summons was likely to excite. The King spoke to her with his wonted good-nature, asked her a few questions, hoped she liked Windsor, and concluded by saying he was glad to hear she had consented at last to have a Lunardi bonnet. Trifling as this is, it is a sort of trifling in which none but a kind-hearted king would have indulged; and I believe no one ever heard the story without liking George III. the better for it: I am sure this was the effect it produced in the circle of her acquaintance. How well do I remember the looks, and tones, and gestures, and mon Dieus! with which she accompanied the relation. James Beresford was the other visitor at Cheshunt, an unsuccessful translator of the Eneid into blank verse, but the very successful author of the Miseries of Human Life. He was then a young man, either just in orders, or on the point of being ordained. This story was then remembered of him at the Charter House: that he had been equally remarkable when a boy for his noisiness and his love of music; and having one day skipped school to attend a concert, there was such an unusual quietness in consequence of his absence, that the master looked round, and said "Where's Beresford? I am sure he cannot be in school!" and the detection thus brought about cost poor Beresford a flogging. Him also, like Betsey La Chaumette, I never saw after that visit; and, with all his pleasantness and good-nature, he left upon me an unpleasant impression, from a trifling circumstance which I remember as indicative of my own moral temper at that time. Our holydays' exercise was to compose a certain number of Latin verses from any part instead of saying, in of Thomson's Spring. I did my task doggedly, in .such a manner that it was impossible any exercise could have been more unlike a good one, and yet the very best could not more effectually have proved the diligence with which it had been made. There was neither a false quantity, nor a grammatical fault, nor a decent line in the whole. The ladies made me show it to Beresford; and he, good-natured sincerity, "You have never been taught to make verses, but it is plain that you have taken great pains in making these, and therefore I am sure the usher will give you credit for what you have done," returned them to me, saying, "Sir, I see you will be another Virgil one of these days." I knew that this was neither deserved as praise nor as mockery; and I felt then, as I have continued through life to do, that unmerited censure brings with it its own antidote in the sense of injustice which it provokes, but that nothing is so mortifying as praise to which you are conscious that you have no claim. Smedley spoke to me sensibly and kindly about this exercise, and put me in training as far as could then be done. He had no reason to complain of my want of good-will, for before the next holydays I wrote about fifty long and short verses upon the death of Fair Rosamund, which I put into his hands. The composition was bad enough, I dare say, in many respects; but it gave proofs of good progress. They were verses to the ear as well as to the fingers; and I remember them sufficiently to know that the attempt was that of a poet. It is worth remembering as being the only Latin poem that I ever composed voluntarily. For there my ambition ended. When I was so far upon a footing with the rest of the remove, that I could make verses decent enough to pass muster, I was satisfied. It was in English, and not in heathen Latin, that "The sacred Sisters for their own Baptized me in the springs of Helicon ; and I also knew, though I did not know Lope de Vega had said it, that "Todo paxaro en su nido Natural canto mantiene, LETTER XVII. RECOLLECTIONS OF WESTMINSTER CONTINUED. March 16th, 1825. THE Christmas before my entrance at Westminster, I remember seeing in the newspapers the names of those boys who acted in the Westminster Play that year (1787). For one who knew nothing of the school, nor of any person in it, it was something to be acquainted with three or four boys, even by name; and I pleased myself with thinking that they were soon to be my friends. This was a vain fancy in both senses of the word: by their being selected to perform in the Play, I supposed they were studious and clever boys, with whom I should of course become familiar; and I had no notion of the inequality which station produces at a public school. It is such that, when I came to Westminster, I never exchanged a word with any of these persons. Oliphant, Twistleton, and Carey, were three of them. Carey was a marked favourite with Vincent, and afterwards with Cyril Jackson at Christ Church; he is now Bishop of Exeter, having been head master of the school where, at the time of which I am now writing, he was one of the monitors. It is said that he is indebted to Cyril Jackson for his promotion to the bench, the dean requesting a bishopric for him, or rather earnestly recommending him for one, when he refused it for himself. Twistleton was remarkable for a handsome person, on which he prided himself, and for wearing his long hair loose and powdered in school, but tied and drest when he went out; for in those days hobble-de-hoys used to let their hair grow, cultivating it for a tail, which was then the costume of manhood. The Westminster Play gave him a taste for private theatricals: immediately after leaving school he married a girl with whom he had figured away in such scenes; she became an actress afterwards in public of some pretensions, and much notoriety, as being the wife of an honourable and a clergyman. For a while Twistleton figured in London as a popular preacher, which too frequently is but another kind of acting; he then went out to India, and died there lately as archdeacon in Ceylon, where he had latterly taken a very useful and becoming part in promoting the efforts which are made in that island for educating and converting the natives. Oliphant was the more remarkable person of the three, and would probably have risen to celebrity, had he lived. He was from Liverpool, the son, I believe, of a tradesman, one of the queerest fellows in appearance that I ever remember to have seen; and so short-sighted, that we had stories of his walking into a grave in the cloisters, and running his head through a lamp-lighter's ladder in the street. The boys in the sixth form speak in public, once a week in rotation, three king's scholars and three town boys: generally this is got through as a disagreeable task; but now and then an ambitious fellow mouths instead of mumbling it; and I remember Twistleton and Oliphant reciting the scene between Brutus and Cassius with good effect, and with voices that filled the school. After leaving Cambridge Oliphant tried his fortune as an author, and published a novel which I never saw; but it had some such title as "Memoirs of a Wild Goose Philosopher." He died soon afterwards. His first efforts in authorship were, however, made as a periodical essayist, before he left school. The Microcosm, which the Etonians had recently published, excited a spirit of emulation at Westminster; and soon after I went there, some of the senior king's scholars, of whom Oliphant was at the head, commenced a weekly paper called the Trifler. As the master's authority in our age of lax discipline could not prevent this, Smith contented himself, in his good-natured easy way, with signifying his disapprobation, by giving as a text for a theme, on the Monday after the first number appeared, these words scribimus indocti doctique. There were two or three |