Notwithstanding the difficulty, above noticed, of arranging by means of anecdotes and tabletalk, any sufficient idea of the living man, the two following letters appear to me peculiarly and accurately graphic. These contributions are the more valuable, as they exhibit my brother's portrait from two opposite points of view :

"DEAR SIR,

"8 Beaufort-terrace, Seacombe, near Liverpool. "Oct. 29, 1850.

"I thank you for your very polite letter. I am glad that my hasty outlines should be of any use. Since sending them I have lit upon this sonnet, which is, I think, of too personal a nature to be brought before the public, though it has two very pretty lines. Another sonnet begins with'How strange the cold ungenial atmosphere,' written when we were together in 1841. I gave Hartley a copy of it some years after. He had quite forgotten it, and thought it good. I have mislaid the original, but I can vouch for the correctness of the copy from memory. Hartley never, or very seldom, remembered what he had written. The sonnet I have quoted he had so far forgotten, that, but for the style, he thought some one else might have composed it. It was his custom to put aside what he had written for some months, till the heat and excitement of composition had effervesced, and then he thought it was in a fair condition to criticise. He seldom altered. 'Strike the nail on the anvil,' was the advice he often gave to me. 's poetry he called bakers' poetry, from its superfine polish. He never kneaded, or pounded his thoughts; they always came out cap-à-pie, like a troop in quick march. To see him brandishing his pen (the very recollection of which has made me sadly blot this page) and now and then beating time with his foot, and breaking out into a shout at any felicitous idea, was a thing never to

be forgotten. The common method of keeping up the velocity, by muttering and remuttering what is written, and using one line as a spring-board to reach another, was not the method which he adopted. His sonnets were all written instantaneously, and never, to my knowledge, occupied more than ten minutes; when he once challenged me to a match, and exceeded that time, he tore up the paper; and yet a rapid, continuous, oral discourse he told me he never accomplished. I remember him once taking a text, and betting me he would preach a sermon, but he broke down after the first sentence. 'I can write,' he said, 'why can't I speak?' His enthusiasm carried him off the rails. His genius was too uneven to run in a groove. His conversation was a continual sparkle; very irregular and unequal, yet, when worked up to a certain warmth, throwing out jets and gushes so radiant and hilarious that, like a Christmas fire, it inspirited and made happy everybody. I never saw him in a large party; it was chiefly at Fell's, and when he dined with two or three friends, that I met him. 'I hate fashionable parties,' he said, 'I feel very uncomfortable. The other night I was at one, and I shrank up, like a rat in a corner, and conceived the idea of jealousy. There was a beautiful little girl there that I should have liked to have talked to; but a fop came

"With crooks and cringes ;

Sleek were all his oily hinges,'

and I couldn't say a thing.' The description of the dance I remember as very beantiful.

"On his way to one of these parties he called on me, and I could not help saying, 'How well you look in a white neckcloth!' 'I wish you could see me sometimes,' he replied; 'if I had only black-silk stockings and shoe-buckles I should be quite a gentleman.' Those who had only seen him in the careless dress that he chose to adopt in the lanes-his trowsers, which were generally too long, doubled half-way up the leg, unbrushed, and often splashed; his hat brushed the wrong way, for he never used an umbrella; and his wild, unshaven

weather-beaten look—were amazed at his metamorphose into such a faultless gentleman as he appeared when he was dressed for the evening. I hate silver forks with fish,' he said; 'I can't manage them.' So did Dr. Arnold, I told him. That's capital; I am glad of such an authority. Do you know I never understood the gladiator's excellence till the other day? The way in which my brother eats fish with a silver fork made the thing quite clear.'

"He often referred to his boyish days, when he told me he nearly poisoned half the house with his chemical infusions, and spoiled the pans, with great delight. The 'Pilgrim's Progress' was an early favourite with him. 'It was strange,' he said, 'how it had been overlooked. Children are often misunderstood. When I was a baby I have often been in the greatest terror, when, to all appearance, I was quite still; -so frightened that I could not make a noise. Crying, I believe, is oftener a sign of happiness than the reverse. I was looked upon as a remarkable child. My mother told me, when I was born she thought me an ugly red thing; but my father took me up and said, "There's no sweeter baby anywhere than this." He always thought too much of me. I was very dull at school, and hated arithmetic; I always had to count on my fingers.'

"He once took me to the little cottage where he lived by the Brathay, when Charles Lloyd and he were school-companions. Mrs. Nicholson of Ambleside told me of a donkey-race which they had from the market-cross to the end of the village and back, and how Hartley came in last, and minus his white straw hat.

"I send this to-day. My time and thoughts are occupied with one subject just now, and I could only crop a minute here and there; you will excuse me, and believe me,

"Faithfully yours,

"THOMAS BLACKBURNE."

(In continuation.)

"He seldom talked about scenery. He hated nothing more

than what he called 'mock raptures.' The popular use of the word 'nice,' as, a nice day, a nice horse, &c., he greatly disliked. Nice ought only to be applied to puddings and tarts, which he never ate. His sight was not keen enough to distinguish objects at a distance, which was perhaps the reason why he never enjoyed wide prospects. High mountain views, he told me, he had no taste for at all. His favourite spot was a little glade above Stock-gill force, quite shut in with trees and hills, where the stream flows in deep lucid pools. I wonder what pleasure the people find in that noisy fall,' he one day said to me, 'I like this silence a great deal better; but no one notices it.' His remarks for the most part concluded with some sadness. He used to say, when he saw me sad, 'Don't give way, my dear fellow; if I were to do so, I could make out a list of more sorrows than any man living.' The only rivers I ever heard him mention were those in the neighbourhood of Sedbergh. They run over peat moss, and are rapid; and, when flooded, the colour of old port. They are Homer's rivers, he used to say, olvores TOTάμOL. A bridge on the road to Kirkby Stephen was a favourite leaning-place of his. He preferred the Brathay to the Rotha; and Derwentwater, he said, was the sweetest of the lakes. I fancied, because he had lived near both. 'When you go to Keswick,' he once said, ‘you must not forget St. John's vale.' I shall not soon forget two long rambles in summer and early spring; the only set walks we ever had. 'Where shall we go?' I said, it was when I first went to stay at the Lakes. 'I'll take you the prettiest walk in the world;' and so we set out, avoiding the village, and following the stream from Stock-gill force to Rotha bridge, where he showed me a house which he thought he never could have liked again, for one of his best friends had left it; but, do you know, an excellent family has come to it; they're Quakers. I always like Quakers, and Quakeresses most of all. Simplex munditiis, Wordsworth translates with a neat simplicity,' but Pyrrha was anything but a Quakeress. I think it means 'becomingly beautiful.' I like Horace, he's such a gay old fellow. Persicos

odi, puer, apparatus, is the true expression of the poet; and moriture Deli, who could ever translate that?'-and thereupon, as if a thought struck him, he set off a-running. At Clappersgate we stopped by the little white-washed cottage, almost covered with clematis and yellow corchorus, built up into the crag. My father once lived there,' he said, looking up with a kind of awe and tenderness, as he always did when he spoke of his father, as of a spirit in heaven.* 'Owen Lloyd and I used to play here and go to school at Ambleside. Poor Owen! Have you ever been to Langdale? He's buried there.' We sauntered down to Brathay Bridge, and looked down where the river hurries among the smooth black rocks, overshadowed almost to the water's edge on either side by thick and wide-spreading beeches. It is very beautiful,' he said, 'but I like the islands on the other side better, and those little shallows; I used to fish there.' We kept the left bank of the Rotha, and there he read me a sonnet, which he said he once thought of calling Geology and Genesis; but that some people might think it profane. It began:

'No revelation hath withdrawn the veil

That God hath deign'd to cast o'er Eden's bowers.' +

"We went to Brathay churchyard, and looked down into the valley. 'Do you see those hazel-woods on the other side? I once attempted to take a short cut over Loughrigg, and I never was so nearly lost in my life. "The nodding horror"

*There is a slip here in the links of memory. His father lived for a short time in Grasmere, not at Clappersgate. Again, the boy Hartley never fished. The reference is, doubtless, to his schoolfellows.

This sonnet (see vol. ii., 343,) was sent in a letter to his sister, with the following remarks :-"You will easily understand, though perhaps you will not confirm, my fancy that our first parents may have lived millions of years in innocency, while all the geological changes were going on."