eight, at a little wayside inn, and then travelled till midnight with scarcely any cessation.
The way would have been very tedious had it not been enlivened by the eccentricities of Mr. Latham, an English passenger. After breakfast the conversation in the stage was pretty general, led by the individual aforesaid, who lectured and preached, rather than conversed. Few subjects were untouched by his eloquence; he spoke with equal ease on a difficult point in theology, and on the conformation of the sun. He lectured on politics, astronomy, chemistry, and anatomy with great fluency and equal incorrectness. In describing the circulation of the blood, he said, "It's a purely metaphysical subject;" and the answering remark, "It is the most purely physical," made him vehemently angry. He spoke of the sun by saying, "I've studied the sun; I know it as well as I do this field; it's a dark body with a luminous atmosphere, and a climate more agreeable than that of the earth"—thus announcing as a fact what has been timidly put forward as a theory only by our greatest astronomers.
Politics soon came on the tapis, when he attacked British institutions violently, with an equal amount of ignorance and presumption, making such glaring misstatements that I felt bound to contradict them; when he, not liking to be lowered in the estimation of his companions, contested the points in a way which closely bordered upon rudeness.
He made likewise a very pedantic display of scientific knowledge, in virtue of an occasional attendance at meetings of mechanics' institutes, and asked the gentlemen—
