health and life to the service of his country, and asked only that the empty honor conferred on him might be continued to his descendant. Had he been a Chapman in the House of Commons, and could have commanded a couple of votes, his honors would have been perpetuated. The English must be the most quiet and orderly people in the universe not to rush into the rapacious demagogues, and to tie them by the necks in couples, and to throw them tutti quanti into the Thames. This good temper is really most fortunate at the present, for their opponents would throw Europe back upon the Dark Ages, and the next frontispiece to the 'Book of Beauty' would be decorated with a glorified heart, deliciously larded with swords and arrows. Do not hint this to any of your Whig friends, or we may have a coalition, and see the thing yet. W. S. L." "Florence, 8th April, 1834. "For some time I have been composing ‘The Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare, &c., before the worshipful Sir Thomas Lucy, Knight, touching Deer-stealing, on the 19th day of September, in the year of grace 1582, now first published from Original Papers.' "This is full of fun-I know not whether of wit. It is the only thing I ever wrote that is likely to sell. W. S. L." "July 7th, 1834. “My zeal is quite evaporated for the people I hoped to benefit by the publication of The Trial of Shakspeare.' I find my old schoolfellow (whom, bythe-by, I never knew, but who placed enough confidence in me to beg my assistance in his distress) has been gaming. Had he even tried but a trifle of assassination, I should have felt for him; or, in fact, had he done almost any thing else. But to rely on superior skill in spoliation is less pardonable than to rely on superior courage, or than to avenge an affront in a sudden and summary way. "I am highly gratified by Lord Mulgrave's recollection of me. When he and Lady M- were at Florence, I received every civility from them very undeservedly. I hope Lord Mulgrave will soon be the director of our affairs in England. There is only one office I could accept under him, which is that of Archbishop of Canterbury, provided I am not called to the Papacy. "W. S. L." "Florence, October 11th, 1834. "Before I express to you any of my fears and other fancies, let me thank you for your letter—and now for the fears; the first is, that you have really taken the trouble to overlook the sheets of my Examination; the next, that the conferences of Spenser and Essex are not added to it. For this I have written an Introduction which quite satisfied me, which hardly any thing does upon the whole, though every thing in part. "Pray relieve me from this teasing anxiety, for the Examination and the Conferences, if disjoined, would break my heart. Never were two things so totally different in style. * I did not believe such kind things would be said of me for at least a century to come. * "Perhaps, before we meet, even fashionable persons will pronounce my name without an apology, and I may be patted on the head by dandies, with all the gloss upon their coats, and with unfrayed straps to their trousers. Who knows but I may be encouraged, at last, to write as they instruct me, and may attract all the gay people of the parks and Parliament by my puffpaste and powder-sugar surface? But then, how will my older and rather more dignified patricians look upon me My Cæsar and Lucullus-my pleasant Peterborough-above all, my dear Epicurus? No, not above all; for if my little Ternissa should frisk away from me, I am utterly undone. Lady Jane Grey, too, who saw so many of my tears fall before her, foreknowing, as I did, what must happen-all these, in their various miens and voices, would upbraid me. "It occurs to me that authors are beginning to think it an honest thing to pay their debts, and that they are debtors (as they surely are) to all by whose labor and charges the fields of literature have been cleared and sown. It must be confessed, we have been a rascally gang hitherto, for the most part, particularly we moralists. Few writers have said all the good they thought of others, and fewer have concealed the ill. They praise their friends, because their friends, it may be hoped, will praise them-or get them praised. As these propensities seem inseparable from the literary character, I have always kept aloof from authors where I could. Southey stands erect, and stands alone. I love him no less for his integrity than for his genius. No man, in our days, has done a twentieth part for the glory of our literature. "Arnold is so mischievous as to show me, at this moment, the portrait of the Duchess of, and to say she ought to have been put in the Index or Notes. Sure enough, she never was a beauty. The duke had so little idea of countenance, that he remarked a wonderful resemblance between me and Perhaps he thought to compliment both parties. Now you had better find a ghost than a resemblance. If an ugly woman is compared to a beautiful one, she will tell you, 'This is the first time I was ever taken for an idiot. If a sensible woman is compared to Madame de Staël, she shows you her foot, and thanks God she has not yet taken to rouge. "I have been reading Beckford's Travels, and Vatheck. The last pleases me less than it did forty years ago, and yet the Arabian Nights have lost none of their charms for me. All the learned and wiseacres in England cried out against this wonderful work upon its first appearance-Gray among the rest. Yet I doubt whether any man, except Shakspeare, has afforded so much deVOL. II.-F light, if we open our hearts to receive it. The author of the Arabian Nights was the greatest benefactor the East ever had, not excepting Mohammed. How many hours of pure happiness has he bestowed upon six-and-twenty millions of hearers! All the springs of the desert have less refreshed the Arabs than those delightful tales, and they cast their gems and genii over our benighted and foggy regions. 66 “B———, in his second letter, says that two or three of Rosa da Tivoli's landscapes merit observation, and in the next he scorns P. Potter. Now all Rosa da Tivoli's works are not worth a blade of grass from the hand of P. Potter. The one was a consummate artist; the other one of the coarsest that ever bedaubed a canvas. He talks of the worst roads that ever pretended to be made use of,' and of a dish of tea, without giving us the ladle or the carving-knife for it. When I read such things, I rub my eyes, and awaken my recollections. I not only fancy that I am older than I am in reality (which is old enough, in all conscience), but that I have begun to lose my acquaintance with our idiom. Those who desire to write upon light matters gracefully, must read with attention the writings of Pope, Lady M. W. Montague, and Lord Chesterfield-three ladies of the first water. "I am sorry you sent my Examination' by a private hand. Nothing affects me but pain and disappointment. Hannah More says, 'There are no evils in the world but sin and bile.' They fall upon me very unequally. I would give a good quantity of bile for a trifle of sin, and yet my philosophy would induce me to throw it aside. No man ever began so carly to abolish hopes and wishes. Happy he who is resolved to walk with Epicurus on his right and Epictetus on his left, and to shut his ears to every other voice along the road. W. S. L." "Firenze, March 16th, 1835. “After a year or more, I receive your reminiscences of Byron. Never, for the love of God, send any thing again by a Welshman—I mean, any thing literary. Lord D's brother, like Lord D himself, is a very good man, and if you had sent me a cheese, would have delivered it safely in due season. But a book is a thing that does not spoil so soon. Alas! how few are there who know the aches of expectancy, when we have long been looking up high for some suspended gift of bright imagination! Thanks upon thanks for making me think Byron a better and a wiser man than I had thought him. Since this precious volume, I have been reading the English Opium-cater's Recollections of Coleridge, a genius of the highest order, even in poetry. "I was amused-when I was a youth I should have been shocked and disgusted at his solution of Pythagoras's enigma on bears. "When I was at Oxford, I wrote my opinion on the origin of the religion of the Druids. It appeared to me that Pythagoras, who settled in Italy, and who had many followers in the Greek colony of the Phoenicians at Marseilles, had ingrafted on a barbarous and bloodthirsty religion the humane doctrine of the Metempsychosis. "It would have been vain to say, Do not murder: no people ever minded this doctrine; but he frightened the savages by saying, If you are cruel even to beasts and insects, the cruelty will fall upon yourselves: you shall be the same. In this disquisition, I gave exactly the same solution as (it appears) Coleridge gave. Our friend Parr was delighted with it, and beyond a doubt it remains among my letters, &c., sent to him. I did not allow any of these to be published by Dr. John Johnston, his biographer, who asked my permission. "Infinite as are the pains I take in composing and correcting my 'Imaginary Conversations' (having no right to make other people speak and think worse than they did), I may indulge all my natural idleness in regard to myself. "Mr. Robinson, the soundest man that ever stepped through the trammels of law, gave me, a few days ago, the sorrowful information that another of our great writers had joined Coleridge. Poor Charles Lamb, what a tender, good, joyous heart had he! What playfulness! what purity of style and thought! His sister is yet living, much older than himself. One of her tales is, with the exception of the Bride of Lammermoor,' the most beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern. A young girl has lost her mother; the father marries again, and marries a friend of his former wife. The child is ill reconciled to it, but, being dressed in new clothes for the marriage, she runs up to her mother's chamber, filled with the idea how happy that dear mother would be at seeing her in all her glory-not reflecting, poor soul! that it was only by her mother's death that she appeared in it. How natural, how novel is all this! Did you ever imagine that a fresh source of the pathetic would burst forth before us in this trodden and hardened world? I never did, and when I found myself upon it, I pressed my temples with both hands, and tears ran down to my elbows. "The Opium-eater calls Coleridge 'the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive that has yet existed among men. Impiety to Shakspeare! treason to Milton! I give up the rest, even Bacon. Certainly, since their day, we have seen nothing at all comparable to him. Byron and Scott were but as gun-flints to a granite mountain; Wordsworth has one angle of resemblance; Southey has written more, and all well, much admirably. Forster has said grand things about me; but I sit upon the earth with my heels under me, looking up devoutly to this last glorious ascension. Never ask me about the rest. If you do, I shall only answer, in the cries that you are very likely to hear at this moment from your window, ' Ground ivy! ground ivy! ground ivy!' "Can not you teach those about you to write somewhat more purely? I m very fastidious. Three days ago I was obliged to correct a friend of mine, a man of fashion, who so far forgot the graces as to say of a lady, 'I have not am 124 often been in her company.' 'Say presence;' we are in the company of men, in the presence of angels and of women. "Let me add a few verses, as usual: "Pleasures-away, they please no more: Whene'er these witnesses that time For human weal and human woes, 'Tis then the hour our days should close. W. S. L." (No date.) My disquisition on Pythagoras arose from finding the lawgiver (as he is Now Samotes would mean called) of the Gauls to have been named Samotes. the Samiot, and Pythagoras was of Samos. Although I never keep what I write, hating the labor of transcribing, and never having a good pen in the house, yet I believe one of my brothers has taken a copy of this boyish production. I do not wonder that Coleridge and I should have often gone into the same train of thought. I have usually thrown myself down, when I have found some pleasant spot to rest in, and have looked about me quietly and complacently he has gone quite through, and has sometimes lost himself, and has often reached the outskirts, and shuddered (which he need not to have done) at the briery hedge and barren termination. I am, dear Lady P, yours, &c., W. S. L." "Baths of Lucca. "You know how many have had reason to speak of you with gratitude, and all speak in admiration of your generous and gentle heart, incapable as they are of estimating the elevation of your mind. “Among the last letters I received was one from Mrs. D—, whose sister married poor Reginald Heber, the late Bishop of Calcutta. She is a cousin of W's, and has heard Augustus speak of you as I have often written. Her words are (if she speaks of faults, remember you are both women), 'I |