“We have heard our hero, with emotions which do his heart honor, describe the awful circumstances attending the decease of this worthy old gentleman.  It seems they had been walking out together, master and pupil, in a fine sunset, to the distance of three-quarters of a mile west of Lupton, when a sudden curiosity took Mr. Goodenough to look down upon a chasm, where a shaft had been lately sunk in a mining speculation (then projecting, but abandoned soon after, as not answering the promised success, by Sir Ralph Shepperton, Knight, and member for the county).  The old clergyman leaning over, either with incaution or sudden giddiness, (probably a mixture of both,) suddenly lost his footing, and, to use Mr. Listen’s phrase, disappeared, and was doubtless broken into a thousand pieces.  The sound of his head, etc., dashing successively upon the projecting masses of the chasm, had such an effect upon the child that a serious sickness ensued, and even for many years after his recovery he was not once seen so much as to smile.

“The joint death of both his parents, which happened not many months after this disastrous accident, and were probably (one or both of them) accelerated by it, threw our youth upon the protection of his maternal great-aunt, Mrs. Sittingbourn.  Of this aunt we have never heard him speak but with expressions amounting almost to reverence.  To the influence of her early counsels and manners he has always attributed the firmness with which, in maturer years, thrown upon a way of life commonly not the best adapted to gravity and self-retirement, he has been able to maintain a serious character, untinctured with the levities incident to his profession.  Ann Sittingbourn (we have seen her portrait by Hudson) was stately, stiff, tall, with a cast of features strikingly resembling the subject of this memoir.  Her estate in Kent was spacious and well-wooded; the house, one of those venerable old mansions which are so impressive in childhood, and so hardly forgotten in succeeding years.  In the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, among thick shades of the oak and beech, (this last his favorite tree,) the young Listen cultivated those contemplative habits which have never entirely deserted him in after-years.  Here he was commonly in the summer months to be met with, with a book in his hand,—­not a play-book,—­meditating.  Boyle’s ‘Reflections’ was at one time the darling volume, which in its turn was superseded by Young’s ‘Night Thoughts,’ which has continued its hold upon him through life.  He carries it always about him; and it is no uncommon thing for him to be seen, in the refreshing intervals of his occupation, leaning against a side-scene, in a sort of Herbert-of-Cherbury posture, turning over a pocket-edition of his favorite author.

“But the solitudes of Charnwood were not destined always to obscure the path of our young hero.  The premature death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, at the age of seventy, occasioned by incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in her sleeping-chamber, left him in his nineteenth year nearly without resources.  That the stage at all should have presented itself as an eligible scope for his talents, and, in particular, that he should have chosen a line so foreign to what appears to have been his turn of mind, may require some explanation.