CHAPTER X. P. I.

ONE WHO WAS NOT SO WISE AS HIS FRIENDS COULD HAVE WISHED, AND YET QUITE AS HAPPY AS IF HE HAD BEEN WISER. NEPOTISM NOT CONFINED TO POPES.

William Dove was Daniel's only surviving brother, seven years his junior. He was born with one of those heads in which the thin partition that divides great wits from folly is wanting. Had he come into the world a century sooner, he would have been taken nolens volens into some Baron's household, to wear motley, make sport for the guests and domestics, and live in fear of the rod. But it was his better fortune to live in an age when this calamity rendered him liable to no such oppression, and to be precisely in that station which secured for him all the enjoyments of which he was capable, and all the care he needed. In higher life, he would probably have been consigned to the keeping of strangers who would have taken charge of him for pay; in a humbler degree he must have depended upon the parish for support; or have been made an inmate of one of those moral lazar-houses in which age and infancy, the harlot and the idiot, the profligate and the unfortunate are herded together.

William Dove escaped these aggravations of calamity. He escaped also that persecution to which he would have been exposed in populous places where boys run loose in packs, and harden one another in impudence, mischief and cruelty. Natural feeling, when natural feeling is not corrupted, leads men to regard persons in his condition with a compassion not unmixed with awe. It is common with the country people when they speak of such persons to point significantly at the head and say 'tis not all there;—words denoting a sense of the mysteriousness of our nature which perhaps they feel more deeply on this than on any other occasion. No outward and visible deformity can make them so truly apprehend how fearfully and wonderfully we are made.

William Dove's was not a case of fatuity. Though all was not there, there was a great deal. He was what is called half-saved. Some of his faculties were more than ordinarily acute, but the power of self conduct was entirely wanting in him. Fortunately it was supplied by a sense of entire dependence which produced entire docility. A dog does not obey his master more dutifully than William obeyed his brother; and in this obedience there was nothing of fear; with all the strength and simplicity of a child's love, it had also the character and merit of a moral attachment.

The professed and privileged Fool was generally characterized by a spice of knavery, and not unfrequently of maliciousness: the unnatural situation in which he was placed, tended to excite such propensities and even to produce them. William had shrewdness enough for the character, but nothing of this appeared in his disposition; ill-usage might perhaps have awakened it, and to a fearful degree, if he had proved as sensible to injury as he was to kindness. But he had never felt an injury. He could not have been treated with more tenderness in Turkey (where a degree of holiness is imputed to persons in his condition) than was uniformly shewn him within the little sphere of his perambulations. It was surprizing how much he had picked up within that little sphere. Whatever event occurred, whatever tale was current, whatever traditions were preserved, whatever superstitions were believed, William knew them all; and all that his insatiable ear took in, his memory hoarded. Half the proverbial sayings in Ray's volume were in his head, and as many more with which Ray was unacquainted. He knew many of the stories which our children are now receiving as novelties in the selections from Grimm's Kinder- und Haus-Marchen, and as many of those which are collected in the Danish Folk-Sagn. And if some zealous lover of legendary lore, (like poor John Leyden, or Sir Walter Scott) had fallen in with him, the Shakesperian commentators might perhaps have had the whole story of St. Withold; the Wolf of the World's End might have been identified with Fenris and found to be a relic of the Scalds: and Rauf Collyer and John the Reeve might still have been as well known as Adam Bell, and Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudeslie.

William had a great fondness for his nephew. Let not Protestants suppose that Nepotism is an affection confined to the dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church. In its excess indeed it is peculiarly a Papal vice,—which is a degree higher than a Cardinal one; but like many other sins it grows out of the corruption of a good feeling. It may be questioned whether fond uncles are not as numerous as unkind ones, notwithstanding our recollections of King Richard and the Children in the Wood. We may use the epithet nepotious for those who carry this fondness to the extent of doting, and as expressing that degree of fondness it may be applied to William Dove: he was a nepotious uncle. The father regarded young Daniel with a deeper and more thoughtful, but not with a fonder affection, not with such a doting attachment. Dinah herself, though a fond as well as careful mother did not more thoroughly

and perhaps the boy so long as he was incapable of distinguishing between their moral qualities, and their relative claims to his respect and love and duty, loved his uncle most of the three. The father had no idle hours; in the intervals when he was not otherwise employed, one of his dear books usually lay open before him, and if he was not feeding upon the page, he was ruminating the food it had afforded him. But William Dove from the time that his nephew became capable of noticing and returning caresses seemed to have concentered upon him all his affections. With children affection seldom fails of finding its due return; and if he had not thus won the boy's heart in infancy, he would have secured it in childhood by winning his ear with these marvellous stories. But he possessed another talent which would alone have made him a favourite with children,—the power of imitating animal sounds with singular perfection. A London manager would have paid him well for performing the cock in Hamlet. He could bray in octaves to a nicety, set the geese gabbling by addressing them in their own tongue, and make the turkey-cock spread his fan, brush his wing against the ground, and angrily gob-gobble in answer to a gobble of defiance. But he prided himself more upon his success with the owls, as an accomplishment of more difficult attainment. In this Mr. Wordsworth's boy of Winander was not more perfect. Both hands were used as an instrument in producing the notes; and if Pope could have heard the responses which came from barn and doddered oak and ivied crag, he would rather, (satirist as he was,) have left Ralph unsatirized, than have vilified one of the wildest and sweetest of nocturnal sounds.

1 DONNE.

He was not less expert to a human ear in hitting off the wood-pigeon's note, though he could not in this instance provoke a reply. This sound he used to say ought to be natural to him, and it was wrong in the bird not to acknowledge his relation. Once when he had made too free with a lasses lips, he disarmed his brother of a reprehensive look, by pleading that as his name was William Dove it behoved him both to bill and to coo.