rning the seamen's manner of singing when
they sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his Latin grammar,
he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a member of Harrington's
Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before it had
received the name. Boyle's _Hydrostatics_ was "of infinite delight" to
him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him comparing Bible concordances, a
captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and Aristotle. We find him,
in a single year, studying timber and the measurement of timber; tar and
oil, hemp, and the process of preparing cordage; mathematics and
accounting; the hull and the rigging of ships from a model; and "looking
and improving himself of the (naval) stores with"--hark to the
fellow!--"great delight." His familiar spirit of delight was not the
same with Shelley's; but how true it was to him through life! He is only
copying something, and behold, he "takes great pleasure to rule the
lines, and have the capital words wrote with red ink;" he has only had
his coal-cellar emptied and cleaned, and behold, "it do please him
exceedingly." A hog's harslett is "a piece of meat he loves." He cannot
ride home in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he must exclaim, with
breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach!" When he is bound for a supper
party, he anticipates a "glut of pleasure." When he has a new watch, "to
see my childishness," says he, "I could not forbear carrying it in my
hand and seeing what o'clock it was an hundred times." To go to
Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the nightingales and other birds, hear
fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here laughing, and
there fine people walking, is mighty divertising." And the nightingales,
I take it, were particularly dear to him; and it was again "with great
pleasure" that he paused to hear them as he walked to Woolwich, while the
fog was rising and the April sun broke through.

He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two
agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's
tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled tunes,
lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty moment. If
he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by
playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read in the book
of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest women. When
he walked, it must be with a book