Chapter XIII: Part II: I. Clouds in the Horizon (4)

[9] The autopsy exhibited the same appearance generally discovered in those subjects whose death has been caused by the fever of the country: the brain was watery, the veins of the head were gorged, and the liver was soft. No signs of poison were discovered; the death of the Emperor was in the course of nature.

[10] The French authorities would have removed the trophies of Napoleon's victories, and the commemoration of the Russian share in the disastrous days of Jena and Austerlitz. The Emperor Alexander magnanimously replied, "No, let them remain: it is sufficient that I have passed over the bridge with my army!" A noble and generous reply. Few princes have effaced public wrongs so completely, or used their opportunity of making reprisals so mercifully. (See Chateaubriand's Autobiography.)

FALLEN GENIUS.

BY MISS ALICE CAREY.

No tears for him!--he saw by faith sublime
Through the wan shimmer of life's wasted flame,
Across the green hills of the future time,
The golden breaking of the morn of fame.

Faded by the diviner life, and worn,
The dust has fallen away, and ye but see
The ruins of the house wherein were borne
The birth-pangs of an immortality.

His great life from the wondrous life to be,
Clasped the bright splendors that no sorrow mars,
As some pale, shifting column of the sea,
Mirrors the awful beauty of the stars.

What was Love's lily pressure, what the light
Of its pleased smile, that a chance breath may chill?
His soul was mated with the winds of night,
And wandered through the universe at will.

Oft in his heart its stormy passion woke,
Yet from its bent his soul no more was stirred,
Than is the broad green bosom of the oak
By the light flutter of the summer bird.

His loves were of forbidden realms, unwrought
In poet's rhyme, the music of his themes,
Hovering about the watch-fires of his thought,
On the dim borders of the land of dreams.

For while his hand with daring energy
Fed the slow fire that, burning, must consume,
The ravishing joys of unheard harmony
Beat like a living pulse within the tomb.

Pillars of fire that wander through life's night,
Children of genius! ye are doomed to be,
In the embrace of your far-reaching light,
Locking the radiance of eternity.

From the London Times.

COPENHAGEN.

A more stately city than Copenhagen can scarcely be imagined. The streets, wide and long, filled with spacious and lofty houses of unspotted whiteness, and built with great regularity, remind one somewhat of Bath, but that the ground is level; many of them all but equal, in breadth, to the Irishman's test of street architecture--Sackville-street, Dublin. But large squares break up their continuous lines, and the eye rests on fine statues, noble palaces, and splendid buildings devoted to the arts, to amusement, to justice, or to the purposes of religion in every quarter of the city. Copenhagen is but a creation of the last century, and, after a little time spent there, a large portion of it gives the idea that it was built all of a sudden, by some Danish Grissell and Peto, according to contract. Surrounded by a deep foss, by ramparts and intrenchments, defended by formidable forts and batteries, filled with the halls of kings, with churches, museums, and castles, it combines the appearance of a new cut made by the royal commissioners through some old London rookery, with the air of an old feudal town. The moat prohibits any considerable extension. Seen under a bright cold sky, the blanched fronts of the houses, the white walls of the public edifices, the regularity of the streets, conveyed an impression of cleanliness, which could only be destroyed when one happened to look down at his feet, or ceased to keep guard over his nose. The paving is of the style which may be called Titanic, and was never intended for any foot garb less defensive than a _sabot_ or a _caliga_. The drainage is superficial,--that is, all the liquid refuse of the city runs, or rather walks very leisurely, along grooves in the pavement aforesaid, which are covered over by boards in various stages of decomposition. In summer, the city must be worse than Berlin (which, by the by, it very much resembles in many respects). In spring time, after rain, my own experience tells me it suggests forcible reminiscences of the antique odors of Fleet Ditch. One thing which soon strikes the stranger is the apparent want of shops. But they are to be found by those who want them. Nearly every trader carries on his business very modestly in his front parlor, and makes a moderate display of his stock in the ordinary window, so that the illusory and enchanting department of trade is quite gone. A Danish gentleman can walk out with his wife without the least fear that he will fall a victim to "a stupendous sacrifice," or be immolated on the altar of "an imperative necessity to clear out in a week."

Moving through these streets is a quiet, soberly-attired population. Bigger than most foreigners, and with great roundness of muscle and size of bone, your Dane wants the dapper air of the Frenchman, or the solemnity of the Spaniard, while he is not so bearded or so dirty as the German. But then he smokes prodigiously, dresses moderately in the English style, is addicted to jewelry in excess, and has a habit of plodding along, straight in the middle of the road, with his head down, which must be a matter of considerable annoyance to the native cabman. He is, however, amazingly polite. He not only takes off his hat to every one he knows, but gives any lady-acquaintance the trouble of recognizing him, by bowing to her before she has made up her mind whether the individual is known or not. Another of his peculiarities is, that he always has a dog. I should say, more correctly, there is always a dog following him,--for I have seen an animal, which seemed to be bound by the closest ties to a particular gentleman, placidly leave him at the corner of a street, and set off on an independent walk by itself. These dogs are, in fact, a feature of the place by themselves. In number they can only be excelled by the canine scavengers of Cairo or Constantinople, and in mongrelness and ugliness by no place in the world--not even in Tuum before the potato rot. They get up little extemporary hunts through the squares, the trail being generally the remnant of an old rat, carried away by the foremost, and dash between your legs from unexpected apertures in walls and houses, so as to cause very unpleasant consequences to the nervous or feeble sojourner. On seeking for an explanation of their great abundance, I was informed that they were kept to kill rats. But this is a mere delusion. These dogs are far too wise to lose their health by keeping late hours in pursuit of vermin. No, they retire as soon as darkness sets in, and with darkness, out come the rats in the most perfect security. Such rats! they are as big as kittens, and their squeaking under the wooden planks of the gutters as you walk home is perfectly amazing. The celebrated dog Billy would have died in a week of violent exercise in any one street in Copenhagen, giving him his usual allowance of murder. I must say that, in the matters of paving, dogs, rats, sewers, water, and lights, Copenhagen is rather behind the rest of the world. As to the lights, they are sparely placed, and as yet gas is not used. With a laudable economy, the oil-wicks are extinguished when the moon shines, and the result is, that sometimes an envious cloud leaves the whole city in Cimmerian darkness for the rest of the night, in consequence of five minutes' moonshine in the early part, as, once put out, they are not again relumed.

In the crowd you meet many pale, sorrow-stricken women in mourning, and now and then a poor soldier limps before you, with recent bandages on his stump, or hobbles along limpingly, with perhaps a sabre-cut across the face, or an empty coat-sleeve dangling from his shoulder; and then you remember all the horrors the late war must have caused Denmark, when, out of her small population, 90,000 men were under arms in the field. It can scarcely atone for this sight to meet dashing hussars, with their red coats and sheepskin calpacks; heavy dragoons in light-blue and dark-green; jagers in smart frocks of olive-green, decorated with stars and ribands, and swaggering along in all the pride of having smelt powder and done their duty. They are numerous enough, indeed every third man is a soldier; but one of these sad widows or orphans is an antidote to the glories of these fine heroes, scarcely less powerful than that of the spectacle of their mutilated and mangled comrades. This war has roused the national spirit of Denmark; it has caused her to make a powerful effort to shake off all connection with Germany, or dependence on her Germanic subjects, but it has cost her L5,000,000 of money, and it has left many a home desolate for ever.

From Household Words.

THE SHADOW OF LUCY HUTCHINSON.

There are some books that leave upon the mind a strange impression, one of the most delightful reading can produce--a haunting of the memory, it may be, by one form or by several, strangely real, having a positive personal presence and identity, yet always preserving an immaterial existence, and occupying a "removed ground," from which they never stir to mingle with the realities of recollection. These shadows hold their place apart, as some rare dreams do, claiming from us an indescribable tenderness.

The "Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson" is such a book. In many passages it is tedious--a record of petty strategies of partisan warfare--and, more dreary still, of factious jealousies and polemical hatreds. The absolute truth of the book is fatal, in one direction to our hero-worship. The leaders of the Great Rebellion, in such minute details, appear as mere schemers, as rival agents at a borough election; and the most fervent in professions of religious zeal are as bitter in their revenges as the heroes of a hundred scalps; but there arises out of the book, and is evermore associated with it, the calm quiet shadow of a woman of exquisite purity, of wondrous constancy, of untiring affection--Lucy Hutchinson, its writer.

John Hutchinson is at Richmond, lodging at the house of his music-master. He is twenty-two years of age. The village is full of "good company," for the young Princes are being educated in the palace, and many "ingenious persons entertained themselves at that place." The music-master's house is the resort of the king's musicians; "and divers of the gentlemen and ladies that were affected with music came thither to hear." There was a little girl "tabled" in the same house with John Hutchinson, who was taking lessons of the lutanist--a charming child, full of vivacity and intelligence. She told John she had an elder sister--a studious and retiring person--who was gone with her mother, Lady Apsley, into Wiltshire--and Lucy was going to be married, she thought. The little girl ever talked of Lucy--and the gentlemen talked of Lucy--and one day a song was sung which Lucy had written--and John and the vivacious child walked, another day, to Lady Apsley's house, and there, in a closet, were Lucy's Latin books. Mr. Hutchinson grew in love with Lucy's image; and when the talk was more rife that she was about to be married--and some said that she was indeed married--he became unhappy--and "began to believe there was some magic in the place, which enchanted men out of their right senses; but the sick heart could not be chid nor advised into health." At length Lucy and her mother came home; and Lucy was not married. Then John and Lucy wandered by the pleasant banks of the Thames, in that spring-time of 1638, and a "mutual friendship" grew up between them. Lucy now talked to him of her early life; how she had been born in the Tower of London, of which her late father, Sir John Apsley, was the governor; how her mother was the benefactress of the prisoners, and delighted to mitigate the hard fortune of the noble and the learned, and especially Sir Walter Raleigh, by every needful help to his studies and amusements; how she herself grew serious amongst these scenes, and delighted in nothing but reading, and would never practise her lute or harpsichords, and absolutely hated her needle. John was of a like serious temper. Their fate was determined.

The spring is far advanced into summer. On a certain day the friends on both sides meet to conclude the terms of the marriage. Lucy is not to be seen. She has taken the small-pox. She is very near death. At length John is permitted to speak to his betrothed. Tremblingly and mournfully she comes into his presence. She is "the most deformed person that could be seen." Who could tell the result in words so touching as Lucy's own? "He was nothing troubled at it, but married her as soon as she was able to quit the chamber, when the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look on her. But God recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her; though she was longer than ordinary before she recovered to be as well as before."

They were married on the 3d of July, 1638.

In the autumn of 1641, John and Lucy Hutchinson are living in their own house of Owthorpe, in Nottinghamshire. They have two sons. They are "peaceful and happy." John has dedicated two years since his marriage to the study of "school divinity." He has convinced himself of "the great point of predestination." This faith has not, as his wife records, produced a "carelessness of life in him," but "a more strict and holy walking." He applies himself, in his house at Owthorpe, "to understand the things then in dispute" between the King and Parliament. He is satisfied of the righteousness of the Parliament's cause; but he then "contents himself with praying for peace." In another year the King has set up his standard in Nottingham; the battle of Edgehill has been fought; all hope of peace is at an end. John Hutchinson is forced out of his quiet habitation by the suspicions of his royalist neighbors. He is marked as a Roundhead. Lucy does not like the name. "It was very ill applied to Mr. Hutchinson, who having naturally a very fine thick-set head of hair, kept it clean and handsome, so that it was a great ornament to him; although the godly of those days, when he embraced their party, would not allow him to be religious because his hair is not in their cut." The divinity student now becomes a lieutenant-colonel. He raises a company of "very honest godly men." The Earl of Chesterfield is plundering the houses of the Puritans in the vale of Belvoir, near Owthorpe; and the young colonel has apprehensions for the safety of his family. In the depth of winter, a troop of horse arrive one night at the lonely house where Lucy and her children abide. They are hastily summoned to prepare for an instant journey. They are to ride to Nottingham before sunrise, for the soldiers are not strong enough to march in the day. Lucy is henceforth to be the companion of her husband in his perilous office--his friend, his comforter--a ministering angel amongst the fierce and dangerous spirits, whom he sways by a remarkable union of courage and gentleness.

Let us look at the shadow of Lucy Hutchinson. She tranquilly sits in one of the upper chambers of the old and ruinous castle of which her husband is appointed governor. It is a summer evening of 1643. In that tower, built upon the top of the rock, tradition says that Queen Isabel received her paramour Mortimer; and at the base of the rock are still shown Mortimer's Well, and Mortimer's Hole, as Lady Hutchinson saw them two centuries ago. She looks out of the narrow windows by which her chamber is lighted. There is the Trent, peacefully flowing on one side, amid flat meadows. On the other is the town of Nottingham. The governor has made the ruinous castle a strong fortress, with which he can defy the Cavaliers should they occupy the town beneath. Opposite the towers is the old church of St. Nicholas, whose steeple commands the platform of the castle. The Governor has sent away his horse, and many of his foot, to guard the roads by which the enemy could approach Nottingham. There is no appearance of danger. The reveille is beat. Those who have been watching all night lounge into the town. It is in the possession of the Cavaliers. The scene is changed. The din of ordnance rouses Lucy from her calm gaze upon the windings of the Trent. For five days and nights there is firing without intermission. Within the walls of the castle there are not more than eighty men. The musketeers on St. Nicholas steeple pick off the cannoniers at their guns.

Now and then, as the assailants are beaten from the walls, they leave a wounded man behind, and he is dragged into the castle. On the sixth day, after that terrible period of watchfulness, relief arrives. The Cavaliers are driven from the town with much slaughter, and the castle is filled with prisoners. Lucy has been idle during those six days of peril. There was a task to be performed,--a fitting one for woman's tenderness. Within the castle was a dungeon called the Lion's Den, into which the prisoners were cast; and as they were brought up from the town, two of the fanatical ministers of the garrison reviled and maltreated them. Lucy reads the commands of her Master after another fashion. As the prisoners are carried bleeding to the Lion's Den, she implores that they should be brought in to her, and she binds up and dresses their wounds. And now the two ministers mutter--and their souls abhor to see this favor done to the enemies of God--and they teach the soldiers to mutter. But Lucy says, "I have done nothing but my duty. These are our enemies, but they are our fellow-creatures. Am I to be upbraided for these poor humanities?" And then she breathes a thanksgiving to Heaven that her mother had taught her this humble surgery. There is a tear in John's eye as he gazes on this scene. That night the Cavalier officers sup with him, rather as guests than as prisoners.

In the vale of Belvoir, about seven miles from Belvoir Castle, is the little village of Owthorpe. When Colonel Hutchinson returned to the house of his fathers, after the war was ended, he found it plundered of all its movables--a mere ruin. In a few years it is a fit dwelling for Lucy to enjoy a lifelong rest, after the terrible storms of her early married days. There is no accusing spirit to disturb their repose. John looks back upon that solemn moment when he signed the warrant for the great tragedy enacted before Whitehall without remorse. He had prayed for "an enlightened conscience," and he had carried out his most serious convictions. He took no part in the despotic acts that followed the destruction of the monarchy. He had no affection for the fanatics who held religion to be incompatible with innocent pleasures and tasteful pursuits. At Owthorpe, then, he lived the true life of an English gentleman. He built--he planted--he adorned his house with works of art--he was the first magistrate--the benefactor of the poor. The earnest man who daily expounded the Scriptures to his household was no ascetic. There was hospitality within those walls--with music and revelry. The Puritans looked gloomily and suspiciously upon the dwellers at Owthorpe. The Cavaliers could not forgive the soldier who had held Nottingham Castle against all assaults.

The Restoration comes. The royalist connexions of Lucy Hutchinson have a long struggle to save her husband's life; but he is finally included in the Act of Oblivion. He is once more at Owthorpe, without the compromise of his principles. He has done with political strife for ever.

On the 31st of October 1663, there is a coach waiting before the hall of Owthorpe. That hall is filled with tenants and laborers. Their benefactor cheerfully bids them farewell; but his wife and children are weeping bitterly. That coach is soon on its way to London with the husband and wife, and their eldest son and daughter. At the end of the fourth day's journey, at the gates of that fortress within which she had been born, Lucy Hutchinson is parted from him whose good and evil fortunes she had shared for a quarter of a century.

About a mile from Deal stands Sandown Castle. In 1664, Colonel Hutchinson is a prisoner within its walls. It was a ruinous place, not weatherproof. The tide washed the dilapidated fortress; the windows were unglazed; cold, and damp, and dreary was the room where the proud heart bore up against physical evils. For even here there was happiness. Lucy is not permitted to share his prison; but she may visit him daily. In the town of Deal abides that faithful wife. She is with him at the first hour of the morning; she remains till the latest of night. In sunshine or in storm, she is pacing along that rugged beach, to console and be consoled.

Eleven months have thus passed, when Lucy is persuaded by her husband to go to Owthorpe to see her children.

"When the time of her departure came, she left with a very sad and ill-presaging heart." In a few weeks John Hutchinson is laid in the family vault in that Vale of Belvoir.

Lucy Hutchinson sits in holy resignation in the old sacred home. She has a task to work out. She has to tell her husband's history, for the instruction of her children:--"I that am under a command not to grieve at the common rate of desolate women, while I am studying which way to moderate my woe, and, if it were possible, to augment my love, can, for the present, find out none more just to your dear father, nor consolatory to myself, than the preservation of his memory."

So rests her shadow, ever, in our poor remembrance.

From Eliza Cook's Journal.

THE WIVES OF SOUTHEY, COLERIDGE, AND LOVELL.

Southey, Coleridge, and Lovell, three poets, married three sisters, the Misses Fricker of Bristol. They were all alike poor when they married. Southey's aunt shut her door in his face when she found he was resolved on marrying in such circumstances; and he, postponing entry upon the married life, though he had contracted the responsibility of husband, parted from his wife at the church door, and set out on a six months' visit to Portugal, preparatory to entering on the study of the legal profession. Southey committed his maiden wife to the care of Mr. Cottle's sisters during his absence. "Should I perish by shipwreck," he wrote from Falmouth to Mr. Cottle, "or by any other casualty, I have relations whose prejudice will yield to the anguish of affection, and who will love, cherish, and give all possible consolation to my widow." With these words Southey set sail for Portugal, and his wife, who had persuaded him to go, and cried when he was going, though she would not then have permitted him to stay, meekly retired to her place of refuge, wearing her wedding-ring round her neck.

Southey returned to England, and commenced the study of the law, but after a year's drudgery gave it up. His wife joined him in a second visit to Portugal, and on his return he commenced the laborious literary career which he pursued till his death. He enjoyed on the whole a happy married life; took pleasure in his home and his family; loving his children and his wife Edith dearly. This is one of his own pictures:--"Glance into the little room where sits the gray-haired man, 'working hard and getting little--a bare maintenance, and hardly that; writing poems and history for posterity with his whole heart and soul; one daily progressing in learning, not so learned as he is poor, not so poor as proud, not so proud as happy.'" Great men have invited him to London, and he is now answering the invitation. The thought of the journey plagues him. "Oh dear, oh dear!" he writes, "there is such a comfort in one's old coat and old shoes, one's own chair and own fireside, one's own writing-desk and own library--with a little girl climbing up to my neck and saying, 'Don't go to London, papa, you must stay with Edith'--and a little boy whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, dogs, cuckoos, jackasses, &c., before he can articulate a word of his own--there is such a comfort in all these things, that _transportation_ to London seems a heavier punishment than any sins of mine deserve." But a sad calamity fell upon him in his old age. His dear Edith was suddenly bereft of reason. "Forty years," he writes to Grosvenor Bedford from York, "has she been the life of my life--and I have left her this day in a lunatic asylum." In the same letter he expresses the resignation of a Christian and the confident courage of a man. "God, who has visited me with this affliction," he says, "has given me strength to bear it, and will, _I know_, support me to the end, whatever that may be. To-morrow I return to my poor children. I have much to be thankful for under this visitation. For the first time in my life (he was sixty years old) I am so far beforehand with the world that my means are provided for the whole of next year, and that I can meet this expenditure, considerable in itself, without any difficulty."

Mrs. Southey, after two years' absence, returned to Keswick, the family home, and closed her pitiable existence there. Southey was now a broken-down man. "There is no one," he mournfully writes, "to partake with me the recollections of the best and happiest portion of my life; and for that reason, were there no other, such recollections must henceforth be purely painful, except when I collect them with the prospects of futurity." Two years after, however, Southey married again: the marriage was one of respect on the part of Caroline Bowles, the gifted authoress, who was his choice, and probably of convenience and friendship on the part of Southey. We have heard that the union greatly tended to his comfort, and that his wife tenderly soothed and cheered his declining years.

Southey, in addition to maintaining his own wife and family at Keswick by his literary labors, had the families of his two sisters-in-law occasionally thrown upon his hands. He was not two-and-twenty when Mr. Lovell, who married his wife's sister, fell ill of fever, died, and left his widow and child without the slightest provision. Robert Southey took mother and child at once to his humble hearth, and there the former found happiness until his death. Coleridge, not sufficiently instructed by a genius to which his contemporaries did homage, in a wayward and unpardonable mood withdrew himself from the consolations of home; and in their hour of desertion his wife and children were saved half the knowledge of their hardships by finding a second husband and another father in the sanctuary provided for them by Robert Southey.

Coleridge was unpunctual, unbusiness-like, improvident, and dreamy, to the full extent to which poets are said proverbially to be. When he married--his pantisocratic Owenite scheme having just been exploded, and his lectures at Bristol having proved a failure--he retired with Sara Fricker, his wife, to a cottage at Clevedon, near Bristol. Though the cottage was a poor one, consisting of little more than four bare walls, for which he paid only L5 annual rental, he and his wife made it pretty snug with the aid of the funds supplied by their constant friend, Mr. Cottle, the Bristol bookseller. Coleridge decorated this cottage with all the graces that his imagination and fancy could throw around it. It is alluded to in many of his poems:--

"Low was our pretty cot! our tallest rose
Peep'd at the chamber window. We could hear
At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,
The sea's faint murmur. In the open air
Our myrtles blossom'd, and across the porch
Thick jasmines twin'd: the little landscape round
Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye.
It was a spot which you might aptly call
The valley of seclusion."

But his loved young wife was not forgotten; for again he sings:--

"My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclin'd
Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is
To sit beside our cot--our cot o'ergrown
With white-flowered jasmine, and the broad leav'd myrtle
(Meet emblems they of innocence and love!)
And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve,
Serenely brilliant (such should wisdom be!)
Shine opposite."

Here their first child was born--Hartley, the dreamer--on whom the happy parent shed tears of joy:--

"But when I saw it on its mother's arm,
And hanging at her bosom (she the while
Bent o'er its features with a tearful smile,)
Then I was thrill'd and melted, and most warm
Impress'd a father's kiss; and all beguil'd
Of dark remembrance and presageful fear,
I seem'd to see an angel's form appear--
'Twas even thine, beloved woman mild!
So for the mother's sake the child was dear,
And dearer was the mother for the child."

But writing poetry, reading Hartley and Condillac, would not make the poet's pot boil at all briskly, and so he had to go a little nearer to the world, and went back to Bristol. Coleridge, however, wanted application, and could scarcely be induced to work, even though the prospect of liberal remuneration was offered to him. Hence, a few years after marriage, in July, 1796, we find him thus groaning in the spirit to a friend: "It is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful if He had made me a journeyman shoemaker, instead of an author, by trade. I have left my friends, I have left plenty," &c. "So I am forced to write for bread! with the nights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan from my wife--groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quickset of embarrassments, and whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me! The future is a cloud and thick darkness! Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread looking up to me," &c. This was not the kind of spirit to make a wife happy--very different indeed from the manly, courageous, and self-helping Southey--and the poor wife suffered much. Whatever Coleridge touched failed: his fourpenny paper, the _Watchman_, was an abortion; and the verses he wrote for a London paper did little for him. He next preached for a short time among the Unitarians, deriving a very precarious living from that source; when at length the Messrs. Wedgwood, struck by his great talents, granted him an annuity of L150 to enable him to devote himself to study. Then he went to Germany, leaving his wife and little family to the hospitality of Southey; and returned and settled down to the precarious life of a writer for the newspapers: his eloquent conversation producing unbounded admiration, but very little "grist." He was often distressed for money, wasting what he had by indulgence in opium, to which he was at one time a fearful victim. The great and unquestionable genius of Coleridge was expended chiefly on projections. He was a man who was capable of greatly adorning the literature of his time, and of creating an altogether new era in its history; but he could not or would not work, and his life was passed in dreamy idleness, in self-inflicted poverty, often in poignant misery, in gloomy regrets, and in unfulfilled designs. We fear the life of Mrs. Coleridge was not a happy one, good and affectionate though she was as a wife and mother.

MY NOVEL: OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.[11]

BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON.