there your appointed tale of
brick-making was set before you, which you must finish, with or without
straw, as it happened. The craving Dragon--_the Public_--like him in
Bel's temple--must be fed; it expected its daily rations; and Daniel,
and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side
bursting him.

MISS PATE
[Sidenote: _M.M. Betham_]

A Miss Pate (when he heard of her, he asked if she was any relation to
Mr. John _Head_, of Ipswich) was at a party, and he said, on hearing her
name, "Miss Pate I hate." "You are the first person who ever told me so,
however," said she. "Oh! I mean nothing by it. If it had been Miss Dove,
I should have said, Miss Dove I love, or Miss Pike I like." ... Another,
who was very much marked with the small-pox, looked as if the devil had
ridden roughshod over her face. I saw him talking to her afterwards
with great apparent interest, and noticed it, saying, "I thought he had
not liked her." His reply was, "I like her internals very well."

THE LOST ORNAMENT
[Sidenote: _Washington Allston_]

Lamb was present when a naval officer was giving an account of an action
which he had been in, and, to illustrate the carelessness and disregard
of life at such times, said that a sailor had both his legs shot off,
and as his shipmates were carrying him below, another shot came and took
off his arms; they, thinking he was pretty much used up, though life was
still in him, threw him out of a port. "Shame, d----d shame," stuttered
our Lamb, "he m-m-might have l-lived to have been an a-a-ornament to
Society!"

YOUR HAT, SIR
[Sidenote: _Crabb Robinson_]

I dined at Lamb's, and then walked with him to Highgate, self-invited.
There we found a large party. Mr. and Mrs. Green, the Aderses, Irving,
Collins, R.A., a Mr. Taylor, a young man of talents in the Colonial
Office, Basil Montagu, a Mr. Chance, and one or two others. It was a
_rich_ evening. Coleridge talked his best, and it appeared better
because he and Irving supported the same doctrines. His superiority was
striking. The idea dwelt on was the higher character of the internal
evidence of Christianity, as addressed to our immediate consciousness of
our own wants and the necessity of a religion and a revelation. In a
style not to me clear or intelligible, Irving and Coleridge both
declaimed. The _advocatus diaboli_ for the evening was Mr. Taylor, who,
in a way very creditable to his manners as a gentleman, but with little