drove me, by invitation, to drink tea at Firfield, a house used during the war as a French prison, and then inhabited by Mr. Cottle and his sister.

Mr. Cottle had been during seven years a bookseller at Bristol, and had during that time had the singular fortune, let me add the liberality and good taste, to publish the first works of Southey, of Coleridge, and of Wordsworth. Himself the author of many works of excellent feeling and tendency, and of one (" The Recollections of Coleridge") of the very highest merit. I found him as I had expected, a mild and venerable man, distinguished for courtesy and intelligence. He received us in a room stored with books and piled with portfolios, into each of which he had most carefully inserted the letters of such correspondents as few persons could boast. Letters of Sir Humphrey Davy, of Robert Hall, of John Foster, of Hannah More, of Charles Lloyd, of Charles Lamb, of Mr. Landor, of Coleridge, of Southey, of Wordsworth, and of a certain John Henderson, who might, Mr. Cottle said, have excelled them all, but who died at nine-andtwenty, and left nothing behind him except an immense reputation for general power, and especially for the power of conversation. "He evaporated in talk." His father had been a neighbouring schoolmaster, and had retained his gifted son as his assistant, until driven by general remonstrance into sending him to Oxford. When he arrived there, the astonishment that such a scholar should come to be taught seems to have been universal. He staid on, however, and in the course of a few years died. I remember to have heard the same account of him from my good old friend, Dr. Valpy, whom he occasionally visited at

Reading, and who spoke of him as a very disturbing visitor to a man of regular habits. He would sit smoking and talking till three or four o'clock in the morning, neither of them remembering the hour, John Henderson carrying the good doctor away by the flow of his eloquence. It may be doubted whether, if he had lived, he would have left anything behind him. except a great recollection.

Besides these portfolios (many of them very bulky, and some from men whose names have probably escaped me), the walls were hung with portraits of these illustrious friends, some engravings, some drawings, some oil-paintings, and many of them repeated two or three times, at different ages. Mr. Cottle was engaged in transcribing Southey's letters, for a life even then projected, and since executed by his son. He said, that of his various epistolary collections he thought Southey's the most amusing, preferring them even to those he had received from Charles Lamb. Very few of these letters are inserted in Mr. Cuthbert Southey's work (doubtless he was embarrassed by his over-riches); but I cannot help thinking that a selection of familiar epistles from all the portfolios would be a very welcome gift to the literary world. People can hardly know too much of these great poets, and of such prose writers as Charles Lamb, John Foster, and Robert Hall.

Both Coleridge and Southey were married at Bristol; Coleridge certainly, and Southey, I think, at the beautiful church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Upon my mentioning this to the parish clerk, very learned upon the subject of Chatterton, he was surprised into confessing his ignorance of the fact, and got as near

as a parish clerk ever does to an admission that he had never heard the first of those illustrious names. So strange a thing is local reputation.

Plenty of people, however, were eager to show me the localities rendered famous by Southey, and I looked with delight on his father's house, his early home. How great and how good a man he was! how fine a specimen of the generosity of labour! Giving so largely, so liberally, so unostentatiously, not from the superfluities of an abundant fortune, but from the hard-won earnings of his indefatigable toil! Some people complain of his change of politics; and I, for my own particular part, wish very heartily that he had been content with a very moderate modification of opinion. But does not the violent republicanism of youth often end in the violent toryism of age? Does not the pendulum, very forcibly set in motion, swing as far one way as it has swung the other? Does not the sun rise in the east and set in the west ?

As to his poetry, I suspect people of liking it better than they say. He was not Milton or Shakespeare, to be sure; but are we to read nobody but Shakespeare or Milton? I will venture to add the "Lines on a Holly-tree :"

O reader! hast thou ever stood to see
The holly-tree?

The eye that contemplates it well, perceives
Its glossy leaves

Ordered by an intelligence so wise

As might confound the atheist's sophistries.

Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen;

No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;

But as they grow where nothing is to fear,
Smooth and unarmed the pointless leaves appear.

I love to view these things with anxious eyes
And moralise :

And in this wisdom of the holly-tree

Can emblems see

Wherewith perchance to make a pleasant rhyme
One that will profit in the after time.

Thus though abroad perchance I might appear
Harsh and austere,

To those who on my leisure would intrude

And should my youth, as youth is apt I know,
Some harshness show,

All vain asperities I day by day

Would wear away,

Till the smooth temper of my age should be,
Like the high leaves upon the holly-tree.

And as, when all the summer trees are seen
So bright and green ;

The holly leaves their fadeless hue display
Less bright than they,

But when the bare and wintry woods we see,
What then so cheerful as the holly-tree?

So serious should my youth appear among
The thoughtless throng,

So would I seem among the young and

More grave than they,

That in my age as cheerful I might be
As the green winter of the holly-tree.

gay

But he has not done himself justice in this compa

rison. Never was man more beloved by all who approached him. Even his peculiarities, if he had any, were genial and pleasant. One anecdote I happen to know personally. He was invited to a large evening party, at Tavistock House, the residence of Mr. Perry, proprietor of the "Morning Chronicle," a delightful person, where men of all parties met, forgetting their political differences in social pleasure. The guest was so punctual, that only two young inmates were in the room to receive him.

"What are we to have to-night?" inquired he of Miss Lunan, Mr. Perry's niece, and Professor Porson's step-daughter.

66

Music, I suppose," was the reply; "at least I know that Catalani is coming!"

"Ah!" rejoined the poet, "then I shall come another time. You will not miss me. Make my excuses!" and off he ran, laughing at his own dislike to opera singers and bravura songs.

Everybody has heard the often-told story of Coleridge's enlisting in a cavalry regiment under a feigned name, and being detected as a Cambridge scholar in consequence of his writing some Greek lines, or rather, I believe, some Greek words, over the bed of a sick comrade, whom, not knowing how else to dispose of him, he had been appointed to nurse. It has not been stated that the arrangement for his discharge took place at my father's house at Reading. Such, however, was the case. The story was this. Dr. Ogle, Dean of Winchester, was related to the Mitfords, as relationships go in Northumberland, and having been an intimate friend of my maternal grandfather, had no small share in bringing about the