pheasant and bread sauce-barn door fowls for dissenters, but for the real churchman, the thirty-nine times articled clerk-the pheasant, the pheasant!

Ever yours,

SYDNEY SMITH.

CCLI.

No man in his day was more earnest than Sydney Smith in endeavours to procure redress of grievances, social, religious, or moral. He was ever ready to wage war against what he considered public wrongs, great or small; and would take up his pen in good-humoured ridicule of railway directors or sporting parsons as readily as in eager denunciation (though not invariably in the best taste), of some religious disabilities or political shortcomings.

The Rev. Sydney Smith to the Editor of the Morning Chronicle.' June 7, 1842.

Sir,-Since the letter upon railroads, which you were good enough to insert in your paper, I have had some conversation with two gentlemen officially connected with the Great Western. Though nothing could be more courteous than their manner, nor more intelligible than their arguments, I remain unshaken as to the necessity of keeping the doors open.

There is in the first place, the effect of imagination, the idea that all escape is impossible, that (let what will happen) you must sit quiet in first class No. 2, whether they are pounding you into a jam, or burning you into a cinder, or crumbling you into a human powder. These excellent directors, versant in wood and metal, seem to require that the imagination should be sent by some other conveyance, and that only loads of unimpassioned, unintellectual flesh and blood should be darted along on the Western rail; whereas, the female homo is a screaming, parturient, interjectional, hysterical animal, whose delicacy and timidity, monopolists (even much as it may surprise them) must be taught to consult. The female, in all probability, never would jump out; but she thinks she may jump out when she pleases, and this is intensely comfortable.

There are two sorts of dangers which hang over railroads. The one retail dangers, where individuals only are concerned; the

other, wholesale dangers, where the whole train or a considerable part of it, is put in jeopardy. For the first danger there is a remedy in the prudence of individuals; for the second there is none. No man need be drunk, nor need he jump out when the carriage is in motion; but in the present state of science it is impossible to guard effectually against the fracture of the axle-tree, or the explosion of the engine; and if the safety of the one party cannot be consulted but by the danger of the other, if the foolish cannot be restrained but by the unjust incarceration of the wise, the prior consideration is due to those who have not the remedy for the evil in their own hands.

But the truth is-and so (after a hundred monopolising experiments on public patience) the railroad directors will find itthere can be no other dependence for the safety of the public than the care which every human being is inclined to take of his own life and limbs. Every thing beyond this is the mere lazy tyranny of monopoly, which makes no distinction between human beings and brown paper parcels. If riding were a monopoly, as travelling in carriages is now become, there are many gentlemen whom I see riding in the Park upon such false principles, that I am sure the cantering and galloping directors would strap them, in the ardour of their affection, to the saddle, padlock them to the stirrups, or compel them to ride behind a policeman of the stable; and nothing but a motion from O'Brien, or an order from Gladstone, could release them.

Let the company stick up all sorts of cautions and notices within their carriages and without; but, after that, no doors locked. If one door is allowed to be locked, the other will soon be so too; there is no other security to the public than absolute prohibition of the practice. The directors and agents of the Great Western are individually excellent men; but the moment men meet in public boards, they cease to be collectively excellent. The fund of morality becomes less, as the individual contributors increase in number. I do not accuse such respectable men of any wilful violation of truth, but the memoirs which they are about to present will be, without the scrupulous cross-examination of a committee of the House of Commons, mere waste paper.

But the most absurd of all legislative enactments is this hemiplegian law-an act of Parliament to protect one side of the

body and not the other. If the wheel comes off on the right, the open door is uppermost, and every one is saved. If, from any sudden avalanche on the road, the carriage is prostrated to the left, the locked door is uppermost, all escape is impossible, and the railroad martyrdom begins.

Leave me to escape in the best way I can, as the fire offices very kindly permit me to do. I know very well the danger of getting out on the off-side; but escape is the affair of a moment; suppose a train to have passed at that moment, I know I am safe from any other trains for twenty minutes or half an hour; and if I do get out on the off side, I do not remain in the valley of death between the two trains, but am over to the opposite bank in an instant—only half-roasted, or merely browned, certainly not done enough for the Great Western directors.

On Saturday morning last, the wheel of the public carriage, in which a friend of mine was travelling, began to smoke, but was pacified by several buckets of water, and proceeded. After five more miles, the whole carriage was full of smoke, the train was with difficulty stopped, and the flagrant vehicle removed. The axle was nearly in two, and in another mile would have been severed.

Railroad travelling is a delightful improvement of human life. Man is become a bird; he can fly longer and quicker than a Solan goose. The mamma rushes sixty miles in two hours to the aching finger of her conjugating and declining grammar boy. The early Scotchman scratches himself in the morning mists of the North, and has his porridge in Piccadilly before the setting sun. The Puseyite priest, after a rush of one hundred miles, appears with his volume of nonsense at the breakfast of his bookseller. Every thing is near, every thing is immediate-time, distance, and delay are abolished. But, though charming and fascinating as all this is, we must not shut our eyes to the price we shall pay for it. There will be every three or four years some dreadful massacrewhole trains will be hurled down a precipice, and two or three hundred persons will be killed on the spot. There will be every now and then a great combustion of human bodies, as there has been at Paris; then all the newspapers up in arms—a thousand regulations, forgotten as soon as the directors dare-loud screams of the velocity whistle-monopoly locks and bolts, as before. The

locking plea of directors is philanthropy; and I admit that to guard men from the commission of moral evil is as philanthropical as to prevent physical suffering. There is, I allow, a strong propensity in mankind to travel on railroads without paying; and to lock mankind in till they have completed their share of the contract is benevolent, because it guards the species from degrading and immoral conduct, but to burn or crush a whole train merely to prevent a few immoral insides from not paying, is I hope a little more than Ripon or Gladstone will bear.

We have been, up to this point, very careless of our railway regulations. The first person of rank who is killed will put every thing in order, and produce a code of the most careful rules. I hope it will not be one of the bench of bishops; but should it be so destined, let the burnt bishop-the unwilling Latimer-remember that, however painful gradual concoction by fire may be, his death will produce unspeakable benefit to the public. Even Sodor and Man will be better than nothing. From that moment the bad effects of the monopoly are destroyed; no more fatal deference to the directors; no despotic incarceration, no barbarous inattention to the anatomy and physiology of the human body; no commitment to locomotive prisons with warrant. We shall then find it possible

Coleridge took a little tour through Somersetshire in 1797; he was always particularly troublesome in a coach, insisting upon talking to everybody with that ceaseless volubility for which he was so famous. For once, however, he seems to have met his match, and indeed to have had the tables turned upon him with some violence. Mr. George Burnet was then residing with the Coleridges at Stowey, and was supposed to be a convert to Pantisocracy.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Josiah Wade.

Stowey 1797.

My dear friend,—I am here after a most tiresome journey; in the course of which a woman asked me if I knew one Coleridge, of Bristol; I answered, I had heard of him. Do you

know, (quoth she) that that vile jacobin villain drew away a young man from our parish, one Burnet, &c. and in this strain did the woman continue for near an hour; heaping on me every name of abuse that the parish of Billingsgate could supply. I listened very particularly; appeared to approve all she said, exclaiming, 'dear me!' two or three times, and, in fine, so completely won the woman's heart by my civilities, that I had not the courage to undeceive her. S. T. COLERIDGE.

P.S.

You are a good prophet. Oh, into what a state have the scoundrels brought this devoted kingdom.

If the House of Commons would but melt down their faces, it would greatly assist the copper currency-we should have brass enough.

CCLIII.

Mr. Cottle was proud to remember in his old age that he, a provincial bookseller, had been the publisher of the first volumes of three such poets as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. The transaction discussed in the following letter is a no less momentous one than the publication of the famous 'Lyrical Ballads.' The poets were then living at Allfoxden, near Stowey, and the caballing against Wordsworth to which Coleridge refers was the result of the intense terror caused in the village by Wordsworth's habit of roaming over the hills at night, like a partridge.' At last the skeleton of a child, as it was supposed, was discovered close to Allfoxden, and they were about to march Wordsworth off on suspicion of murder, when the bones were most vexatiously proved to be those of a dog.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Joseph Cottle.

May, 1798.

My dear Cottle,-Neither Wordsworth nor myself could have been otherwise than uncomfortable, if any but yourself had received from us the first offer of our Tragedies, and of the volume of Wordsworth's Poems. At the same time, we did not expect that you could with prudence and propriety, advance such a sum as we should want at the time we specified. In short, we both regard the publication of our Tragedies as an evil. It is not impossible but that in happier times, they may be brought on the stage and to throw away this chance for a mere trifle, would be