The cat and the fiddle." "My dear Charles," said Words "Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John,' my friends, had an enthusiasm for member." "Don't you, sir? I am Wordsworth, and begged I would a comptroller of stamps." There was procure him the happiness of an a dead silence; the comptroller eviintroduction. He told me he was dently thinking that was enough. a comptroller of stamps, and often While we were waiting for Wordshad correspondence with the poet. worth's reply, Lamb sung out: I thought it a liberty; but still, as 66 Hey diddle diddle, he seemed a gentleman, I told him he might come. When we retired to tea we found the comptroller. worth: In introducing him to Wordsworth I forgot to say who he was. After a little time the comptroller looked chaunted Lamb; and then, rising, down, looked up, and said to Words- exclaimed, "Do let me have anworth, "Don't you think, sir, Mil- other look at that gentleman's orton was a great genius?" Keats gans!" Keats and I hurried Lamb looked at me, Wordsworth looked into the painting-room, shut the at the comptroller. Lamb, who door, and gave way to inextinguishwas dozing by the fire, turned able laughter. Monkhouse followed, round and said, "Pray, sir, did you and tried to get Lamb away. We say Milton was a great genius ?" went back, but the comptroller was "No, sir, I asked Mr. Words- irreconcileable. We soothed and worth if he were not." "O!" said smiled, and asked him to supper. He Lamb, "then you are a silly fellow." stayed, though his dignity was sorely "Charles, my dear Charles," said affected. However, being a goodWordsworth; but Lamb, perfectly natured man, we parted all in good innocent of the confusion he had humour, and no ill effects followed. created, was off again by the fire. All the while, until Monkhouse sucAfter an awful pause the comptrol- ceeded, we could hear Lamb strugler said, "Don't you think Newton gling in the painting-room, and calla great genius?" I could not stand ling at intervals, "Who is that felit any longer. Keats put his head low? Allow me to see his organs into my books. Ritchie squeezed once more."-(Life of Benjamin R. in a laugh. Wordsworth, seemed Haydon.) asking himself, "Who is this?" Lamb got up, and taking a candle, said, "Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?" He then turned his back on the poor man, and at every question of the comptroller he chaunted: LEIGH HUNT'S DESCRIPTION OF CAMPBELL. "They who knew Mr. Campbell," says Leigh Hunt, "only as the author of Gertrude of Wyoming, and the Pleasures of Hope, would not have suspected him to be a merry companion, overflowing with "humour and anecdote, and anything but fastidious. "Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John Went to his bed with his breeches on." The man in office, finding Words- "The Scotch poets have always worth did not know who he was, something in reserve. It is the said in a spasmodic and half-chuck-only point in which the major part ling anticipation of assured vic- of them resemble their countrymen. tory, "I have had the honour of He was one of the few men whom some correspondence with you, Mr. I could at any time have walked Wordsworth." "With me, sir?" half-a-dozen miles through the snow said Wordsworth; "not that I re- to spend an evening with. POETIC INSPIRATION. "No man felt more kindly towards his fellow-creatures, or took less credit for it. When he indulged in doubt and sarcasm, and spoke contemptuously of things in general, he did it, partly, no doubt, out of actual dissatisfaction, but more perhaps, than he suspected out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive; which is a blind that the best men very commonly practise. "When I first saw this eminent person, he gave me the idea of a French Virgil. I found him as handsome as the Abbé Delille is said to have been ugly. But he seemed to me to embody a Frenchman's ideal notion of the Latin poet; something a little more cut and dry than I had looked for; compact and elegant, critical and acute, with a consciousness of authorship upon him; a taste overanxious not to commit itself, and refining and diminishing nature as in a drawing-room mirror. 66 This fancy was strengthened, in the course of conversation, by his expatiating on the greatness of Racine. I think he had a volume of the French poet in his hand. "His skull was sharply cut and fine, with a full share, according to the phrenologists, both of the reflective and amative organs; and his poetry will bear them out. His face and person were rather on a small scale; his features regular; his eye lively and penetrating; and when he spoke, dimples played about his mouth; which, nevertheless, had something restrained and close in it. Some gentle Puritan seemed to have crossed the breed, and to have left a stamp on his face, such as we often see in the female Scotch face, rather than the male." 169 "The mammoth comes, the foe, the monster Brandt, With all his howling, desolating band." It was rather a serious moment when a gentleman with an English name called on Campbell, demanding, on the part of the son of Brandt, some explanation of this language, as applied to his father. A long letter from Campbell is printed in Stone's Life of Brandt, addressed to the Mohawk chief, Ahyonwalgs, commonly called John Brandt, Esq., of the Grand River, Upper Canada, in which he states the various authorities which had misled him into the belief of the truth of the incidents on which his notion of Brandt's character was founded, and which, it seems, misrepresented it altogether. It was, no doubt, a strange scene, and the poet could with some truth say, and with some pride, too, that when he wrote his poem, it was unlikely that he should ever have contemplated the case of the son or daughter of an Indian chief being affected by its contents. He promises in future editions to correct the involuntary error, and he does so by saying, in a note, that the Brandt of the poem is a pure and declared character of fiction. This does not satisfy Mr. Stone's sense of justice, who would have the tomahawk applied to the offending rhyme, and who thinks anything less than this is a repetition of the offence. POETIC INSPIRATION. 66 GERTRUDE OF WYOMING." Some fourteen or fifteen years after the publication of Gertrude, We hear much about "poetic Campbell found himself engaged in inspiration," and the "poet's eye in a correspondence with the son of a fine frenzy rolling," but Sir Joshua Reynolds gives an anecdote | structure of his versification, when of Goldsmith, while engaged upon I knew him, was more artificial his poem, calculated to cure our than it was afterwards; and in his notions about the ardour of compo- serious compositions it suited him sition. better. He had hardly faith enough to give way to his impulses in writ Calling upon the poet one day, he opened the door without cere-ing, except when they were festive mony, and found him in the double and witty; and artificial thoughts occupation of turning a couplet and demand a similar embodiment. teaching a pet dog to sit upon his Both patriotism and personal exhaunches. At one time he would perience, however, occasionally inglance his eye at his desk, and at spired him with lyric pathos; and another shake his finger at the dog in his naturally musical perception to make him retain his position. of the right principles of versificaThe last lines on the page were still tion, he contemplated the fine, easy wet; they form a part of the de-playing, muscular style of Dryden, scription of Italy: "By sports like these are all their cares beguiled; The sports of children satisfy the child." Goldsmith, with his usual good humour, joined in the laugh caused by his whimsical employment, and acknowledged that his boyish sport with the dog suggested the stanza. LEIGH HUNT'S DESCRIPTION OF 66 THOMAS MOORE. "Moore's forehead," says Leigh Hunt, was bony and full of character, with bumps' of wit, large and radiant enough to transport a phrenologist. In this particular he strongly resembled Sterne. His eyes were as dark and fine as you would wish to see under a set of vine-leaves; his mouth generous and good-humoured, with dimples; and his manner as bright as his talk, full of the wish to please and be pleased. He sang and played with great taste on the pianoforte, as might be supposed from his musical compositions. His voice, which was a little hoarse in speaking,—at least I used to think so,— softened into a breath, like that of the flute, when singing. "In speaking he was emphatic in rolling the letter r, perhaps out of a despair of being able to get rid of the national peculiarity. The with a sort of perilous pleasure. I remember his quoting with delight a couplet of Dryden's which came with a peculiar grace out of his mouth : 'Let honour and preferment go for gold; But glorious beauty isn't to be sold.' "Besides the pleasure I took in Moore's society as a man of wit, I had a great esteem for him as a man of candour and independence. His letters were full of all that was pleasant in him. As I was a critic at that time, and in the habit of giving my opinion of his works in the Examiner, he would write me his opinion of the opinion, with a mixture of good humour, admission, and deprecation, so truly delightful, and a sincerity of criticism on my own writings so extraordinary for so courteous a man, though with abundance of balm and eulogy, that never any subtlety of compliment could surpass it." MISS JEWSBURY'S DESCRIPTION OF In the following passage from Miss Jewsbury's Three Histories, she avowedly describes Mrs. Hemans : "Egeria was totally different from any other woman I had ever seen, either in Italy or in England. She did not dazzle; she subdued me. Other women might be more 66 COWLEY AND HIS MISFORTUNES. 171 COWLEY AND HIS MISFORTUNES. Cowley, in an ode, had commemorated the genius of Brutus, with all the enthusiasm of a votary of liberty. After the king's return, when Cowley solicited some reward for his sufferings and services in the royal cause, the chancellor is said to have turned on him with a severe countenance, saying, “Mr. Cowley, your pardon is your reward." commanding, more versatile, more acute, but I never saw any one so exquisitely feminine. Her birth, her education, but, above all, the genius with which she was gifted, combined to inspire a passion for the ethereal, the tender, the imaginative, the heroic, in one word the beautiful. It was in her faculty divine, and yet of daily life; it touched all things, but, like a sun-beam, touched them with a golden finger. Any thing abstract or scientific was unintelligible or distasteful to It seems that the ode was then her. Her knowledge was extensive considered to be of a dangerous and various; but, true to the first tendency among half the nation; principle of her nature, it was poetry Brutus would be the model of enthat she sought in history, scenery, thusiasts, who were sullenly bendcharacter, and religious belief- ing their necks under the yoke of poetry that guided all her studies, royalty. Charles II. feared the governed all her thoughts, coloured all her imaginative conversation. Her nature was at once simple and profound; there was no room in her mind for philosophy, nor in her heart for ambition. The one was filled by imagination, the other engrossed by tenderness. attempt of desperate men; and he might have forgiven Rochester a loose pasquinade, but not Cowley a solemn invocation. This fact, then, is said to have been the true cause of the despondency so prevalent in the latter poetry of "the melancholy Cowley." And hence the indiscretion of the Muse, in a single flight, condemned her to a painful, rather than a voluntary, solitude, and made the poet complain of "barren praise" and "She had a passive temper, but decided tastes; any one might influence, but very few impressed her. Her strength and her weakness lay alike in her affections: these would sometimes make her weep, at others" neglected verse." imbue her with courage; so that she was, alternately, 'a falcon-hearted dove,' and a 'reed broken with the wind.' Her voice was a sweet, sad melody, and her spirits reminded me of an old poet's description of the orange-tree, with its ⚫ Golden lamps, hid in a night of green,' or of those Spanish gardens where the pomegranate blossoms beside the cypress. Her gladness was like a burst of sunlight; and if in her sadness she resembled night, it was night wearing her stars. I might describe and describe forever, but I should never succeed in portraying Egeria. She was a Muse, a Grace, a variable child, a dependent woman, the Italy of human beings." No wonder, therefore, that he thus expresses himself in the preface to his Cutter of Coleman Street:: "We are, therefore, wonderfully wise men, and have a fine business of it; we, who spend our time in poetry. I do sometimes laugh, and am often angry with myself, when I think on it; and if I had a son inclined to the same folly by nature, I believe I should bind him from it by the strictest conjurations of a parental blessing. For what can be more ridiculous than to labour to give men delight, whilst they labour, on their part, most earnestly, to take offence ?” And thus he closes the preface, in all the solemn expression of injured feelings: "This I do affirm, that from all which I have written, I never received the least benefit or the least advantage, but, on the contrary, have felt sometimes the effects of malice and misfortune." ADDISON'S COMPANIONS. Addison's chief companions, before he married Lady Warwick, in 1716, were Steele, Budgell, Philips, Carey, Davenant, and Colonel Brett. He used to breakfast with one or other of them, at his lodgings in St. James's Place; dine at taverns with them; then to Button's; and then to some tavern again for supper in the evening: and this was then the usual round of his life. PERCIVAL THE AMERICAN POET. Dr. Percival is one of the most eccentric men in the world, and one of the most learned. He lived a long time in a garret-literally a garret, after the manner of the old poets at New Haven, and had very few companions, save his books, cabinets, and herbarium. He reads with fluency ten languages, and is so familiar with the Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, that he can take a work never before seen by him, in any of those languages, and read it in English with as much correctness and ease as he would one of his own poems. had interrupted his progress. He had walked over every hill, plain, and morass in Connecticut, with his basket on his arm and his bag on his back; stopping at the farmhouses at night, and resuming his examination at early light." He was engaged in this work for five years, and his salary never exceeded three hundred dollars per annum. The legislature of course adopted the proposal of giving to him the copyright. He is one of the poorest, as well as one of the most meritorious, of our authors.-(Arvine.) NIGHT THOUGHTS. Dr. Young was fond of coffee in an afternoon; till, finding it prejudicial to his nerves, he intimated his intention of abstaining from it. His grandson, who was then a little boy, inquired into the particular motive that led him to this resolution. "My reason is," answered the doctor, "because it keeps me awake at night. I can't sleep for it." "Then I beg you, sir, not to leave off your coffee; otherwise you will give us no more Night Thoughts." TASSO. Tasso's contradictory critics perplexed him with the most intricate literary discussions, and probably occasioned a mental alienation. We find, in one of his letters, that he repents the composition of his great poem; for although his own taste approved of the marvellous, which still forms the nobler part of its creation, yet he confesses that his critics have decided that the history of his hero, Godfrey, required another species of conduct. "Hence," cries the unhappy bard, “doubts vex me; but for the past, and what For several years, he was engaged in making a geological survey of Connecticut; and his report was laid before the legislature of that state, when a proposal to give the copyright to the author, after a certain number of copies should be printed for the use of the state, was discussed. On this occasion, one of the members said, that "in his ex-is done, I know of no remedy;" and amination of our geology, Dr. Percival had been upon one side at least of every square mile in the state, except where river or lake he longs to precipitate the publication, that "he may be delivered from misery and agony." He solemnly swears that "did not the |