him, if that portrait ever resembled him. He had a long pale face, with prominent drooping nose, anxious and somewhat staring eyes, and a mouth turning down at the corners. I believe there was not an honester man in the world, or one of an acuter intellect, short of the mischief that had been done it by a melancholy temperament and a superstitious training. It is distressing, in the work alluded to, to see what a torment the intellect may be rendered to itself by its own sharpness, in its efforts to make its way to conclusions, equally unnecessary to discover and impossible to be arrived at.

But, perhaps, there was something naturally selftormenting in the state of Mr. White's blood.

The

first time I met him at a friend's house, he was suffering under the calumnies of his countrymen; and though of extremely gentle manners in ordinary, he almost startled me by suddenly turning round, and saying, in one of those incorrect foreign sentences which force one to be relieved while they startle, "If they proceed more, I will go mad."

In like manner, while he was giving me the Holland-house invitation, and telling me of the amusement derived from the pathetic cod's head and shoulders, he looked so like the piscatory bust which he was describing, that with all my respect for his patriotism and his sorrows, I could not help partaking of the unlucky tendency of my country

men to be amused, in spite of myself, with the involuntary burlesque.

Mr. White, on his arrival in England, was so anxious a student of the language, that he noted down in a pocket-book every phrase which struck him as remarkable. Observing the words "Cannon Brewery" on premises then standing in Knightsbridge, and taking the figure of a cannon which was over them, as the sign of the commodity dealt in, he put down as a nicety of speech," The English brew cannon."

Another time, seeing maid-servants walking with children in a nursery-garden, he rejoiced in the progeny-loving character of the people among whom he had come, and wrote down, "Public gardens provided for nurses, in which they take the children to walk."

This gentleman, who had been called "Blanco" in Spain-which was a translation of his family name "White," and who afterwards wrote an excellent English book of entertaining letters on the Peninsula, under the Græco-Spanish appellation of Don Leucadio Doblado (White Doubled)--was author of a sonnet which Coleridge pronounced to be the best in the English language. I know not what Mr. Wordsworth said on this judgment. Perhaps he wrote fifty sonnets on the spot to disprove it. And in truth it was a bold sentence, and probably spoken

out of a kindly, though not conscious, spirit of The sonnet, nevertheless, is truly

exaggeration.

beautiful.

As I do not like to have such things referred to without being shown them, in case I have not seen them before, I shall do as I would be done by, and lay it before the reader :

"Mysterious night! when our first parent knew
Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,—
This glorious canopy of light and blue?

Yet, 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,

Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame
Hesperus, with the host of heaven, came,
And, lo! creation widened in Man's view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed,

That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind!
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life ?"

VOL. II.

I

CHAPTER XIII.

THE REGENT AND THE EXAMINER.

"The Prince on St. Patrick's Day."-Indictment for an attack on the Regent in that article.-Present feelings of the writer on the subject.-Real sting of the offence in the article.-Sentence of the proprietors of the Examiner to an imprisonment for two years. Their rejection of two proposals of compromise.-Lord Ellenborough, Mr. Garrow, and Mr. Justice Grose.

EVERYTHING having been thus prepared by myself, as well as by others, for a good blow at the Examiner, the ministers did not fail to strike it.

There was an annual dinner of the Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, at which the Prince of Wales's name used to be the reigning and rapturous toast, as that of the greatest friend they possessed in the United Kingdom. He was held to be the jovial advocate of liberality in all things, and sponsor in particular for concession to the Catholic claims. But the Prince of Wales, now become Prince Regent, had retained

the Tory ministers of his father; he had broken life-long engagements; had violated his promises, particular as well as general, those to the Catholics among them; and led in toto a different political life from what had been expected. The name, therefore, which used to be hailed with rapture, was now, at the dinner in question, received with hisses.

An article appeared on the subject in the Examiner ; the attorney-general's eye was swiftly upon the article; and the result to the proprietors was two years' imprisonment, with a fine, to each, of five I shall relate the imprisonment a few pages onward.

hundred pounds.

story of my

Much as it

injured me, I cannot wish that I had evaded it, for I believe that it did good, and I should have suffered far worse in the self-abasement. Neither have I any quarrel, at this distance of time, with the Prince Regent; for though his frivolity, his tergiversation, and his treatment of his wife, will not allow me to respect his memory, I am bound to pardon it as I do my own faults, in consideration of the circumstances which mould the character of every human being. Could I meet him in some odd corner of the Elysian fields, where charity had room for both of us, I should first apologize to him for having been the instrument in the hand of events for attacking a fellow-creature, and then expect to hear him avow