rt. Once, he writes, "I took the Bezan back
with me, and with a brave gale and tide reached up that night to the
Hope, taking great pleasure in learning 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 informing 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,