check my grate with brick-bats. Instead of hanging my room with pictures, I intend to adorn it with maxims of frugality. Those will make pretty furniture enough, and won't be a bit too expensive; for I shall draw them all out with my own hands, and my landlady's daughter shall frame them with the parings of my black waistcoat. Each maxim is to be inscribed on a sheet of clean paper, and wrote with my best pen, of which the following will serve as a specimen: "Look sharp"; "Mind the main

chance"; "Money is money now"; "If you

have a thousand pounds, you can put your hands by your sides and say you are worth a thousand pounds every day of the year"; "Take a farthing from a hundred, and it will be a hundred no longer." Thus, which way soever I turn my eyes they are sure to meet one of those friendly monitors; and as we are told of an actor who hung his room round with looking-glass to correct the defects of his person, my apartment shall be furnished in a peculiar manner, to correct the errors of my mind.

Faith! Madam, I heartily wish to be rich, if it were only for this reason—to say without a blush how much I esteem you; but alas! I have

many a fatigue to encounter before that happy time comes, when your poor old simple friend may again give a loose to the luxuriance of his nature, sitting by Kilmore fireside, recount the various adventures of a hard-fought life, laugh over the follies of the day, join his flute to your harpsichord, and forget that ever he starved in those streets where Butler and Otway starved bofere him.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR TO ROBERT SOUTHEY. FLORENCE, April 11, 1825.

Taylor's first villainy in making me disappoint the person with whom I had agreed for the pictures instigated me to throw my fourth volume, in its imperfect state, into the fire, and and has cost me nine tenths of my fame as a writer. His next villainy will entail perhaps a Chancery suit on my children,-for at its commencement I blow my brains out. Mr. Hazlitt, Mr. Leigh Hunt, Lord Dillon, Mr. Brown, and some other authors of various kinds, have been made acquainted, one from another, with this whole affair, and they speak of it as a thing unprecedented. It is well that I rewrote the "Tiberius and Vipsania" before Taylor gave

me a fresh proof of his intolerable roguery. This cures me for ever, if I live, of writing what could be published; and I will take good care that my son shall not suffer in the same way. Not a line of any kind will I leave behind me. My children shall be carefully warned against literature. To fence, to swim, to speak French, are the most they shall learn.

ROBERT SOUTHEY TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD. BRISTOL, April 3, 1803.

I love old houses best, for the sake of the odd closets and cupboards, and good thick walls that don't let the wind blow in, and little outof-the-way polyangular rooms, with great beams running across the ceiling-old heart of oak, that has outlasted half a score of generations; and chimney-pieces with the date of the year carved above them, and huge fire-places that warmed the shins of Englishmen before the house of Hanover came over. The most delightful associations that ever made me feel, and think, and fall a-dreaming, are excited by old buildings-not absolute ruins, but in a state of decline. Even the clipped yews interest me; and if I found one in any garden that should

become mine, in the shape of a peacock, I should be as proud to keep his tail well spread as the man who first carved him. In truth, I am more disposed to connect myself by sympathy with the ages which are past, and by hope with those that are to come, than to vex and irritate myself by any lively interest about the existing generation. . .

ROBERT SOUTHEY TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

GRETA HALL, March 12, 1804.

. You would rejoice with me were you now at Keswick, at the tidings that a box of books is safely harbored in the Mersey, so that for the next fortnight I shall be more interested in the news of Fletcher* than of Bonaparte. It contains some duplicates of the lost cargo; among them, the collection of the old Spanish poems, in which is a metrical romance upon the Cid. I shall sometimes want you for a Gothic etymology. Talk of the happiness of getting a great prize in the lottery! What is that to the opening a box of books! The joy upon lifting up the cover must be something like what we shall feel when Peter the Porter opens the door

*A Keswick carrier.

up-stairs, and says, "Please to walk in, sir." That I shall never be paid for my labor is tolerably certain; but if any one should offer me £10,000 to forego that labor, I should bid him and his money to go to the devil, for twice the sum could not purchase me half the enjoyment. It will be a great delight to me in the next world to take a fly and visit these old worthies, who are my only society here, and to tell them what excellent company I found them here at the lakes of Cumberland, two centuries after they had been dead and turned to dust. In plain truth, I exist more among the dead than the living, and think more about them, and, perhaps, feel more about them.

ROBERT SOUTHEY TO NICHOLAS LIGHTFOOT.

KESWICK, April 24, 1807.

Your last letter is fourteen months old, and they may have brought forth so many changes that I almost fear to ask for my godchild, Fanny. During that time I have had a son born into the world, and baptized into the Church by the name of Herbert, who is now six months old, and bids fair to be as noisy a fellow as his father-which is saying something;