without giving the least appearance of damp to the roads and I drove to Ck, Mr J's villa, molto gustosamente the expectation of the manifold luxuries I hoped to enjoy there

the prospective delights both of palate and intellect being heightened and improved by the preliminary gratification I tasted, while the shandrydan rolled along between the refreshed green of the meadows and corn-fields. His house is an old turreted mansion, much patched in the whole mass of its structure, and, I believe, much increased in its accommodations since he entered upon possession of it. The situation is extremely beautiful. There are very few trees immediately about the house; but the windows open upon the side of a charming hill, which, in all its extent, as far as the eye can reach, is wooded most luxuriantly to the very summit, There cannot be a more delicious rest for the eyes, than such an Arcadian height in this bright and budding time of the year; but, indeed, where, or at what time, can a fine wood be looked upon without delight? Between the wood and the house, there is a good garden, and some fields, in the cultivation of which Mr J seems to take much pleasure; for I had no

sooner arrived, than he insisted upon carrying me over his ditches and hedges to show me his method of farming; and, indeed, talked of Swedish turnip, and Fiorin grass, and red-blossomed potatoes, in a style that would have done no dishonour to your friend Curwen himself. I had come, thanks to my rustic ignorance, exactly at the hour appointed for dinner, (five o'clock,) so that I had three parts of an hour of the great man entirely to myself during the whole of which space he continued to talk about rural affairs, and to trot me up one field and down another, till I was weary, without (credite posteri !) making one single allusion to law, politics, or literature.

We were joined towards six o'clock by Professors Play and I, and one or two young advocates, who had walked out with them. Then came R―

Morwhom you remember at 0 Balliol, a relation and intimate friend of J's. He and the celebrated orator Alison officiate together in one of the Episcopalian chapels in Edinburgh. Although we never knew each other at Oxford, yet we immediately recognized each other's old High-Street faces, and began to claim a sort of acquaintance on that score,

as all Oxonian contemporaries, I believe, are accustomed to do, when they meet at a distance from their alma mater. There were several other gentlemen, mostly of grave years, so that I was not a little astonished, when somebody proposed a trial of strength in leaping. Nor was my astonishment at all diminished, when Mr Plamuɓegan to throw off his coat and waistcoat, and to prepare himself for taking his part in the contest. When he did so much, I could have no apology, so I also stripped; and, indeed, the whole party did the same, except J alone, who was dressed in a short green jacket, with scarcely any skirts, and, therefore, seemed to consider himself as already sufficiently "accinctus ludo."

I used to be a good leaper in my day-witness the thousands of times I have beat you in the Port-Meadow, and elsewhere-but I cut a very poor figure among these sinewy Caledonians. With the exception of Leslie, they all jumped wonderfully; and Jeffery was quite miraculous, considering his brevity of stride. But the greatest wonder of the whole was Mr Plaq He also is a short man, and he cannot be less than seventy, yet he took his stand with the assurance of an athletic, and positively beat every one of us-the very best of us, at least half a

heel's breadth. I was quite thunderstruck, never having heard the least hint of his being so great a geometrician-in this sense of the word. I was, however, I must own, agreeably surprised by such a specimen of buoyant spirit and muscular strength in so venerable an old gentleman, and could not forbear from complimenting him on his revival of the ancient peripatetic ideas, about the necessity of cultivating the external as well as the internal energies, and of mixing the activity of the practical with that of the contemplative life. He took what I said with great suavity; and, indeed, I have never seen a better specimen of that easy hilarity and good humour, which sits with so much gracefulness on an honoured old age. I wish I could give you a notion of his face. It is not marked by any very striking features; but the unison of mildness of disposition, and strength of intellect in the expression, is too remarkable to be unnoticed even by a casual observer. His habits of profound thought have drawn some deep lines about his mouth, and given him a custom of holding his lips very closely shut, otherwise I suspect the whole countenance would have been nothing more than an amiable one; although the light eyes have certainly at times something very

piercing in their glance, even through his spectacles. The forehead is very finely developed--singularly broad across the temples, as, according to Spurzheim, all mathematical foreheads must be; but the beauty in that quarter is rather of an ad clerum character, or, as Pindar hath it,

προς το παν Ερμηνεων χατίζει.

I, however, who really, in good earnest, begin to believe a little of the system, could not help remarking this circumstance; and more particularly so, because I found Mr Le's skull to possess many of the same features-above all, that of the breadth between the temples. This other great mathematician is a much younger man than Play but his hair is already beginning to be grey. He is a very fat heavy figure of a man, without much more appearance of strength than of activity; and yet, although a bad leaper, by no means a slothful-looking person neither. He has very large eyes, in shape not unlike Coleridge's, but without the least of the same mysterious depth of expression. Altogether, his face is one which, at first sight, you would pronounce to be merely a coarse one;