded naturalness, he recognizes under the waistcoat of
this dear, old, charming cockney the traces of close cousinship to the
Waltons, and binds him, and all the simplicity of his talk, to his
heart, for aye. There is never a hillside under whose oaks or chestnuts
I lounge upon a smoky afternoon of August, but a pocket Elia is as
coveted and as cousinly a companion as a pocket Walton, or a White of
Selborne. And upon wet days in my library, I conjure up the image of the
thin, bent old gentleman--Charles Lamb--to sit over against me, and I
watch his kindly, beaming eye, as he recites with poor stuttering
voice,--between the whiffs of his pipe,--over and over, those always new
stories of "Christ's Hospital," and the cherished "Blakesmoor," and
"Mackery End."

(No, you need not put back the book, my boy; 't is always in place.)

I never admired greatly James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd; yet he belongs
of double right in the coterie of my wet-day preachers. Bred a shepherd,
he tried farming, and he wrote pastorals. His farming (if we may believe
contemporary evidence) was by no means so good as his verse. The Ettrick
Shepherd of the "Noctes Ambrosianae" is, I fancy, as much becolored by
the wit of Professor Wilson as any daughter of a duchess whom Sir Joshua
changed into a nymph. I think of Hogg as a sturdy sheep-tender, growing
rebellious among the Cheviot flocks, crazed by a reading of the Border
minstrelsy, drunken on books, (as his fellows were with "mountain-dew,")
and wreaking his vitality on Gaelic rhymes,--which, it is true, have a
certain blush and aroma of the heather-hills, but which never reached
the excellence that he fondly imagined belonged to them. I fancy, that,
when he sat at the laird's table, (Sir Walter's,) and called the laird's
lady by her baptismal name, and--not abashed in any presence--uttered
his Gaelic gibes for the wonderment of London guests,--that he thought
far more of himself than the world has ever been incline