of the celebrated Jacob Behmen, had taught him to smoke, and was teaching him Theosophy-coffee, and a glass of Inniskillen to crown the solemnity. In this broken and parenthetic form did the bill of fare ferment in the anticipator's brain: and in the same form, with some little interpolation, by way of gloss, for the Reader's information, have we, sacrificing elegance of style to faith of History, delivered it.

Maxilian was no ready accountant; but he had acted over the whole expenditure, had rehearsed it in detail, from the admission to the concluding shilling and pence thrown down with an uncounting air for the waiter. Voluptuous Youth!

But, ah! that fatal incursion on the apple-basket-all was lost! The brimming cup had even touched his lips-it left its froth on them, when it was dashed down, untasted, from his hand. The music, the gay attires, the tripping step and friendly nod of woman, the volunteer service, the rewarding smile-perhaps, the permitted pressure of the hand felt warm and soft within the glove-all shattered, as so many bubbles, by that one malignant shock! In fits and irregular pulses of locomotion, hurrying yet lingering, he forced himself alongside the gate, and with many a turn, heedless whither he went, if only he left the haunts and houses of men behind him, he reached at length the solitary banks of the streamlet that pours itself into the bay south of the Liffey. Close by stood the rude and massy fragment of an inclosure, or rather the angle where the walls met that had once protected a now deserted garden,

"And still where many a garden-flower grew wild."

Here, beneath a bushy elder-tree, that had shot forth from the crumbling ruin, something higher than midway from the base, he found a grassy couch, a sofa or ottoman of sods, overcrept with wild-sage and camomile. Of all his proposed enjoyments, one only remained, the present of his friend, itself almost a friend—a Meerschaum pipe whose high and ample bole was filled and surmounted by tobacco of Lusatian growth, made more fragrant by folded leafits of spicy or balsamic plants. For a thing was dear to Maxilian, not for what it was, but for that which it represented or recalled to him: and often, while his eye was passing,

"O'er hill and dale, thro' CLOUDLAND, gorgeous land!"

had his spirit clomb the heights of Imaus, and descended into the vales of Iran, on a pilgrimage to the sepulchre of Hafiz, or the bowers of Mosellara. Close behind him plashed and murmured the companionable stream, ber and which the mountains of Wicklow hung floating in the dim horizon; while full before him rose the towers and pinnacles of the metropolis, now softened and airy-light, as though they had been the sportive architecture of air and sunshine. Yet Maxilian heard not, saw not-or, worse

still,

He saw them all, how excellently fair

He saw, not felt, how beautiful they were.

The pang was too recent, the blow too sudden. Fretfully striking the fire-spark into the nitred sponge, with glazed eye idly fixed, he transferred the kindled fragment to his pipe. True it is, and under the conjunction of friendlier orbs, when, like a captive king beside the throne of his youthful conqueror, Saturn had blended his sullen shine with the subduing influences of the star of Jove, often had Maxilian experienced its truth—that

The poet in his lone yet genial hour
Gives to his eye a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes

From the black shapeless accidents of size

In unctuous cones of kindling coal,

Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole,
His gifted ken can see
Phantoms of sublimity.

But the force and frequence with which our student now commingled its successive volumes, were better suited, in their effects, to exclude the actual landscape, than to furnish tint or canvas for ideal shapings. Like Discontent, from amid a cloudy shrine of her own outbreathing, he at length gave vent and utterance to his feelings in sounds more audible than articulate, and which at first resembled notes of passion more nearly than parts of speech, but gradually shaped themselves into words, in the following soliloquy :

Yes! I am born to all mishap and misery!-that is the truth of it! Child and boy, when did it fall to my lot to draw king or bishop on Twelfth Night? Never! Jerry Sneak or Nincompoop, to a dead certainty! When did I ever drop my bread and butter-and it seldom got to my mouth without some such cir

cuit—but it fell on the buttered side? When did I ever cry, Head! but it fell tail? Did I ever once ask, Even or odd, but I lost? And no wonder; for I was sure to hold the marbles so awkwardly, that the boy could cont them between my fingers! But this is to laugh at! though in my life I could never descry much mirth in any laugh I ever set up at my own vexations, past or present. And that's another step-dame trick of Destiny! My shames are all immortal! I do believe, Nature stole me from my proper home, and made a blight of me, that I might not be owned again! For I never get older. Shut my eyes, and I can find no more difference between eighteen me and eight me, than between to-day and yesterday! But I will not remember the miseries that dogged my earlier years, from the day I was first breeched! (Nay, the casualties, tears, and disgraces of that day I never can forget.) Let them pass, however-school-tide and holiday-tide, school hours and play hours, griefs, blunders, and mischances. For all these I might pardon my persecuting Nemesis! Yea, I would have shaken hands with her, as forgivingly as I did with that sworn familiar of hers, and Usher of the Black Rod, my old schoolmaster, who used to read his newspaper, when I was horsed, and flog me between the paragraphs! I would forgive her, I say, if, like him, she would have taken leave of me at the School Gate. But now, vir et togatus, a seasoned academic-that now, that still, that evermore, I should be the whipping-stock of Destiny, the laughing-stock of Fortune."

* *

N.B. Of the "Selection from Mr. Coleridge's Literary Correspondence" the author said in a note to the Aids to Reflection, "which, however, should any of my readers take the trouble of consulting, he must be content with such parts as he finds intelligible at the first perusal. For from defects in the MS., and without any fault on the part of the Editor, too large a portion is so printed that the man must be equally bold and fortunate in his conjectural readings who can make out any meaning at all.” -S. C.

NOTES.

(a) p. 17. Ir now seems clear to me, that my Father here alludes to a course of lectures delivered in 1808, and I think it most probable that, from some momentary confusion of mind, he wrote "sixteen or seventeen," instead of " ten or eleven ;” unless his writing was wrongly copied. It does not appear that he lectured on Shakspeare in 1801 or 1802; but in March, April, and May of 1808, and I doubt not in February likewise, he lectured on Poetry at the Royal Institution. Schlegel's lectures, the substance of which we now have in the Dramaturgische Vorlesungen, were read at Vienna that same Spring; but they were not published till 1809, and it is mentioned in an Observation prefixed to part of the work printed in 1811, that the portion respecting Shakspeare and the English Theatre was re-cast after the oral delivery.

(b) p. 18. My Father appears to confound the date of publication with that of delivery, when he affirms that Schlegel's Dramatic Lectures were not delivered till two years after his on the same subjects: but the fact is, as has been mentioned in the last note, that those parts of Schlegel's Dram. Vorlesung. which contain the coincidences with my Father, in his view of Shakspeare, were not orally delivered at all-certainly not in the Spring of 1808, but added when the discourses were prepared for the press, at which time the part about Shakspeare was almost altogether re-written.

Few auditors of Mr. Coleridge's earliest Shaksperian lectures probably now survive. None of those who attended his lectures before April in 1808 have I been able to discover or communicate with. But I have found this record in Mr. Payne Collier's edition of Shakspeare, vol. vii. p. 193. Coleridge, after vindicating himself from the accusation that he had derived his ideas of Hamlet from Schlegel (and we heard him broach them some years before the Lectures Ueber Dramatische Kunst und Litteratur were published) thus in a few sentences sums up the character of Hamlet. "In Hamlet," &c. Introduction to Hamlet.