Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton—­what a spark you were like to have extinguished for ever!  Your salubrious streams to this City, for now near two centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing away.  Mockery of a river—­liquid artifice—­wretched conduit! henceforth rank with canals, and sluggish aqueducts.  Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks?—­Ye have no swans—­no Naiads—­no river God—­or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters?

Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some consonancy in it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture?—­or, having no name, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN?

  And could such spacious virtue find a grave
  Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave?

I protest, George, you shall not venture out again—­no, not by daylight—­without a sufficient pair of spectacles—­in your musing moods especially.  Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.  You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can help it.  Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years’ after your many tracts in favour of sprinkling only!

I have nothing but water in my head o’ nights since this frightful accident.  Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream.  At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful (that is to me), “I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me.  Selah.”  Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage.  I cry out too late to save.  Next follow—­a mournful procession—­suicidal faces, saved against their wills from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet hue-constrained Lazari—­Pluto’s half-subjects—­stolen fees from the grave-bilking Charon of his fare.  At their head Arion—­or is it G.D.?—­in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea.  Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy death.

And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts.  When a soul knocks once, twice, at death’s door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable; and the grim Feature, by modern science so often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus.