tude about the book which had so much interested me in the day of my fall. It had, it seems, been reclaimed by the good old man who had sent it to me, and who doubtless concluded that I should have no more need of books in this life. He was wrong; for there has been nothing in this life which I have needed more. I asked for this book with much earnestness, and was answered by signs which I did not comprehend.

66

"Why do you not speak?" I cried. Pray let me have the

book."

This seemed to create some confusion; and at length some one more clever than the rest, hit upon the happy expedient of writing upon a slate, that the book had been reclaimed by the owner, and that I could not in my weak state be allowed to read.

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'But," I said in great astonishment, "why do you write to me? why not speak? Speak, speak."

Those who stood around the bed exchanged significant looks of concern, and the writer soon displayed upon his slate the awful words-"YOU ARE DEAF."

Did not this utterly crush me? By no means. In my then weakened condition nothing like this could affect me. Besides, I was a child; and to a child the full extent of such a calamity could not be at once apparent. However, I knew not the future— it was well I did not; and there was nothing to show me that I suffered under more than a temporary deafness, which in a few days might pass away. It was left for time to show me the sad realities of the condition to which I was reduced.

Time passed on, and I slowly recovered strength, but my deafness continued. The doctors were perplexed by it. They probed and tested my ears in various fashions. The tympanum was uninjured, and the organ seemed in every respect perfect, excepting that it would not act. Some thought that a disorganization of the internal mechanism had been produced by the concussion, others that the auditory nerve had been paralyzed.

They poured into my tortured ears various infusions, hot and cold; they bled me, they blistered me, leeched me, physicked me; and, at last, they put a watch between my teeth, and on find ng that I was unable to distinguish the ticking, they gave it up as a bad case, and left me to my fate. I cannot know whether

my case was properly dealt with or not. I have no reason to complain of inattention, of my own knowledge; but, some six months after, a wise doctor from London affirmed that, by a different course at the commencement, my hearing might have been restored. He caused a seton to be inserted in my neck; but this had no effect upon my deafness, although it seems to have acted beneficially upon the general health. Some years after, Mr. Snow Harris, with a spontaneous kindness for which I am happy to be able at this distant day to express my obligations, put my ears through a course of electrical operations. He persevered for more than a month, but no good came of it; and since then nothing further has been done or attempted. Indeed, I have not sought any relief, and have discouraged the suggestions of friends who would have had me apply to Dr. This and Dr. That. The condition in which two-thirds of my life has been passed has become a habit to me—a part of my physical nature. I have learned to acquiesce in it, and to mould my habits of life according to the conditions which it imposes; and have hence been unwilling to give footing for hopes and expectations which I feel in my heart can never be realized. It was some time before I could leave my bed, and much longer before I could quit my chamber. During this time I had no resource but reading; and the long and uninterrupted spell at it which I had now, went far to fix the habit of my future life. The book to which I have repeatedly referred was re-borrowed for me, and was read without restraint. I wish this book had been the "Paradise Lost," or some other great work: the reader would be better pleased, and the dignity of this record would have been much enhanced. But I still think it was 'Kirby's Wonderful Magazine;" and, on second thoughts, I do not know but that this was a very proper book for the time and the circumstances. The strange facts which it recorded were well calculated to draw my attention to books as a source of interest and a means of information; and this was precisely the sort of feeling proper for drawing me into the habits which have enabled me, under all my privations, to be of some use in my day and generation.

I had been so much in the habit, like others in my class of life, of regarding the Bible as a book specially appointed for reading upon Sundays, that I had never ventured to look into it on any

other day. It seemed a sort of profanation to handle the sacred book with work-day fingers; but the exhaustion of all other materials at length drove me to it, and then I read it quite through, Apocrypha and all. It is not in this place my business to trace the religious impressions which resulted from the direction which my reading had thus taken; but as much of my attention has been in the course of my life devoted to sacred literature, with results which have long been before the public, it may be desirable to state the means by which this bent of study seems to have been created.

At the period to which my present recollections refer, the art of reading was by no means diffused among the class in which I then moved, in the same degree as at present. Many could read; but the acquirement was not in the same degree as now applied to practical purposes. It was regarded more in the light of an occult art,--a particular and by no means necessary attainment, specially destined for and appropriate to religious uses and Sunday occupations. Besides, books were then extravagantly dear, and those which were sold in numbers, to enable the poor to purchase them by instalments, were dearest of all. Hence men could not afford to procure any merely current or temporary literature, but desired to have something of substantial and of permanent worth for their money, something which might form a body of edifying Sunday reading to themselves and to their children. The range of books embraced by these considerations was very narrow a folio Family Bible; Fox's book of Martyrs; Life of Christ; Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews; Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; Hervey's Meditations; Drelincourt on Death (with Defoe's Preface, containing the Ghost Story of Mrs. Veal); Baxter's Saint's Rest; Watts's World to Come; Gesner's Death of Abel; Sturm's Reflections, &c. Those who launched forth beyond this range into profane literature were for the most part content with Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and Henry Earl of Moreland. This was a selection of books not to be despised. They were all good, and some of them immortal works. But the thing was that you could see no other books than these. The selection from these books varied, and it was rare to see the whole or a great part of them together; but when ever a book was to be seen it was sure to be some one of these

Periodical literature had not reached even the class of tradesmen in any other shape than that of religion. The only periodicals within their reach were of a religious kind, being the magazines of their respective denominations, which were sold at sixpence each. Tradesmen doubtless read the newspapers, but the use of them (except in public-houses) had not descended below their class, and I can declare that I never saw a newspaper, to read, till I was nearly twenty years of age, and after I had been, in fact, removed out of the position to which these first experiences apply.

From this account it will appear that my studies, founded upon the books to be found under these circumstances, could not but be of an essentially religious tone. At a later period I fell in with books of a different description in the same class, and was enabled to satiate myself with controversies on the five points, and to treasure up the out-of-the-way knowledge to be found in such books as Dupin's Ecclesiastical History. The day came when I plunged into the sea of general literature, and, being able to get nothing more to my mind, read poems, novels, histories, and magazines without end. A day came in which any remarkable fact that I met with was treasured up, in my tenacious mind, as a miser treasures gold; and when the great thoughts which I sometimes found filled my soul with raptures too mighty for utterance. Another day come in which I was enabled to gratify a strange predilection for metaphysical books; and with all the novelists, poets, and historians, within the reach of my arm, gave my days to Locke, Hartley, Tucker, Reid, Stewart, and Brown. I think little of these things now, and my taste for them has gone by; but, although I now think that my time might have been more advantageously employed, my mind was doubtless thus carried through a very useful discipline, of which I have since reaped the benefit. But amid all this, the theological bias, given by my earlier reading and associations, remained; and the time eventually came, when I was enabled to return to it, and indulge it with redoubled ardor: and after that another time arrived, when I could turn to rich account whatever useful thing I had learned and whatever talent I had cultivated, however remote such acquirment or cultivation might have at first seemed removed from any definite pursuits. This point is one of some importance; and as I am anxious

to inculcate upon my younger readers the instruction it involes, it may be mentioned as an instance, that an acquaintance with the Hebrew language, which has eventually proved one of the most useful acquirements I ever made, was originally formed with no higher view than that of qualifying myself to teach that language to the sons of a friend, whose tuition I had undertaken.

175. THE ACADEMY OF LAGADO.

SWIFT.

I HAD hitherto seen only one side of the academy, the other being appropriated to the advancers of speculative learning, of whom I shall say something, when I have mentioned one illustrious person more, who is called among them" the universal artist." He told us "he had been thirty years employing his thoughts for the improvement of human life." He had two large rooms full of wonderful curiosities, and fifty men at work. Some were condensing air into a dry tangible substance, by extracting the nitre, and letting the aqueous or fluid particles percolate; others softening marble for pillows and pincushions; others petrifying the hoofs of a living horse to preserve them from foundering. The artist himself was at that time busy upon two great designs; the first to sow land with chaff, wherein he affirmed the true seminal virtue to be contained, as he demonstrated by several experiments, which I was not skilful enough to comprehend. The other was, by a certain composition of gums, minerals and vegetables, outwardly applied, to prevent the growth of wool upon two young lambs; and he hoped in a reasonable time to propagate the breed of naked sheep all over the kingdom.

We crossed a walk to the other side of the academy, where, as I have already said, the projectors in speculative learning resided. The first professor I saw was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame which took up the greatest part of both the length and breadth of the room, he said, "Perhaps I might wonder to