situations; and it was usually efficient, as it never relaxed while they
justified his patronage. He did not, indeed, scruple, while it was in
his power, to entrust them with large sums, when there appeared a
prospect of their future ability for repayment; but as this prospect not
seldom failed, either through death or unavoidable impediments, his
property was greatly reduced by such beneficence.

"Another distinctive mark of the character of Hayley, which few possess
by nature, and still fewer attain to by art, was an eminently great
conversational ability. It was scarcely possible for any one to be in
his company an hour, how distinguished soever his own gifts or
acquirements might be in the possession and exercise of colloquial
powers, without being conscious of his superiority in this respect. It
has been a subject of repeated astonishment to the Editor, that in a
soil so unfavourable to the growth of this faculty, as seclusion must
necessarily be, it should yet have arrived at such a pitch of
exuberance, in the case of the retired subject of this Memoir, as only
an interchange of the best informed minds, and that continually
exercised, could be supposed capable of producing. He can only attempt
to account for it from the opportunities which the author enjoyed,
through the advantage of one of the finest private libraries in the
kingdom, of conversing at all hours, and in all conceivable frames of
mind, with the illustrious dead of every age and nation. But the
solution of the difficulty is still incomplete, for although these
literary "Pleiades" could furnish as it were "the sweet influences of
rain and sunshine," to foster his native talent; yet, breath being
denied them, its improvement is more than his friend Cowper could have
accounted for, without violating his poetical axiom, that

--Ev'n the oak