at my lord's house among those stately beech-woods that slope to the Thames and fade into the remote horizon. But the tramp, travel-soiled and weary, sleeps on God's turf and in God's sunshine, dreaming, perhaps, of days when he was happy,-when he was a workman in full employ, and made prosperous love to the pretty lass whom he married. And she, old before her time, haggard with work and want, watches him with tearless eyes, and silently hopes that some good Christian may give them a copper before evening, that they may allay the pangs of hunger.

Enough. We have travelled through Bohemia Proper and Bohemia Improper. We have encountered those who have deliberately chosen misery as their comrade, and those who are obliged to accept it as their tyrant. Both classes might occasionally echo Henry Murger's bitter remark: "La Providence a trop de besogne auprès des petits oiseaux."1

1 At the time this was written, Mortimer Collins was perhaps a thorough Bohemian. He gained at the time the title of the King of Bohemia. After he retired to his Berkshire cottage he still retained his unconventional habits, but his Bohemianism was then of the country and not of the town, and the cynicism which caused him to echo Henri Murger's remark entirely disappeared.-F. C.

COLERIDGE'S COUNTRY.

You cannot separate man from the world in which he lives; cannot imagine him severed from his "accidentals." Whose highest flights of fancy can conceive a disembodied spirit? Even ghosts must be visible to be appreciated. Hamlet's father revisited the glimpses of the moon in his habit as he lived, and walked the windy battlements of Elsinore in the very armour which he had worn in his mortality when at war with Norway. And in no ghost story which I have ever heard does the apparition come without costume; even if the spectral phenomenon is invisible, there is a rustle of silken attire, or a tapping of high-heeled boots, or a clatter of chain

armour.

Similarly, there is a tendency to connect a man with the country in which he dwelt, and which influenced his character and career. No one is influenced by the scenes which surround him. What island but Corsica, the home of romance and revenge and adventure, could have given the world Napoleon Bonaparte? Where, but in the very omphalos of England, could a Shakespeare or a Landor

the place in which a man is born t his life. I begin, for example, with ridge; he was a baby in Devon, a s pantisocratic enthusiast in Somerset, land, a rather visionary philosoph slight foreign adventures I admit need I recall the details of his bri private. But, while Devon gave h it was in the romantic region of the the perfection of his art. Everyw his footsteps, and have thereby re that among the Lakes was his natur

But when he was a young fellow just begun to sow his wild-oats, he Stowey, in Somerset. It is a pretty miles from what the Somerset folk the sea, namely, the muddy Seve the Bristol Channel. I think the is something perfectly unnatural. one of the watering-places beloved

Clevedon or Weston, to wit-with the expectation of a Brighton or Scarborough seascape, how I admire your inevitable disappointment! Instead of seeing

up

66

"The wild white horses play,

Champ and chafe and toss in the spray,”

while a merry wind that has travelled over leagues of foam plays tricks with your apparel, you are face to face (at low water) with countless acres of mud, through which travels a thread of water looking like the Fleet Ditch, all that remains of the famous river Severn. When living down in this dull vicinage-really dull, for though the scenery is often rich, it is void of variety-Coleridge made his mind to be a Unitarian minister. There is perhaps a recondite connection between flat scenery and Unitarianism. Any way, the pulpit of the disciples of Socinus was at that time the poet's great ambition; and in search of a cure of souls he made his way to Shrewsbury to preach. Here is that same river Severn, many a mile nearer its source, a clear and beautiful and rapid stream, undreaming of the mud in which its glory is doomed to expire. A quaint old town is Shrewsbury, and they show you Glendower's Oak to this day; it is an ancient tree, which grows green every spring, though its trunk is completely hollow. To the summit of this oak, says the legend, Owen Glendower climbed when the famous battle of Shrewsbury had begun, that very battle wherein Jack Falstaff fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock. The tradition is, that Glendower ascended the tree in order to judge how the battle was likely to go before he decided whether or not to join his allies. His inspection was

COLERIDGE AND HAZLITT.

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unfavourable, and the Welshman discreetly drew off his forces.

A curious glimpse of Coleridge in his early days is afforded by Hazlitt, who made his acquaintance at Shrewsbury. Hazlitt's father was a Unitarian minister living at Wem, ten miles from the capital of Salop. Young Hazlitt, in his twentieth year, was naturally attracted by the fame of this marvellous young preacher, who uttered with magical eloquence things unintelligible; so, on a Sunday morning in January 1798, he rose before daybreak, and walked ten muddy miles to hear Coleridge preach. "Did you ever hear me preach ?" asked Coleridge of Lamb many a year later. "I never heard you do anything else," was the reply. This particular sermon intoxicated Hazlitt, who at once became Coleridge's admirer. His description of the great poet, as he seemed in his youth, is worth quotation. "His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre. A certain tender bloom his face o'erspread '—a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait-painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round; but his nose-the rudder of the face, the index of the will-was small, feeble, nothing; like what he has done." I may here remark, that the tendency to represent Coleridge as having done nothing is a symptom of that serene and supercilious ignorance which is often observable in second-class men who have to estimate their superiors.