ill-nature before me, and yet relieve himself by relieving the sailor.” And by contrivance he gains his end. The mandarin’s curiosity to know “what could be his motives for thus concealing virtues which others take such pains to display,” is natural, and finds natural expression; and thereby hangs the tale of the “reluctantly good” Man in Black. Smollett, again, makes one of his heroes, though young and pleasure-loving, retrench his expenses in order to help the needy: “Numberless were the objects to which he extended his charity in private. Indeed, he exerted this virtue in secret, not only on account of avoiding the charge of ostentation, but also because he was ashamed of being detected in such an awkward, unfashionable practice by the censorious observers of this humane generation. In this particular he seemed to confound the ideas of virtue and vice; for he did good as other people do evil, by stealth; and was [like the man in black] so capricious in point of behaviour, that frequently, in public, he wagged his tongue in satirical animadversions upon that poverty which his hand had, in private, relieved.” It cannot be affirmed of him that he exemplified, in detail, all the attributes of a portrait from life, but after death, by Cowper; but some of them he did: “Yet was thy liberality discreet, Nice in its choice, and of a tempered heat; And though in act unwearied, _secret still_, As in some solitude the summer rill Refreshes, where it winds, the faded green, And cheers the drooping flowers, _unheard_, _unseen_.”