of Swedenborg, I fancy that the whole may be explained out of the same cause which occasionally may be descried, through a distance of two complete centuries, as weighing heavily upon the Farrers--viz. the dire monotony of daily life, when visited by no irritations either of hope or fear--no hopes from ambition, no fears from poverty. Nearly (if not quite) sixty years did my venerable friend inhabit that same parsonage house, without any incident more personally interesting to himself than a cold or a sore throat. And I suppose that he resorted to Swedenborg--reluctantly, perhaps, at the first--as to a book of fairy tales connected with his professional studies. And one thing I am bound to add in candour, which may have had its weight with him, that more than once, on casually turning over a volume of Swedenborg, I have certainly found most curious and felicitous passages of comment--passages which extracted a brilliant meaning from numbers, circumstances, or trivial accidents, apparently without significance or object, and gave to things, without a place or a habitation in the critic's regard, a value as hieroglyphics or cryptical ciphers, which struck me as elaborately ingenious. This acknowledgment I make not so much in praise of Swedenborg, whom I must still continue to think a madman, as in excuse for Mr. Clowes. It may easily be supposed that a person of Mr. Clowes's consideration and authority was not regarded with indifference by the general body of the Swedenborgians. At his motion it was, I believe, that a society was formed for procuring and encouraging a translation into English of Swedenborg's entire works, most of which are written in Latin. Several of these translations are understood to have been executed personally by Mr. Clowes; and in this obscure way, for anything I know, he may have been an extensive author. But it shows the upright character of the man that never, in one instance, did he seek to bias my opinions in this direction. Upon every other subject, he trusted me confidentially--and, notwithstanding my boyish years (15-16), as his equal. His regard for me, when thrown by accident in his way, had arisen upon his notice of my fervent simplicity, and my unusual thoughtfulness. Upon these merits, I had gained the honourable distinction of a general invitation to his house, without exception as to days and hours, when few others could boast of any admission at all. The common ground on which we met was literature--more especially the Greek and Roman literature; and much he exerted himself, in a spirit of the purest courtesy, to meet my animation upon these themes. But the interest on his part was too evidently a secondary interest in _me_, for whom he talked, and not in the subject: he spoke much from memory, as it were of things that he had once felt, and little from immediate sympathy with the author; and his animation was artificial, though his courtesy, which prompted the