GOOCH. 2m that troubles me more than ever, and though I can no where detect any mortal disease, yet I am in a state which keeps constantly before my mind the probability that my life will be short, too short for me to do what I could do for my family, and what little I would try to do in my way for mankind." The next two years of Gooch's life were marked by increasing success in his profession, but the satisfaction resulting from this circumstance was more than balanced by anxiety on the score of his wife's health and his own. In 1820 he lost his eldest son, an interesting and promising child of five years old : no calamity which he had ever experienced affected him so deeply as the death of this boy. In a letter, written soon after this event, he says, " There is only one subject I can talk to you about, and that is my boy ; he is always in our thoughts. Southey, in ' Roderick,' gives the recipe for grief with a truth which shows he has tried it, and found its efficacy — religion and strenuous exertion. Whoever says, that the latter is the chief, says false, for the former affords support when the mind is incapable of exertion ; it tranquillizes in moments which exertion cannot reach, and is not only not the least, but the best of the two. When we went down to Croydon to deposit our dear boy in my little tenement there, you will easily believe that I approached the town and entered the church-yard with strange feehngs : ten years back I had visited this spot to lay a wife and a child in the same tomb ; since then I had reco- vered from my grief, had formed new affections, had had them wounded as bitterly as the former,
