me are good meditations; when I am in the city, they are choked with business.”  Lord CLARENDON, whose life so happily combined the contemplative with the active powers of man, dwells on three periods of retirement which he enjoyed; he always took pleasure in relating the great tranquillity of spirit experienced during his solitude at Jersey, where for more than two years, employed on his history, he daily wrote “one sheet of large paper with his own hand.”  At the close of his life, his literary labours in his other retirements are detailed with a proud satisfaction.  Each of his solitudes occasioned a new acquisition; to one he owed the Spanish, to another the French, and to a third the Italian literature.  The public are not yet acquainted with the fertility of Lord Clarendon’s literary labours.  It was not vanity that induced Scipio to declare of solitude, that it had no loneliness for him, since he voluntarily retired amidst a glorious life to his Linternum.  CICERO was uneasy amid applauding Rome, and has distinguished his numerous works by the titles of his various villas.  AULUS GELLIUS marked his solitude by his “Attic Nights.”  The “Golden Grove” of JEREMY TAYLOR is the produce of his retreat at the Earl of Carberry’s seat in Wales; and the “Diversions of Purley” preserved a man of genius for posterity.  VOLTAIRE had talents well adapted for society; but at one period of his life he passed five years in the most secret seclusion, and indeed usually lived in retirement.  MONTESQUIEU quitted the brilliant circles of Paris for his books and his meditations, and was ridiculed by the gay triflers he deserted; “but my great work,” he observes in triumph, “avance a pas de geant.”  Harrington, to compose his “Oceana,” severed himself from the society of his friends.  DESCARTES, inflamed by genius, hires an obscure house in an unfrequented quarter at Paris, and there he passes two years, unknown to his acquaintance.  ADAM SMITH, after the publication of his first work, withdrew into a retirement that lasted ten years:  even Hume rallies him for separating himself from the world; but by this means the great political inquirer satisfied the world by his great work.  And thus it was with men of genius long ere Petrarch withdrew to his Val chiusa.

The interruption of visitors by profession has been feelingly lamented by men of letters.  The mind, maturing its speculations, feels the unexpected conversation of cold ceremony chilling as March winds over the blossoms of the Spring.  Those unhappy beings who wander from house to house, privileged by the charter of society to obstruct the knowledge they cannot impart, to weary because they are wearied, or to seek amusement at the cost of others, belong to that class of society which have affixed no other idea to time than that of getting rid of it.  These are judges not the best qualified to comprehend the nature and evil of their depredations in the silent apartment of the studious, who may be often driven to exclaim, in the words of the Psalmist, “Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency:  for all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning.”