like. It has a martial, and by no means disagreeable effect.

Go, my dear freeholder, and if any chance calls you out of this transitory scene earlier than expected, the coroner shall sit lightly on your corpse. He shall not too anxiously enquire into the circumstances of blood found upon your razor. That might happen to any gentleman in shaving. Nor into your having been heard to express a contempt of life, or for scolding Louisa for what Julia did, and other trifling incoherencies.

CLVIII.

TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

13th Aug., 1814. Dear Resuscitate.- -There comes to you by the vehicle from Lad Lane this day a volume of German ; what it is I cannot justly say, the characters of those northern nations having been always singularly harsh and unpleasant to me. It is a contribution of Dr Southey's towards your wants, and you would have had it sooner but for an odd accident. I wrote for it three days ago, and the Doctor, as he thought, sent it me. A book of like exterior he did send, but being disclosed, how far unlike! It was the Well-bred Scholar, a book with which it seems the Doctor laudably fills up those hours which he can steal from his medical avocations. Chesterfield, Blair, Beattie, portions from the Life of Savage, make up a pretty ish system of morality and the belles-lettres, which Mr. Mylius, a schoolmaster, has properly brought together, and calls the collection by the denomination above mentioned. The Doctor had no sooner discovered his error, than he dispatched man and horse to rectify the mistake, and with a pretty kind of ingenuous modesty in his note, seemeth

to deny any knowledge of the Well-bred Scholar; false modesty surely, and a blush misplaced: for what more pleasing than the consideration of professional austerity thus relaxing, thus improving! But so, when a child, I remember blushing, being caught on my knees to my Maker, or doing otherwise some pious and praiseworthy action: now I rather love such things to be seen. Henry Crabb Robinson is out upon his circuit, and his books are inaccessible without his leave and key. He is attending the Norfolk Circuit, a short term, but to him, as to many young lawyers, a long vacation, sufficiently dreary. I thought I could do no better than transmit to him, not extracts, but your very letter itself, than which I think I never read any thing more moving, more pathetic, or more conducive to the purpose of persuasion. The Crab is a sour Crab if it does not sweeten him. I think it would draw another third volume of Dodsley out of me; but you say you don't want any English books. Perhaps, after all, that's as well; one's romantic credulity is for ever misleading one into misplaced acts of foolery. Crab might have answered by this time his juices take a long time supplying, but they'll run at last-I know they will-pure golden pippin. His address is as T. Robinson's, Bury, or if on circuit to be forwarded immediately-such my peremptory superscription. A fearful rumour has since reached me that the Crab is on the eve of setting out for France. If he is in England your letter will reach him, and I flatter myself a touch of the persuasive of my own, which accompanies it, will not be thrown away; if it be, he is a sloe, and no true-hearted Crab, and there's an end. For that life of the German conjuror which you speak of Colerus de Vitá Doctoris vix-Intelligibilis, I perfectly remember the last evening we spent with Mrs Morgan and Miss Brent, in London Street,-(by

that token we had raw rabbits for supper, and Miss B. prevailed upon me to take a glass of brandy and water, which is not my habit,)—I perfectly remember reading portions of that life in their parlour, and I think it must be among their packages. It was the very last evening we were at that house. What is gone of that frank-hearted circle, Morgan, and his cos-lettuces? He ate walnuts better than any man I ever knew. Friendships in these parts stagnate.

with

One piece of news I know will give you pleasure, Rickman is made a Clerk to the House of Commons, £2000 a year with greater expectations-but that is not the news-but it is that poor card-playing Phillips that has felt himself for so many years the outcast of Fortune, which feeling pervaded his very intellect till it made the destiny it feared, withering his hopes in the great and little games of life-by favour of the single star that ever shone upon him since his birth, has strangely stept into-Rickman's Secretaryship-sword, bag, House and all-from a hopeless 100 a year, eaten up aforehand desperate debts, to a clear £400 or £500—it almost reconciles me to the belief of a moral government of the world. The man stares and gapes and seems to be always wondering at what has befaln him— he tries to be eager at cribbage, but alas! the source of that Interest is dried up for ever, he no longer plays for his next day's meal, or to determine whether he shall have a half dinner or a whole dinner, whether he shall buy a pair of black silk stockings or coax his old ones a week or two longer, the poor man's relish of a Trump, the Four Honours, is goneand I do not know whether if we could get at the bottom of things whether poor star-doomed Phillips with his hair staring with despair was not a happier being than the sleek well-combed oily-pated Secretary that has succeeded. The gift is however clogged

with one stipulation, that the Secretary do remain a Single Man. Here I smell Rickman. Thus at once are gone all Phillips' matrimonial dreams, those verses which he wrote himself and those which a surprised Pen (with modesty let me speak as I name no names) endited for him to Elisa, Amelia, &c.for Phillips was always a-wive-hunting, probably, from the circumstance of his having formed an extreme rash connection in early life which paved the way to all his after misfortunes, but there is an obstinacy in human nature which such accidents only serve to whet on to try again. Pleasure thus at two entrances quite shut out, I hardly know how to determine of Phillips' result of happiness. He appears satisfyed, but never those bursts of gaiety, those moment-rules from the Cave of Despondency, that used to make his face shine and show the lines that care had marked in it. I would bet an even wager he marries secretly. The Speaker find it out, and he is reverted to his old Liberty and a hundred pounds a year. These are but speculations-I can think of no other news.

I am going to eat turbot, turtle, venison, marrow pudding, - cold punch, claret, Madeira, - at our annual feast, at half-past four this day. Mary has ordered the bolt to my bedroom door inside to be taken off and a practicable latch to be put on, that I mayn't bar myself in and be suffocated by my neck-cloth, so we have taken all precautions, three watchmen are engaged to carry the body upstairs -Pray for me. They keep bothering me, (I'm at office,) and my ideas are confused. Let me know if I can be of any service as to books. God forbid the Architectonican should be sacrificed to a foolish scruple of some book proprietor, as if books did not belong with the highest propriety to those that understand 'em best. C. LAMB.

CLIX.

TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Aug. 14, 1814.

Dear Wordsworth,-I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great armful of poetry which you have sent me; and to get it before the rest of the world too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you, but M. Burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it, but we expect restitution in a day or two. It is the noblest conversational poem I ever read. a day in Heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odour on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is the Tales of the Churchyard; the only girl among seven brethren, born out of due time, and not duly taken away again, the deaf man and the blind man ; the Jacobite and the Hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; the Scarron-entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude;-these were all new to me too. My having known the story of Margaret (at the beginning), a very old acquaintance, even as long back as when I saw you first at Stowey, did not make her reappearance less fresh. I don't know what to pick out of this best of books upon best subjects for partial naming. That gorgeous sunset is famous; I think it must have been the identical one we saw on Salisbury Plain five years ago, that drew Phillips from the card-table, where he had sat from rise of that luminary to its unequalled set; but neither he nor I had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the prophets saw them in that sunset-the wheel, the potter's clay, the wash-pot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the baskets of figs, the fourfold visaged head, the throne, and Him that sat thereon.

the