of which parish were discharged by his curate; but much of the duties within the church were still discharged by himself, and with such exemplary zeal that his parishioners, afterwards celebrating the fiftieth anniversary, or golden jubilee of his appointment to the living (the twenty-fifth anniversary is called in German the silver-the fiftieth, the golden jubilee), went farther than is usual in giving a public expression and a permanent shape to their sentiments of love and veneration. I am surprised, on reflection, that this venerable clergyman should have been unvexed by Episcopal censures. He might, and I dare say would, keep back the grosser parts of Swedenborg's views from a public display; but, in one point, it would not be easy for a man so conscientious to make a compromise between his ecclesiastical duty and his private belief; for I have since found, though I did not then know it, that Swedenborg held a very peculiar creed on the article of atonement. From the slight pamphlet which let me into this secret I could not accurately collect the exact distinctions of his creed ; but it was very different from that of the English Church.

However, my friend continued unvexed for a good deal more than fifty years, enjoying that peace, external as well as internal, which, by so eminent a title, belonged to a spirit so evangelically meek and dovelike. I mention him chiefly for the sake of describing his interesting house and household, so different from all which belong to this troubled age, and his impressive style of living. The house seemed almost monastic; and yet it stood in the centre of one of the largest, busiest, noisiest towns in England; and the whole household seemed to have stepped out of their places in some Vandyke, or even some Titian, picture, from a forgotten century and another climate. On knocking at the door, which of itself seemed an outrage to the spirit of quietness which brooded over the place, you were received by an ancient manservant in the sober livery which belonged traditionally to Mr. 's family; for he was of a gentleman's descent,

1 As De Quincey has divulged the name of this clergyman in his Autobiography (see vol. i. pp. 136-138), there is no need for concealing it here. He was the Rev. John Clowes, Rector of St. John's Church, Manchester, and we shall substitute the full name for the blank in the sequel.-M.

and had had the most finished education of a gentleman. This venerable old butler put me in mind always, by his noiseless steps, of the Castle of Indolence, where the porter or usher walked about in shoes that were shod with felt, lest any rude echoes might be roused. An ancient housekeeper was equally venerable, equally gentle in her deportment, quiet in her movements, and inaudible in her tread. One or other of these upper domestics,—for the others rarely crossed my path,— ushered me always into some room expressing by its furniture, its pictures, and its coloured windows, the solemn tranquillity which, for half a century, had reigned in that mansion. Among the pictures were more than one of St. John, the beloved apostle, by Italian masters. Neither the features nor the expression were very wide of Mr. Clowes's own countenance; and, had it been possible to forget the gross character of Swedenborg's reveries, or to substitute for these fleshly dreams the awful visions of the Apocalypse, one might have imagined easily that the pure, saintly, and childlike evangelist had been once again recalled to this earth, and that this most quiet of mansions was some cell in the island of Patmos. Whence came the stained glass of the windows I know not, and whether it were stained or painted. The revolutions of that art are known from Horace Walpole's account; and, nine years after this period, I found that, in Birmingham, where the art of staining glass was chiefly practised, no trifling sum was charged even for a vulgar lacing of no great breadth round a few drawing-room windows, which one of my friends thought fit to introduce as an embellishment. These windows, however, of my clerical friend were really "storied windows," having Scriptural histories represented upon them. A crowning ornament to the library or principal room was a sweet-toned organ, ancient, and elaborately carved in its wood-work, at which my venerable friend readily sate down, and performed the music of anthems as often as I asked him, sometimes accompanying it with his voice, which was tremulous from old age, but neither originally unmusical, nor (as might be perceived) untrained.

Often, from the storms and uproars of this world, I have looked back upon this most quiet and, I believe, most innocent abode (had I said saintly I should hardly have erred), con

necting it in thought with Little Gidding, the famous mansion (in Huntingdonshire, I believe) of the Farrers, an interesting family in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. Of the Farrers there is a long and circumstantial biographical account, and of the conventual discipline maintained at Little Gidding. For many years it was the rule at Gidding-and it was the wish of the Farrers to have transmitted that practice through succeeding centuries-that a musical or cathedral service should be going on at every hour of night and day in the chapel of the mansion. Let the traveller, at what hour he would, morning or evening, summer or winter, and in what generation or century soever, happen to knock at the gate of Little Gidding, it was the purpose of Nicholas Farrer-a sublime purpose--that always he should hear the blare of the organ, sending upwards its surging volumes of melody, God's worship for ever proceeding, anthems of praise for ever ascending, and jubilates echoing without end or known beginning. One stream of music, in fact, never intermitting, one vestal fire of devotional praise and thanksgiving, was to connect the beginnings with the ends of generations, and to link one century into another. Allowing for the sterner asceticism of N. Farrer-partly arising out of the times, partly out of personal character, and partly, perhaps, out of his travels in Spain-my aged friend's arrangement of the day, and the training of his household, might seem to have been modelled on the plans of Mr. Farrer; whom, however, he might never have heard of. There was also, in each house, the same union of religion with some cultivation of the ornamental arts, or some expression of respect for them. In each case, a monastic severity, that might, under other circumstances, have terminated in the gloom of a La Trappe, had been softened by English sociality, and by the habits of a gentleman's education, into a devotional pomp, reconcilable with Protestant views. When, however, remembering this last fact in Mr. Clowes's case (the fact I mean of his liberal education), I have endeavoured to explain the possibility of one so much adorned by all the accomplishments of a highbred gentleman, and one so truly pious, falling into the grossness, almost the sensuality, which appears to besiege the visions of Swedenborg, I fancy that the whole may be

explained out of the same cause which occasionally may be descried, through a distance of two complete centuries, as weighing heavily upon the Farrers-viz. the dire monotony of daily life, when visited by no irritations either of hope or fear no hopes from ambition, no fears from poverty.

Nearly (if not quite) sixty years did my venerable friend inhabit that same parsonage house, without any incident more personally interesting to himself than a cold or a sore throat. And I suppose that he resorted to Swedenborg-reluctantly, perhaps, at the first-as to a book of fairy tales connected with his professional studies. And one thing I am bound to add in candour, which may have had its weight with him, that more than once, on casually turning over a volume of Swedenborg, I have certainly found most curious and felicitous passages of comment-passages which extracted a brilliant meaning from numbers, circumstances, or trivial accidents, apparently without significance or object, and gave to things, without a place or a habitation in the critic's regard, a value as hieroglyphics or cryptical ciphers, which struck me as elaborately ingenious. This acknowledgment I make not so much in praise of Swedenborg, whom I must still continue to think a madman, as in excuse for Mr. Clowes. It may easily be supposed that a person of Mr. Clowes's consideration and authority was not regarded with indifference by the general body of the Swedenborgians. At his motion it was, I believe, that a society was formed for procuring and encouraging a translation into English of Swedenborg's entire works, most of which are written in Latin. Several of these translations are understood to have been executed personally by Mr. Clowes; and in this obscure way, for anything I know, he may have been an extensive author. But it shows the upright character of the man that never, in one instance, did he seek to bias my opinions in this direction. Upon every other subject, he trusted me confidentially-and, notwithstanding my boyish years (15-16), as his equal. His regard for me, when thrown by accident in his way, had arisen upon his notice of my fervent simplicity, and my unusual thoughtfulness. Upon these merits, I had gained the honourable distinction of a general invitation to his hou, without exception as to days and hours, when few others

could boast of any admission at all. The common ground on which we met was literature-more especially the Greek and Roman literature; and much he exerted himself, in a spirit of the purest courtesy, to meet my animation upon these themes. But the interest on his part was too evidently a secondary interest in me, for whom he talked, and not in the subject: he spoke much from memory, as it were of things that he had once felt, and little from immediate sympathy with the author; and his animation was artificial, though his courtesy, which prompted the effort, was the truest and most unaffected possible.

The connexion between us must have been interesting to an observer; for, though I cannot say with Wordsworth, of old Daniel and his grandson, that there were "ninety good years of fair and foul weather" between us, there were, however, sixty, I imagine, at the least; whilst as a bond of connexion there was nothing at all that I know of beyond a common tendency to reverie, which is a bad link for a social connexion. The little ardour, meantime, with which he had, for many years, participated in the interests of this world, or all that it inherits, was now rapidly departing. Daily and consciously he was loosening all ties which bound him to earlier recollections; and, in particular, I remember-because the instance was connected with my last farewell visit, as it proved that for some time he was engaged daily in renouncing with solemnity (though often enough in cheerful words) book after book of classical literature in which he had once taken particular delight. Several of these, after taking his final glance at a few passages to which a pencil reference in the margin pointed his eye, he delivered to me as memorials in time to come of himself. The last of the books given to me under these circumstances was a Greek "Odyssey," in Clarke's edition. “This,” said he, “is nearly the sole book remaining to me of my classical library—which, for some years, I have been dispersing amongst my friends. Homer I retained to the last, and the 'Odyssey,' by preference to the Iliad,' both in compliance with my own taste, and because this very copy was my chosen companion for evening amusement during my freshman's term at Trinity College, Cambridge-whither I went early in the spring of