Appear'd a roofless hut; four naked walls
That stared upon each other! I look'd round,
And to my wish and to my hope espied

Him whom I sought; a man of reverend age,
But stout and hale, for travel unimpair'd.
There was he seen upon the cottage bench,
Recumbent in the shade, as if asleep;

An iron-pointed staff lay at his side."

Alas!"stout and hale" are words that could not be applied, without cruel mocking, to our figure. "Recumbent in the shade" unquestionably he is-yet "recumbent" is a clumsy word for such quietude; and, recurring to our former image, we prefer to say, in the words of Wilson

"Still is he as a frame of stone

That in its stillness lies alone,

With silence breathing from its face,

For ever in some holy place,

Chapel or aisle--on marble laid,

With pale hands on his pale breast spread,
An image humble, meek, and low,

Of one forgotten long ago!"

No" iron-pointed staff lies at his side"--but " Satan's

dread," THE CRUTCH!

that the Pedlar

Wordsworth tells us over again

"With no appendage but a staff,

The prized memorial of relinquish'd toils,
Upon the cottage-bench reposed his limbs,
Screen'd from the sun."

On his couch, in his Alcove, Christopher is reposing— not his limbs alone—but his very essence. THE CRUTCH is, indeed, both de jure and de facto the prized memorial of toils-but, thank Heaven, not relinquished toils; and then how characteristic of the dear merciless old man-hardly distinguishable among the fringed draperies of his canopy, the dependent and independent KNOUT.

Was the Pedlar absolutely asleep? We shrewdly suspect not-'twas but a doze. "Recumbent in the shade, as if asleep"-" Upon that cottage-bench reposed his limbs"-induce us to lean to the opinion that he was but on the border of the Land of Nod. Nay, the poet gets more explicit, and with that minute particularity so charming in poetical description, finally informs us that

"Supine the wanderer lay,

His eyes, as if in drowsiness, half shut,

The shadows of the breezy elms above
Dappling his face."

It would appear, then, on an impartial consideration of all the circumstances of the case, that the "man of reverend age," though "recumbent" and "supine" upon the "cottage bench," "as if asleep," and "his eyes, as if in drowsiness, half shut," was in a mood between sleeping and waking; and this creed is corroborated by the following assertion—

"He had not heard the sound
Of my approaching steps, and in the shade
Unnoticed did I stand some minutes' space.
At length I hail'd him, seeing that his hat
Was moist with water-drops, as if the brim
Had newly scoop'd a running stream.”

He rose; and so do We, for probably by this time you may have discovered that we have been describing Ourselves in our siesta or mid-day snooze- —as we have been beholding in our mind's eye our venerated and mysterious Double.

We cannot help flattering ourselves—if indeed it be flattery that though no relative of his, we have a look

of the Pedlar-as he is elaborately painted by the hand of a great master in the aforesaid Poem.

"Him had I mark'd the day before-alone,

And station'd in the public way, with face

Turn'd to the sun then setting, while that staff
Afforded to the figure of the man,

Detain'd for contemplation or repose,
Graceful support," &c.

As if it were yesterday, we remember our first interview with the Bard. It was at the Lady's Oak, between Ambleside and Rydal. We were then in the very flower of our age-just sixty; so we need not say the century had then seen but little of this world. The Bard was a mere boy of some six lustres, and had a lyrical ballad look that established his identity at first sight, all unlike the lack-a-daisical. His right hand was within his vest on the region of the heart, and he ceased his crooning as we stood face to face. What a noble countenance! at once austere and gracious-haughty and benign-of a man conscious of his greatness while yet companioning with the humble—an unrecognized power dwelling in the woods. Our figure at that moment so impressed itself on his imagination, that it in time supplanted the image of the real Pedlar, and grew into the Emeritus of the Three Days. We were standing in that very attitude-having deposited on the coping of the wall our Kit, since adopted by the British Army, with us at once a library and a larder.

And again—and even more characteristically—

"Plain was his garb :

Such as might suit a rustic sire, prepared

For Sabbath duties; yet he was a man

Whom no one could have pass'd without remark.
Active and nervous was his gait; his limbs
And his whole figure breathed intelligence.
Time had compress'd the freshness of his cheeks
Into a narrower circle of deep red,

But had not tamed his eye, that under brows,
Shaggy and grey, had meanings, which it brought
From years of youth; whilst, like a being made
Of many beings, he had wondrous skill

To blend with knowledge of the years to come,
Human, or such as lie beyond the grave."

In our intellectual characters we indulge the pleasing hope that there are some striking points of resemblance, on which, however, our modesty will not permit us to dwell-and in our acquirements, more particularly in Plane and Spherical Trigonometry.

"While yet he linger'd in the rudiments
Of science, and among her simplest laws,
His triangles-they were the stars of heaven.
The silent stars! oft did he take delight
To measure the altitude of some tall crag,
That is the eagle's birthplace," &c.

So it was with us. Give us but a base and a quadrant -and when a student in Jemmy Millar's class, we could have given you the altitude of any steeple in Glasgow or the Gorbals.

Occasionally, too, in a small party of friends, though not proud of the accomplishment, we have been prevailed on, as you may have heard, to delight humanity with a song

"The Flowers of the Forest," "Roy's Wife," " Flee up, flee up, thou bonnie bonnie Cock," or "Auld Langsyne"-just as the Pedlar

"At request would sing

Old songs, the product of his native hills;
A skilful distribution of sweet sounds,
Feeding the soul, and eagerly imbibed
As cool refreshing water, by the care

Of the industrious husbandman diffused

Through a parch'd meadow field in time of drought."

Our natural disposition, too, is as amiable as that of the "Vagrant Merchant.”

"And surely never did there live on earth
A man of kindlier nature. The rough sports
And teasing ways of children vex'd not him:
Indulgent listener was he to the tongue
Of garrulous age; nor did the sick man's tale,
To his fraternal sympathy address'd,

Obtain reluctant hearing."

Who can read the following lines, and not think of Christopher North?

"Birds and beasts,

And the mute fish that glances in the stream,
And harmless reptile coiling in the sun,
And gorgeous insect hovering in the air,
The fowl domestic, and the household dog-
In his capacious mind he loved them all."

True, that our love of

"The mute fish that glances in the stream,"

is not incompatible with the practice of the "angler's silent trade," or with the pleasure of "filling our pannier." The Pedlar, too, we have reason to know, was like his poet and ourselves, in that art a craftsman, and for love beat the molecatcher at busking a batch of May-flies. We question whether Lascelles himself