The world will never be tired reading and talking of the peculiarities and struggles of some of its literary worthies, they seem so incredible. Poor Goldsmith, for example: every incident relating to him is interesting, even if colored by envy—as most of the contemporaneous gossip about him was. "I first met Goldsmith," says Cumberland, "at the British Coffee House. He dined with us as a visitor, introduced by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and we held a consultation upon the naming of his comedy, which some of the company had read, and which he detailed to the rest after his manner with a great deal of good-humor. Somebody suggested She Stoops to Conquer, and that title was agreed upon.... 'You and I,' said he, 'have very different motives for resorting to the stage. I write for money, and care little about fame.'... The whole company pledged themselves to the support of the poet, and faithfully kept their promise to him. In fact, he needed all that could be done for him, as Mr. Colman, then manager of Covent Garden Theatre, protested against the comedy, when as yet he had not struck upon a name for it. Johnson at length stood forth in all his terror, as champion for the piece, and backed by us, his clients and retainers, demanded a fair trial. Colman again protested, but, with that salvo for his own reputation, liberally lent his stage to one of the most eccentric productions that ever found its way to it, and She Stoops to Conquer was put into rehearsal. We were not over-sanguine of success, but perfectly determined to struggle hard for our author; we accordingly assembled our strength at the Shakespeare Tavern in a considerable body for an early dinner, where Samuel Johnson took the chair at the head of a long table, and was the life and soul of the corps: the poet took post silently by his side, with the Burkes, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fitzherbert, Caleb Whitefoord, and a phalanx of North British predetermined applauders, under the banner of Major Mills, all good men and true. Our illustrious president was in inimitable glee, and poor Goldsmith that day took all his raillery as patiently and complacently as my friend Boswell would have done any day or every day of his life. In the meantime, we did not forget our duty, and though we had a better comedy going, in which Johnson was chief actor, we betook ourselves in good time to our separate and allotted posts, and waited the awful drawing up of the curtain. As our stations were preconcerted, so were our signals for plaudits arranged and determined upon in a manner that gave every one his cue where to look for them and how to follow them up. We had amongst us a very worthy and sufficient member, long since lost to his friends and the world at large, Adam Drummond, of amiable memory, who was gifted by nature with the most sonorous, and, at the same time, the most contagious, laugh that ever echoed from the human lungs. The neighing of the horse of the son of Hystaspes was a whisper to it; the whole thunder of the theatre could not drown it. This kind and ingenuous friend fairly forewarned us that he knew no more when to give his fire than the cannon did that was planted on a battery. He desired, therefore, to have a flapper at his elbow, and I had the honor to be deputed to that office. I planted him in an upper box, pretty nearly over the stage, in full view of the pit and galleries, and perfectly well situated to give the echo all its play through the hollows and recesses of the theatre. The success of our manoeuvres was complete. All eyes were upon Johnson, who sat in a front row of a side box, and when he laughed everybody thought themselves warranted to roar. In the meantime, my friend followed signals with a rattle so irresistibly comic that, when he had repeated it several times, the attention of the spectators was so engrossed by his person and performances that the progress of the play seemed likely to become a secondary object, and I found it prudent to insinuate to him that he might halt his music without any prejudice to the author; but, alas, it was now too late to rein him in; he had laughed upon my signal where he found no joke, and now unluckily he fancied that he found a joke in almost everything that was said; so that nothing in nature could be more malapropos than some of his bursts every now and then were. These were dangerous moments, for the pit began to take umbrage; but we carried our play through, and triumphed, not only over Colman's judgment, but our own." It is related that Goldsmith, during the performance of the comedy, walked all the time in St. James's Park, in great uneasiness; and when he thought it must be over, he hastened to the theatre. His ears were assailed with hisses as he entered the green-room, when he eagerly inquired of Mr. Colman the cause. "Pshaw! Pshaw!" said Colman, "don't be afraid of squibs, when we have been sitting on a barrel of gun-powder these two hours." The fact was, that the comedy had been completely successful, and that it was the farce which had excited those sounds so terrific to Goldsmith.

A scene very different from that occurred at another "first acting"—as remarkable if not as famous. It was on the occasion of the first presentation of Lamb's farce of Mr. H., thirty years later, at Drury Lane. That acute dramatic scholar and critic had written a tragedy,—John Woodvil,—the fate of which his friend Procter has pleasantly narrated: "It had been in Mr. Kemble's hands for about a year, and Lamb naturally became urgent to hear his decision upon it. Upon applying for this he found that his play was—lost! This was at once acknowledged, and a 'courteous request made for another copy, if I had one by me.' Luckily, another copy existed. The 'first runnings' of a genius were not, therefore, altogether lost, by having been cast, without a care, into the dusty limbo of the theatre. The other copy was at once supplied, and the play very speedily rejected. It was afterward facetiously brought forward in one of the early numbers of the Edinburgh Review, and there noticed as a rude specimen of the earliest age of the drama, 'older than Æschylus.'" But the condemnation of his tragedy did not discourage him; he now tried his genius upon a farce. Its acceptance, Talfourd says, gave Lamb some of the happiest moments he ever spent. He wrote joyously to Wordsworth about it, even carrying his humorous anticipations so far as to indulge in a draft of the "orders" he should send out to his friends after it had had a successful run: "Admit to Boxes. Mr. H. Ninth Night. Charles Lamb." Hear what he says about it to his friend Manning, then in China: "The title is Mr. H., no more; how simple, how taking! A great H— sprawling over the play-bill, and attracting eyes at every corner. The story is a coxcomb appearing at Bath, vastly rich—all the ladies dying for him—all bursting to know who he is—but he goes by no other name than Mr. H.; a curiosity like that of the dames of Strasburg about the man with the great nose. But I won't tell you any more about it. Yes, I will; but I can't give you any idea how I have done it. I'll just tell you that after much vehement admiration, when his true name comes out,—'Hogsflesh,'—all the women shun him, avoid him, and not one can be found to change her name for him—that's the idea: how flat it is here, but how whimsical in the farce! And only think how hard upon me it is that the ship is dispatched to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday after; but all China will ring of it by and by.... I shall get two hundred pounds from the theatre if Mr. H. has a good run, and I hope one hundred pounds for the copyright.... Mary and I are to sit next the orchestra in the pit, next the dweedle dees." The Wednesday came, the wished-for evening, which decided the fate of Mr. H. "Great curiosity," says Talfourd, "was excited by the announcement; the house was crowded to the ceiling, and the audience impatiently awaited the conclusion of the long intolerable opera by which it was preceded. At length the hero of the farce entered, gayly dressed, and in happiest spirits,—enough, not too much, elated,—and delivered the prologue with great vivacity and success. The farce began; at first it was much applauded; but the wit seemed wire-drawn; and when the curtain fell on the first act, the friends of the author began to fear. The second act dragged heavily on, as second acts of farces will do; a rout at Bath, peopled with ill-dressed and over-dressed actors and actresses, increased the disposition to yawn; and when the moment of disclosure came, and nothing worse than the name Hogsflesh was heard, the audience resented the long play on their curiosity, and would hear no more. Lamb, with his sister, sat, as he anticipated, in the front of the pit; and having joined in encoring the epilogue, the brilliancy of which injured the farce, he gave way with equal pliancy to the common feeling, and hissed and hooted as loudly as any of his neighbors!" Away went the poet's fame, and the hoped-for three hundred pounds! Not even the autocratic countenance of Johnson, and the big, contagious laugh of Drummond, could have saved them. The next morning's play-bill contained a veracious announcement, that "the new farce of Mr. H., performed for the first time last night, was received by an overflowing audience with universal applause, and will be repeated for the second time to-morrow;" but the stage lamps never that morrow saw! An amusing, sad spectacle the whole thing was; Lamb, especially,—the dramatic scholar, critic, and wit, the theatre-goer, the associate of playwrights and actors,—hissing and hooting his own bantling! In a letter afterward to Manning, he labors to be amusing over the catastrophe in this ghastly and extravagant manner: "So I go creeping on since I was lamed by that cursed fall from off the top of Drury Lane Theatre into the pit, something more than a year ago. However, I have been free of the house ever since, and the house was pretty free with me upon that occasion. Hang 'em, how they hissed! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese; with roaring sometimes like bears; mows and mops like apes; sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness. 'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us! that God should give his favorite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labors of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them! Heaven be pleased to make the teeth rot out of them all, therefore! Make them a reproach, and all that pass by them to loll out their tongues at them! Blind mouths! as Milton somewhere calls them."

Poor Elia! Of crazy stock; himself in a mad-house for six weeks at the end of his twentieth year; his sister insane at intervals throughout her life; his mother hopelessly bed-ridden till killed by her daughter in a fit of frenzy; his father pitifully imbecile; his old maiden aunt home from a rich relation's to be nursed till she died—all dependent upon him, his more prosperous brother declining to bear any part of the burden; his work for more than thirty years monotonous, and most of it performed at the same desk in the same back office; pinched all the time by adversity; with no ear for music; the list of his few friends, to use his own words, "in the world's eye, a ragged regiment,"—including the poet Lloyd, who died insane, and the scholar Dyer, who was so absent-minded as at one time to empty the contents of his snuff-box into the tea-pot when he was preparing breakfast for a hungry friend, at another, with staff in hand, and at noonday, to walk straight into the river,—the humor, we say, of dear, wretched, gentle Charles Lamb must stand a wonder in English literature.

Not less incredible was the steady growth of the prodigious genius of Charlotte BrontË, under circumstances hardly less awfully depressing. Think of the woful life of that suffering prodigy, in that cheerless village of forbidding stone houses, whose grim architecture illustrated the rigid hardness of their inhabitants. Above, below, all around, were rocks and moors, "where neither flowers nor vegetables would flourish, and where even a tree of moderate dimensions might be hunted far and wide; where the snow lay long and late; and where often, on autumnal and winter nights, the four winds of heaven seemed to meet and rage together, tearing round the houses as if they were wild beasts striving to find an entrance." Stone dikes were used in place of hedges. The cold parsonage, at the top of the one desolate street, with its stone stairs and stone floors in the passages and parlors, was surrounded on three sides by the "great old church-yard," which was "terribly full of upright tomb-stones," and which poisoned the water-springs of the pumps. The funeral bells, tolling, tolling, and the "chip, chip" of the mason, as he cut the grave-stones in a shed close by, were habitual sounds. The pews in the old church were of black oak, with high divisions, with the names of the owners painted in white letters on the doors. Her father, the clergyman, harsh, hard, and unsocial; at all times denying flesh food to his puny children; at dinner permitting them only potatoes, and rarely or never taking his meals with them; with a temper so violent and distrustful as to cause him always to carry a pistol, which he was in the habit of discharging from an upper window whenever in a fit of passion; who burned the little colored shoes of his children, presented by their mother's cousin, lest they should foster a love of dress; who cut in strips the silk gown of his wife because its color was not suited to his puritanical taste—at the time, too, when she was slowly dying of an internal cancer. Sent from home to be educated at a miserable school provided for the daughters of clergymen, where were bad air and bad food, and which caused the speedy death of both her elder sisters. So short-sighted that "she always seemed to be seeking something, moving her head from side to side to catch a sight of it." Having no visitors; visiting, during her childhood, but at one house, and that for but a short time. Her only intimate associates her two younger sisters. Wonderful trio! "At nine o'clock they put away their work, and began to pace the room backward and forward, up and down, over the stone floors,—as often with the candles extinguished, for economy's sake, as not,—their figures glancing in the firelight, and out into the shadow, perpetually. At this time they talked over past cares and troubles; they planned for the future, and consulted each other as to their plans. In after years, this was the time for discussing together the plots of their novels. And again, still later, this was the time for the last surviving sister (Charlotte) to walk alone, from old accustomed habit, round and round the desolate room, thinking sadly upon the 'days that were no more.'" Is there anything in books more sad and touching? Her only pet was a fierce bull-dog, and her only male associate her brilliant, drunken brother (who willfully died upon his feet, in an upright position, to fulfill an oft-declared purpose), a continual disgrace and terror as long as he lived. And much of the time, poor thing, in an agony about the fate of her soul! How the little, pinched victim of all this misery and wretchedness could have written a narrative which at once took its place, in spite of faithless and unsympathizing critics, and securely kept it, too, amongst the highest and best productions of the age, is a startling marvel in literature. Out of her own life she wrought her wonderful works. "The fiery imagination that at times eats me up," she wrote to her friend. In her stories she but told her own agonies, as Cowper noted the progress of his insanity, and the French physiologist his ebbing pulse under the deadly influence of burning charcoal.

But, recurring to Lamb and his set, what impossible, incomprehensible characters it included: Elton Hammond, for instance, a contemporary if not an associate. He inherited his father's tea business in Milk Street. In order, he said, to set an example to the world how a business should be carried on, and that he might not be interfered with in his plans, he turned off the clerks and every servant in the establishment, which soon wound up the business altogether. For a while he had no other society than a little child, which he taught its letters, and a mouse, that fed out of his hands. He journalized his food, his sleep, his dreams. He had a conviction that he was to have been, and ought to have been, the greatest of men, but was conscious in fact that he was not. The reason assigned by him for putting an end to his life was that he could not condescend to live without fulfilling his proper vocation. He said to one of his friends that he was on the point of making a discovery which would put an end to physical and moral evil in the world. He quarreled with another of his friends for not being willing to join him in carrying a heavy box through the streets of London for a poor woman. He refused a private secretaryship to Rough, a colonial chief justice, on the ground of the obligation involved to tell a lie and write a lie every day, subscribing himself the humble servant of people he did not serve, and toward whom he felt no humility. Here are a few things he wrote: "When I was about eight or ten I promised marriage to a wrinkled cook we had, aged about sixty-five. I was convinced of the insignificance of beauty, but really felt some considerable ease at hearing of her death, about four years after, when I began to repent of my vow."... "I always said that I would do anything to make another happy, and told a boy I would give him a shilling if it would make him happy; he said it would, so I gave it to him. It is not to be wondered at that I had plenty of such applications, and soon emptied my purse. It is true I rather grudged the money, because the boys laughed rather more than I wished them. But it would have been inconsistent to have appeared dissatisfied. Some of them were generous enough to return the money, and I was prudent enough to take it, though I declared that if it would make them happy I should be sorry to have it back."... "It is not pain, it is not death, that I dread, it is the hatred of a man; there is something in it so shocking that I would rather submit to any injury than incur or increase the hatred of a man by revenging it."... "The chief philosophical value of my papers I conceive to be that they record something of a mind that was very near taking a station far above all that have hitherto appeared in the world."... "It is provoking that the secret of rendering man perfect in wisdom, power, virtue, and happiness, should die with me. I never till this moment doubted that some other person would discover it; but I now recollect that when I have relied on others I have always been disappointed. Perhaps none may ever discover it, and the human race has lost its only chance of eternal happiness."... "I believe that man requires religion. I believe that there is no true religion now existing. I believe that there will be one. It will not, after eighteen hundred years of existence, be of questionable truth and utility, but perhaps in eighteen years be entirely spread over the earth, an effectual remedy for all human suffering, and a source of perpetual joy. It will not need immense learning to be understood, it will be subject to no controversy."... "Another sufficient reason for suicide is, that I was this morning out of temper with Mrs. Douglas (for no fault of hers). I did not betray myself in the least, but I reflected to be exposed to the possibility of such an event once a year was evil enough to render life intolerable. The disgrace of using an impatient word is to me overpowering."... "I am stupefied with writing, and yet I cannot go my long journey without taking leave of one from whom I have received so much kindness, and from whose society so much delight. My place is booked in Charon's boat to-night at twelve. Diana kindly consents to be of the party. This is handsome of her. She was not looked for on my part. Perhaps she is willing to acknowledge my obedience to her laws by a genteel compliment. Good. The gods, then, are grateful." To the coroner and his jury he wrote, "Let me suggest the following verdict, as combining literal truth with justice: 'Died by his own hand, but not feloniously.' If I have offended God, it is for God, not you, to inquire. Especial public duties I have none. If I have deserted any engagement in society, let the parties aggrieved consign my name to obloquy. I have for nearly seven years been disentangling myself from all my engagements, that I might at last be free to retire from life. I am free to-day, and avail myself of my liberty. I cannot be a good man, and prefer death to being a bad one,—as bad as I have been and as others are."

And there was Blake—"artist, genius, mystic, or madman?" "Probably all," thought Robinson, one of his warmest admirers; for he had admirers, and some of them were eminent. Coleridge knew him, and talked finely about him. Wordsworth thought he had "in him the elements of poetry much more than either Byron or Scott." Lamb liked his poems. Hazlitt said of them, "They are beautiful, and only too deep for the vulgar." His genius as an artist was praised by Flaxman and Fuseli. His countenance is described as "Socratic," with "an expression of great sweetness;" "when animated he had about him an air of inspiration." Though in great poverty, he was ever a gentleman; with genuine dignity and independence, he scorned all presents. He wrote songs, composed music, and painted, at the same time he pursued his business as an engraver. Among his friends he gave out that his pictures were copied from great works revealed to him, and that his lessons in art were given him by celestial tongues. When he spoke of his "visions," it was in the ordinary unemphatic tones in which we speak of every-day matters. He conversed familiarly with the spirits of Homer, Moses, Pindar, Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Sir William Wallace, Milton, and other illustrious dead, giving repeatedly their very words in their conversations. Sometimes, too, he wrangled with demons. His books (and his MSS. are immense in quantity) are dictations from the spirits. He possessed, it was said, the highest and most exalted powers of the mind, but not the lower. "He could fly, but he could not walk; he had genius and inspiration, without the prosaic balance-wheel of common sense." In poetry, it was observed, he most enjoyed the parts which to others are most obscure. His wife Katherine, good soul, believed in him, and was invaluable to him. She was ever sitting by his side, or assisting him at the press. "You know, dear," she said, believingly, "the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and he put his head to the window, and set you a-screaming." Both believed that his pictures were veritable visions transferred to the canvas or the plate. Sixteen of his mystical designs are illustrations of "The Gates of Paradise," one hundred of "Jerusalem," and twenty-seven "singular, but powerful drawings" disclose the mysteries of hell. He wrote to Flaxman, addressing him as "Dear Sculptor of Eternity," and saying, in his strange, wild way, "In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity, before my mortal life; and these works are the delight and study of archangels." A friend said to him, "You express yourself as Socrates used to do. What resemblance do you suppose there is between your spirit and his?" "The same as between our countenances," he answered. After a pause he added, "I was Socrates;" and then, as if correcting himself, said, "a sort of brother. I must have had conversations with him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them." Once he said, "There is no use in education. I hold it to be wrong. It is the great sin. It is eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the fault of Plato. He knew of nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes." Being asked about the moral character of Dante, in writing his "Vision,"—was he pure? "Pure," said Blake, "do you think there is any purity in God's eyes? The angels in heaven are no more so than we. 'He chargeth his angels with folly.'" He afterward represented the Supreme Being as liable to error. "Did he not repent him that he had made Nineveh?" Though he spoke of his happiness, he also alluded to past sufferings, and to suffering as necessary. "There is suffering in heaven, for where there is the capacity of enjoyment, there is also the capacity of pain." Comparing moral with natural evil, he said, "Who shall say that God thinks evil? That is a wise tale of the Mahometans, of the angel of the Lord that murdered the infant" (alluding to the Hermit of Parnell). "Is not every infant that dies of disease murdered by an angel?" "I saw Milton," he said on one occasion, "and he told me to beware of being misled by his Paradise Lost. In particular he wished me to show the falsehood of the doctrine, that carnal pleasures arose from the Fall. The Fall could not produce any pleasure." He spoke of Milton as being at one time a sort of classical atheist, and of Dante as being now with God. His faculty of vision, he said, he had had from early infancy. He thought all men partook of it, but it is lost for want of being cultivated. "I assert for myself," said he, "that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hinderance and not action. 'What!' it will be questioned, 'when the sun rises, do you not see a disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?' Oh no, no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.' I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it."... "I have written more than Voltaire or Rousseau. Six or seven epic poems as long as Homer, and twenty tragedies as long as Macbeth."... "I write when commanded by the spirits, and the moment I have written I see the words fly about the room in all directions. It is then published, and the spirits can read. My MS. is of no further use. I have been tempted to burn my MSS., but my wife won't let me."... "Men are born with a devil and an angel."... "I have never known a very bad man, who had not something very good about him."... "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much taken from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy." For the greater part of his life, he "lived in a garret, on crusts of bread." Death he considered as nothing but "going from one room to another." He died with his pencil in his hand, making a likeness of his wife, and chanting pleasant songs. Died, she said, "like an angel."

And George Dyer—a pet acquaintance of Lamb's—what a character was he! A bundle of contradictions if ever there was one. Poor and always struggling, but never envious, and utterly without hatred of the rich. A poet whose poetry was to himself "as good as anybody's, and anybody's as good as his own." A bachelor, his life was solitary, but he never thought of his solitude, till it was suggested to him by an observing, sympathizing widow, who kindly and generously consented to share it with him—her fourth husband! He is characterized by one of his literary friends as "one of the best creatures morally that ever breathed." He was a ripe scholar, but to the end of his days (and he lived to be eighty-five) he was a bookseller's drudge. He made indexes, corrected the press, and occasionally gave lessons in Greek and Latin. Simple and kind, he repeatedly gave away his last guinea. He was the author of the Life and Writings of Robert Robinson, which was pronounced by Wordsworth and Samuel Parr one of the best biographies in the language. The charm of the book is that Robinson's peculiar humor was wholly unappreciated by the simple-minded biographer. Robinson was a fine humorist; Dyer had absolutely no sense of humor. It was when he was on his way from Lamb's to Mrs. Barbauld's, that, in his absent-mindedness, he walked straight into New River, and was with difficulty saved from drowning. (Young, one of Fielding's intimate friends, who sat for the portrait of Parson Adams, was another such character. He also "supported an uncomfortable existence by translating for the booksellers from the Greek," overflowed with benevolence and learning, and was noted for his absence of mind. He had been chaplain of a regiment during Marlborough's wars; and "meditating one evening upon the glories of nature, and the goodness of Providence, he walked straight into the camp of the enemy; nor was he aroused from his reverie till the hostile sentinel shouted, 'Who goes there?' The commanding officer, finding that he had come among them in simplicity and not in guile, allowed him to return, and lose himself, if he pleased, in meditations on his danger and deliverance.") It is said that certain roguish young ladies, Dyer's cousins, lacking due reverence for learning and poetry, were wont to heap all sorts of meats upon the worthy gentleman's plate at dinner, he being lost in conversation until near the close of the repast, when he would suddenly recollect himself and fall to till he had finished the whole. Talfourd, speaking of Lamb and Dyer, says, "No contrast could be more vivid than that presented by the relations of each to the literature they both loved,—one divining its inmost essences, plucking out the heart of its mysteries, shedding light on its dimmest recesses; the other devoted with equal assiduity to its externals. Books, to Dyer, 'were a real world, both pure and good;' among them he passed, unconscious of time, from youth to extreme old age, vegetating on their dates and forms, and 'trivial fond records,' in the learned air of great libraries, or the dusty confusion of his own, with the least possible apprehension of any human interest vital in their pages, or of any spirit of wit or fancy glancing across them. His life was an academic pastoral. Methinks I see his gaunt, awkward form, set off by trousers too short, like those outgrown by a gawky lad, and a rusty coat as much too large for the wearer, hanging about him like those garments which the aristocratic Milesian peasantry prefer to the most comfortable rustic dress; his long head silvered over with short yet straggling hair, and his dark gray eyes glistening with faith and wonder, as Lamb satisfies the curiosity which has gently disturbed his studies as to the authorship of the Waverley Novels, by telling him, in the strictest confidence, that they are the works of Lord Castlereagh, just returned from the Congress of Sovereigns at Vienna. Off he runs, with animated stride and shambling enthusiasm, nor stops till he reaches Maida Hill, and breathes his news into the startled ear of Leigh Hunt, who, 'as a public writer,' ought to be possessed of the great fact with which George is laden! Or shall I endeavor to revive the bewildered look with which just after he had been announced as one of Lord Stanhope's executors and residuary legatees, he received Lamb's grave inquiry whether it was true, as commonly reported, that he was to be made a lord? 'Oh dear, no, Mr. Lamb,' responded he with earnest seriousness, but not without a moment's quivering vanity. 'I could not think of such a thing; it is not true, I assure you.' 'I thought not,' said Lamb, 'and I contradict it wherever I go. But the government will not ask your consent; they may raise you to the peerage without your ever knowing it.' 'I hope not, Mr. Lamb; indeed—indeed, I hope not. It would not suit me at all,' responded Dyer, and went his way musing on the possibility of a strange honor descending on his reluctant brow. Or shall I recall the visible presentment of his bland unconsciousness of evil when his sportive friend taxed it to the utmost by suddenly asking what he thought of the murderer Williams, who, after destroying two families in Ratcliffe Highway, had broken prison by suicide, and whose body had just before been conveyed in shocking procession to its cross-road grave? The desperate attempt to compel the gentle optimist to speak ill of a mortal creature produced no happier success than the answer, 'Why, I should think, Mr. Lamb, he must have been rather an eccentric character.'" Honest, simple soul! My Uncle Toby over again, for all the world.

What a contrast with all these ailing souls was the magnificent Christopher North! You remember the scene of his triumph on the occasion of his first lecture to the moral philosophy class in the University of Edinburgh. It deserves to be thought of along with the "trial scenes" we have been reviewing. The contest for the professorship had been bitterly fought over a period of four months, with Sir William Hamilton for competitor,—Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Malthus being only possible candidates. Austerity and prejudice—essential and saintly elements in all good Scotsmen—instinctively combined against him, and inveterately pursued him. "When it was found useless to gainsay his mental qualifications for the office, or to excite odium on the ground of his literary offenses, the attack was directed against his moral character, and it was broadly insinuated that this candidate for the chair of ethics was himself a man of more than doubtful morality; that he was, in fact, not merely a 'reveler,' and a 'blasphemer,' but a bad husband, a bad father, a person not fit to be trusted as a teacher of youth." A "bad husband" to the good woman he thus memorably characterized in a letter to one of his friends: "I was this morning married to Jane Penney, and doubt not of receiving your blessing, which, from your brotherly heart, will delight me, and doubtless not be unheard by the Almighty. She is gentleness, innocence, sense, and feeling, surpassed by no woman, and has remained pure, as from her Maker's hands;" the mother of all those children he loved so,—the death of whom, in his ripe manhood and in the bloom of his fame, nearly broke his heart! Sir Walter and other powerful friends repelled the slanders. Wilson triumphed. Still he was pursued; his enemies determined he should be put down, humiliated, even in his own class-room. An eye-witness thus describes the scene on the occasion of the delivery of the professor's first lecture: "There was a furious bitterness of feeling against him among the classes of which probably most of his pupils would consist, and although I had no prospect of being among them, I went to his first lecture, prepared to join in a cabal, which I understood was formed to put him down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a collection of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their knobsticks, I never saw. The professor entered with a bold step, amid profound silence. Every one expected some deprecatory or propitiatory introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to decide against him, reason or no reason; but he began in a voice of thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept up unflinchingly and unhesitatingly, without a pause, a flow of rhetoric such as Dugald Stewart or Thomas Brown, his predecessors, never delivered in the same place. Not a word, not a murmur escaped his captivated, I ought to say his conquered audience, and at the end they gave him a downright unanimous burst of applause. Those who came to scoff remained to praise." The ruling classes in educational matters could not conceive of the fitness of a man like Wilson for the moral philosophy chair in a university. The giant he was physically, with appetites and passions to match, he was a reproach to the feeble, a terror to the timid, and a horror to the "unco guid, or the rigidly righteous." The truth of him was such an exaggeration of the average man that the scholars and pedagogues and parsons could only look upon him as a monster, with a character as monstrous as his nature. He is described as "long-maned and mighty, whose eyes were 'as the lightnings of fiery flame,' and his voice like an organ bass; who laid about him, when the fit was on, like a Titan, breaking small men's bones; who was loose and careless in his apparel, even as in all things he seemed too strong and primitive to heed much the niceties of custom." In his youth, he "ran three miles for a wager against a chaise," and came out ahead. Somewhat later he "gained a bet by walking, toe and heel, six miles in two minutes within the hour." When he was twenty-one, height five feet eleven inches, weight eleven stone, he leaped, with a run, twenty-three feet "on a slightly inclined plane, perhaps an inch to a yard," and "was admitted to be (Ireland excepted) the best far leaper of his day in England." He could jump twelve yards in three jumps, with a great stone in each hand. "With him the angler's silent trade was a ruling passion. He did not exaggerate to the Shepherd in the Noctes, when he said that he had taken 'a hundred and thirty in one day out of Loch Aire,' as we see by his letters that even larger numbers were taken by him." Of his pugilistic skill, it is said by De Quincey that "there was no man who had any talents, real or fancied, for thumping or being thumped, but he had experienced some preening of his merits from Mr. Wilson." "Meeting one day with a rough and unruly wayfarer, who showed inclination to pick a quarrel concerning right of passage across a certain bridge, the fellow obstructed the way, and making himself decidedly obnoxious, Wilson lost all patience, and offered to fight him. The man made no objection to the proposal, but replied that he had better not fight with him, as he was so and so, mentioning the name of a (then not unknown) pugilist. This statement had, as may be supposed, no effect in dampening the belligerent intentions of the Oxonian; he knew his own strength, and his skill too. In one moment off went his coat, and he set to upon his antagonist in splendid style. The astonished and punished rival, on recovering from his blows and surprise, accosted him thus: 'You can only be one of the two: you are either Jack Wilson or the devil.'" His pedestrian feats were marvelous. "On one occasion," writes an old classmate of Wilson's at Oxford, "having been absent a day or two, we asked him, on his return to the common room, where he had been. He said, In London. When did you return? This morning. How did you come? On foot. As we all expressed surprise, he said, 'Why, the fact is, I dined yesterday with a friend in Grosvenor (I think it was) Square, and as I quitted the house, a fellow who was passing was impertinent and insulted me, upon which I knocked him down; and as I did not choose to have myself called in question for a street row, I at once started, as I was, in my dinner dress, and never stopped until I got to the college gate this morning, as it was being opened.' Now this was a walk of fifty-eight miles at least, which he must have got over in eight or nine hours at most, supposing him to have left the dinner-party at nine in the evening." Some years later, he walked—his wife accompanying him—"three hundred and fifty miles in the Highlands, between the 5th of July and the 26th of August, sojourning in divers glens from Sabbath unto Sabbath, fishing, eating, and staring." Mrs. Wilson returned from this wonderful tour "bonnier than ever," and Wilson himself, to use his own phrase, "strong as an eagle." One of their resting-places was at the school-master's house in Glenorchy. While there "his time was much occupied by fishing, and distance was not considered an obstacle. He started one morning at an early hour to fish in a loch which at that time abounded in trout, in the Braes of Glenorchy, called Loch ToilÀ. Its nearest point was thirteen miles distant from his lodgings at the school-house. On reaching it, and unscrewing the butt-end of his fishing-rod to get the top, he found he had it not. Nothing daunted, he walked back, breakfasted, got his fishing-rod, made all complete, and off again to Loch ToilÀ. He could not resist fishing on the river when a pool looked inviting, but he went always onward, reaching the loch a second time, fished round it, and found that the long summer day had come to an end. He set off for his home again with his fishing-basket full, and confessing somewhat to weariness. Passing near a farm-house whose inmates he knew (for he had formed acquaintance with all), he went to get some food. They were in bed, for it was eleven o'clock at night, and after rousing them, the hostess hastened to supply him; but he requested her to get him some whisky and milk. She came with a bottle full, and a can of milk, with a tumbler. Instead of a tumbler, he requested a bowl, and poured the half of the whisky in, along with half the milk. He drank the mixture at a draught, and while his kind hostess was looking on with amazement, he poured the remainder of the whisky and milk into the bowl, and drank that also. He then proceeded homeward, performing a journey of not less than seventy miles." Prodigious! It beat the achievement of Phidippides, who, according to tradition, ran from Athens to Sparta, one hundred and twenty miles, in two days. But here is a street scene, related to his daughter by a lady who saw it, which illustrates the tremendous professor of moral philosophy still further. "One summer afternoon, as she was about to sit down to dinner, her servant requested her to look out of the window, to see a man cruelly beating his horse. The sight not being a very gratifying one, she declined, and proceeded to take her seat at table. It was quite evident that the servant had discovered something more than the ill-usage of the horse to divert his attention, for he kept his eyes fixed on the window, again suggesting to his mistress that she ought to look out. Her interest was at length excited, and she rose to see what was going on. In front of her house (Moray Place) stood a cart of coals, which the poor victim of the carter was unable to drag along. He had been beating the beast most unmercifully, when at that moment Professor Wilson, walking past, had seen the outrage and immediately interfered. The lady said that from the expression of his face, and vehemence of his manner, the man was evidently 'getting it,' though she was unable to hear what was said. The carter, exasperated at this interference, took up his whip in a threatening way, as if with the intent to strike the professor. In an instant that well-nerved hand twisted it from the coarse fist of the man as if it had been a straw, and walking quietly up to the cart he unfastened its trams, and hurled the whole weight of coals into the street. The rapidity with which this was done left the driver of the cart speechless. Meanwhile, poor Rosinante, freed from his burden, crept slowly away, and the professor, still clutching the whip in one hand, and leading the horse in the other, proceeded through Moray Place to deposit the wretched animal in better keeping than that of his driver." Another of his "interferences" occurred during vacation time, in the south of Scotland, when the professor had exchanged the gown for the old "sporting jacket." "On his return to Edinburgh, he was obliged to pass through Hawick, where, on his arrival, finding it to be fair-day, he readily availed himself of the opportunity to witness the amusements going on. These happened to include a 'little mill' between two members of the local 'fancy.' His interest in pugilism attracted him to the spot, where he soon discovered something very wrong, and a degree of injustice being perpetrated which he could not stand. It was the work of a moment to espouse the weaker side, a proceeding which naturally drew down upon him the hostility of the opposite party. This result was to him, however, of little consequence. There was nothing for it but to beat or be beaten. He was soon 'in position;' and, before his unknown adversary well knew what was coming, the skilled fist of the professor had planted such a 'facer' as did not require repetition. Another 'round' was not called for; and leaving the discomfited champion to recover at his leisure, the professor walked coolly away to take his seat in the stage-coach, about to start for Edinburgh." Is it any wonder that such a gigantic specimen of human nature was thought by the steady-going and saintly Edinburghers, who tried men by mathematics and the catechism, to be preposterously unfit for the chair of ethics in their hallowed university? They did not know then that the monster they hunted was capable of producing a description of a fairy's funeral—one of the most exquisite bits of prose composition in literature, which is said to have so impressed Lord Jeffrey's mind that he never was tired of repeating it. Read it, and say you if anybody but Christopher North could have written it: "There it was, on a little river island, that once, whether sleeping or waking we know not, we saw celebrated a fairy's funeral. First we heard small pipes playing, as if no bigger than hollow rushes that whisper to the night winds; and more piteous than aught that trills from earthly instrument was the scarce audible dirge! It seemed to float over the stream, every foam-bell emitting a plaintive note, till the fairy anthem came floating over our couch, and then alighting without footsteps among the heather. The pattering of little feet was then heard, as if living creatures were arranging themselves in order, and then there was nothing but a more ordered hymn. The harmony was like the melting of musical dew-drops, and sang, without words, of sorrow and death. We opened our eyes, or rather sight came to them when closed, and dream was vision. Hundreds of creatures, no taller than the crest of the lapwing, and all hanging down their veiled heads, stood in a circle on a green plat among the rocks; and in the midst was a bier, framed as it seemed of flowers unknown to the Highland hills; and on the bier a fairy lying with uncovered face, pale as a lily, and motionless as the snow. The dirge grew fainter and fainter, and then died quite away; when two of the creatures came from the circle, and took their station, one at the head, the other at the foot of the bier. They sang alternate measures, not louder than the twitter of the awakened woodlark before it goes up the dewy air, but dolorous and full of the desolation of death. The flower-bier stirred; for the spot on which it lay sank slowly down, and in a few moments the greensward was smooth as ever, the very dews glittering above the buried fairy. A cloud passed over the moon; and, with a choral lament, the funeral troop sailed duskily away, heard afar off, so still was the midnight solitude of the glen. Then the disenthralled Orchy began to rejoice as before, through all her streams and falls; and at the sudden leaping of the waters and outbursting of the moon, we awoke."