Yates, or he
would reply to his invitation that he could not come, for that he was
busy knitting. He would station himself at his garden wall, which
overhung the river, and watch the progress of a cast-iron bridge in
building, asking questions of the architect, and carefully examining
every pin and screw with which it was put together. He would loiter along
a river, with his angle-rod, musing upon what he supposed to pass in the
mind of a pike when he bit, and when he refused to bite; or he would
stand by the sea-side, and speculate upon what a young shrimp could mean
by jumping in the sun.
With the handle of his stick in his mouth, he would move about his garden
in a short hurried step, now stopping to contemplate a butterfly, a
flower, or a snail, and now earnestly engaged in some new arrangement of
his flower-pots.
He would take from his own table to his study the back-bone of a hare, or
a fish's head; and he would pull out of his pocket, after a walk, a plant
or stone to be made tributary to an argument. His manuscripts were as
motley as his occupations; the workshop of a mind ever on the alert;
evidences mixed up with memorandums for his will; an interesting
discussion brought to an untimely end by the hiring of servants, the
letting of fields, sending his boys to school, reproving the refractory
members of an hospital; here a dedication, there one of his children's
exercises--in another place a receipt for cheap soup. He would amuse his
fire side by family anecdotes:--how one of his ancestors (and he was
praised as a pattern of perseverance) separated two pounds of white and
black pepper which had been accidentally mixed--_patiens pulveris_, he
might truly have added; and how, when the _Paley arms_ were wanted,
recourse was had to a family tankard which was supposed to bear them, but
which he always took a malicious pleasure in insisting had been bought at
a sale--
----------Haec est
Vita solutorum misera ambitione gravique;
the life of a man far more happily employed than in the composition of
political pamphlets, or in the nurture of political discontent.
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