ness; and, if you come but once to each, your practice must have made you very rich."—" Nay, nay," quoth Sir John, "I am not rich in this world; I lay up my treasure in heaven."-" Then you may take leave of it for ever," rejoined the other, "for you have laid it up where you will never find it."

Henderson's memory was so prodigious, that I dare not risk the instance which I could give of it; not thinking myself entitled to demand more credit than I could probably be disposed to give. In his private character many good and amiable qualities might be traced, particularly in his conduct to an aged mother, to whom he bore a truly filial attachment; and in laying up a provision for his wife and daughter he was sufficiently careful and economical. He was concerned with the elder Sheridan in a course of public readings: there could not be a higher treat than to hear his recitations from parts and passages in Tristram Shandy let him broil his dish of sprats, seasoned with the sauce of his pleasantry, and succeeded by a dessert of Trim and my Uncle Toby, it was an entertainment worthy to be enrolled amongst the noctes cænasque Divûm. I once heard him read part of a tragedy, and but once; it was in his own parlour, and he ranted most outrageously: he was conscious how ill he did it, and laid it aside before he had finished it. It was clear he had not studied that most excellent property of pitching his voice to the size of the room he was in; an art which so few readers have, but which Lord Mansfield was allowed to possess in perfection. He was an admirable mimic, and in

his sallies of this sort he invented speeches and dialogues, so perfectly appropriate to the characters he was displaying, that I do not doubt that many sayings have been given to the persons he made free with, which being fastened on them by him in a frolic, have stuck to them ever since, and perhaps gone down to posterity amongst their memorabilia. If there was any body now qualified to draw a parallel between the characters of Foote and Henderson, I do not pretend to say how the men of wit and humour might divide the laurel between them; but in this all men would agree, that poor Foote attached to himself very few true friends, and Henderson very many, and those highly respectable, men virtuous in their lives, and enlightened in their understandings. Foote, vain, extravagant, embarrassed, led a wild and thoughtless course of life, yet when death approached him, he shrunk back into himself, saw and confessed his errors, and I have reason to believe was truly penitent. Henderson's conduct was uniformly decorous, and in the concluding stage of it exemplarily devout.

CUMBERLAND.

THE ABBÉ HUSSEY.

I HAD now manoeuvred the Abbe Hussey into a mission, the most acceptable to him that could be devised, as it took him out of Spain, and liberated him from the necessity of acting a part which he could not longer have sustained with any credit to himself; for it was only whilst the treaty was in train with the sincere good will of

Spain that he could be truly cordial in the cause; when unforeseen events occurred to check and interrupt the progress of it, his sagacity did not fail to discover that he could no longer preserve a middle interest with both parties, but must be hooked into a dilemma of choosing his side; which that would have been when duplicity must have been thrown off, was a decision he did not wish to come to, though I perhaps can conjecture where it would have led him. He had no great prejudices for England; Ireland was his native country, but even that and the whole world had been renounced by him, when he threw himself into the oblivious convent of La Trappe, and was only dragged from out of his cell by force and the emancipating authority of the Pope himself. Whilst he was here digging his own grave, and consigning himself to perpetual taciturnity, he was a very young man, high in blood, of athletic strength, and built as if to see a century to its end. It was not the enthusiasm of devotion, no holy raptures, that inspired him with this desperate resolution: it was the splenetic effect of disappointed passion; and such was the change, which a short time had wrought in him, that father Robinson, the worthy priest, with whom he afterwards cohabited, told me, that when he attended the order for his deliverance, he could hardly ascertain his person, especially as he persisted to asseverate in the strongest terms that he was not the man they were in search of.

When he came forth again into the world with passions rather suspended than subdued, I am inclined to think that he considered himself as VOL. II.

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forced upon a scene of action where he was to play his part with as much finesse and dissimulation as suited his interest, or furthered his ambition; and this he probably reconciled to his conscience by a commodious kind of casuistry, in which he was a true adept.

He wore upon his countenance a smile sufficiently seductive for common purposes and cursory acquaintance: his address was smooth, obsequious, studiously obliging, and at times glowingly heightened into an impassioned show of friendship and affection. He was quick enough in finding out the characters of men, and the openings through which they were assailable to flattery; but he was not equally successful in his mode of tempering and applying it; for he was vain of showing his triumph over inferior understandings, and could not help colouring his attentions sometimes with such a florid hue, as gave an air of irony and ridicule, that did not always escape detection: and thus it came to pass that he was little credited (and even less than he deserved to be) for sincerity in his warmest professions, or politeness in his best attempts to please.

As I am persuaded that he left behind him in his coffin at La Trappe no one passion, native or ingrafted, that belonged to him when he entered it, ambition lost no hold upon his heart, and of course I must believe that the station which he filled in Spain, and the high sounding titles and dignities which the favour of his Catholic Majesty might readily endow him with, were to him such lures as, though but feathers, outweighed English

guineas in his balance, for of these I must do him the justice to say he was indignantly regardless, but to the honours that his church could give, to the mitre of Waterford, though merely titular, it is clear to demonstration he had no repugnance.

He made profession of a candour and liberality of sentiment, bordering almost upon downright protestantism, whilst in heart he was as high a priest as Thomas à Becket, and as stiff a Catholic, though he ridiculed their mummeries, as ever kissed the cross. He did not exactly want to stir up petty insurrections in his native country of Ireland, but to head a revolution that should overturn the church established, and enthrone himself primate in the cathedral of Armagh, would have been his brightest glory and supreme felicity; and in truth he was a man by talents, nerves, ambition, intrepidity, fitted for the boldest enterprise.

CUMBERLAND.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

He

His illness had been long, but borne with a mild and cheerful fortitude, without the least mixture of any thing irritable or querulous, agreeably to the placid and even tenor of his whole life. had from the beginning of his malady a distinct view of his dissolution, which he contemplated with that entire composure which nothing but the innocence, integrity, and usefulness of his life, and an unaffected submission to the will of Providence could bestow, In this situation he