ble men who have freely poured their real sentiments and
thoughts out of their brain into their letters, who have given their
best (without keeping their worst) to their correspondents, so that
the letters abound with pathetic and amusing confessions, and with
ideas that bear the stamp of the author's singular idiosyncrasy. The
_Memorials of Coleorton_ are a collection of letters written to the
Beaumont family by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott; the
reader may pass from one to another by taking them as they come; the
book is like the _menu_ of a dinner with varied courses. Wordsworth's
letters are the product of cultivated taste, a fine eye for rural
scenery, and lofty moral sentiment. Southey is the high-class
_litterateur_, with a strong dash of Toryism in Church and State; in
both there is a total absence of eccentricity, but in neither case is
the attention forcibly arrested or any striking passage retained. When
Coleridge is served up the flavour of unique expression and a sort of
divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and
remorseful; he soars to themes transcendent, and sinks anon to the
humble details of his errors and embarrassments. Uncongenial society
plunged him into such dark depression that he is not ashamed to
confess that he found 'bodily relief in weeping.'

'On Tuesday evening Mr. R----, the author of ----, drank tea and
spent the evening with us at Grasmere; and this had produced a very
unpleasant effect upon my spirits.... If to be a poet or man of
genius entailed on us the necessity of housing such company in our
bosoms, I would pray the very flesh off my knees to have a head as
dark and unfurnished as Wordsworth's old Molly's.... If I believed
it possible that the man liked me, upon my soul I should feel
exactly as if I were tarred and feathered.'

And so on through the whole letter, with a comical energy of phrase
that scorns reserve or compass in giving vent to the misery caused by
uninteresting conversation. We may contrast this melancholy
tea-drinking with Byron's rollicking account of a dinner with some
friends 'of note and notoriety':

'Like other parties of the same kind, it was first silent, then
talking, then argumentative, then disputatious, then
unintelligible, then altogethery, then articulate, and then drunk.
When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder it was
difficult to