even affected his practice, which from that time fell off to his great detriment. Strange as it may appear, this operated essentially upon Mordaunt's too morbid delicacy, and completed a disgust which the professional quarrels and rivalries he had too often witnessed had begun to create, so that he was prepared for the first opportunity that offered to quit a life which had never been to his taste. Nor did politics offer him any consolation. For, though he had conciliated many powerful friends, he had witnessed, with still more pain, the gross malignity of party, exhibited in such virulent libels and perversions of truth, that he thought no man of feeling, no one whose heart was not callous to abuse, or did not itself delight in it, could possibly be at ease in such a pursuit.

It must be owned that, however able my friend was from the endowments of his mind, with this diseased sensibility he was totally unfitted for the life he had chosen, and from which, in fact, he had long sighed to be delivered, when the death of his uncle, and the succession I have mentioned, determined him at once. He therefore, multo lubens, quitted what necessity (which to him was duty) had alone made him undertake, and continue so long. Many of his friends, and among them I for one, opposed this design. For though, if ever I had any, I had long parted with worldly ambition myself, I entertained it for my friends, and particularly for him, who had so many of the qualifications for success, though perhaps not the most necessary one, the

power to splash with indifference through thick and thin. But his resolution was taken. He said he knew himself; and, instead of answering all my fine reasons, which, he said, applied to others, not him, he read to me with seemingly peculiar pleasure, some of those delicious passages in Horace and Virgil which made him and Sir William Temple such amiable moral philosophers, and wound up with the sentiment of Sir William: "A man ought to choose his course of life rather by his own humour and temper, than by common accidents, or the advice of friends."

Silenced by these arguments and authorities, I had nothing farther to allege against my friend's determination, except the scantiness of the income on which he was prepared to retire. This, after the large expense at which he had lived, and having saved nothing hitherto from his professional income, I thought would make him repent; but this fortune, such as it was, and although, as I have intimated, not above a few hundreds a year, he said, with his usual decision, he would force to supply him with all he wanted. "At any rate," continued he, "it is better than Swift's summum bonum; for while the six hundred pounds a year he wished for, the house to lodge a friend, and the river, and the wood, are all mine, they are also what he in vain wished his to be when he wrote

I can't but think 't would sound more clever,

To me and to my heirs for ever.'

But," added poor Mordaunt with a sigh, "you will also

consider that I am now left alone in the world, with no one to provide for but myself; and, from remembrance of that dear person who has been torn from me, little likely to form any other engagement." With these words he pressed my hand, and leaping into the carriage that waited for him, in a few moments disappeared.

No. XII.

THE RETREAT.

"This is some priory; -In, or we are spoil'd."

SHAKSPEARE: Com. of Errors.

We have said that Mordaunt's retreat was the remains of an old religious house. It was called Saint Julian's, and situated in the Vale of Llangollen, in North Wales, whose romantic character is too well known to need description. Here he had been born, and during the great part of his early youth, at least in the vacations from school or college, he had passed much of his time with his uncle, and, from various pleasing reminiscences of study and sport, as well as of some of the neighbouring inhabitants, although it was many years since he had visited it from his uncle having removed to town, he had always thought of it with unabated interest. My knowledge of this made me the more impatiently wait the performance of a promise he had given, to inform me faithfully of all the impressions made upon him by this important change. Yet, I confess, my expectation was not sanguine; and, in truth, I thought that, like many others of the same nature, the plan would be a failure. I had the fate of Cowley himself before my eyes; and, though not so real, yet of those fully as instructive

personages, Euphanor* and Columella†, all of whom had joyfully left busy society for what they expected would be happy hermitages, but which proved any thing but a refuge from the evils which they imagined had tormented them.

It was full a month before his expected communication came; and though the interest which it expressed argued tolerably for his success in his experiment, yet, as it was only the commencement of it, allowing for the effects of a new pursuit, I felt doubtful what to decide, and I therefore think it best to let the reader judge for himself.

*See an admirable paper on the disappointments of retirement, No. 37. in the "Mirror," by Mr. Craig.

Or the "Distressed Anchorite;" the clever and interesting old novel of the Rev. Richard Graves.