in the nursery.--This
ends the eighth book.

The Ninth and last is chiefly occupied with the mystical discourses of
the Pedlar; who maintains, that the whole universe is animated by an
active principle, the noblest seat of which is in the human soul; and
moreover, that the final end of old age is to train and enable us

To hear the mighty stream of _Tendency_
Uttering, for elevation of our thought,
A clear sonorous voice, inaudible
To the vast multitude whose doom it is
To run the giddy round of vain delight--

with other matters as luminous and emphatic. The hostess at length
breaks off the harangue, by proposing that they should all make a little
excursion on the lake,--and they embark accordingly; and, after
navigating for some time along its shores, and drinking tea on a little
island, land at last on a remote promontory, from which they see the sun
go down,--and listen to a solemn and pious, but rather long prayer from
the Vicar. They then walk back to the parsonage door, where the author
and his friend propose to spend the evening;--but the Solitary prefers
walking back in the moonshine to his own valley, after promising to take
another ramble with them--

If time, with free consent, be yours to give,
And season favours.

--And here the publication somewhat abruptly closes.

Our abstract of the story has been so extremely concise, that it is more
than usually necessary for us to lay some specimens of the work itself
before our readers. Its grand staple, as we have already said, consists
of a kind of mystical morality: and the chief characteristics of the
style are, that it is prolix and very frequently unintelligible: and
though we are very sensible that no great gratification is to be
expected from the exhibition of those qualities, yet it is necessary to
give our readers a taste of them, both to justify the sentence we have
passed, and to satisfy them that it was really beyond our power to
present them with any abstract or intelligible account of those long
conversations which we have had so much occasion to notice in our brief
sketch of its contents.

* * * * *

There is no beauty, we think, it must be admitted, in such passages; and
so little either of interest or curiosity in the incidents they
disclose, that we can scarcely conceive that any man to whom they had
actually occurred, should take the trouble to recount them to his wife
and children by his