There rises up now before my memory a noted representative of the practical-joke midshipman, whose exploits would be a mine of incident to a naval novelist. Once, when he was sent on shore sick to the temporary hospital at Lisbon, his inventive faculties were for some time on the rack in devising how to play a joke upon the inmates of a contiguous nunnery, whom he could never get a glimpse of, and whose premises were surrounded by a high wall. At length, with a perseverance 'worthy of a better cause,' he, with some accomplices from the ship, contrived to capture a donkey, to hoist it over the wall at dead of night, and to land it in the courtyard. The flutter in the nunnery dovecote next morning may be easily imagined. On another occasion, at a missionary meeting at Portsmouth, he had the audacity to assume a clerical garb, and to throw some of the audience who recognised him into suppressed convulsions, by appearing seated on the platform among the deputation who were to address the meeting, and looking serenely upon them through his borrowed spectacles.

One of the pluckiest things I ever witnessed was done by a brother of his, who is one of the

E

most able and earnest of clergymen. When Dickens was giving his readings in London, we went one night to St. James's Hall to hear him. It was crowded with a fashionable audience, and the principal characters in the readings-Mrs. Gamp the midwife, the villain Fagin, Sikes the murderer, and the wretched Nancywere brought upon the imaginary stage and placed before us with the reality of life. With wonderful acting, inimitable power of facial expression, and subtle modulations of voice, this master of fiction reproduced before English girls the scene where Pecksniff calls for the purpose of obtaining the services of Mrs. Gamp, not omitting the small jokes and points which hinge on her professional avocation. He then, in loud dialogue and startling description, painted the horrible scenes of blackguardism and vice which cluster round the lives of the Jew, the burglar and his paramour, ending with the murder of the latter, and which was sketched with such frightful vividness and power that one seemed positively to see the streaming blood flow from the upturned face, to hear the crashing blows, and to look on the eyes of the murdered woman glaring upward, as if watching

the reflection of the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling.'

Anything more shameless, horrible, and debasing it were hardly possible to conceive; and it filled one with disgust and indignation to see gentlemen there, with their sisters and daughters, listening with gratification to these recitals of infamy and crime. All in that large assembly vied with one another in applauding the popular idol, excepting one man, who refused to bow to it, or to express gratification at the pictured vice and vulgarity laid bare to view. And that one man was my friend the clergyman, who between one of the readings stood up, and, being gifted with a powerful voice, called upon the audience for an adverse expression of opinion as to the tendency of such readings, stating as his own that it was the most demoralising and degrading exhibition he had ever witnessed. A storm of indignant dissent, and cries of Turn him out!' burst from that cultivated audience. Dickens had too truly gauged the tastes of the man of the day and the 'girl of the period'; and when he reappeared he was received with redoubled applause.

To enforce virtue from the pulpit is one thing,

but as a unit in a vast audience to stand up and address them in the cause of morality, and by implication condemn them, is quite another matter. It was as bold and intrepid an act as modern civil life ever gives scope for the exercise of; and I only wished that I had been Archbishop of Canterbury, that I might have promoted him on the spot to the best living in my gift.

CHAPTER V.

ON leaving Malta we cruised along the coast of Italy; and from Leghorn we made up a large party to Florence. How we induced the conducteur of the diligence to allow us in turns to work his team along the beautiful valley of the Arno, and the merry dinner in the evening at the Hôtel de York, are things to linger in one's memory, side by side almost with the glories of the Florentine galleries. Naples then received us for the rest of the summer; and Baiæ, Pompeii, and Vesuvius were enjoyed and wondered at at leisure.

The mountain was in fierce eruption-1848and a party of us getting to the top one night, made a dash through the shower of falling stones and cinders during a brief lull, and got between them and the mouth of the crater, which, sending up its burning contents in a cascade far over our heads, scattered them as they fell all round, but outside us. The earth