standing the pnrase he burst out: "East- tion festivities which followed he took a ern bishops, sir! no! I wouldn't for the world break bread with such a pack of superstitious rascals! - quite as bad as the Catholics." This may be capped by another story. The dean had reinstated in the choir the ancient lectern, a fine eagle, and requested the canons to read the lessons from it; but Sedgwick, disliking the innovation, continued to read them from his stall. Whereupon being remonstrated with by one of his female admirers, who said she had quite looked forward to seeing him at the lectern, he exclaimed, "What? me, ma'am ! me! expose myself before that bird! Nothing shall induce me!" At first even the ordinary cathedral ritual was extremely irksome to him, but happily the years were speedily passed when he could write of it," These long services cut my time to shreds, and destroy the spirit of labor. We have the shadow of Catholicism without a grain of its substance, for not one of the chapter thinks himself better for these heartless formalities, or nearer heaven. A cold, empty cathedral, and a set of unwilling hirelings sing prayers for an hour together," and so on. The time came when he was quite a popular preacher during his term of residence, and thoroughly enjoyed his life. His genius for friendship found at Norwich its greatest scope, and as a member of Bishop Stanley's family said, He threw a mantle of love over every one, and loved us and was beloved by all as no one in Norwich ever was, or ever will be again." The whole story of Sedgwick's connection with Prince Albert, and his flattering experiences at court, is given in the biography chiefly by means of his own copious letters, and so told it admirably exhibits both the beautiful simplicity of his own character, and the warm regard which he won for himself in the highest place. When the chancellorship of the university unexpectedly became vacant in 1847 through the sudden death of the Duke of Northumberland, Sedgwick, then vicemaster of Trinity, and acting for the col lege in the master's absence, promoted the prince's candidature, and after his election became his secretary at Cambridge. The new duties and responsibilities arising out of this office of course "put geology, viewed as the serious pursuit of his life, still further into the back ground;" but his chivalrous loyalty to the queen, and the delight of being useful to her husband, made him proud and happy in accepting it. In the brilliant installa leading part, both as vice-master of the Royal College and one of the prince's suite; and when the queen told him of her gratification at the splendid reception which had been given to herself and her husband, he replied that "the value of our cheers was this, that they were given in all loyalty and with the whole heart." A visit to Osborne followed before the end of the year, the particulars of which, even down to the most minute, were related in a diary letter to his niece with all the relish and simplicity of a child. Several years later it was at the prince's express desire that he accepted a seat in the "Royal Commission to enquire into the Revenues of the University," offered him by Lord John Russell. Two reasons had strongly disinclined him to undertake this uncongenial office; one that he foresaw that "the commission will be abused in good set terms, and without any regard to truth, honor, or reason;" the other - a more curious one that it was only by the tacit connivance of the Senate that he continued to hold the stall at Norwich with his professorship, and he feared that if he accepted the office of commissioner the Senate might turn against him, and some angry member would call on the vicechancellor to do his duty by introducing a grace to compel him to fulfil the conditions of Dr. Woodward's will. It may easily be imagined how deeply Sedgwick was affected by the death of the good prince. "I am very sorrowful," he writes, "and have often had my eyes filled with tears;" and when next month he received two large lithographic portraits of the queen and the prince, inscribed, “By command of her Majesty the queen. In memoriam, January, 1862," he says: "When I had gazed at those two portraits, side by side, for a few seconds, I sat down and wept like a child." More touching still was his last interview with the queen a few months afterwards, a summons hav ing called him to Windsor for a private audience. "It does seem strange to me," he tells a friend, "when I think of it, but I believe I was the first person, out of her own family, to whom she fully opened her heart, and told of her sorrows. After the first greeting, when I bent one knee and kissed her hand, there was an end of all form, and the dear, sorrowing lady talked with me as if I had been her elder brother. He had the greatest regard for you,' she said, and this was why I had a strong desire to talk with you without reserve." Don't accuse me of vanity, above an old man's measure, for writing this. It was assuredly the most remarkable event of my summer's life." Writing a message of grateful thanks to the queen afterwards through one of her ladies, he says: "The remembrance of that audience, and the thoughts that spring out of it, are often present with me in the House of God, and still more are they with me when I bend my knees in private, and ask him to bless our sovereign." It is to the same occasion that the following little anecdote refers. On returning to Cambridge, Sedgwick was accosted by a lady: "You have been to court, professor, since I saw you last." "No, madam," he replied, "I have not been to court; I have been to see a Christian woman in her affliction." We have left to the last a special notice of the most fascinating part of the volumes before us the large collection of letters addressed by Sedgwick to his nieces and other young ladies with whom he had formed intimate and delightful friendships. For the mixture of lively narrative, wise counsel, and overflowing playfulness, we do not know any bundle of letters to surpass these. He did himself an injustice when he once wrote to one of his fair correspondents, "Ever since I was fifteen (for more than half a century) all young ladies have been to me a most amazing puzzle;" for he certainly knew the way to their hearts. Of what is best in woman, the conception which he loved to impress upon them may in these days of advanced ideas wear an old-fashioned look, but perhaps may be none the worse for that. "Simplicity, humility, and charity," he used to say, "are a woman's best graces.' But "dragonesses of blues" were little to "I think I have heard it said," he remarks on one occasion, "that a good woman might have her stockings as blue as you like, only she ought to have petticoats long enough to cover them." He voted in the minority against the extension to girls of the local university examinations, thinking that "the plan will be a mere stepping-way to the puffing of secondrate forward chits and bloomers;" and it is on record that in hall, after the grace had been carried in their favor, when a brother fellow remarked: "I never could have believed that the university would have sunk so low as this," he replied: No, indeed! nasty forward minxes, I call them!" A well-informed woman was the object of his admiration, and to his "dearest Isabella" and his "darling Fankin his taste. mental cultivation; but, between what he wished them to become, and the woman that tries to ape the man, he drew a strong line of demarcation. When pouring out to Lyell his denunciations of his special bête-noire, the anonymous "Vestiges of Creation," which for a time he thought must be a woman's work, because of the "gracefulness of the externals" which covered "its inner deformity and foulness," he gives full expression to his view of woman's rightful sphere: She longed for the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and she must pluck it right or wrong. In all that belongs to tact and feeling I would monkeys: but petticoats are not fitted for the trust her before a thousand breeches-wearing steps of a ladder. And 'tis only by laddersteps we are allowed to climb to the high platforms of natural truth. Hence most women have by nature a distaste for the dull realities of physical truth, and above all for the labor-pains by which they are produced. When they step beyond their own glorious province, where high sentiment, kind feeling, moral judgments most pure and true, and all like heaven's light, they mar their nature (of the graces of imagination, flash from them mischief, or at best manufacture compounds course there are some exceptions), and work of inconsistency. The mesmeric dreamer and economist in petticoats is, I think, no exception to this remark. At the same time he welcomed the "petticoated bipeds" to his lectures, and the account he gives of them to one of his fair favorites is delicious: Do you know that the Cambridge daughters of Eve are like their mother, and love to pluck fruit from the tree of knowledge? They believe in their hearts that geologists have dealings with the spirits of the lower world; yet in spite of this they came, and resolved to learn from me a little of my black art. And, do you know, it is now no easy matter to find room for ladies, so monstrously do they puff of their lower garments, so that they put my themselves, out of all nature, in the mounting poor lecture-room quite in a bustle. Lest they should dazzle my young men, I placed them, with their backs to the light, on one side of my room. And what do you think was the consequence? All my regular academic class learnt to squint, long before my course was over. If you can't understand this, come and see for yourself; and I will promise you that and sit down with your back to the light, you when you set your foot in my lecture-room, will make them all squint ten times worse than ever. The little gallant turn at the close of he gave many instructions in the art of this extract was very characteristic of I have found your lost glove and now return it. Call therefore all your lady friends together, and tell them to rejoice with you. But it was cruel of you to ask for it, as it was the only glove of the kind in my old College ONCE MORE AND YET AGAIN. FROM that hour I set myself to look after my uncle's affairs. It was the only way to endure his absence. Working for him, thinking what he would like, trying to carry it out, referring every perplexity to him and imagining his answer, he grew so much dearer to me, that his absence was filled with hope. My heart being in it, I had soon learned enough of the management to perceive where, in more than one quarter, improvement, generally in the way of saving, was possible; I do not mean by any lowering of wages; my uncle would have conned me small thanks for such improvement as that! Neither was den; and indeed I had watched it and fostered it, with as much care as if it had been the big Punjaub diamond. Now that you have it, pray take care of it. Gloves have done much mischief sometimes they have been symbols of love sometimes of deadly hate and furious fight-sometimes they may have symbolized both love and hate-for purring and scratching are often close together. But these are mysteries I have long outlived. All it long before I began to delight in the I have to say is take care of your glove, feeling that I was in partnership with the and keep it safe till the day a priest orders powers of life; that I had to do with the you to pull off your glove, and give your bare operation and government and preservahand to the happiest man in England. tion of things created; that I was doing a Had I been forty years younger, I should have work to which I was set by the Highest; cried out with Romeo, "Oh that I were a that I was at least a floor-sweeper in the glove!" or perhaps I might have come with house of God, a servant for the good of your glove pinned to the left side of my waist- his world. Existence had grown fuller coat, and asked you to wear the man that bore and richer; I had come, like a toad out of it so near his heart. a rock, into a larger, therefore truer universe; I had something to do in the world. How otherwise should I have patiently waited while hearing nothing from my uncle! Being such as this biography truly exhibits him, it is no wonder that Adam Sedgwick was the pride of his college, and the idol of his large circle of friends It was not long before John began to down to the end of his prolonged life. If it was not given him to lay posterity under press me to let my uncle have his way; a lasting obligation, by bequeathing to it where was the good any longer, he said, in some epoch-making work which should be our not being married! But I could not a possession forever, the least that can be endure the thought of being married withsaid is that in his own generation he filled out my uncle; it would hardly seem like his place nobly, and left many to mourn husband. And when John came to see marriage without his giving me to my him whose lives had been brightened by that I was not to be prevailed with, I his affectionate and playful solicitude, and found that he thought the more of me their hearts strengthened in goodness by his wise lessons and fair example. Well both because of my resolve, and because would it be for the world if there were of my persistency in holding by it. For many more of whom it could be as truly John was always reasonable, and that is recorded, as it is of him in the cathedral more than can be said of most men, espewhich knew him so well, that in him met cially such as have a woman to deal with. not that it would together an imperial love of truth, an illus- If women should at last please me one tiniest atom - have to take trious simplicity of character, and an unthe management of affairs - it will be beshaken constancy in the faith. cause men have made it necessary by carelessness and arrogance combined. Then when they have been kept down a while, just long enough to learn that they are not the lords of creation one bit more than the weakest woman, they may per haps be allowed to take the lead again, lest the women should become like what the men were, and go strutting about full of their own importance. It is only the true man that knows what the true woman is only the true woman that knows what the true man is; the difficulty between them comes all from the fact that so few are either. John lived in his own house with his mother, but they never met. She managed John's affairs, to whose advantage I need hardly say; and John helped me to manage my uncle's, to the advantage of all concerned. Every day he came to see me, and every night rode back to his worse than dreary home. At my earnest request he had had a strong bolt put on his bedroom door, which he promised me never to forget to shoot. He let it be known about the house that he had always a brace of loaded pistols within his reach, and showed himself well practised in the use of them. After I no longer only believed, but knew that the bailiff was trustworthy, and had got some few points in his management bettered, I ceased giving so much attention to detail, and allowed myself a little more time to go about with John, to whom I owed every consolation I could give him, seeing he had none at home. It was a little wearing to him too that he could never tell what his mother might not be plotting against him. He had had a very strong box made for Leander, in which he always locked him up when he went home at night, and which he locked also when he brought him to our place in the morning where he had all the grooming and tendance his master could wish. John could not forget what had befallen Leander once before; and I could not forget the great black horse down in the bog! I feared much for John. I knew that where a woman would, she could more than a man, One lovely, cold day in the month of March, with ice on some of the pools of the heath, and the wind blowing from the north, I mounted Zoe to meet John midway on the moor, and had gone about twothirds of the distance, when I saw him, as I thought, a good way to my right, and concluded he had not expected me so soon, and had gone exploring. I turned aside therefore to join him; but had ridden only a few yards when, from some change in his position, I saw that the horse was not John's; it was a grey, or rather, a white horse. Could the rider I was too far off to note anything of him- be my uncle? Was he still and always lingering about the place, to be near lest ill should befall me? It would be like him, said my heart. I gave Zoe the rein, and she sprang off at her best speed. But apparently the horseman had caught sight of my approach, and was not willing to await my coming; for, after riding some distance, I became suddenly aware that he had vanished; and I saw then that, if I did not turn at once, I should not keep my appointment with John. The incident would not have been worth mentioning, for grey horses are not so uncommon but there might be one upon the heath at any moment; and although it was natural enough that the sight of one should make me think of my uncle, I should not long have thought of the occurrence, but for something more that I saw the same night. It was one of bright moonlight. I had taken down a curtain of my window to mend, and the moon shone in so that I could not sleep. My thoughts were all with my uncle - wondering what he was about; whether he was very dull; whether he wanted me much; whether he was going about Paris, or haunting the moor that stretched far out into the distance from where I lay-out in that moonlight, perhaps, in the cold, wide, lonely night while I slept! The thought made me feel lonely; one is apt to feel lonely when sleepless; and as the moon was having a night of it, or rather making a day of it, all alone with herself, I thought we might keep each other a little company. I rose, drew the other curtain of my window aside, and looked out. I have said that the house lay on the slope of one side of a hollow, so that, from whichever window of it you might glance, you saw the line of your private horizon close to you; for any outlook, you must climb, and then you were on the moor. From my window I could see the more distant edge of the hollow; happening to look thitherward, I saw against the sky the shape of a man on horseback. I could not for a moment doubt it was my uncle. The figure was plainly his. My heart seemed to stand still with awe, and the delight of having him so near me, perhaps every night-a heavenly sentinel patrolling the house while I slept the visible one of a whole camp unseen, of horses of fire and chariots of fire. So entrancing was the notion, that I stood there a little child, a mere incarnate love, the tears run ning down my cheeks at the thought of the man who had been very father to me instead of my own. When first I saw him he was standing still, but presently he moved on, keeping so to the horizon line that it was plain his object was to have the house in view. But as thus he skirted the edge of heaven, he seemed, oh, how changed! His tall figure hung bent over the pommel, and his neck drooped heavily. And his horse was so thin that I seemed to see, almost to feel his bones. He looked very tired, and I thought I saw his knees quiver as he made each short, slow step. Ah, how unlike the happy old horse that had been! I thought of Death returning home weary from the slaughter of many kings, and cast the thought away. I thought of Death returning home on the eve of the great dawn, weary with his age-long work, pleased that at last it was over, and no more need of him; I kept that thought. Along the skyline they held their way, the rider with weary swing in the saddle, the horse with long grey neck hanging low to his hoofs, picking his way. When his rider should collapse and fall from his back, not a step farther would he take. Then fancy gave way to reality. I woke up, called myself hard names, and hurried on a few of my clothes. My blessed uncle out in the night and weary to death, and I at a window, contemplating him like a picture! I was an evil brute! By the time I had my shoes on, and went again to the window, he had passed out of its range. I ran to one on the stair that looked at right angles to mine. He had not yet come within its field of vision. I stood and waited. Presently he appeared, crawling along, a grey mounted ghost, in the light that so strangely befits lovers wandering in the May of hope, and the wasted spectre whose imagination of the past reveals him to the eyes of men. For an instant I almost wished him dead and at rest; the next I was out of the house, up on the moor, looking eagerly this way and that, poised on the swift feet of love, ready to spring to his bosom. How I longed to lead him to his own warm bed, and watch by him as he slept, while the great father kept universal watch, out on the moor in the moonlight, and within every house and its darkness. I gazed and gazed, but nowhere could I see the death-jaded horseman. I bounded down the hill, through the wilderness and the dark alleys, and hurried to the stable. Trembling with haste I led Zoe out, sprang on her bare back, and Not a man darted off to scout the moor. or a horse or a live thing was to be seen in any direction! Almost I concluded I had beheld an apparition. Might it not be that my uncle was dead, come back thus to let me know, and now was gone home indeed? Weary and cold and disappointed, I returned to bed, full of the conviction that I had seen my uncle, but whether in the body or out of the body, I could not tell. When John came the notion of my being out alone on the moor in the middle of the night did not please him, and he would have had me promise that I would not, for any vision or apparition whatever, leave the house again without his company. But he could not persuade me. He asked what I would have done, if I had overtaken the horseman, and found neither my uncle nor Death. I told him I would have given Zoe the use of her heels, when that horse at least would soon have seen the last of her. At the same time, John was inclined to believe with me, that I had seen my uncle. His proximity would ac count, he said, for his making no arrangement to hear from me. But if he continued to haunt the moor in such fashion, we could not fail to encounter him before long. In the mean time he thought it well to show no sign of suspecting his neighborhood. That I had seen my uncle John was for a moment convinced, when, the very next day, having gone to Wittenage, he saw his horse carrying Dr. Southwell, my uncle's friend. But then Death looked quite spry, and in lovely condition. The doctor would not confess to knowing anything about my uncle, and expressed his wonder that he had not yet returned, but said he did not mind how long he had the loan of such a horse. Things went on as before for a while. Then John began again to press me to marry him. I think it was mainly, I am sure it was in part, that I might never again ride the midnight moor "like a witch out on her own mischievous hook;" I use John's phrase in regard to what he seemed to count quite an escapade; he knew that, if I caught sight of my uncle anywhere, John or no John, I would go after him. But there was of course another good reason for not marrying before John was of legal age; who could tell what truth might not lurk in his mother's threat! Who could tell what such a woman might not have prevailed on her husband to set down in his will? I was ready enough to |