Wilberforce, whose head was not strong
enough to keep him out of the pale of
religious bigotry, but whose heart was most
kindly, and his temperament most happy,
contrived (though it is difficult to conceive
how even the merriest of such theologians
manage it) to combine the most terrific ideas
of the next world (for others) with the most
comfortable enjoyment of this world in his
own person. He was a little plain-faced man,
radiant by nature with glee and good-
humour; very "serious" at a moment's
notice; an earnest devotee; a genial host; a
good speaker and member of parliament;
now siding, and now differing with his friend
Pitt, now joining in devotion with Lord
Teignmouth; now laughing heartily with
Canning; now sighing over the table-talk of
the Prince Regent; but, above all, deep in
tractarianism, and at the same time
advocating the freedom of the poor negroes;
which was by no means the case with all
persons of his way of thinking, political or
religious.

"About a year and three quarters ago," says
this worthy, ultra-serio-comic person, "I
changed my residence, and found myself in
the habitation which my family now occupies
and which we find more salubrious than
Clapham Common. We are just one mile
from the turnpike gate at Hyde Park Corner,
which I think you will not have forgotten
yet, having about three acres of pleasure
ground around my house, or rather behind it,
and several old trees, walnut and mulberry,
of thick foliage. I can sit and read under
their shade, which I delight in doing, with
as much admiration of the beauties of
nature (remembering at the same time
the words of my favourite poet: 'Nature
is but a name for an effect, whose cause is
God,') as if I were two hundred miles from
the great city."

This is excellent; and would have been
more so, if Mr. Wilberforce could have allowed
others, not quite of the same creed, to have
the same right to a comfortable enjoyment of
nature, and the same reputation for piety.
He was of opinion that you must be continually
thinking about God, otherwise God would
be very angry. As if the Divine Father
could not dispense with these eternal
references to him from his children; or would
burthen them with the weight of even too
much gratitude. Our prosperous and lively-
blooded saint, however, bore the burthen
with singular vivacity, owing to a notion he
had (hardly burthened with modesty, though
he always professed to wonder at the
circumstance) that he was a special favourite of God.

His meditations down Kensington Road
were certainly very different from those of
Mr. Wilkes. "Walked" (he says, in his
diary) "from Hyde Park Corner, repeating
the hundred and nineteenth Psalm in great
comfort." This is the longest of the Psalms,
extending to a hundred and seventy-six
verses, full of pious self-congratulation, and
of rebukes of its deriders.

The Vicissitudes in the history of houses
are curious. Here in the Grounds of Gore
House, the Government contractor meditated                                       how he could save himself a penny; Mr.                                       Wilberforce meditated psalms; Lady
Blessington novels; Monsieur Soyer the composition
of sauces, and how many dinners the
place would hold; and now the district is to
be occupied by the new National Gallery, its
schools of art and science, and bowers for the
exhibition of sculpture. A display of
Cabinet-work, and of studies from the Schools of
Art, has already commenced operations,
and the public are re-admitted to the grounds.
This, however, it must be allowed, is a good
absorption of the antecedent individualities,
pleasant as some of them were; though it is
to be doubted, whether Mr. Wilberforce's
ghost will be quite easy at the sight of the
Venuses and Apollos.

England, a teacher of nations in so many
respects, is but now discovering, what has
so long been known to Italy, and partially
known to France, that utility and beauty,
instead of being antagonists, are friends; that
the one without the other, besides being in
danger of falling into the gross and the
sordid, cannot thoroughly work out its
purposes; form and proportion, and adaptation
of means to ends, being constituent qualities
of the beautiful; and finally, that as Nature,
far from disliking the beautiful, thought fit
to be the cause of it, and loves it, and deals
in it to profusion, often in the very humblest
of her productions, so it becomes Art to
imitate her great mistress in the like
impartiality of adornment, and show us what
opulence and what elevation, in the scale of
discerning beings, await the perceptions of
those whose ideas are not limited to the
commonest forms of the desirable. The use
of use itself is but to administer to our
satisfactions; and the use of beauty is to refine
and perfect those satisfactions, and raise them
by degrees, in proportion as we cultivate a
true sense of it, to thoughts of the beauty
and goodness of its great First Cause. To
ask with a sneer what is the use of beauty,
is to ask with impiety why God has filled the
universe with beauty; why he has made the
skies blue and the fields green, and vegetation
full of flowers, and the human frame a model
for the sculptor, and gifted everything in
existence with shape and colour. The
commonest piece of grass, with the straightness
of its stem, the flowing contrast of its leaves,
and the trembling fullness of its ears, is a
miracle of beauty. So rich in grace and
suggestiveness has it pleased Him to make
the houses of the very insects, and the food
of cattle! Is it not better to discern this, in
addition to the other uses of grass, than to
see in it nothing but those uses?—nothing but
hay for the market, and so much return of
money to the grower? Very good things both