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wine at his own table. So far, all was right. But doubtless, on such a system, under the known habits of modern life, it should have been made a rule to ask no man to dinner: for to force men, without warning, to a single (and, therefore, thoroughly useless) act of painful abstinence, is what neither I nor any man can have a right to do. In point of sense, it is, in fact, precisely the freak of Sir Roger De Coverley, who drenches his friend the Spectator" with a hideous decoction: not, as his confiding visiter had supposed, for some certain and immediate benefit to follow, but simply as having a tendency (if well supported by many years' continuance of similar drenches) to abate the remote contingency of the stone. Hear this, ye Gods of the Future. I am required to perform a most difficult sacrifice; and forty years hence I may, by persisting so long, have some dim chance of reward. One day's abstinence could do no good on any scheme: and no man was likely to offer himself for a second. However, such being the law of the castle, and that law well known to Coleridge, he, nevertheless, thought fit to ask to dinner Colonel (then Captain) Pasley, of the Engineers, well known in those days for his book on the "Military Policy of England;" and since, for his "System of Professional Instruction." Now, where or in what land abides that

"Captain, or Colonel, or Knight-in-arms,"

to whom wine in the analysis of dinner is a neutral or indifferent element? Wine, therefore, as it was not of a nature to be omitted, Coleridge took care to furnish at his own private cost. And so far, again, all was right. But why must Coleridge give his dinner to the captain in Mr Montagu's house? There lay the affront; and, doubtless, it was a very inconsiderate act on the part of Coleridge. I report the case simply as it was then generally borne

upon the breath, not of scandal, but of jest and merriment. The result, however, was no jest; for bitter words ensued words that festered in the remembrance; and a rupture between the parties followed, which no reconciliation has ever healed.

Meantime, on reviewing this story, as generally adopted by the learned in literary scandal, one demur rises up. Dr Parr, a lisping Whig pedant, without personal dignity or conspicuous power of mind, was a frequent and privileged inmate at Mr Montagu's. Him now-this Parr— there was no conceivable motive for enduring; that point is satisfactorily settled by the pompous inanities of his works. Yet, on the other hand, his habits were in their own nature far less endurable than Samuel Taylor Coleridge's; for the monster smoked; and how? How did the "Birmingham Doctor" * smoke? Not as you, or I, or other civilised people smoke, with a gentle cigar-but with the very coarsest tobacco. And those who know how that abomination lodges and nestles in the draperies of window-curtains, will guess the horror and detestation in which the old Whig's memory is held by all enlightened women. Surely, in a house where the doctor had any toleration at all, Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have enjoyed an unlimited toleration.

"Birmingham Doctor :"-This was a sobriquet imposed on Dr Parr by "The Pursuits of Literature," that most popular of satires at the end of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries. The name had a mixed reference to the doctor's personal connection with Warwickshire, but chiefly to the doctor's spurious and windy imitation of Dr Johnson. He was viewed as the Birmingham (or mock) Dr Johnson. Why the word Birmingham has come for the last sixty or seventy years to indicate in every class of articles the spurious in opposition to the genuine, I suppose to have arisen from the Birmingham habit of reproducing all sorts of London or Paris trinkets, bijouterie, &c., in cheaper materials and with inferior workmanship.

CHAPTER V.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

IN 1807 it was, at the beginning of winter, that I first saw William Wordsworth. I have already mentioned that I had introduced myself to his notice by letter as early as the spring of 1803. To this hour it has continued, I believe, a mystery to Wordsworth, why it was that I suffered an interval of four and a half years to slip away before availing myself of the standing invitation with which I had been honoured to the poet's house. Very probably he accounted for this delay by supposing that the new-born liberty of an Oxford life, with its multiplied enjoyments, acting upon a boy just emancipated from the restraints of a school, and, in one hour, elevated into what we Oxonians so proudly and so exclusively denominate a 'man,"* might have tempted me into pursuits alien

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* At the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges— the civic Oxford, for instance, existing for the sake of the academic Oxford, and not vice versa-it has naturally happened that the students honour with the name of "a man" him only who wears a cap and gown. The word is not used with any reference to physical powers, or to age; but simply to the final object for which the places

from the pure intellectual passions which had so powerfully mastered my youthful heart some years before. Extinguished such a passion could not be; nor could he think, if remembering the fervour with which I had expressed it, the sort of "nympholepsy" which had seized upon me, and which, in some imperfect way, I had avowed with reference to the very lakes and mountains, amongst which the scenery of this most original poetry had chiefly grown up and moved. The very names of the ancient hills-Fairfield, Seat Sandal, Helvellyn, Blencathara, Glaramara; the names of the sequestered glens-such as Borrowdale, Martindale, Mardale, Wasdale, and Ennerdale; but, above all, the shy pastoral recesses, not garishly in the world's eye, like Windermere or Derwentwater, but lurking half unknown to the traveller of that day-Grasmere, for instance, the lovely abode of the poet himself, solitary, and yet sowed, as it were, with a thin diffusion of humble dwellings-here a scattering, and there a clustering, as in the starry heavens-sufficient to afford, at every turn and angle, human remembrances and memorials of time-honoured affections, or of passions (as the "Churchyard amongst the Mountains" will amply demonstrate) not wanting even in scenic and tragical interest-these were so many local spells upon me, equally poetic and elevating with the Miltonic names of Valdarno and Vallombrosa.

Deep are the voices which seem to call, deep is the lesson

are supposed to have first arisen, and to maintain themselves. There is, however, a ludicrous effect produced in some instances by the use of this term in contradistinguishing parties. "Was he a man?” is a frequent question; and as frequent in the mouth of a stripling under nineteen, speaking, perhaps, of a huge elderly tradesman— 'Oh, no! not a man at all."

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which would be taught even to the most thoughtless of

men

"Could field, or grove, or any spot of earth, Show to his eye an image of the pangs Which it hath witness'd; render back an echo Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod."* Meantime, my delay was due to anything rather than to waning interest. On the contrary, the real cause of my delay was the too great profundity, and the increasing profundity, of my interest in this regeneration of our national poetry; and the increasing awe, in due proportion to the decaying thoughtlessness of boyhood, which possessed me for the character of its author. So far from neglecting Wordsworth, it is a fact that twice I had undertaken a long journey expressly for the purpose of paying my respects to Wordsworth; twice I came so far as the little rustic inn (then the sole inn of the neighbourhood) at Church Coniston; and on neither occasion could I summon confidence enough to present myself before him. It was not that I had any want of proper boldness for facing the most numerous company of a mixed or ordinary character: reserved, indeed, I was, perhaps even shy-from the character of my mind, so profoundly meditative, and the character of my life, so profoundly sequestered-but still, from counteracting causes, I was not deficient in a reasonable self-confidence towards the world generally. But the very image of Wordsworth, as I prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as before Elijah or St Paul. Twice, as I have said, did I advance as far as the Lake of Coniston; which is about eight miles

* See the divine passage (in the Sixth Book of "The Excursion") beginning

"Ah, what a lesson to a thoughtless man," &c.

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