It is now my duty, as well as my greatest pleasure, to put on record the true kindness, the considerate generosity, and the well-directed munificence of a family, a parallel to which can only be found in our soil--a superior nowhere. By the heads of this family I was honoured with particular notice. Perhaps they never gave a thought about my poetical talent, or the wonderful progress that my master said that I had made in my classics, and my wooden-legged tutor in my mathematics. Their kind patronage sprang from higher motives,--from benevolence; they had heard that I had been forsaken--their own hearts told them that the sunshine of kindness must be doubly grateful to the neglected, and, indeed, to me they were very kind. Perhaps it may be thought that I had a quick eye to the failings and the ridiculous points of those with whom chance threw me in contact. I am sure that I was equally susceptible to the elevation of character that was offered to me in the person of Mr ---, the respected father of the family of which I have just made mention. As the noble class to which he belonged, and of which he was the first ornament, are fast degenerating, I will endeavour to make a feeble portrait of a man, that, at present, finds but too few imitators, and that could never have found a superior. He was one of those few merchant princes, who are really, in all things, princely. Whilst his comprehensive mind directed the commerce of half a navy, and sustained in competence and happiness hundreds at home, and thousands abroad, the circle immediately around him felt all the fostering influence of his well-directed liberality, as if all the energies of his powerful genius had been concentrated in the object of making those, only about him, prosperous. He was born for the good of the many, as much as for the elevation of the individual. Society had need of him, and it confessed it. When its interests were invaded by a short-sighted policy, it called upon his name to advocate its violated rights, and splendidly did he obey the call. He understood England's power and greatness, for he had assisted in increasing it; he knew in what consisted her strength, and in that strength he was strong, and in his own.