thing-controversy; and it had at least the attraction of novelty. To one more experienced in books and life it would have appeared ludicrous, worthy only of being settled by some such clinching simile as the practical one of the coachman. However, it was to our youth suggestive of serious thought; and he may be pardoned for not perceiving then the shallow and incoherent side of the matter, and separating it distinctly in his mind from the more important one.

It was nearly midnight when the coach reached Bristol. The disputants had, at length, exhausted their eloquence without having made any change in each other's opinions, unless it were that each was more firmly fixed in his own than when the argument began. But their voices were heard no longer-they yawned occasionally-the silent passenger on the box seat yawned also and many an echo of those indications of stupidity and weariness came from the other passengers on the back seats. Hardy

and the vigorous coachman only gave no symptoms of the prevailing lassitude. It may be that the latter, with that determined exertion of free-will by which he managed his cattle and his passions, was able to keep his jaws close. As to the young man, his jaws remained unmoved without any effort on his part, so full was he of eager curiosity and exciting thought, when from a distance. the long lines of lamps in the streets of a large town first appeared to him in glowworm-like files.

CHAPTER III.

"It pleased fate,

To make me the object of his desperate choice
Whilst he came on, not with the face

Of any man, but of a public ruin;

His countenance was a civil war in itself."

BEN JOHNSON.

If we might here at once unroll the ample page of young Hardy's fate, and place its termination in contact with its commencement, our quotation from his old poet namesake would not appear startling or irrelevant, though we have as yet only to speak of his travelling companions on his first journey from his home. But we must proceed as we have begun, and let his life unfold itself, as

each life unfolds itself, with its own inevitable sequence unanticipated.

The coach by which he was to proceed did not start till the afternoon of the day following his late arrival; he had therefore, time to see Bristol. This assemblage of houses, streets, churches, hospitals, marts, docks, and ships, was the greatest of the works of men which he had yet beheld. To take a place among his fellow-beings, active and energetic, the constructors of such works, not alone to contemplate life, was the purpose which he had laid out for himself. He cared not to know that life has for its student a voice to which he makes the souls of men re-echo. He cared not to know that to become the utterers of this voice, thousands had contended against poverty and obscurity, as he meant to contend against them-that from Bristol one of these had set forth full of vigour and ambition like him, and that four months of the contest had sent him to an unhonoured grave. No! He had

never heard of Chatterton, and there was then no monument to speak of him. Had there been, it would, no doubt, have • awakened in him strong sympathy with that spirit, which, full of reliance on itself, went out, like the Israelite stripling of old, to meet the Goliaths of literature, and take of their spoil, as he to meet the Goliaths of commerce and take of theirs.

But Hardy knew nothing of this, and the reflections which Bristol called up were neither poetical nor philosophical. Had they set out from a certain point, ending as they did in thorough admiration of the achievements of mercantile success, they might have been called historical. Assuredly the feudal times when Bristol had its wars on its own account, would have been regarded by him as those of utter darkness and bondage to its people, in comparison with that picture of the present condition of its population, which his fancy drew.

In a mood of satisfaction then with his