I should not have doubted his giving them a correct report, even had no evidence of it followed. But there did; for Lord Holland courteously sent me his publications, and never ceased, while he lived, to show me all the kindness in his power.

Of high life in ordinary, it is little for me to say that I might have had a surfeit of it, if I pleased. Circumstances, had I given way to them, might have rendered half my existence a round of it. I might also have partaken no mean portion of high life extraordinary. And very charming is its mixture of softness and strength, of the manliness of its taste and the urbanity of its intercourse. I have tasted, if not much of it, yet some of its very essence, and I cherish, and am grateful for it at this moment. What I have said, there fore, of Holland House, is mentioned under no feelings, either of assumption or servility. The invitation was made, and declined, with an equal spirit of faith on both sides in far better impulses.

Far, therefore, am I from supposing, that the silence of the Whig critics respecting me was owing to any hostile influence which Lord Holland would have condescended to exercise. Not being among the visitors at Holland House, I dare say I was not thought of; or if I was thought of I was regarded as a person who, in shunning Whig connection, and, perhaps, in persisting to advocate a reform toward which they were cooling, might be supposed indifferent to Whig advocacy. And, indeed, such was the case, till I

felt the want of it.

Accordingly the Edinburgh Review took no notice of the Feast of the Poets, though my verses praised it at the expense of the Quarterly, and though some of the reviewers, to my knowledge, liked it, and it echoed the opinions of others. It took no notice of the pamphlet on the Folly and Danger of Methodism, though the opinions in it were, perhaps, identical with its own. And it took as little of the Reformist's Answer to an Article in the Edinburgh Review-a pamphlet which I wrote in defense of it own re forming principles, which it had lately taken it into its head. to renounce as impracticable. Reform had been apparently given up for ever by its originators; the Tories were in

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creasing in strength every day; and I was left to battle with them as I could. Little did I suppose, that a time would come when I should be an Edinburgh reviewer myself; when its former editor, agreeably to the dictates of his heart, would be one of the kindest of my friends; and when a cadet of one of the greatest of the Whig houses, too young at that time to possess more than a prospective influence, would carry the reform from which his elders recoiled, and gift the prince-opposing Whig-Radical with a pension, under the gracious countenance of a queen whom the Radical loves. I think the Edinburgh Review might have noticed my books a little oftener. I am sure it would have done me a great deal of worldly good by it, and itself no harm in these progressing days of criticism. But I said nothing on the subject, and may have been thought indifferent.

Of Mr. Blanco White, thus brought to my recollection, a good deal is known in certain political and religious quarters; but it may be new to many readers, that he was an AngloSpaniard, who was forced to quit the Peninsula for his liberal opinions, and who died in his adopted country not long ago, after many years' endeavor to come to some positive faith within the Christian pale. At the time I knew him he had not long arrived from Spain, and was engaged, or about to be engaged, as tutor to the present Lord Holland. Though English by name and origin, he was more of the Spaniard in appearance, being very unlike the portrait prefixed to his Life and Correspondence. At least, he must have greatly altered from what he was when I knew 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 self-tormenting 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 Hollandhouse 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 countrymen 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 pocketbook 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 afterward 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

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not conscious, spirit of exaggeration. The sonnet, nevertheless, is truly 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 ?"

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 offense 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.

EVERY thing 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 St. 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 hundred pounds. I shall relate the story of my imprisonment a few pages onward. Much as it injured me, I can not 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