wanting to what, if I were the most fretful and fastidious, I could have required in a companion; and nothing even to my wishes for your happiness, but where they were either whimsical, or unreasonable, or most likely mistaken. I have often been on the point of taking hold of your hand and bursting into tears at the time that I was refusing you my affections: my approbation I was precipitate to give you.
"Write to me, if I could do any thing about your church, and you want any thing to be done for you, such as I am, believe me, dear Bob, yours most affectionately,
There is a strain of tender remonstrance, singularly mingled with diffidence and self-accusation throughout this letter which exhibits in a strong and very amiable light the character of the father, nor is it less interesting as an encouragement to youthful instruction, by shewing how early those virtues were planted in the son, to which his character remained faithful ever afterwards.
Changes there were in him, indeed, as there generally have been in all persons whose minds have laboured with great questions of moral interest; and some of them certainly remarkable. They who had seen him only in his later years, and had been accustomed to the calm and peaceful tenor of his life, his kind and gentle manners, and the earnest and serious tone of his general conversation, would scarcely credit that the two features most remarkable in his boyhood were a pugnacious spirit and a keen perception of the ludicrous. And yet such was the report made to his father by his earliest tutor, Mr. Graves: the former being evinced in his unconquerable love of fighting for fighting's sake, the latter in the ease and delight with which he entered into many refined and unexpected strokes of wit in classic poets, which were entirely lost upon the minds of others much older than himself. "Don Roberto," says this gentleman in one of his letters, speaking of the first
