of society will not permit a parson to give way to his temper in any shape- so he festers in himself -his features get a peculiar, diabolical, self-sufficient, iron stupid expression. He is continually acting. His mind is against every man, and every man's mind is against him. He is an hypocrite to the believer and a coward to the unbeliever. He must be either a knave or an idiot—and there is no man so much to be pitied as an idiot parson. The soldier who is cheated into an esprit du corps by a red coat, a band, and colours, for the purpose of nothing, is not half so pitiable as the parson who is led by the nose by the bench of bishops and is smothered in absurditiesa poor, necessary subaltern of the Church. Friday, 18th February.-The day before yesterday I went to Romney street; your mother was not at home. We lead very quiet lives here; Dilke is at present at Greek history and antiquities, and talks of nothing but the elections of Westminster and the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. I never drink above three glasses of wine, and never any spirits and water; though, by the bye, the other day Woodhouse took me to his coffee-house and ordered a bottle of claret. How I like claret! When I can get claret, I must drink it. 'Tis the only palate affair I am at all sensual in. Would it not be a good spec. to send you some vine roots? Could it be done? I'll inquire. If you could make some wine like claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour! It fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness, then goes down cool and feverless. Then, you do not feel it quarreling with one's liver. No; 'tis rather a peace-maker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape. Then it is as fragrant as the queen bee ; and the more ethereal part mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral parts like a bully looking for his trull, and hurrying from door to door, bouncing against the wainscot, but rather walks like Aladdin about his enchanted palace, so gently that you do not feel his step. Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus; this makes him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an Ariadne, for whom Bacchus always kept a good cellar of claret, and even of that he never could persuade her to take above two cups. I said this same claret is the only palatepassion I have. I forgot game; I must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the back-bone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock passim. Talking of game (I wish I could make it), the lady whom I met at Hastings, and of whom I wrote you, I think, has lately sent me many presents of game and enabled me to make as many. She made me take home a pheasant the other day, which I gave to Mrs. Dilke. The next I intend for your mother. I have not said in any letter a word about my own affairs. In a word, I am in no despair about them. My poem has not at all succeeded. In the course of a year or so, I think I shall try the public again. In a selfish point of view, I should suffer my pride and my contempt of public opinion to hold me silent; but for yours and Fanny's sake I will pluck up spirit and try it again. I have no doubt of success in a course of years, if I persevere; but I must be VOL. I. 9 patient; for the reviewers have enervated men's minds and made them indolent; few think for themselves. These reviews are getting more and more powerful, especially the "Quarterly." They are like a superstition which, the more it prostrates the crowd and the longer it continues, the more it becomes powerful, just in proportion to their increasing weakness. I was in hopes that as people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and iniquity of these plagues, they would scout them; but no; they are like the spectators at the Westminster cockpit, they like the battle, and do not care who wins or who loses. On Monday, we had to dinner Severn and Cawthorn, the bookseller and print-virtuoso. In the evening, Severn went home to paint, and we other three went to the play to see Sheil's new tragedy ycleped "Evadne." In the morning, Severn and I took a turn around the Museum. There is a sphinx there of giant size and most voluptuous Egyptian expression; I had not seen it before. The play was bad, even in comparison with 1818, the "Augustan age of the drama." The whole was made up of a virtuous young woman, an indignant brother, a suspecting lover, a libertine prince, a gratuitous villain, a street in Naples, a cypress grove, lilies and roses, virtue and vice, a bloody sword, a spangled jacket, one "Lady Olivia,” one Miss O'Neil alias " Evadne" alias " Bellamira." The play is a fine amusement, as a friend of mine once said to me. "Do what you will," said he, "a poor gentleman who wants a guinea cannot spend his two shillings better than at the play-house." The pantomime was excellent; I had seen it before, and enjoyed it again. Your mother and I had some talk about Miss a lath with a boddice,- she has been fine drawn,— fit for nothing but to be cut up into cribbage-pins; one who is all muslin, all feathers and bone? Once in travelling she was made use of as a linchpin. I hope he will not have her, though it is no uncommon thing to be smitten with a staff; though she might be useful as a walking-stick, his fishingrod, his tooth-pick, his hat stick (she runs so much in his head). Let him turn farmer, she would cut into hurdles ; let him write poetry, she would be his turn-style. Her gown is like a flag on a pole; she would do for him if he turn freemason; I hope she will prove a flag of truce. When she sits languishing, with one foot on a stool and one elbow on the table and her head inclined, she looks like the sign of the Crooked Billet, or the frontispiece to Cinderella, or a tea-paper wood-cut of Mother Shipton at her studies." The nothing of the day is a machine called the "velocipede." It is a wheel carriage to ride cockhorse upon, sitting astride and pushing it along with the toes, a rudder-wheel in hand. They will go seven miles an hour. A handsome gelding will come to eight guineas; however, they will soon be cheaper, unless the army takes to them. [I look back upon the last month and find nothing to write about; indeed, I do not recollect one thing particular in it. It's all alike; we keep on breathing; the only amusement is a little scandal, of however fine a shape, a laugh at a pun-and then, after all, we wonder how we could enjoy the scandal or laugh at the pun. I have been at different times turning it in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh and study for a physician. I am afraid I should not take kindly to it; I am sure I should not take fees: and yet I should like to do so; it is not worse than writing poems and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the "Review" shambles. Everybody is in his own mess: here is the parson at Hampstead quarrelling with all the world; he is in the wrong by this same token. When the black cloth was put up in the church for the Queen's mourning, he asked the workmen to hang it the wrong side outwards, that it might be better when taken down, it being his perquisite. Friday, 19th March.-This morning I have been reading "The False One." Shameful to say, I was in bed at ten - I mean this morning. The Blackwood's reviewers have committed themselves to a scandalous heresy; they have been putting up Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, against Burns: the senseless villains! The Scotch cannot manage themselves at all; they want imagination; and that is why they are so fond of Hogg, who has so little of it. This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent, and supremely careless; I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's "Castle of Indolence"; my passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies, I should call it languor; |