d, daughters of an aged and
retired merchant on Blackheath.

The countenance and musical talents of the elder sister made a strong
impression on the sequestered poet. Their accidental visit gradually led
to his second marriage, on the 23d of March 1809, an event attended with
much general exultation and delight, though evidently, like the usual
steps of poets in the world, rather a step of hasty affection than of
deliberate prudence.

In three years they were separated; I know not for what reasons. On
shewing me some gaps in his library, he said that they had been made by
proceedings in Doctors Commons.

To Felpham where he passed the last twenty years of his life, there
retired also, to end his days in privacy and quiet, Doctor Cyril
Jackson, who had been many years Dean of Christ Church, and in that time
had refused some of the highest honours in the church. It is said that
when Hayley waited on him, the Doctor declined entering upon an
interchange of visits; but said that he should be happy to establish an
intercourse of a different kind, and to send him occasionally books, or
anything else which he might happen to have, and which Hayley might be
without, and to receive from him the same neighbourly accommodations in
return. Accordingly when the poet took a wife in his old age, he sent
the Doctor a piece of the wedding cake, with a message, that he hoped at
some future time to receive a neighbourly communication of the same sort
in return.

In 1818, he told me that his medical attendant was apprehensive of his
becoming dropsical, and had prescribed him a glass of port wine after
his dinner. His usual drink before this had been water. In the October
of the following year he wrote to me that "he had been assailed by two
of the most formidable enemies of the human frame; and had been almost
demolished by a fit of apoplexy, and a fit of the stone: the blow from
the former," he adds, "was so violent, that my physician despaired of my
revival; but, by the mercy of Heaven, I am so far revived, that I can
again enjoy a social and literary intercourse with my friends; and even
dabble again in rhyme; but, as I suspect, that my rhymes, like the
Homilies of Gil Blas' Archbishop, may savour of apoplexy, I think it
right to keep them in utter privacy."

His other complaint the stone, terminated his life on the 12th of
November, 1820.

Under all his sufferings (says his early friend, Mr. Sargent), he was
never heard to expr