As a comprehension of all delights he loved London; with its bustle and
its living throngs of men and women; its shops, its turns and windings;
the cries and noises of trade and life; beyond all other things. He liked
also old buildings and out-of-the-way places; colleges; solemn
churchyards, round which the murmuring thousands floated unheeding. In
particular he was fond of visiting, in his short vacations, the
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Although (he writes) "Mine have been
anything but studious hours," he professes to have received great solace
from those "repositories of 'mouldering' learning." "What a place to be in
is an old library!" he exclaims, "where the souls of the old writers seem
reposing, as in some dormitory or middle state." The odor of the "moth-
scented" coverings of the old books is "as fragrant as the blooms of the
tree of knowledge which grew in the happy orchard."

An ancient manor-house, that Vanbrugh might have built, dwelt like a
picture in his memory. "Nothing fills a child's mind like an old mansion,"
he says. Yet he could feel unaffectedly the simplicity and beauty of a
country life. The heartiness of country people went to his heart direct,
and remained there forever. The Fields and the Gladmans, with their homely
dwellings and hospitality, drew him to them like magnets. There was
nothing too fine nor too lofty in these friends for his tastes or his
affection; they did not "affront him with their light." His fancy always
stooped to moralize; he hated the stilted attitudes and pretensions of
poetasters and self-glorifying artists.

He never spoke disparagingly of any person, nor overpraised any one. When
it was proposed to erect a statue of Clarkson, during his life, he
objected to it: "We should be modest," he says, "for a modest man." He was
himself eminently modest; he never put himself forward: he was always
sought. He had much to say on many subjects, and he was repeatedly pressed