unereal canopy and its heavy curtains, through which no breath
of fresh air could penetrate, all I can say is that people slept in it
and survived the operation--so wonderfully does nature adapt itself to
circumstances the most adverse.

This reference to Bernard Barton reminds me of a portrait he has left in
one of his pleasant letters of a Suffolk yeoman, a class of whose virtues
I can testify from personal experience. 'He was a hearty old yeoman of
eighty-six, and had occupied the farm in which he lived and died about
fifty-five years. Social, hospitable, friendly, a liberal master to his
labourers, a kind neighbour, and a right merry companion within the
limits of becoming mirth. In politics a stanch Whig, in his theological
creed as sturdy a Dissenter; yet with no more party spirit in him than a
child. He and I belonged to the same book-club for about forty years.
. . . Not that he greatly cared about books or was deeply read in them, but
he loved to meet his neighbours and get them round him on any occasion or
no occasion at all. As a fine specimen of the true English yeoman, I
have met with few to equal, if any to surpass him, and he looked the
character as well as he acted it, till within a few years, when the
strong man was bowed by bodily infirmity. About twenty-six years ago, in
his dress costume of a blue coat and yellow buckskins, a finer sample of
John Bullism you would rarely see. It was the whole study of his long
life to make the few who revolved round him in his little orbit as happy
as he seemed to be himself. Yet I was gravely queried when I happened to
say that his children had asked me to write a few lines to his memory,
whether I could do this in keeping with the general tone of my
poetry--the speaker doubted if he was a decidedly pious character! He
had at times in his altitude been known to vociferate a song, of which
the chorus was certainly not teetotalism:

'"Sing old Rose, and burn the bellows,
Drink and drive dull care away."'

Bernard Barton goes on to describe the deceased yeoman as a diligent
attendant at the meeting-house, a frequent and serious reader of the
Bible, and the head of an orderly and well-regulated house. He is
described as knowing Dr. Watts' hymns almost by heart, and as singing
them on Sunday at meeting with equal fervour and unction. Bernard Barton
feared in 1847--the date of his epistle--the breed of such men was dying
out. It is to be feared in Ea