was denied in the circle of his immediate relations. As he advanced in years, his mind, stimulated by a general sense of hunger, rather than by any discrimination of appetite, sought food for the cravings of curiosity in a library of motley mixture, accruing from various professional hoards, and a medley of novels, annual registers, and magazines, accumulated in a series of generations, through family survivorship. He was not met at home by either literary tact or talent. No, nor by that sort of tact which sometimes supplies in a great degree, the defect of one and the other. Let loose as it were in an immense common, without a guide to direct him in the choice of his pasture, he devoured with avidity whatever presented itself. He passed through school and university with distinguished success, less the meed of brilliant talent than the reward of diligent application, and, unfortunately for himself, was emancipated from the trammels of education long before his age would permit him to enter one of the learned professions for which he was designed. The interval between the termination of a young man's first course of scholastic discipline, and the commencement of his professional career, is perhaps by far the most important period of existence in determining his future fate, and no prudent parent should permit that interval to be a long one. The mind, relieved from its former habitual restraint, and not yet _harnessed_ in a new pursuit, dashes wildly forward to revel in the charms of liberty, and woe to him who enjoys such length of holyday as to unfit him for returning to the toilsome track in which he must plod for daily bread. George Bentley employed the _chasm_ in _his_ course, chiefly in reading every thing upon which he could lay his hands in the region of fiction and romance. His college studies were ended before he had passed that awkward time of life, when neither child, nor man, the youth not knowing how to dispose of the disproportioned length of legs and arms by which he is encumbered, often flies from polished society in which he cannot expect to receive much notice; and young Bentley was too amiable, too aspiring a character to seek in low company the ease which he might have attained at the expense of morality. Thus while he was sliding into manhood, his days were principally occupied in solitude, amidst a heterogeneous mass of books, except during the hours of occasional meeting with his parents, brothers and sisters.