a young provincial actress,
whom he had once chided for her inattention or inability, but whose
artlessness of manner, purity and sweetness of nature and aptness for
improvement so enlisted his sympathies that he constituted himself her
friend and guide until the death of her father and brother awakened a
still warmer solicitude, bringing with it the discovery that "love had
been the inspiration of all the counsel and assistance he had rendered
her." Nor is the noble frankness less noticeable with which he tells
of his sister's unconcealed disappointment on her first introduction to
the _fiancee_, whose person as well as mind he had so extolled in his
descriptions and whom happily she learned ere long to look at with his
eyes, so that the happiness and serenity of his home were destined to
be pure and undisturbed.

Within a few years after his marriage he fixed his abode at a short
distance from London, where the sight of open fields, of trees and
flowers, never failed to exercise its soothing and restorative
influence upon him. The love of Nature was a passion with him, and in
the record of his journeys--whether the few which he was able to make
for the sole purpose of pleasure or his many professional tours--his
notices of the scenery show how large was the enjoyment he derived
from this healthful source. When, too, he withdrew from public life,
it was to the neighborhood of a small town, remote from the former
scenes of his struggles and triumphs, but commanding a wide view over
a pleasing landscape. Here, as the friend who has edited this volume
tells us, "he devoted himself almost exclusively to labors of kindness
and usefulness; his charity was so extensive that, although his left
hand knew not what his right hand did, it was impossible that it
should escape observation even beyond the sphere of the recipients of
his bounty; and while thus engaged in relieving distress in the
neighborhood of his new home, he continued to remit money to old
pensioners elsewhere up to the day of his death.... But his great
interest was in the cause of education, especially among the poorer
classes, which he developed at the cost of incessant personal
exertion, and mainly at his own expense. He established a
night-school, which he conducted himself, and in which he was assisted
by voluntary teachers from among the gentlemen and tradesmen of the
town, who attended in turns, but he was himself never absent from his
post, except under