have nothing to do but cultivate letters." Nothing at this time disturbed the mind of the philosopher but "the mad and wicked rage of the English against the Scots," which was likely, he feared, to lessen the reputation of his history. "There has been nothing of note in Parliament," said Horace Walpole the same year," but one slight day on the American taxes." Six weeks later, he wrote: "I don't remember the day when I was reduced to complain, in winter and Parliament-tide, of having nothing to say. There has not been an event, from a debate to a wedding, capable of making a paragraph. Such calms," he added, with what now looks like prophetic insight, "often forerun storms." The silly young king was so little aware of the mischief he was doing that, in the speech with which he prorogued Parliament, he described the session as "this season of tranquillity." The House of Lords, however, had not been careless of the tranquillity of America. On March 6 of the year when the Stamp Act was passed the keeper of the Sun Tavern in the Strand was summoned to their bar, and examined about an exhibition in his house of two Indian warriors. He assured their lordships "that they had had their meals regularly, and drank nothing stronger than small beer." The House resolved "that the bringing from America any of the Indians who are under his Majesty's protection, without proper authority for so doing, may tend to give great dissatisfaction to the Indian nations, and be of dangerous consequence to his Majesty's subjects residing in the colonies." When, eight or nine years later, Lord Chesterfield's Letters were published, the following passage was suppressed: "The repeal of the Stamp Act was carried in both Houses by the ministers, against the king's declared inclinations, which is a case that has seldom happened, and I believe seldom will happen." It is a curious fact that the editor had not the courage to print these words. If George III. did his best to crush

patriots in America, he pensioned one in Europe. I have a long letter written by the Corsican hero, Pascal Paoli, who lived in England for nearly forty years on a noble pension from the crown. In the king's eyes he had atoned for the guilt of fighting for liberty by fighting against the French. The French, in their turn, who crushed the rising liberties of the Corsicans, on the other side of the Atlantic supported the young American commonwealth. Rousseau, in his anger at their invasion of Corsica, wrote of the French, "S'ils savaient un homme libre à l'autre bout du monde, je crois qu'ils y iraient pour le seul plaisir de l'exterminer." It was not as friends of freedom, but as enemies of England, that they supported the United States. Individual Frenchmen, such as La Fayette, were inspired, no doubt, by a love of liberty, just as, a few years earlier, individual Englishmen had been inspired by the same love to send a supply of arms to Paoli. When I was in Corsica I was shown Paoli's house, with its window shutters lined with thick layers of cork to keep out the bullets of assassins. never mastered our tongue, as his letter shows. That he did not speak it much more correctly than he wrote it we can see by the following record, by Miss Burney, of the account he gave her of Boswell's visit to him in Corsica: "He came to my country, and he fetched me some letter of recommending him; but I was of the belief that he might be an impostor, and I supposed in my minte he was an espy; for I look away from him, and in a moment I look to him again, and I behold his tablets. Oh! he was to the work of writing down all I say. Indeed I was angry. But soon I discover he was no impostor and no espy; and I only find I was myself the monster he had come to discern. Oh! he is a very good man; I love him indeed; so cheerful, so gay, so pleasant! but at the first, oh! I was indeed angry."

He

The date of the letter is not given, but

it must have been written soon after the battle of the Nile:

MY DEAR MISS MAINARD, Much indebted, indeed, to Miss Jones for having made an apology with you for my seemingly neglect to answer the letters you honored me with since a long time. The pain I feel to write, or read since that time I got the contagious disease which our victory in egypt brought over to england, a melancholy truth it is that every time the europeans go to any of the three quarters of the Globe with an hostile force, by sad merited penance they come back with some malady which continues incurable for along period of time. I consulted many Physicians oculists in vain, the obstinacy of my complaint has baffled all their skill and ointments. I cannot read two pages of a book or write a letter without feeling such a pressure in my Eyes which obliges me to stop for a quarter of an hour. I hope it wont be so now, as I hope this answer to your last letters may dissipate the injurious doubt you seem to have entertained that I would have forgot the many obligations I owe to kindness and friendship you had for me in so many occasions when I was at Clifton, where without your kind assistance I never would have been acquainted with the beaties of the country about, or with the persons of the best sort and caracters. Among those I shall always be proud of the acquaintance of the worthy Colonnel [illegible] to whom I pray you to make agreable my best compliments. My dear you have a write to call yourself my niece with our commons friends, as with them speaking of you I have always used the very same appellation. Very seldom I ride on the Coach upon the Pavement nor can I walk at such a distance as St. James Street; but after what you hint me of the Pictures of Mr Right, I will go there though I am unacquainted, but your name shall be my passport. If I get admittance I shall feel sadly the imperfection

of my sight. I am not a judge of Pictures, but I could have said something about those which form a great deal of the merit of M: Wright. In my country the mountains are very conspicuous and very little inferiors to [illegible] or if you please to call it with his ancient name [illegible], or the highest of the Alps

Mr Rich was but a child when I frequented the house of her worthy mother, nevertheless I am vastly proud for the remembrance she entertains of me, and hope you will be so good by to make her agreable my respectful returns of compliments. I don't doubt She and Daughters have inherited the talents of mind and the charming of the conversation of Mrs Draper, and dont wonder that they are the first rate Constellations among the Beaty of Clifton. Our acquaintance if he succeed to emancipate his country will have a singular place in the temple of fame, if unsuccessful will hav a [illegible] of the sincere Lovers of Liberty [illegible] of the scriblers of the Day. Adieu my dear Neice read if [illegible] thy servant.

DE P.

I have in my collection two or three poems and letters of Mrs. Hemans, addressed to Paoli's niece by adoption, Miss Maynard, of Clifton. On one occasion she sends her friend her inscription for the Waterloo Column. With a feeling of modesty rarely found in a poet, she does not think it right to inflict both poetry and postage on her correspondent. Above the address of her letter she has written, "Three sheets. Post paid." Below there is marked in red ink, no doubt by the postmaster, "Pd 2 s. 9. d." Two shillings and ninepence would certainly have been a heavy price to pay for such lines as the following, even though they are in the poet's autograph:

"Soldier! whose eyes this trophied stone sur

In one of her letters, dated "Daventry, 5th March," she says: "I am constantly wishing that some fortunate occurrence would transport us into your part of the world; the people here (with the exception I have just mentioned) are remarkably inhospitable, and from what I have seen of them, however earnestly I may wish for society, I certainly cannot consider it as any deprivation not to be welcomed into theirs. You know that the society at St. Asaph is by no means distinguished for its intelligence, but I can assure you it is in every respect far superior to that of Daventry."

Falstaff's red-nosed innkeeper of Daventry seems to invest this little country town with something of an hospitable air; but perhaps his red nose and hospitality were strictly personal and professional. Of the bishop's palace at St. Asaph, Johnson, who had visited it many years earlier, wrote, "They have a library, and design a room." It would seem that the bishop, though he had books, had no place in which to keep them. It is not, therefore, surprising that in Mrs. Hemans's time "St. Asaph was by no means distinguished for its intelligence." had once boasted of a great deal of intelligence in William Lloyd, one of the seven bishops who were sent to the Tower by James II. Of him a brother bishop said that "he had the most learning in ready cash of any he ever knew." But

It

"times and seasons they must change," and red-nosed innkeepers and quickwitted and learned bishops alike must

66

pass away."

The following letter I received from Mr. John Forster in acknowledgment of some notes I had sent him on his Life of Oliver Goldsmith. The engravings were two portraits of that great patriot Sir John Eliot, who died a lingering death in the Tower, a victim of the cruelty of Charles I. One of the pictures, taken on the eve of his imprisonment, represents him in full health; the other, painted a few days before his death, shows a body wasted with disease and suffering. In midwinter he had written to John Hampden, "My lodgings are removed, and I am now where candle-light may be suffered, but scarce fire." "To the end that a likeness might be preserved of him in the condition to which he had been brought by his imprisonment, he sent for a painter to the Tower. He was to paint him exactly as he was; his friends, so long denied access to him, were to see again the familiar face as the last few months had changed it; and his family were to keep the picture on the walls at Port Eliot as a perpetual memorial of his hatred of tyranny.' So the tradition has been preserved from generation to generation of his descendants." His son petitioned the king for leave to lay his father to rest among his dead ancestors. "Whereto was answered, at the foot of the petition, Lett Sir John Eliot's body be buried in the Churche of that parish where he dyed.' And so he was buried in the Tower." When I remember Eliot's sufferings and death, I rejoice in the thought that not many years were to pass by before it was seen that it was no lying vision which had passed before the eyes of the great Puritan poet when he uttered the stern threat,

6

"That two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."

I wonder what has become of the million and more copies of Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy which were scat tered over England and America? Of one copy, finely bound in best morocco, I can tell the fate. It had been given to my wife, on leaving school, by one of her companions; for in those days of the world's innocence young ladies adored the mild Tupper. One idle morning, discovering this handsome volume on a bookshelf, I held a secret court of justice, and condemned it to much the same end as befell Don Quixote's books of chivalry. I had constituted myself sheriff and executioner as well as judge and jury; so I heated the poker red-hot, and bored the pages through. The covers I left uninjured. I then restored the book to its proper place, where it slumbered peacefully for some months, or perhaps years. A day came at last when our first-born, having taken it down to use it as a brick

in building a house, brought it, with awestricken eyes, to her mother. In my undergraduate days I once heard Mr. Swinburne mock his brother bard by playfully maintaining that he had seen a book advertised with the title The Poet, the Proverbialist, and the Philosopher, or Selections from the Writings of Solomon, Shakespeare, and Martin F. Tupper. Of such a selection and such a title Tupper would have been quite capable. In a free rendering of "Non omnis moriar he joins himself with Horace and Shakespeare, as all three destined to immortality. A slight but amusing instance of his vanity was told me by a friend of mine, who was taking part in the election of the representatives to Parliament of the University of Oxford. Tupper, who had come up to vote, with an air of importance had given in his name. The official, not catching it, asked him to repeat it. With great dignity, but yet with a certain plaintive tone, as if such a question should not have had to be put to so famous a man, he deliberately said, "Martin Farquhar Tupper, the poet." Of the vanity shown in the following letter his was not a solitary instance: a poetess, who had not mastered enough of her art to count on her fingers the number of feet in her verses, was convinced, like him, that Gordon, beset as he was in Khartoum, would be cheered by her poetry, if only I could manage to break through the blockade and transmit it to him. Tupper wrote as follows:

get one of these to reach him at Khartoum it might help to cheer him.

I would give you other staves of mine about Gordon, but I cannot lay hands on them; if you care to see them I could perhaps tell you the newspaper dates when they appeared.

Believe me to be

Truly your well-wisher,
MARTIN F. TUPPER.

G. B. HILL, Esq.

In my undergraduate days, a friendly band of young pre-Raphaelite painters, as a work of love, covered the walls of the new debating-room of. the Oxford Union Society with frescoes, and the ceiling with a graceful pattern. The leaders among these enthusiasts were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Valentine Prinsep. Unhappily, they began to paint when the walls were not thoroughly dry; before many years had gone by the frescoes were almost ruined by the dampness. Rossetti left his work incomplete. Throughout his life it far too frequently happened that he did not finish even the pictures for which he was paid, if he had received the money in advance. That which had been begun in enthusiasm was little likely to bind him fast. The undergraduates were not satisfied with an imperfect panel, and, in their simplicity, hired a man to complete the great painter's work. In one of the patterns on the ceiling Rossetti had drawn a comical likeness of William Morris. It was so inconspicuous that it was little likely to be discovered by any chance observer. I often pointed it out to my friends, till a summer vacation came when the undergraduates had the whole ceiling repainted, with as much indifference as if the original work had been done by a set of oil-and-color men.

In June, 1858, I rowed down the Thames from Oxford to a village on the outskirts of London, in company with Mr. Morris and another friend. With

the improvidence of youth, by the time we reached Henley we had spent all our money. One of the three had a watchchain, on which he raised enough to enable us, with close economy, to continue our voyage. The weather was unusually hot. I have not forgotten the longing glances cast on a large basket of strawberries at Henley, and on many a tavern on the bank as we rowed by, as effectually constrained as ever was Ulysses not to listen to their siren call. It was through no earthly paradise that the young poet and artist and his companions passed on the afternoon of their last day. When we reached the landing-stage where we were to leave our boat, our common stock of money amounted to just one penny. We were still seven or eight miles from our destination; but by neither train nor omnibus would our empty pockets allow us to travel, so we hired a cab, the fare of which we could pay when we reached our friends. We were, I well remember, in some alarm lest we should have to pass through a toll-gate. Though these gates were common enough in those days, our road, happily, lay clear of them. At last we arrived at one of the old houses in Red Lion Square, where Rossetti and Burne-Jones occupied the first story.1 At night five mattresses were spread on the carpetless floor, and there I slept amidst painters and poets.

The following undated letter was written by Rossetti soon after the publication of the illustrated edition of Tennyson's Poems. "Ned" is Sir Edward Burne