So Vincent Bourne lived his shabby, unpretending life, the _secretum iter, et fallentis semita vitæ_. Every one must have known some one of this kind,--good-natured, easy-going, murmuring a phantom music in his head, indifferent to what went on about him, without ambition or personal dignity. His patron, the Duke of Newcastle, was anxious to benefit him, but Vinny could not be coerced into taking Orders, and so the Prebend at Westminster and the Canonry at Christchurch, which were destined for him, went elsewhere. And yet he seems to have had some obscure visions of preferment, founded on a promise given by Dr. Arbuthnot, the friend of Pope. Bourne wrote in a copy of Arbuthnot's work on Coins: "[As] to the reputation of Dr. Arbuthnot, I never met with less honour and generosity than I have received from him; I scorn to charge that upon his country which he has been guilty of in his private character; he should have remembered his promise, and would have done it, if he had not been a courtier;" and there is a preceding passage, which looks as if Bourne had given Arbuthnot literary assistance which had neither been acknowledged nor repaid. Bourne, in a curious letter to his wife, written shortly before and in anticipation of his death, gives her the reasons which prevented him from taking orders; he says that the importance of so great a charge, joined with a mistrust of his own sufficiency, made him fearful of undertaking it. And he adds, "If I have not in that capacity assisted in the salvation of souls, I have not been the means of losing any; if I have not brought reputation to the function by any merit of mine, I have the comfort of this reflection, I have given no scandal to it by my meanness and unworthiness." This letter shows that he considered the pastoral office in a different light from most of his contemporaries, as one of great personal responsibility; and the whole letter breathes a spirit of intense contrition and pathetic humility at the thought of the opportunities he has missed and the idleness and vanity of his life. He does not however write as if with any sense of his shortcomings as a teacher, for he says that his one desire has been to be humbly serviceable in his quiet sphere of duty. But the most touching part of the letter is the vague dismay which, in spite of his deep and sincerely Christian hope, he finds in the thought of dissolution; the terrors of the grave lie very hard upon him, as they would upon a man of imagination and sensibility who had lived a thoughtless and easy-going life. The whole letter is a singular contrast to another rhetorical epistle which has been preserved, addressed to a young lady on the thoughts suggested by a graveyard, in which he says with a pretentious philosophy that the more human document belies, that "the frequent perusal of gravestones and monuments, and the many walks I have taken in a churchyard, have given me so great a distaste for life." Poor Vinny!