I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may at it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not that felicity -- and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in Brownes Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. "In such a pass of time," he says, "a man may have a close apprehension what it is to be fotten, wheh lived to find none who could remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and ma sensibly see with what a fa no long time OBLIVION will look upon himself."
I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single blessedness had soured to the world. She ofteo say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved; and, whehought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with mothers tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason ot altogether approve. She was from m till night p ood books, aional exercises. Her favourite volumes were Thomas Kempis, in Staranslation; and a Roman Catholic prayer Book, with the matins and plines regularly set down, -- terms which I was at that time too young to uand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily ing their Papistical tendency; ao church every Sabbath, as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied; though, I think, at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great satisfa the Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman. Finding the door of the chapel in Essex-street open one day -- it was in the infancy of that heresy -- she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of worship, and freque at intervals some time after. She came not for doal points, and never missed them. With some little asperities in her stitution, which I have above hi, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old Christian. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mind -- extraordinary at a repartee; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence -- else she did not much value wit. The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting of French beans, and dropping them into a a basin of fair water. The odour of those tender vegetables to this day es back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recolles. Certainly it is the most delicate of ary operations.
Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none -- to remember. By the uncles side I may be said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any -- to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies. What a fort, or what a care, may I not have missed in her! -- But I have cousins, sprinkled about ifordshire -- besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, and whom I may term cousins par excellehese are James and Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten, years; aher of them seems disposed, in matters of advid guidao waive any of the prerogatives which primogeniture fers. May they tiill in the same mind; and when they shall be seventy-five, ay-three, years old (I ot spare them sooner), persist iing me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother!
James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, whiot every criti pee; or, if we feel, we ot explaihe pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could have drawn J. E. entire -- those fine Shandian lights and shades, which make up his story. I must limp