III.] THREE YEARS OP IDLENESS.

inind: habit comes in aid of all deficiencies.* The reader
will be therefore not unprepared to find, as well in these
sunny Irish years, as in other parts of the apparently
vagrant and idle career to be now described, some points
of even general beneficial example.

The two years, then, are passed; and Oliver must apply
for orders. " For the clerical profession," says Mrs. Hodson,
" he had no liking." It is not very wonderful; after having
seen, in his father and his brother, how much learning
and labour were rewarded in the church by forty pounds a
year. But he had yet another, and to him perhaps a stronger
motive ; though I do not know if it has not been brought
against him as an imputation of mere vanity or simplicity,
that he once said, " he did not deem himself good enough
" for it." His friends, however, though not so resolutely as
at first, still advised him to this family profession. " Our
" friends," says the man in black, " always advise, when they
" begin to despise us." He made application to the Bishop
of Elphin, and was refused; sent back as he went; in short,
plucked;—but the story is told in various ways, and it is
hard to get at the truth. His sister says that his youth
was the objection; while it was a tradition "in the diocese "
that either Mr. Theaker Wilder had given the bishop an
exaggerated report of his college irregularities, or (which
is more likely, and indeed is the only reasonable account of
the affair) that he had neglected the preliminary professional
studies. Doctor Strean on the other hand fully believed,
from rumours he picked up, that " Mr. Noll's " offence was
the having presented himself before his right reverence in
scarlet breeches; t and certainly if this last reason be the

* "Rely upon it, sir, vivacity is much an ait, and depends greatly on habit."
Johnson to Boswell, Life, vi. 95.

'I* Mangin's Essay, 150. "To be obliged," says the man in black, "to wear apwing,