ned Mago-Pico during his state of
celibacy.[I-22] His butter was ill churned, and declared by all but
himself and the quean who made it, altogether uneatable; his milk was
burnt in the pan, his fruit and vegetables were stolen, and his black
stockings mended with blue and white thread.

For all these things the minister cared not, his mind ever bent upon far
different matters. Do not let my fair readers do Josiah more than
justice, or suppose that, like Beltenebros in the desert, he remained
for years the victim of an unfortunate and misplaced passion. No--to the
shame of the male sex be it spoken, that no degree of hopeless love,
however desperate and sincere, can ever continue for years to embitter
life. There must be hope--there must be uncertainty--there must be
reciprocity, to enable the tyrant of the soul to secure a dominion of
very long duration over a manly and well-constituted mind, which is
itself desirous to _will_ its freedom. The memory of Augusta had long
faded from Josiah's thoughts, or was remembered only as a pleasing, but
melancholy and unsubstantial dream, while he was straining forward in
pursuit of a yet nobler and coyer mistress, in a word, of Knowledge
herself.

Every hour that he could spare from his parochial duties, which he
discharged with zeal honourable to his heart and head, was devoted to
his studies, and spent among his books. But this chase of wisdom, though
in itself interesting and dignified, was indulged to an excess which
diminished the respectability, nay, the utility, of the deceived
student; and he forgot, amid the luxury of deep and dark investigations,
that society has its claims, and that the knowledge which is unimparted,
is necessarily a barren talent, and is lost to society, like the miser's
concealed hoard, by the death of the proprietor. His studies were also
under the additional disadvantage, that, being pursued for the
gratification of a desultory longing after knowledge, and directed to no
determined object, they turned on points rather curious than useful, and
while they served for the amusement of the student himself, promised
little utility to mankind at large.

Bewildered amid abstruse researches, metaphysical and historical, Mr.
Cargill, living only for himself and his books, acquired many ludicrous
habits, which exposed the secluded student to the ridicule of the world,
and which tinged, though they did not altogether obscure, the natural
civility of an amiabl