mean." All I recall of his verse is a single line, in which he describes how the sea

"Burst in one terrific boil."

A year or so later we received from him the following letter:

SIR, - You reduced me to a jelly re my Throbs of Genius. Can you find it in you to discover balm in Gilead for After-Throbs?

Your broken-boned

AUGUSTUS JINKS.1

He wrote too late. My review of After-Throbs appeared the very day on which I received his letter, and it was not balm that it contained. Unhappy poet! may his genius have long ceased to astound him, but may it be the object of the ardent if somewhat perplexed admiration of a dutiful and loving wife!

Now and then my reviews brought me letters of a different character. One was from a grand-niece of Sir Walter Scott, who was grateful for the resentment I had shown when a popular female novelist, with a great parade of conferring a benefit on the world, began to serve up a miserable hash of his stories, each in a penny number some twenty or thirty pages long. In her abridgment of Rob Roy she had been so shameless as to make one of the purest of writers guilty of a coarse jest. There was something in this abridgment which led me to suspect that it had not been made from the original, but in the very wantonness of indolence from the dramatized version. I turned

to the play, and my suspicions were confirmed, for there I found this same coarse jest. "It is," wrote Scott's niece, "a real pleasure to me to thank you, those who would have done so far better than I being all dead. There is something touching in the fact that Sir Walter's fame lives in children; we must be men and women to thoroughly appreciate him,

...

1 I have changed the names of the poet and his works, so that he may not be recognized.

but it is as children that we learn to love him and his creations."

The following letter came to me from the west coast of Ireland :—

DEAR MR. LITERARY CRITIC, — I'd rather like to make your acquaintance in the flesh, as I have done long since in the spirit for you seem to have a good deal of fun in you, and some feeling; I say some feeling with caution, for in many ways you are utterly without heart, witness the cruel way you cut up those poor lady-novelists. You hash their grammar their best and most finely-turned phrases, their plots, their spelling, everything is made mince-meat of, without mercy, and without remorse. In the review I have just laid down after some minutes of quiet enjoyment of Mrs. 's novel, how you ravened like a wolf among her pet descriptions (there's a bit of metaphor for you now to carp at), and then you were coarse, not to say brutal, when you said that you could have seen her heroine hanged with much complacency. I often think you are a sour discontented old bachelor with a natural antipathy to the sexwhen suddenly you turn round and by a little sentence betray more feeling than I could give you credit for, which makes me suppose you are lord of a happy household of girls and boys with quite a fund of general benevolence in your composition.

Now it was not to tell you all this I have taken the trouble on this blessed Valentine's Day to sit down and write to you. It is to tell you (and here, if you have got so far, you smile sardonically) I too am among the foolish women. I have written a book- of verses and published them. I have put dashes purposely between each word to give you time to breathe and I want to know will you review it? or has it come to you? or would you if I sent you a copy? You said in one of your late Saturdays that though nearly every one who can rhyme

tries his or her hand at a sonnet - very few succeed. I send you four sonnets. Do you think them any good? Some reviewer in this sweet little Ireland, peaceful, prosperous, happy Ireland — said I had been following in Mrs. Browning's footsteps, of course I love and honour her and admire her with all my heart, but I never had the presumption to fancy I could follow her even afar off. One day after I had read these remarks, the thought stuck to me, till I wrote these things I send you. When first her sonnets from the Portuguese were given me I lived on them.

I don't know if this letter will ever reach its destination. I have a very vague idea about a reviewer in the Saturday. He is a sort of myth— and yet a very palpable reality. . . . I'd almost rather be cut up than passed over in contemptuous silence, and I don't think any one with a soul worth calling a soul would let it be "snuffed out by an article." I'm perfectly sure Keats never deserved that line of Byron's- poor fellow- there was "death in his hand" long before the review in the Quarterly was put into it.

Farewell. May you live to write many more critiques - but not on me clever, satirical, abusive, amusing, admirable, as yours sometimes are. I say sometimes as I before said some for you are not infallible.

Truly yours,

I cannot call to mind whether we re

ceived this lady's poems. Her letter shows that she might have done something better than write sonnets. Anybody can write sonnets, though few can read them.

The following letter was written to one of my uncles, a young barrister, by Major John Cartwright, a radical of the old school. So early as 1774 he had published a Letter in Defence of American Independence. He was at that time an officer in the navy. Fond as he was

of his profession, he threw it up rather than take part in the war against our colonies. He entered the militia, and rose to the rank of major. Three years before the date of his letter, he had been present at a meeting held in Birmingham for the purpose of electing a "legislatorial attorney," who was to knock at the door of the House of Commons, and claim the right to look after the interests of that great town in Parliament. With all its population, its industry, and its wealth, it was unrepresented. In its case, and in the case of many another English town in those evil days, taxation went without representation. The major and four gentlemen who stood by his side at the meeting were put on their trial at the Warwick assizes for misdemeanor. Another of my uncles had been on the platform, but he was young and insignificant enough to escape prosecution. His brother, the barrister, was one of Cartwright's counsel. On the morning of the trial, the old fellow said to him, "I hope they will send me to prison. It will be the best thing for the cause, for I am sure to die there. I hope they will send me to prison." The judge was too wise to make such a martyr. Cartwright's four friends were punished with imprisonment, but he himself was let off with a fine of a hundred pounds. From one of the pockets of his waistcoat, which, after the fashion of the previous century, he wore of a great size, he drew out a large canvas bag, from which he slowly counted one hundred pounds in gold. "He believed, he said, they were all good sovereigns." Even the judge himself was amused by his composed manner and his dry tone. Cartwright outlived his trial three years, dying at the age of eighty-four. His statue stands before his house in Burton Crescent, London. His niece, Mrs. Penrose, under the assumed name of Mrs. Markham, used to be well known to the children of my younger days by her histories.

The major, it is said, usually signed his letters, "Yours radically." These French officers had escaped from that tyranny which the armies of the allies had imposed on France, and on so much of Europe, after the defeat of Napoleon. The common tyrant had been caged in St. Helena, but over each unhappy nation the tyrant of the ancient stock was only the more firmly fixed. What the rulers of the earth were doing in the year in which this letter was written is thus shown by Miss Martineau: "The king of Prussia amused himself and his advisers with devising a plan of a new order of nobility which should suddenly become as imposing and influential as if it had been a thousand years old. Ferdinand of Spain was inventing tinsel ornaments for the Virgin. The restored Bourbons of France were studying how best to impose dumbness on their noisy nation. The king of Sardinia was swimming paper ducks in a wash basin to while away his time." My father met one of the French officers who had escaped from the Bourbon dungeons, who said to him, in English with a foreign accent which added not a little to his humor, "I was once hanged in France, but, very fortunately, I was not present on the occasion." He and his fellowprisoners who had been happy enough to escape the gallows, to which some of their associates were sent, had been hanged in effigy. The same officer told my father

that many of his countrymen maintained that the French had gained the battle of Trafalgar. "Yes, I reply," the officer continued. "It is true we gained the battle; but, unfortunately, our French sailors were so ignorant of navigation that they steered their own ships, and their English prizes also, straight into English

harbors."

From a Bourbon king by an easy transition we arrive at Charles I.; for both stubbornly moved along the same narrow groove of dull bigotry and tyranny. In this case I have no autograph, but something perhaps as interesting as an autograph, - a handbill announcing the public sale of the property of the Crown. It runs as follows:

"The Contractors for sale of the Lands and Possessions of the late King, Queen, and Prince have resolved to begin their sittings for Sales upon Monday the Fourth of March 1649, as to all such of the said Lands (onely) before that time Surveyed and Certified to the Register, whereof there shall be immediate Tenancies; from which day the respective preemptions of the immediate Tenants are to begin: And for all such of the Lands, wherof there are such immediate Tenancies, and wherof the Surveys shall be returned after that day, the said respective preemptions to commence according to a late Additional Act of the 18th of February 1649. WILLIAM TAYLEURE, CLERK

attending the Contractors."

How great is the transition when we pass from the old radical major and the contractors for the sale of the king's lands to the poet laureate Southey, a man who, with all his noble qualities, had broken, like the Lost Leader, from the van and the freemen, and sunk to the rear and the slave! A few months after the date of the following letter, young George Ticknor met him at an evening party. "There was little company present," writes Ticknor, "and soon after I went in I found myself in a corner with Southey, from which neither of us moved until nearly

midnight. He immediately began to talk about America. Of Roger Williams and John Eliot I was ashamed to find that he knew more than I did. Roger Williams, he thought, deserved the reputation which Penn has obtained, and Eliot he pronounced one of the most extraordinary men of any country. As he was once traveling in a post-chaise to London, he bought at a stall in Nottingham Mather's Magnalia, which he read all the way to town, and found it one of the most amusing books he had ever seen. He had read most of our American poetry, and estimated it more highly than we are accustomed to." Two years later, Ticknor, who visited Southey at Keswick, recorded: "He considers himself an author by profession, and therefore, as he told me, never writes any thing which will not sell, in the hours he regularly devotes to labor. For this reason his poetry has been strictly his amusement. His light reading after supper is now in the fifty-three folios of the Acta Sanctorum." Macaulay wrote of him: "A good father, husband, brother, friend, but prone to hate people whom he did not know, solely on account of differences of opinion, and in his hatred singularly bitter and rancorous. Then he was arrogant beyond any man in literary history. To do him justice, he had a fine, manly spirit where money was concerned." Like Johnson, whom he resembled in his generosity, Southey had known the meaning of the word impransus. "When Joan of Arc was in the press," he wrote, "I often walked the streets at dinner-time for want of a dinner, when I had not eighteen pence for the ordinary, nor bread and cheese at my lodgings. But do not suppose that I thought of my dinner when I was walking; my head was full of what I was composing." It may well be doubted whether he was more bitter in his hatred towards any one than Macaulay was towards Brougham and Croker: Brougham, of whom he wrote, "His powers gone.

His spite immortal. A dead nettle; and Croker, whom "he detested more than cold boiled veal," and whose “ varlet's jacket" he promised "to dust in the next number of the Blue and Yellow [the Edinburgh Review]." Southey's arrogance had been fostered by Landor, who, in the beautiful lines beginning,

"It was a dream (ah! what is not a dream ?) " comparing him with Virgil, had described the English poet laureate as

66

Higher in intellect, more conversant

With earth and heaven, and whatso lies between."

Landor's monstrous laudation had perhaps been won by Southey's admiration of his brother bard. Writing of him, he said, "He is the only man living of whose praise I was ambitious, or whose censure would have humbled me."

The lady to whom Southey's letter was addressed was a correspondent of Pascal Paoli, the Corsican patriot, and of Mrs. Hemans; I have letters addressed to her by both of them. J. Rickman, who franked it, was the secretary of the Speaker of the House of Commons. "His outside," wrote Southey, "has so little polish about it that once, having gone from Christ Church to Pool in his own boat, he was taken by the press gang; his robust figure, hard-working hauds, and strong voice all tending to deceive them."

KESWICK, 23 Dec., 1816.

but

DEAR MADAM, I am very much obliged to you for the manuscript music. The ears which nature has given me are of no use when music is the case, my eldest daughter has some allotment of a sense in which I am deficient, and the tune seems to give pleasure to all who hear it.

Mrs Bonamy informed me that Mr M. Coates was, at that time, hopelessly ill. I have not seen him since I had the pleasure of meeting you at his table, — and probably he is no longer an inhabitant

His indifference to music Southey shared with many men of genius. "Sir Isaac Newton, hearing Handel play on the harpsichord, could find nothing worthy to remark but the elasticity of his fingers." That great man, by the way, cared as little for poetry as for music: "once being asked his opinion of it, he quoted a sentiment of Barrow that it was ingenious nonsense." Pope, who had so exquisite an ear for the melody of verse, had no more music in his soul than Newton. One day, at a concert, he asked Dr. Arbuthnot whether the rapture of the company over Handel and his band did not proceed solely from affectation. Johnson, in the Hebrides, used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone of the bagpipe; nevertheless, much as he must have endeared himself to his Highland host by this devotion, he owned that it was not till he was past seventy that he was ever affected by musical sounds. What first moved him were the French horns at a Freemason's funeral procession. Wordsworth's ear, if I am not mistaken, was almost as deficient as his brother poet's.

Southey, twenty years after the date of his letter, had the heart once more to set foot in his native city. If he was saddened by the loss of the friends of his

From Southey I pass to De Quincey. What a curious account has Carlyle given us of the poet laureate's outburst of anger against the opium-eater! "I asked mildly, with no appearance of special interest, but with more than I really felt, • Do you know De Quincey?' 'Yes, sir,' said Southey, with extraordinary animosity, and if you have opportunity, I'll thank you to tell him he is one of the greatest scoundrels living!' I laughed lightly, said I had myself little acquaintance with the man, and could not wish to recommend myself by that message. Southey's face, as I looked at it, was become of slate color, the eyes glancing, the attitude rigid, the figure altogether a picture of Rhadamanthine rage, that is, rage conscious to itself of being just. He doubtless felt I would expect some explanation from him. I have told Hartley Coleridge,' said he, 'that he ought to take a strong cudgel, proceed straight to Edinburgh, and give De Quincey, publicly in the streets there, a sound beating, as a calumniator, cowardly spy, traitor, base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth for one thing!"" The thrashing would have been well deserved, though one of the Wordsworths should have had a hand in it; for both the poet and his sister, quite as much as Coleridge, had found him " a base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth." The hospitality and kindness which he had for years received from them he repaid by laying bare, in magazine articles, the privacy of their quiet home, and by strokes of envy all the more malignant