What a comfort it
is for once to feel utterly unknown; for even my luggage has only a
monogram, and here at the White Hart I am No. 15, and a commercial gent
to all appearance: really, it is quite a relief to be some one else than
Martin Tupper."

"Read J.S. Mill's autobiography; poor wretch! from his cradle brought up
as an atheist by a renegade father, he can have been hardly more
responsible for his no faith than a born idiot. However, in these
infidel last times, and with our very broad-church and no-church
teachings, a man has only to be utterly godless (so he be moral) to
make himself a name for pure reason. I'd sooner be the most
unenlightened Christian than such a false philosopher. Let a Goldsmith
say of me, 'No very great wit, he believed in a God,' for I refuse to
deny one, like the Psalmist's fool." "I throw myself so into my
readings, that I almost forget my audience, till their cheering, as it
were, wakes me up,--and I feel every word I say: if I didn't, that word
would fall dead. There is a magnetism in earnestness,--an electric
power; I am in a way full of it when reciting, and I am aware of it
flowing through the mass of my audience." "It was a touching thing to me
to hear the aged Mr. B---- conduct his family worship, singing like an
old Covenanter the harmonious Puritan dirgy hymn, reading the Bible most
devoutly, and praying (as only Presbyterians can pray) from the heart
and not from a formal liturgy, earnestly and eloquently; he prayed also
for me and mine, and I thank God and him for it." "My host at Ayr drove
me in his waggonette to see the mausoleum at Hamilton Palace, with its
wonderful bronze doors after Ghiberti, and its inlaid marble floor, much
of which is of real verd antique in small pieces. Then we went down
among the dead men, and inspected the coffins of nearly all the Dukes of
Hamilton. It is an outrage to have expended so much (L100,000) on this
senseless mausoleum, and to have left close by and within sight of the
great Grecian palace those filthy crowded streets of poverty and
disease--the wretched town of Hamilton--as a contrast to profuse
extravagance. The last Duke, the very Lord Douglas who was in the same
class with me at Christ Church, and is supposed to have personated me in
Tom Quad, has a very graceful temple of Vesta all to himself, with his
bust in the middle: his father lies, of all heathenish absurdities, in a
real antique Egyptian sarcophagus, into which it is said he