ago on one Monday morning while we were at breakfast."

The affection of the last generation of his relatives has
preserved all these pieces, but the piety of this generation will
refrain from submitting them to public criticism. A marginal
note, in which Macaulay has expressed his cordial approval of
Uncle Toby's [Tristram Shandy, chapter clxiii.] remark about the
great Lipsius, indicates his own wishes in the matter too clearly
to leave any choice for those who come after him. But there still
may be read in a boyish scrawl the epitome of Universal History,
from "a new king who knew not Joseph,"--down through Rameses, and
Dido, and Tydeus, and Tarquin, and Crassus, and Gallienus, and
Edward the Martyr,--to Louis, who "set off on a crusade against
the Albigenses," and Oliver Cromwell, who "was an unjust and
wicked man." The hymns remain, which Mrs. Hannah More, surely a
consummate judge of the article, pronounced to be "quite
extraordinary for such a baby." To a somewhat later period
probably belongs a vast pile of blank verse, entitled "Fingal, a
poem in xii books;" two of which are in a complete and connected
shape, while the rest of the story is lost amidst a labyrinth of
many hundred scattered lines, so transcribed as to suggest a
conjecture that the boy's demand for foolscap had outrun the
paternal generosity.

Of all his performances, that which attracted most attention at
the time was undertaken for the purpose of immortalising Olaus
Magnus, King of Norway, from whom the clan to which the bard
belonged was supposed to derive its name. Two cantos are extant,
of which there are several exemplars, in every stage of
calligraphy from the largest round hand downwards, a circumstance