Very true,' Mr. Sowerby. 'Ah! Sir, I have a fancy for genus, Sir!' Have you, Mr. Sowerby?' 'Yes, Sir; Mrs. Siddons, Sir, has eat my meat, Sir; never was such a woman for chops, Sir !'and he drew up his beefy, shiny face, clean shaved, with a clean blue cravat under his chin, a clean jacket, a clean apron, and a pair of hands that would pin an ox to the earth if he was obstreperous Ah! Sir, she was a wonderful crayture!' She was, Mr. Sowerby.' 'Ah, Sir, when she used to act that there character, you see (but Lord, such a head! as I say to my sister)--that there woman, Sir, that murders a king between 'em!' 'Oh! Lady Macbeth.' 'Ah, Sir, that's it-Lady Macbeth-I used to get up with the butler behind her carriage when she acted, and, as I used to see her looking quite wild, and all the people quite frightened, Ah, ha! my lady, says I, if it wasn't for my meat, though, you wouldn't be able to do that!' 'Mr. Sowerby, you seem to be a man of feeling. Will you take a glass of wine?' After a bow or two, down he sat, and by degrees his heart opened. You see, Sir, I have fed Mrs. Siddons, Sir; John Kemble, Sir; Charles Kemble, Sir; Stephen Kemble, Sir; and Madame Catalani, Sir; Morland the painter, and, I beg your pardon, Sir, and you, Sir.' 'Mr. Sowerby, you do me honour.' 'Madame Catalani, Sir, was a wonderful woman for sweetbreads; but the Kemble family, Sir, the gentlemen, Sir, rump-steaks and kidneys in general was their taste; but Mrs. Siddons, Sir, she liked chops, Sir, as much as you do, Sir,' &c. &c. I soon perceived that the man's ambition was to feed genius. I shall recommend you to him; but is he not a capital fellow? But a little acting with his remarks would make you roar with laughter. Think of Lady Macbeth eating chops! Is this not a peep behind the curtain? I remember Wilkie saying that at a public dinner he was looking out for some celebrated man, when at last he caught a glimpse for the first time of a man whose books he had read with care for years, picking the leg of a roast goose, perfectly abstracted! Never will I bring up my boys to any profession that is not a matter of necessary want to the world. Painting, unless considered as it ought to be, is a mere matter of ornament and luxury. It is not yet taken up as it should be in a wealthy country like England, and all those who devote themselves to the higher branches of Art must suffer the penalty, as I have done, and am doing. So I was told, and to no purpose. I opposed

my father, my mother, and my friends, though I am duly gratified by my fame in the obscurest corners. Last week a book-stall keeper showed me one of my own books at his stall, and, by way of recommending it, pointed out a sketch of my own on the flyleaf, 'Which,' said he, 'I suppose is by Haydon himself. Ah! Sir, he was badly used—a disgrace to our great men.' 'But he was imprudent,' said I. 'Imprudent!' said he. Yes, of course; he depended on their taste and generosity too much.' Have you any more of his books?' said I. 'Oh! I had a great many; but I have sold them all, Sir, but this, and another that I will never part with.'

CCXCII.

Benjamin Robert Haydon to William Wordsworth.

London: October 16, 1842.

In the words of our dear departed friend, Charles Lamb, 'You good-for-nothing old Lake-poet,' what has become of you? Do you remember his saying that at my table in 1819, with Jerusalem' towering behind us in the painting-room, and Keats and your friend Monkhouse of the party? Do you remember Lamb voting me absent, and then making a speech descanting on my excellent port, and proposing a vote of thanks? Do you remember his then voting me present?—I had never left my chair-and informing me of what had been done during my retirement, and hoping I was duly sensible of the honour? Do you remember the Commissioner (of Stamps and Taxes) who asked you if you did not think Milton a great genius, and Lamb getting up and asking leave with a candle to examine his phrenological development? Do you remember poor dear Lamb, whenever the Commissioner was equally profound, saying: My son John went to bed with his breeches on,' to the dismay of the learned man? Do you remember you and I and Monkhouse getting Lamb out of the room by force, and putting on his great coat, he reiterating his earnest desire to examine the Commissioner's skull? And don't you remember Keats proposing 'Confusion to the memory of Newton,' and upon your insisting upon an explanation before you drank it, his saying: Because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing

it to a prism.' Ah! my dear old friend, you and I shall never see such days again! The peaches are not so big now as they were in our days. Many were the immortal dinners which took place in that painting-room, where the food was simple, the wine good, and the poetry first rate.' Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, David Wilkie, Leigh Hunt, Talfourd, Keats, &c., &c., attended my summons, and honoured my table.

My best regards to Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth, in which my wife and daughter join.

Ever yours,

B. R. HAYDON.

CCXCIII.

The letters of De Quincey display his marvellous style in its most characteristic moods. He doffed his singing robes in addressing those dear to him, and aimed rather at securing sympathy than admiration. For sympathy, indeed, his tortured spirit is seen visibly pining through all the seventy-five years of his suffering existence, and to this is due, no doubt, that occasional excess of emphasis which has brought on his writing the charge of insincerity.

Thomas De Quincey to Jessie Miller.

Saturday morning: May 26, 1837. My dear Miss Jessie,-In some beautiful verses where the writer has occasion to speak of festivals, household or national, that revolve annually, I recollect at this moment from his description one line to this effect

Remembered half the year and hoped the rest.

Thus Christmas, I suppose, is a subject for memory until Midsummer, after which it becomes a subject for hope, because the mind ceases to haunt the image of the past festival in a dawning anticipation of another that is daily drawing nearer. 'Well,' I hear you say, 'a very pretty sentimental opening for a note addressed to a lady; but what is the moral of it?'

The moral, my dear Miss Jessie, is this-that I, soul-sick of endless writing, look back continually with sorrowful remembrances to the happy interval which I spent under your roof; and next after that, I regret those insulated evenings (scattered here and there) which, with a troubled pleasure-pleasure anxious and

boding-I have passed beneath the soft splendours of your lamps since I was obliged to quit the quiet haven of your house. Sorrowful, I say, these remembrances are, and must be by contrast with my present gloomy solitude; and if they ever cease to be sorrowful, it is when some new evening to be spent underneath the same lamps comes within view. That which is remembered only suddenly puts on the blossoming of hope, and wears the vernal dress of a happiness to come instead of the sad autumnal dress of happiness that has vanished.

Is this sentimental? Be it so; but then also it is intensely true; and sentimentality cannot avail to vitiate truth; on the contrary, truth avails to dignify and exalt the sentimental. But why breathe forth these feelings, sentimental or not, precisely on this vulgar Saturday? (for Saturday is a day radically vulgar to my mind, incurably sacred to the genius of marketing, and hostile to the sentimental in any shape). Why?' you persist in asking. Simply because, if this is Saturday, it happens that to-morrow is Sunday; and on a Sunday night only, if even then, I can now approach you without danger. And what I fear is-that you, so strict in your religious observances, will be dedicating to some evening lecture, or charity sermon, or missionary meeting, that time which might be spent in Duncan Street, and perhaps-pardon me for saying so-more profitably. How so?' Why because, by attending the missionary meeting, for example, you will, after all, scarcely contribute the 7th, or even the 70th, share to the conversion of some New Zealander or feather-cinctured prince of Owhyee. Whereas now, on the other hand, by vouchsafing your presence to Duncan Street, you will give-and not to an unbaptised infidel, who can never thank you, but to a son of the Cross, who will thank you from the very centre of his heart-a happiness like that I spoke of as belonging to recurring festivals, furnishing a subject for memory through one half of the succeeding interval, and for hope through the other.

Florence was with me yesterday morning, and again throughout the evening; and, by the way, dressed in your present. Perhaps she may see you before I do, and may tell you that I have been for some time occupied at intervals in writing some memorial Lines for a Cenotaph to Major Miller of the Horse Guards Blue,' and towards which I want some information from

you. The lines are about thirty-six in number; too many, you will say, for an epitaph. Yes, if they were meant for the real place of burial; but these, for the very purpose of evading that restriction, are designed for a cenotaph, to which situation a more unlimited privilege in that respect is usually conceded.

CCXCIV.

De Quincey declared, in writing to an old school fellow in
1847, that he had had no dinner since parting with him in the
eighteenth century.' It is now believed that he suffered all his
life from the terrible disorder known as gastrodynia, a nervous
irritation and constant gnawing at the coats of the stomach.
To relieve this, a happy instinct dictated to him the use of
opium, without which his constitution must early have given
way to that exhaustion and famishing of which he speaks. So,
in the case of this illustrious person, the adage was curiously
confirmed, that one man's meat is another man's poison.

Thomas De Quincey to his daughter, Margaret Craig.
Thursday, June 10, 1847.

My dear M.,-I am rather disturbed that neither M. nor F. nor E. has found a moment for writing to me. Yet perhaps it was not easy. For I know very seriously, and have often remarked, how difficult it is to find a spare moment for some things in the very longest day, which lasts you know twenty-four hours; though, by the way, it strikes one as odd that the shortest lasts quite as many. I have been suffering greatly myself for ten days, the cause being, in part, some outrageous heat that the fussy atmosphere put itself into about the beginning of this month-but what for, nobody can understand. Heat always untunes the harp of my nervous system; and oh heavens! how electric it is! But, after all, what makes me so susceptible of such undulations in this capricious air, and compels me to sympathise with all the uproars and miffs, towering passions or gloomy sulks, of the atmosphere, is the old eternal ground, viz. that I am famished. Oh, what ages it is since I dined! On what great day of jubilee is it that Fate hides, under the thickest of table-cloths, a dinner for me? Yet it is a certain, undeniable truth, which this personal famine has revealed to me, that most people on this terraqueous globe eat too much. Which it is, and nothing else, that makes