man, and he would have been ten times more useful had not his charitable
disposition been over tinged with oddity and caprice. His contact with
the poor of the parish soon made him overseer, although his religious
observances would not qualify him for churchwarden; for he only went
to church at funerals, to which he was frequently invited, his staid
appearance, and a certain air of gentility of which he was master, being
in such cases no mean recommendation. Overseer and select vestryman, he
printed the parish accounts, for the most part gratuitously, although the
poor and even the better portion of the towns-people never gave him full
credit for this generosity, conceiving that he was repaid by some secret
services or funds. The oddity of his pursuits was only exceeded by their
variety. In politics he was a disciple of Cobbett, and year after year,
foretold a revolution, an alarm which he communicated to every one of his
household. He took extreme interest in all new mechanical projects, but
seldom indulged in the practical part of them. In wine-making he was once
a very experimentalist, and studied every line of Macculloch and unripe
fruit; next, he turned over every inch of his garden, analyzed the soil
_à la_ Davy, and _salted_ all his growing crops. His cogitative habits led
him to take long walks in the country, and he soon flew from horticultural
chemistry to real farming; and about the same time took to road making and
macadamization, and became a surveyor of the highways. But the trustees
wanting to macadamize the miserably pitched street of the town, he
bethought him of dust in summer and mud in winter, and drew up a long
memorial to the lords of the soil, remonstrating with them on their
impolitic conduct; but all in vain. It is curious, however, to reflect
that what the people of a country town about ten years ago thought a curse
to their roads should now be adopted in many of the principal London
Streets. The last we heard of our bookseller's hobbies, was that he had
bought the lease of a house for the sake of the large garden attached to
it, and here, like Evelyn in his _Elysium Britannicum_, he passes his days