COLERIDGE "DONE UP.” "I have had a good deal to do with Jews, (Coleridge used to say,) although I never borrowed any money of them. The other day I was what you call floored by a Jew. He passed me several times, crying for old clothes in the most nasal and extraordinary tone I ever heard. At last, I was so provoked that I said to him: 'Pray, why can't you say 'old clothes' in a plain way as I do now?" The Jew stopped, and looking very gravely at me, replied, in a clear and even fine accent: Sir, I can say 'old clothes' as well as you can; but if you had to say so ten times a minute, for an hour together, you would say ogh clo, as I do now ;" and so he marched off. I was so confounded with the justice of his retort, that I followed and gave him a shilling, the only one I had. 66 Elsewhere he relates: "It is not easy to put me out of countenance, or interrupt the feeling of the time by mere. external noise or circumstance; yet once I was thoroughly done up. I was reciting, at a particular house, the Remorse, and was in the midst of Athadra's description of the death of her husband, when a scrubby boy, with a shining face set in dirt, burst open the door, and cried out: 'Please, ma'am, master says, will you ha', or will you not ha', the pin-round?"" Coleridge, however, was a better preacher than practitioner of what he so urgently recommends. When in his younger days he was offered a share in the London Journal, by which he could have made two thousand pounds a year, provided he would devote his time seriously to the interest of the work, he declined,—making the reply, so often praised for its disinterestedness, "I will not give up the country, and the lazy reading of old folios, for two thousand times two thousand pounds; in short, beyond three hundred and fifty pounds a year, I consider money a real evil.” The "lazy reading of old folios" led to laziness, the indolent gratification of mind and sense. Degenerating into an opium-eater, and a mere purposeless theoriser, Coleridge wasted time, talents, and health; came to depend, in old age, on the charity of others; and died at last, with every one regretting, even his friends, that he had done nothing worthy of his genius. COLERIDGE AND HIS SON HARTLEY. Of Hartley Coleridge, Southey ominously foretold “that if he lives he will dream away life like his father; too much delighted over his own ideas ever to embody them or suffer them, if he can help it, to be disturbed." Southey writes: 'The "Moses grows up as miraculous a boy as ever King Pharaoh's daughter found his namesake to be. I am perfectly astonished at him; and his father has the same sentiment of wonder and the same forefeeling that it is a prodigious and an unnatural intellect, and that he will not live to be a man. There is more in the old woman's saying, 'he is too clever to live,' than appears to a common observer. Diseases which ultimately destroy, in their early stages quicken and kindle the intellect like opium. It seems as if death looked out the most promising plants in this great nursery, to plant them in a better soil. The boy's great delight is to his father to talk metaphysics to him,-few men understand him so perfectly;-and then his own incidental sayings are quite wonderful. pity is,' said he one day to his father, who was expressing some wonder that he was not so pleased as he expected with riding in a wheelbarrow,-'the pity is that 'se always thinking of my thoughts.' The child's imagination is equally surprising; he invents the wildest tales you ever heard,—a history of the Kings of England who are to be. How do you know that this is to come to pass, Hartley?' 'Why you know it must be something, or it would not be in my head;' and so, because it had not been, did Moses conclude it must be, and away he prophesies of his King Thomas the Third. Then he has a tale of a monstrous beast called the Rabzeze Kallaton, whose skeleton is on the outside of his flesh; and he goes on with the oddest and most original inventions, till he sometimes actually terrifies himself, and says, 'I'se afraid of my own thoughts.' It may seem like superstition, but I have a feeling that such an intellect can never reach maturity. The springs are of too exquisite workmanship to last long." THE AMBASSADOR FLOORED. What dull coxcombs your diplomatists at home generally are! (says Coleridge, in his Table Talk). I remember dining at Mr. Frere's, in company with Mr. Canning and a few other interesting men. Just before dinner, Lord called on Frere, and asked himself to dinner. From the moment of his entry he began to talk to the whole party, and in French, all of us being genuine English; and I was told his French was execrable. He had followed the Russian army into France, and seen a good deal of the great men concerned in the war. Of none of these things did he say a word, but went on, sometimes in English and sometimes in French, gabbling about cookery, and dress, and the like. At last he paused for a little and I said a few words, remarking how a great image may be reduced to the ridiculous and contemptible by bringing the constituent parts into prominent detail, and mentioned the grandeur of the Deluge, and preservation of life in Genesis and the Paradise Lost, and the ludicrous effect produced by Drayton's description, in his Noah's Flood: And now the beasts are walking from the wood, And to the Ark brings down the fair-eyed cow, &c. Hereupon Lord R-- resumed, and spoke in raptures of a picture which he had lately seen of Noah's Ark, and said the animals were all walking two and two, the little ones first, and that the elephants came last in great majesty and filled up the foreground. "Ah! no doubt, my lord," said Canning: "your elephants, wise fellows! staid behind to pack up their trunks!" This floored the ambassador for half an hour. RICHARD HEBER'S LIBRARY. The greatest book-sale, probably, that ever took place in the world, was that of the collection of Richard Heber, in 1834. The Catalogue was bound up in five thick octavo volumes. Yet this magnificent collection had but a small beginning-one small chance volume, picked up at a stall, entitled "The Vallie of Varietie," about which he was for a time in doubt whether "to buy or not to buy." Heber lived to think nothing of going hundreds of miles any time in search of a book not in his collection. Nor would one copy suffice can comfortably do withfor a show copy, at his him. "No man," he used to say, out three copies of a book-one 66 country-house; a second for his own use and reference; and a third to lend to his friends." Heber lived and died in a small gloomy house within the gates of Elliot's Brewery, between Brewer-street, Pimlico, and York-street, Westminster: here he had a portion of his extensive and noble library-a second portion occupied the whole of a house, from kitchen to attic, in James-street, Buckingham-gate-a third portion was at Hodnet, his countryseat and at Paris he had a fourth depôt. He had a library in the High-street, Oxford, another at Antwerp, another at Brussels, another at Ghent, and at other places in the Low Countries, and in Germany. But Heber was no mere collector of books. He was a ripe scholar. The Church and literature at large owe him a debt which centuries will not repay; and many a modern library is now rich with spoils from the diligence, the perseverance, and learning of Richard Heber.* A Mr. Hill Burton, in his Book-hunter, relates the following incident of Heber's experience in the rarity-market. celebrated dealer in old books was passing a chandler's shop, where he was stopped by a few filthy old volumes in the window. One of them he found to be a volume of old English poetry, which he-a practised hand in that line-saw was utterly unknown as existing, though not unrecorded. Three and sixpence was asked; he stood out for half-a-crown, on first principles, but, not succeeding, he paid the larger sum, and walked away, booksin pocket, to a sale, where the first person he saw was Heber. Him the triumphant bookseller drew into a corner, with "Why do you come to auctions to look for scarce books, when you can pick up such things as this in a chandler's shop for three and sixpence?" "Bless me, where did you get this?" "That's tellings! I may get more there." I must have this." "Not a penny under thirty guineas!" A cheque was drawn, and a profit of 17,900 per cent. cleared by the man who had his eyes about him; in whose estimation such a sum was paltry compared with the triumph over Heber. 66 * Dr. Dibdin addressed to him a curious epistle, entitled, "Bibliomania; or Book Madness: containing some account of the history, symptoms, and cure of this fatal disease.' PORSONIANA. Moore, in his Diary, tells us that the coolness with which Porson received the intelligence of the destruction by fire of his long-laboured Photius was remarkable. He merely quoted "To each his sufferings-all are men;" adding, "Let us speak no more on the subject," and next day patiently began his work all again. At some college dinner, where, in giving toasts, the name was spoken from one end of the table, and a quotation applicable to it was to be supplied from the other, on the name of Gilbert Wakefield being given out, Porson, who hated him, roared forth, "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" The Greek scholar and classical wit, was extremely convivial; but he never drank alone. Porson lived in times much more lax than the present; yet his excesses, even in an age of hard-drinking, were frightful. Dr. Parr and Horne Tooke were not addicted to thin potations. The Prince Regent was an excellent toss-pot. Sheridan bore his blushing honours upon his face. John Kemble drank claret from sunset to sunrise. Seldom," says Sydney Smith, "did gentlemen in the last century come sober into the drawing-room." A threebottle man at this moment is almost a prodigy. Porson, however, was scarcely more ahead of his contemporaries in Greek than he was in drinking. He had an almost superhuman power of doing without sleep. To be requested to take his hat and go to his lodgings, at two in the morning, was resented by him as inhospitable treatment. He could drink anything -ink, it was said. He once drank an embrocation. Here is another instance of this omnivorous drinking : When his friend Hoppner, the painter, was residing in a cottage a few miles from London, Porson, one afternoon, unexpectedly arrived there. Hoppner said he could not offer him dinner, as Mrs. Hoppner had gone to town, and had carried with her the key of the closet which contained the wine. Porson, however, declared that he would be contented with a mutton-chop and beer from the next alehouse; and, accordingly, stayed to dine. During the evening, Porson said, "I am quite certain that Mrs. Hoppner keeps some nice bottle for her private drinking, in her own bed-room ; so pray try if you can lay your hands on it." His host assured |