e made the long-promised visit to my earliest, wisest, and
best friend, Mr. Stanley. I am far from desiring that your friends
should direct your choice. It is what even your father would not do: but
he will be the most faithful and most disinterested of counselors."

I resolved now for a few months to leave the priory, the seat of my
ancestors, to make a tour not only to London, but to Stanley Grove, in
Hampshire, the residence of my father's friend; a visit I was about to
make with him just before his last illness. He wished me to go alone,
but I could not prevail on myself to desert his sick-bed for any scheme
of amusement.

I began to long earnestly for the pleasures of conversation, pleasures
which, in our small, but social and select circle of cultivated friends,
I had been accustomed to enjoy. I am aware that certain fine town-bred
men would ridicule the bare mention of learned and polished conversation
at a village in Westmoreland, or indeed at any place out of the
precincts of the metropolis; just as a London physician or lawyer smiles
superciliously at the suggested merits of a professional brother in a
provincial town. Good sense, however, is of all countries, and even
knowledge is not altogether a mere local advantage. These, and not the
topics of the hour, furnish the best raw materials for working up an
improving intercourse.

It must be confessed, however, as I have since found, that for giving a
terseness and polish to conversation; for rubbing out prejudices; for
correcting egotism; for keeping self-importance out of sight, if not
curing it; for bringing a man to condense what he has to say, if he
intends to be listened to; for accustoming him to endure opposition; for
teaching him not to think every man who differs from him in matters of
taste, a fool, and in politics, a knave; for cutting down harangues; for
guarding him from producing as novelties and inventions, what has been
said a thousand times; for quickness of allusion, which brings the idea
before you without detail or quotation; nothing is equal to the
miscellaneous society of London. The advantages, too, which it possesses
in being the seat of the court, the parliament, and the courts of law,
as well as the common centre of arts and talents of every kind, all
these raise it above every other scene of intellectual improvement, or
colloquial pleasure, perhaps, in the whole world.

But this was only the secondary motive of my intended migrati