commercial motives; and for soon fastening
on everybody worth making a property of, if
practicable; all others, of how great estimation
soever, being in general neglected. In short,
says Mr. Curwen plainly, "This city is
remarkable for sharp dealings; and hence the
proverb, One Jew is equal to two Genoese, one
Bristolian to two Jews.'' To all which it may
be well to add, at the same time, that in the
matter of himself and his real or fancied
sufferings and wrongs, the diarist's authority is not
to be taken more implicitly than the common
understanding in such a case would suggest.
Nothing is so frequent in the diary, for instance,
as lamentations for old age, whose infirmities
every day would appear to be increasing, and
making more and more hard to bear; yet in
close connection with one of the most pathetic
of these complaints, uttered in most doleful
strain soon after the writer was lodged in
Bristol, and when he was sixty-three years old,
the reader's spirits are suddenly raised by the
following memorandum. "Oct. 21. Rose at
six o'clock, and went a coursing with two
greyhounds and a spaniel for hares. Started
one, and left her in a turnip-field; returned
about two o'clock, not greatly fatigued, after
a ramble of fifteen miles over hedge-fences,
ditches, &c."

Nor is this a mere casual indication of
activity and the power of bearing fatigue. It
expresses the habit of the man. During the
long journeyings to which reference has been
made, the mere movement from place to place
has been the least part of the fatigue undergone.
Whatever any place contains, he must see; if
there be any object of interest in the
neighbourhood, off he starts on a visit to it. He is never
willingly at rest, never comes to a positive stand-still,
is still pushing forward where something
more may be seen or known. With the
passion of a dweller in a new country for all
that makes memory and association so pleasant
in an old one, he is honorably anxious to
examine every spot consecrated by genius or
made illustrious by heroism or worth. He
goes out of his way to see Redclyffe church at
Bristol, not because Chatterton has yet become
a name (poor fellow! the earth is still fresh
above him in the Shoe Lane pauper burial-
ground), but because it contains paintings by
Hogarth and the monument of Admiral Penn.
After crossing Salisbury Plain to Stonehenge,
he takes a turn of seven miles that he may
see the classical remains at Lord Pembroke's
seat, admire the handy-work of Inigo Jones,
and touch with reverence the urn alleged to
have held the ashes of Horace. As he passes
though Upton he does not fail to think of
Sophia Western, and the little muff that
turned Tom Jones's head; and nothing
occupies him so much in Wakefield as enquiries
after Goldsmith's vicar, a somewhat spurious
original for that delightful creation being
imposed on him by the worthy inhabitants, who
protested it was their own "Parson Johnson"
put into a book. Of course he went to
Cambridge, and to Oxford; he visited Blenheim
and Stowe; and from Birmingham he made
rapid diversions to Hagley, with its memories
of Pope, and to the Leasowes, still fragrant
with Shenstone's homely and kindly poetry. He
finds out the the house where Marlborough
was born, on the road to Axminster; makes
a pilgrimage from Exeter to Sir Francis
Drake's birthplace; and pleasantly persuades
himself that he has seen in Dovedale "the very
spot in which Chaucer wrote many of his
pieces." Nor has he been in Bristol many
hours, after the long and tedious journey
which has finally lodged him there, before he
sets forth to hear the famous Wesley preach to
an immense concourse, "having the heavens
for his canopy," when the ungraceful, but plain,
intelligible, and earnest speech, the weak and
harsh, but passionate voice, of the grand old
Methodist, suggest to him an instructive
contrast to "the insipid coldness prevalent
among the preferment-seeking, amusement-
hunting, macaroni parsons, who, to the shame
and dishonour of this age and nation, constitute
the bulk of those of the established
clergy who possess valuable livings."

Yet, a few evenings later, it was his chance
to meet one of the dignitaries of the
Establishment deserving a quite different
character, from whom he heard opinions of the
dispute now raging with America, such as
never before had he heard expressed on either
side, or in either country. Mr. Curwen drily
describes him, as well as the opinions he heard
expressed by him, in the remark that he has
been sitting in company with "a famous
political divine and anti-colonist, who judges
the colonies a burden to Great Britain, and
presses Administration to cast them off."

The man who held these eccentric opinions
was the Dean of Gloucester, Doctor Josiah
Tucker; and the reason for his holding
them was, that he alone, among the public
writers of that day, correctly reasoned on the
causes of colonial as well as home prosperity,
and what obstructed their further development.
He did not dispute the right of
England to tax America, and he held the
colonists to have been wrong at the outset
of the dispute; but he had the courage
and foresight to warn his countrymen to
desist from any farther struggle, for that
political power was not to be increased by
the cumbrous and unwieldy retention of
ill-governed territory, but by energetic and
judicious cultivation of physical resources,
commercial interchanges, and intellectual
acquirements. He exploded the fallacy of the
advantage supposed to be implied in the
monopoly of a distant market. A far other and
greater market we had created in America,
a market of the raw material from which
prosperous empires are made; for we had
supplied that vast continent with man, and
with institutions that strengthen arid
develope manhood, nor could the inevitable
tendency of such be stayed by any human