few years, but not by many.  Nicholson was a man of very extensive reading and of profound Biblical learning.  It may be deemed surprising by others, as it was, and is, to me, that such a man should have been an earnest and thoroughly convinced Swedenborgian—­but such was the case.  And I can conscientiously give this testimony to the excellence of that creed—­that it produced in the person of its learned north-country disciple at least one truly good and amiable man.  Dr. Nicholson was emphatically such in all the relations of life.  He was the good and loving husband of a very charming wife, the unremittingly careful and affectionate father of a large family, a delightful host at his own table, an excellent and instructive companion over a cigar (hardly correctly alluded to in the singular number!) and a most jucundus comes in a tramp over the hills.

Amusing to me still is the contrast between those Cumberland walks with Sir George and my ramblings over the same or nearly the same ground with the meditative Swedenborgian doctor;—­the first always pushing ahead as if shouldering along a victorious path through life, knowing the history of every foot of ground he passed over, interested in every detail of it, and with an air of continually saying “Ha! ha!” among the breezy trumpets of those hills, like the scriptural war-horse; the second with his gaze very imperfectly turned outward, but very fruitfully turned inward, frequently pausing with argumentative finger laid on his companion’s breast, and smile half satirical half kindly as the flow of discourse revealed theological lacunae in my acquirements, which, I fear, irreparably and most unfairly injured the Regius professor of divinity in the mind of the German graduate.  For Nicholson was a theological “doctor” by virtue of a degree from I forget what German university, and had a low estimate, perhaps more justified at that day than it would be now, of the extent and calibre of Oxford theological learning.  He was himself a disciple, and an enthusiastic admirer of Ewald, a very learned Hebraist, and an unflagging student.

I was more capable of appreciating at its due value the extent and accuracy of his knowledge upon another subject—­a leg of mutton!  It may be a mere coincidence, but certainly the most learned Hebraist it was ever my lot to know was also the best and most satisfactory carver of a leg of mutton.

Nobody knows anything about mutton in these days, for the very sufficient reason that there is no mutton worth knowing anything about.  Scientific breeding has improved it off the face of the earth.  The immature meat is killed at two years old, and only we few survivors of a former generation know how little like it is to the mutton of former days.  The Monmouthshire farmers told me the other day that they could not keep Welsh sheep of pure breed, because nothing under an eight-foot park paling would confine them.  Just as if they did not jump in the days when I jumped too!  Believe me, my young friends, that George the Third knew what he was talking about (as upon certain other occasions) when he said that very little venison was equal to a haunch of four-year-old mutton.  And the gravy!—­chocolate-coloured, not pink, my innocent young friends.  Ichabod!  Ichabod!