maginary visitors. From this brief
childish experience of his nature and disposition, the chief conclusion
which I drew tended to this--that he was the most _benignant_ person
whom I had met, or was likely to meet, in life. What I have since heard
from others, who knew him well, tallied with my own childish impression.
His life had been too busy to allow him much time for regular study; but
he loved literature with a passionate love; had formed a large and
well-selected library; had himself published a book, which I have read,
and which really is not a bad one; and carried his reverence for
distinguished authors to such a height, that (according to the report,
of several among his friends) had either Dr. Johnson, or Cowper, the
poet--the two contemporary authors whom most he reverenced--happened to
visit Greenhay, he might have been tempted to express his homage through
the Pagan fashion of raising altars and burning incense, or of
sacrificing, if not an ox, yet, at least, a baron of beef. The latter
mode of idolatry Dr. Sam, would have approved, provided always that the
_nidor_ were irreproachable, and that the condiments of mustard,
horse-radish, &c., _more Anglico_, were placed on the altar; but as to
Cowper, who was in the habit of tracing Captain Cooke's death at Owyhee
to the fact that the misjudging captain had once suffered himself to be
worshiped at one of the Society Islands, in all consistency, he must
have fled from such a house with sacred horror. Why I have at all gone
back to this little parenthesis in my childhood is, from the singularity
that I should remember my father at all, only because I had received all
my impressions about him into the very centre of my preconceptions about
certain grand objects--about the Tropics, about summer evenings, and
about some mysterious glory of the grave. It seems metaphysical to say
so, but yet it is true that I knew him, speaking scholastically, through
_a priori_ ideas--I remember him _transcendenter_--and, were it not for
the midsummer night's dream which glorified his return, to me he would
have remained forever that absolute stranger, which, according to the
prosaic interpretation of the case, he really was.

My brother was a stranger from causes quite as little to be foreseen,
but seeming quite as natural after they had really occurred. In an early
stage of his career, he had been found wholly unmanageable. His genius
for mischief amounted to inspiration; it was