degree, creating sympathy for the vicious and infamous, solely because the thing is daring. Not twenty lines of Scott's poetry will ever reach posterity; it has relation to nothing."

66

'It often amuses me to hear men impute all their misfortunes to fate, luck, or destiny; whilst their successes or good fortune they ascribe to their own sagacity, cleverness, or penetration. It never occurs to such minds that light and darkness are one and the same, emanating from and being part of the same nature."

"It is prettily feigned, that, when Plutus is sent from Jupiter, he limps, and gets on very slowly at first; but when he comes from Pluto, he runs and is swift of foot. This, rightly taken, is a great sweetener of slow genius. Bacon (alas! the day) seems to have had this in his mind when he says, 'Seek not proud gains, but such as thou mayst get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly.' He that is covetous makes too much haste; and the wise man saith of him, he cannot be innocent. There are many men, especially at the outset of life, who, in their too eager desire for the end, overlook the difficulties in the way; there is another class who see nothing else. The first class may sometimes fall; the latter rarely succeed."

"I once wrote to Wordsworth, to inquire if he was a good Christian. He replied: "When I am a good man, then I am a Christian.'"

"Lord Erskine, speaking of animals, hesitating to call them brutes, hit upon that happy phrase--the mute creation."

"Lord Kenyon, on the trial of a bookseller for publishing Paine's Age of Reason, in his charge to the jury, enumerated many celebrated men who had been sincere Christians, and, after having enforced the example of Locke and Newton, both of whom were Unitarians, and not Christians, proceeded: 'Nor, gentlemen, is this belief confined to men of comparative seclusion, since men, the greatest and most distinguished, both as philosophers and as monarchs, have enforced this belief, and shown its influence by their conduct. Above all, gentlemen, need I name to you the Emperor Julian, who was so celebrated for the practice of every Christian virtue that he was called Julian the Apostle?"

"It is indisputable that nervous excitation is contagious. The greater part of ghost stories may be traced to this source." "For one person who has remarked or praised a beautiful passage in Sir Walter Scott's works, a hundred have said:

'How many volumes he has written!'

So of Mathews: it

is not, 'How admirable such and such parts are!' but, 'It is wonderful that one man should do all this!"

"A single thought is that while it is from other thoughts, as a wave of the sea takes its form from the waves which precede and follow it."

"To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed."

"Swans sing before they die ; 'twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing."

"BROKEN FRIENDSHIPS.

"Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth ;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain :
And to be wroth with one we love,

Doth work like madness in the brain.
And thus it chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline."

"JOB'S LUCK.

"Sly Belzebub took all occasions
To try Job's constancy and patience;
He took his honours, took his health,
He took his children, took his wealth,
His camels, horses, asses, cows,

Still the sly devil did not take his spouse.

"But Heav'n that brings out good from evil,
And likes to disappoint the devil,

Had pre-determin'd to restore
Two-fold of all Job had before,

His children, camels, asses, cows,

Short-sighted devil, not to take his spouse !"

COLERIDGE'S OPIUM-EATING.

To his constitutional indolence, Coleridge added the vice of opium-eating. The misery and degradation to which this practice led him were unspeakable. His earnings were spent in the purchase of this pernicious drug. His wife and family

dwelt with Southey, and subsisted on his bounty. All dependence on his word was lost; and he became little better than a vagabond upon the earth. Of his horrible condition he had the keenest sense; but he had no strength to break its bond. To Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, he wrote in 1814: "Conceive a poor miserable wretch who, for many years, has been attempting to beat off pain by a constant return to the vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for others a road to the heaven from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state as it is possible for a good man to have.”

One among the many inaccuracies into which the English opium-eater (Mr. De Quincey) has fallen in his articles on Coleridge, in Tait's Magazine, is a statement that Coleridge first resorted to opium for the pleasurable excitement which it affords. This statement has been contradicted by the editor of Coleridge's Table Talk, who also informs us that Coleridge had entirely conquered the habit some time before his death.

For many years Coleridge was a slave to opium, and the way in which he became addicted to it, is thus described by himself, in a letter dated April, 1814: "I was seduced into the accursed habit ignorantly. I had been almost bed-ridden for many months with swelling in my knees. In a medical journal I unhappily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case, by rubbing in laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle. I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits; and this continued for near a fortnight. At length, the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint returned, the supposed remedy was recurred to-but I cannot go through the dreary history. Sufficient to say, that effects were produced which acted on me by terror, and cowardice of pain and sudden death.”

Subsequently, while living at the home of a friend in Bristol, Coleridge put himself in the hands of a medical man; there the most melancholy part of his case exhibited itself. For while he was pretending to be gradually lessening the dose under medical instructions, and while his friends were congratulating themselves that he was absolutely cured, by being brought down to twenty drops a day, he was all the while buying laudanum secretly, and drinking it in large

doses, as before! How his moral sense must have been overborne, and by how powerful a fascination, before he could have stooped to a deception so degrading as this!

And how extreme his own misery and sense of impotence, when he could write of himself: "There is no hope, O God! How willingly would I place myself under Dr. Fox in his establishment, for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself. Go, bid a man paralytic in both arms, to rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. Alas!' he would reply, that I cannot move my arms is my complaint and my misery!'"

6

Although both Coleridge and De Quincey have given such glowing descriptions of the action of opium in their individual cases, yet the British opium-eater in general is by no means subject to the extraordinary excitement, either of body or of mind, which these writers describe. The common effect, according to Dr. Christian, is "merely to remove torpor and sluggishness, and to make the opium-consumer, in the eyes of his friends, an active and conversable man."

Elsewhere, Coleridge says: "For ten years the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my guilt worse, far worse, than all !

"I have prayed with drops of agony on my brow; trembling, not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer.

666 I gave thee so many talents; what hast thou done with them? Secondly, overwhelmed as I am with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the cause.

"On the contrary, not only to friends have I stated the whole case with tears, and the very bitterness of shame, but ́. in two instances I have warned young men, mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum, of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of its tremendous effects on myself. Thirdly, though before God, I cannot lift my eyelids, and only do not despair of His mercy; because, to despair, would be adding crime to crime; to my fellow-men, I may say that I was seduced into the accursed habit ignorantly. . . . Suffice it to say, that effects were produced, which acted on me by terror and cowardice, fear of

...

pain and sudden death, not (so help me God) by any temptation of pleasure or expectation, or desire of exciting pleasurable associations.

"On the very contrary, Mrs. Morgan and her sister will bear witness, so far as to say that, the longer I abstained, the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyments-till the moment, the direful moment arrived, when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison, I exclaimed in agony, which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, 'I am too poor to hazard this. Had I but a few hundred pounds, but £200, half to send to Mrs. Coleridge, and half to place myself in a private madhouse, where I could procure nothing but what a physician thought proper, and where a medical attendant could be constantly with me for two or three months (in less than that time, life or death would be determined), then there might be hope. Now there is none!'"

Perhaps our readers may have heard repeated a saying of Mr. Wordsworth, that many men of this age had done wonderful things, as Davy, Scott, Cuvier, &c., but that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he ever knew. Something, of course, must be allowed in this, as in all other cases, for the antithesis; but we believe the fact really to be, that the greater part of those who had occasionally visited Mr. Coleridge, left him with a feeling akin to the judgment indicated in the above remark. They admired the man more than his works, or they forgot the works in the absorbing impression made by the living author. And no wonder. Those who remember him in his more vigorous days can bear witness to the peculiarity and transcendent power of his conversational eloquence. It was unlike anything that could be heard elsewhere: the kind was different, the degree was different, the manner was different. The boundless range of scientific knowledge, the brilliancy and exquisite nicety of illustration, the deep and ready reasoning, the strangeness and immensity of bookish lore-were not all; the dramatic story, the joke, the pun, the festivity must be added—and with these the clerical-looking dress, the thick-waving silver hair, the youthful-coloured cheek, the indefinable mouth and lips, the quick, yet steady, and penetrating greenish-gray eyes, the