A grand

of Göttingen. This was perhaps the triumph of my life. dinner was got up by Zingleman in my honour, at which more than three hundred were present, but in tacit homage to my principles, they never spoke nor held any communication with each other, and at a concerted signal the toast of "Zimmermann and Solitude" was drunk, by dumb show, in appropriate solemn silence. I was much affected by this tribute, and left with tears in my eyes, to think, with such sentiments, how many of us might be thrown together again. Being thus left to myself, like a vessel with only one hand on board, I was at liberty to steer my own course, and accordingly took a lodging at Number One, in Wilderness Street, that held out the inviting prospect of a single room to let for a single man. In this congenial situation I composed that my great work on Solitude, and here I think it necessary to warn the reader against many spurious books, calling themselves "Companions to Zimmermann's Solitude," as if solitude could have society. Alas, from this work I may date the decline which my presentiment tells me will terminate in my death. My book, though written against populousness, became so popular, that its author, though in love with loneliness, could never be alone. Striving to fly from the face of man, I could never escape it, nor that of woman and child into the bargain. When I stirred abroad mobs surrounded me, and cried, “Here is the Solitary !"—when I staid at home I was equally crowded; all the public societies of Göttingen thought proper to come up to me with addresses, and not even by deputation. Flight was my only resource, but it did not avail, for I could not fly from myself. Wherever I went Zimmermann and Solitude had got before me, and their votaries assembled to meet me. In vain I travelled throughout the European and Asiatic continent: with an enthusiasm and perseverance of which only Germans are capable, some of my countrymen were sure to haunt me, and really showed by the distance they journeyed, that they were ready to go all lengths with me and my doctrine. Some of these Pilgrims even brought their wives and children along with them, in search of my solitude; and were so unreasonable even as to murmur at my taking the inside of a coach, or the cabin of a packet-boat to myself.

From these persecutions I was released by what some persons would call an unfortunate accident, a vessel in which I sailed from Leghorn, going down at sea with all hands excepting my own pair, which happened to have grappled a hen-coop. There was no sail in sight, nor any land to be seen-nothing but sea and sky; and from the midst of the watery expanse it was perhaps the first and only glimpse I ever had of real and perfect solitude, yet so inconsistent is human nature, I could not really and perfectly enter into its enjoyment. I was picked up at length by a British brig of war; and, schooled by the past, had the presence of mind to conceal my name, and to adopt the English one of Grundy. Under this nom de guerre, but really a name of peace, I enjoyed comparative quiet, interrupted only by the pertinacious attendance of an unconscious countryman, who, noticing my

very retired habits, endeavoured by daily lectures from my own work, to make me a convert to my own principles. In short, he so wore me out, that at last, to get rid of his importunities, I told him in confidence that I was the author himself. But the result was any thing but what I expected; and here I must blush again for the inconsistency of human nature. While Winkells knew me only as Grundy, he painted nothing but the charms of Solitude, and exhorted me to detach myself from society; but no sooner did he learn that I was Zimmermann, than he insisted on my going to Lady C's rout and his own converzatione. In fact, he wanted to make me, instead of a Lion of the Desart, a Lion of the Menagerie. How I resented such a proposition may be supposed, as well as his offer to procure for me the first vacancy that happened in the situation of Hermit at Lord P's Hermitage; being, as he was pleased to say, not only able to bear solitude, but well-bred and well-informed, and fit to receive company. The effect of this unfortunate disclosure was to make me leave England, for fear of meeting with the fate of a man or an ox that ventures to quit the common herd. I should immediately have been declared mad, and mobbed into lunacy, and then put into solitary confinement, with a keeper always with me, as a person beside himself, and not fit to be left alone for a moment. As such a fate would have been worse to me than death, I immediately left London, and am now living anonymously in an uninhabited house,-prudence forbids me to say where.

THE PORTRAIT:

BEING AN APOLOGY FOR NOT MAKING AN ATTEMPT ON MY Own life.

THE late inimitable Charles Mathews, in one of his amusing entertainments, used to tell a story of a certain innkeeper, who made it a rule of his house, to allow a candle to a guest, only on condition of his ordering a pint of wine. Whereupon the guest contends, on the reciprocity system, for a light for every half-bottle, and finally drinks. himself into a general illumination.

Something of the above principle seems to have obtained in the case of a Portrait and a Memoir, which in literary practice have been usually dependent on each other a likeness and a life,-a candle and

a pint of wine. The mere act of sitting, probably suggests the idea of hatching; at least an author has seldom nested in a painter's chair, without coming out afterwards with a brood of Reminiscences, and accordingly, no sooner was my effigy about to be presented to the Public, than I found myself called upon by my Publisher, with a finished proof of the engraving in one hand, and a request for an account of myself in the other. He evidently supposed, as a matter of course, that I had my auto-biography in the bottle, and that the time was come to un-cork and pour it out with a Head.

To be candid, no portrait, perhaps, ever stood more in need of such an accompaniment. The figure opposite has certainly the look of one of those practical jokes whereof the original is oftener suspected than really culpable. It might pass for the sign of "The Grave Maurice." The author of Elia has declared that he once sat as substitute for a whole series of British Admirals,* and a physiognomist might reasonably suspect that in wantonness or weariness, instead of giving my head I had procured myself to be painted by proxy. For who, that calls himself stranger, could ever suppose that such a pale, pensive, peaking, sentimental, sonneteering countenance with a wry mouth as as if it always laughed on its wrong side-belonged bona fide to the Editor of the Comic-a Professor of the Pantagruelian Philosophy, hinted at in the preface to the present work? What unknown who reckons himself decidedly serious, would recognise the head and front of my "offending," in a visage not at all too hilarious for a frontispiece to the Evangelical Magazine! In point of fact the owner has been taken sundry times, ere now, for a Methodist Minister, and a pious turn has been attributed to his hair-lucus a non lucendo-from its having no turn in it at all. In like manner my literary contemporaries who have cared to remark on my personals, have agreed in ascribing to me a melancholy bias; thus an authority in the New

He perhaps took the hint from Dibdin, who lays down the rule in his Sea Songs, that a Naval Hero ought to be a Lion in battle, but afterwards a Lamb.

On a march to Berlin, with the 19th Prussian Infantry, I could never succeed in passing myself off as any thing but the Regimental Chaplain.

R

Monthly Magazine has described me as "a grave anti-pun-like-looking person, whilst another-in the Book of Gems-declares that "my countenance is more grave than merry," and insists, therefore, that I am of a pensive habit, and "have never laughed heartily in company or in rhyme." Against such an inference, however, I solemnly protest, and if it be the fault of my features, I do not mind telling my face to its face that it insinuates a false Hood, and grossly misrepresents a person notorious amongst friends for laughing at strange times and odd places, and in particular when he has the worst of the rubber. For it is no comfort for the loss of points, by his theory, to be upon thorns. And truly what can be more unphilosophical, than to sit ruefully as well as whistfully, with your face inconsistently playing at longs and your hand at shorts,-getting hypped as well as pipped," talking of Hoyle," as the city lady said, "but looking like winegar," and betraying as keen a sense of the profit and loss, as if the pack had turned you into a pedlar.

But I am digressing; and turning my back, as Lord Castlereagh would have said, on my face. The portrait, then, is genuine-" an ill-favoured thing, Sir," as Touchstone says, "but mine own." For its quarrel with the rules of Lavater there is precedent. I remember seeing on Sir Thomas Lawrence's easel, an unfinished head of Mr. Wilberforce, so very merry, so rosy, so good-fellowish, that nothing less than the Life and Correspondence recently published could have persuaded me that he was really a serious character. A memoir, therefore, would be the likeliest thing to convince the world that the physiognomy prefixed to this number, is actually Hood's Own :indeed a few of the earlier chapters would suffice to clear up the mystery, by proving that my face is only answering in the affirmative, the friendly inquiry of the Poet of all circles-" Has sorrow thy young days shaded?"--and telling the honest truth of one of those rickety constitutions which, according to Hudibras, seem

as if intended

For nothing else but to be mended."

To confess the truth, my vanity pricked up its ears a little at the proposition of my Publisher. There is something vastly flattering in

the idea of appropriating the half or quarter of a century, mixing it up with your personal experience, and then serving it out as your own Life and Times. On casting a restrospective glance however across Memory's waste, it appeared so literally a waste that vanity herself shrank from the enclosure act, as an unpromising speculation. Had I foreseen indeed, some five-and-thirty years ago, that such a demand would be made upon me, I might have laid myself out on purpose, as Dr. Watts recommends, so as "to give of every day some good account at last." I would have lived like a Frenchman, for effect, and made my life a long dress rehearsal of the future biography. I would have cultivated incidents " pour servir," laid traps for adventures, and illustrated my memory like Rogers's, by a brilliant series of Tableaux. The earlier of my Seven Stages should have been more Wonder Phenomenon Comet and Balloon-like, and have been timed to a more Quicksilver pace than they have travelled; in short, my Life, according to the tradesman's promise, should have been "fully equal to bespoke." But, alas! in the absence of such a Scottish second-sight, my whole course of existence up to the present moment would hardly furnish materials for one of those "bald biographies" that content the old gentlemanly pages of Sylvanus Urban. Lamb, on being applied to for a Memoir of himself, made answer that it would go into an epigram; and I really believe that I could compress my own into that baker's dozen of lines called a sonnet. Montgomery, indeed, has forestalled the greater part of it, in his striking poem on the "Common Lot," but in prose, nobody could ever make anything of it, except Mr. George Robins. The lives of literary men are proverbially barren of interest, and mine, instead of forming an exception to the general rule, would bear the application of the following words of Sir Walter Scott, much better than the career of their illustrious author. "There is no

man known at all in literature, who may not have more to tell of his private life than I have. I have surmounted no difficulties either of birth or education, nor have I been favoured by any particular advantages, and my life has been as void of incidents of importance as that of the weary knife-grinder- Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, sir.'"

Thus my birth was neither so humble that, like John Jones, I have been obliged amongst my lays to lay the cloth, and to court the cook and the muses at the same time; nor yet so lofty, that, with a certain lady of title, I could not write without letting myself down. Then, for education, though on the one hand I have not taken my degree, with Blucher; yet, on the other, I have not been rusticated, at the Open Air School, like the Poet of Helpstone. As for incidents of importance, I remember none, except being drawn for a soldier, which was a hoax, and having the opportunity of giving a casting vote on a great parochial question, only I didn't attend. I have never been even third in a duel, or crossed in love. The stream of time has flowed on with me very like that of the New River, which everybody knows has so little romance about it, that its Head has never troubled