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have passed between us was Jeffrey's saying, on our being left together, 'What a beautiful morning it is!'-'Yes,' I answered, with a slight smile, a morning made for better purposes;' to which his only response was a sort of assenting sigh. As our assistants were not, any more than ourselves, very expert at warlike matters, they were rather slow in their proceedings; and as Jeffrey and I walked up and down together, we came once in sight of their operations; upon which I related to him, as rather à propos to the purpose, that Billy Egan, the Irish barrister, once said, when, as he was sauntering about in like manner while the pistols were loading, his antagonist, a fiery little fellow, called out to him angrily to keep his ground. Don't make yourself unaisy, my dear fellow,' said Egan, 'sure, isn't it bad enough to take the dose, without being by at the mixing up?' Jeffrey had scarcely time to smile at this story, when our two friends, issuing from behind the trees, placed us at our respective posts (the distance, I suppose, having been previously measured by them), and put the pistols into our hands. They then retired to a little distance; the pistols were on both sides raised, and we waited but the signal to fire, when some police-officers, whose approach none of us had noticed, and who were within a second of being too late, rushed out from a hedge behind Jeffrey, and one of them, striking at Jeffrey's pistol with his staff, knocked it to some distance into the field, while another, running over to me, took possession also of mine. We were then replaced in our respective carriages, and conveyed crestfallen to Bow-street."

Moore and Jeffrey afterwards became cordial friends.

WHO KILLED JOHN KEATS?

Keats was the son of a livery-stable-keeper, and was born in 1795, at the Swan and Hoop livery-stables, in Moorfields. He was well educated, evinced early a taste for literature, and inherited family property to the amount of 2,000l. He was articled to a surgeon, but took an early distaste to his profession. He wrote poems when very young,-in lodgings, the second floor of No. 71, Cheapside, over the passage leading to the Queen's Arms tavern: here he wrote his magnificent sonnet on Chapman's Homer, and all the poems in his first little volume. In 1818, he published his poetic romance of Endymion, which he himself termed an "immature and

feverish work." This poem was reviewed in the Quarterly Review, vol. xix. where he is described as "unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language." The review extends only to four pages, but is very stringent, and was said to have caused the poet's death.

"The first effects," says Shelley, "are described to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his sufferings, at length, produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun." His mother died of consumption, after lingering for some years. He left England for Naples, and thence journeyed to Rome, where he died in February, 1821. He was of a remarkably sensitive disposition his constitution was weak, and greatly impaired by the attentions which he bestowed on a dying brother. Upon a post mortem examination, it was found that poor Keats's lungs were entirely gone. It, nevertheless, suited the humour of Lord Byron, in his Don Juan, to say:

:

"John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,

If not intelligible, without Greek

Contrived to talk about the gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! his was an untoward fate;
'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article."

Shelley also wrote an elegiac parody, commencing

"Who killed Jack Keats?
I, says the Quarterly,
So savage and tartarly,
'Twas one of my feats."

WORDSWORTH'S "PETER BELL."

In the new edition of Wordsworth's Poetical Works, the Poet tells us the poem is founded upon an anecdote, which he read in a newspaper, of an ass being found hanging his head over a canal in a wretched posture. Upon examination, a dead body was found in the water, and proved to be the body of its master. "The countenance, gait, and figure of Peter,

(continues Wordsworth,) were taken from a wild rover with whom I walked from Builth, on the river Wye, downwards nearly as far as the town of Hay. He told me strange stories. It has always been a pleasure to me through life to catch at every opportunity that has occurred in my rambles of becoming acquainted with this class of people. The number of Peter's wives was taken from the trespasses in this way of a lawless creature who lived in the county of Durham, and used to be attended by many women, sometimes not less than half-a-dozen, as disorderly as himself. Benoni, or the child. of sorrow, I knew when I was a school-boy. His mother had been deserted by a gentleman in the neighbourhood, she herself being a gentlewoman by birth. The circumstances of her story were told me by my dear old Dame, Anne Tyson, who was her confidante. The lady died broken-hearted. In the woods of Alfoxden I used to take great delight in noticing the habits, tricks, and physiognomy of asses; and I have no doubt that I was thus put upon writing the poem out of liking for the creature that is so often dreadfully abused. The crescent-moon, which makes such a figure in the prologue, assumed this character one evening while I was watching its beauty in front of Alfoxden House. This poem was not published for more than twenty years afterwards. The worship of the Methodists or Ranters is often heard during the stillness of the summer evening in the country with affecting accompaniments of rural beauty. In both the psalmody and the voice of the preacher there is, not unfrequently, much solemnity likely to impress the feelings of the rudest characters under favourable circumstances."

PUBLISHER'S LIBERALITY.

A bookseller, who had heard of Balzac as a young writer of great promise, resolved to offer him 3,000f. for a novel; but, on being told that he lived in an obscure street in the old part of Paris, he observed that he must be a plebeian, and that he would offer him but 2,000f. On arriving at the house he was told that Balzac lived on the fourth floor. "Oh, in that case," said the bookseller, "I will offer him but 1,500f.” But, when he entered a poorly-furnished room, and saw a young man sopping a penny roll in a glass of water, he offered but 300f., and for this sum received the manuscript of what was afterwards considered a chef-d'œuvre-the Dernière Fée.

ORIGIN OF THE LITERARY FUND.

This valuable Institution originated in the failure of a scholar of eminence to accomplish a labour for which his classical attainments fully qualified him. Such was Flower Sydenham, educated at Wadham College, Oxford, who undertook the toilsome and unproductive task of translating Plato into English; he issued proposals for publishing his work by subscription in 1759, accompanied by a "Synopsis, or General View of the Works of Plato;" the subscribers were few, and some, it is said, failed in their engagements; and, after a life of labour and want, Sydenham died in old age (April 1, 1787), imprisoned for a debt contracted at the eating-house which he frequented. Melancholy as was his end, it was honoured in its results; for in consequence, 66 one of the members of a club at the Prince of Wales Coffee-House proposed that it should adopt as its object some means to prevent similar afflictions, and to assist deserving authors and their families in distress ;" and this was the origin of the Literary Fund. In the published account from which the above quotation is taken, Sydenham is characterised as "a man revered for his knowledge, and beloved for the candour of his temper and gentleness of his manners."

LORD CARLISLE AND LORD BYRON.

The first Earl of Carlisle, often mentioned by Boswell as gaining Johnson's praise for his literary performances, owes much of his immortality to the attacks made on him by Byron. He was guardian to the Poet, who dedicated to him his Hours of Idleness, which the Earl is said to have received coolly the affront deeply rankled in Byron's breast, causing a wound which his mother did her best to widen. Byron, however, seems to have forgotten his animosity; for, in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, as originally intended for the press, he compliments Carlisle :

"On one alone Apollo deigns to smile,

And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle."

But the intended honour was not permitted to endure. Receiving, as he considered, a fresh slight, Byron erased the praise, for the vituperative sarcasm still to be read :—

"Let Scott, Matilda, and the rest

Of Grub-street and of Grosvenor-place the best
Scrawl on, till death release us from the strain !
Or common sense asserts her right again."

But the Poet regretted this severity, and afterwards, in his noble tribute to Major Howard, gave utterance to his repentance :

"Their praise is hymned by loftier harps than mine,
Yet one I would select from that proud throng,
Partly because they blend me with their line,
And partly that I did the sire some wrong.'

And of the Major he writes with rapturous eloquence :-

"When showered

The death-bolts deadliest the thin files along,
E'en where the thickest of War's tempests lour'd,
They reach'd no nobler heart than thine,

Young gallant Howard."

Memorials of Knightsbridge.

POETRY OF CAMPBELL AND BYRON.

Mr. Cyrus Redding gives the following interesting résumé of the sums paid by publishers to Campbell and Byron, respectively, for their Poetical Works :

66

Campbell did not receive fifty pounds in money for the copyright of the Pleasures of Hope, but he parted with the copyright of the poem altogether for two hundred printed copies, to be received of the publishers. This is shown by the following documents belonging to Mundell and Son, in the course of the business transacted between them. It must be observed that the dedication of the first edition bore a date three months antecedent, or April 13, 1799.

"Excerpt from a letter dated July 13, 1799:

proper

"As the Pleasures of Hope are now published, it is that it be expressed in writing what bargain I made with you about the copyright of the work. It was settled that, for two hundred copies of the book in quires, Mundell and Son should have the entire copyright of the poem.

(Addressed) "THOMAS CAMPBELL.'

66

:

Excerpt from letter, dated July 15, 1799:

"I acknowledge having sold you the copyright of the Pleasures of Hope for two hundred copies in quires.

(Signed)

"THOMAS CAMPBELL.'

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