The circumstances of my friend's boyhood and early youth, though singularly favourable to his peculiar cast of mind, in many or indeed most respects, were in this point disadvantageous, that they afforded him little or no opportunity of forming those early friendships, which, when they are well formed, contribute so largely to our future happiness. Perhaps the greatest advantage of public education, as compared with private, is, that it presents more such opportunities than are ever met with in any subsequent stage of human life. And yet even then in friendship, as afterwards in love, we are for the most part less directed by choice than by what is called chance. Daniel Dove never associated with so many persons of his own age at any other time as during his studies at Leyden. But he was a foreigner there, and this is almost as great an obstacle to friendship as to matrimony; and there were few English students among whom to choose. Dr. Brocklesby took his degree, and left the University the year before he entered it; Brocklesby was a person in whose society he might have delighted; but he was a cruel experimentalist, and the dispathy which this must have excited in our friend, whose love of science, ardent as it was, never overcame the sense of humanity, would have counteracted the attraction of any intellectual powers however brilliant. Akenside, with whom in many respects he would have felt himself in unison, and by whose society he might have profited, graduated also there just before his time. He had a contemporary more remarkable than either in his countryman John Wilkes, who was pursuing his studies there, not without some diligence, under the superintendence of a private tutor; and who obtained much notice for those lively and agreeable talents which were afterwards so flagrantly abused. But the strict and conscientious frugality which Dove observed rendered it unfit for him to associate with one who had a liberal allowance, and expended it lavishly: and there was also a stronger impediment to any intimacy between them; for no talents however companionable, no qualities however engaging, could have induced him to associate with a man whose irreligion was of the worst kind, and who delighted in licentious conversation.