gentry in the neighbourhood; but the housekeepers were never invited by his daughters, a point of propriety in male and female acquaintanceship which amused us not a little.  His business was of a most multifarious description, and besides the trades of bookseller, stationer, and druggist, he had a printing-office, and was, moreover, a self-taught printer, He was post-master and stamp sub-distributor, receiver of bail, and agent for insurances—­little official appointments which would have made him mayor in a corporate town.  Of late years, he seldom meddled with these matters of business; but tired of their common track, he struck out a course of life, which was neither public nor private, but made him a sort of oracle in the town, whose opinions were freely printed and gratuitously circulated, whilst the author was seldom seen except at vestry-meetings.  In this way he acted as secretary to a benevolent society established by the gentry, and such was his enthusiasm that he gave his services and L200. worth of printing during the first year; and the Committee in return presented him with a handsome piece of plate with a complimentary inscription, which he had the modesty to keep locked up, and never to display even to his visiters.  This proved him to be a benevolent man, and he would have been ten times more useful had not his charitable disposition been over tinged with oddity and caprice.  His contact with the poor of the parish soon made him overseer, although his religious observances would not qualify him for churchwarden; for he only went to church at funerals, to which he was frequently invited, his staid appearance, and a certain air of gentility of which he was master, being in such cases no mean recommendation.  Overseer and select vestryman, he printed the parish accounts, for the most part gratuitously, although the poor and even the better portion of the towns-people never gave him full credit for this generosity, conceiving that he was repaid by some secret services or funds.  The oddity of his pursuits was only exceeded by their variety.  In politics he was a disciple of Cobbett, and year after year, foretold a revolution, an alarm which he communicated to every one of his household.  He took extreme interest in all new mechanical projects, but seldom indulged in the practical part of them.  In wine-making he was once a very experimentalist, and studied every line of Macculloch and unripe fruit; next, he turned over every inch of his garden, analyzed the soil a la Davy, and salted all his growing crops.  His cogitative habits led him to take long walks in the country, and he soon flew from horticultural chemistry to real farming; and about the same time took to road making and macadamization, and became a surveyor of the highways.  But the trustees wanting to macadamize the miserably pitched street of the town, he bethought him of dust in summer and mud in winter, and drew up a long memorial to the lords of the soil, remonstrating with them on their