for training in elocution and debate. On the first night he met there Mr. Jeffrey, who visited Scott next day, "in a small den on the sunk floor of his father's house, in George's-square, surrounded with dingy books ;" and thus commenced a friendship between the two most distinguised men of letters which Edinburgh produced in their time. In the den, Scott had collected out-of-the-way things of all sorts. "He had more books than shelves; a small painted cabinet, with Scotch and Roman coins in it, and so forth. A claymore and Lochabar axe, given him by old Invernahyle, mounted guard on a little print of Prince Charlie; and Broughton's Saucer was hooked up again-t the wall below it." Such was the germ of the magnificent library and museum which Scott, in after-life, assembled in the castellated mansion which he built for himself at Abbotsford *

Scott succeeded so far in his lucubrations as to be called to the bar as an advocate in 1792. He established himself in good style at Edinburgh, but had little practice. He rarely attempted literary composition; nor have any fugitive pieces of Scott's youth been found in any publication of the day. But in Dr. Anderson's Bee for May 9, 1792, the following notice is thought to refer to a contribution from Scott: "The Editor regrets that the verses of W. S. are too defective for publication."

About this time Scott employed his leisure in collecting the ballad poetry of Scotland; and in this class of composition he made his first attempt at originality. Thus may be said to have commenced his literary life of six-and-thirty years. He breathed his last at Abbotsford in 1832; his mind never appearing to wander in its delirium toward those works which had filled all Europe with his fame. This fact is of interest in literary history; and it accords with the observation of honest Allan Cunningham, that "Scott, although the most accomplished author of his day, yet he had none of the airs of authorship."

Sir Walter Scott received his baronetcy from George IV.

in 1820.

LORD HILL, THE WATERLOO HERO.

Rowland, Lord Viscount Hill, was born in Shropshire, in 1772. He was first placed at Ightfield, a neighboring village, and thence sent to Chester, where he won the affections of his

*The splendor in which Scott lived at Abbotsford was entirely obtained from the products of his pen to this he owed his acres, his castle, and his means of hospitality. In 1526, through his losses in the publishing business, his debts amounted to 117,000. He would listen to no overtures of composition with his creditors-his only demand was for time. He retrenched his expenses, took lodgings in Edinburgh, labored incessantly at his literary work, and in four years realized for his creditors no less than 70,000/.!

school-fellows from his gentle disposition, and the gallantry with which he was always ready to assist any comrade who had got into a scrape, at the same time that he was himself the least likely to be involved in one on his own account. He was of delicate constitution, and he was thrown more than usually upon the care of Mrs. Winfield, wife of one of the masters of the school. It is one of the delightful traits of Hill's character, that the grateful affection which he then felt for this amiable lady, continued an enduring sentiment in after-life, and was repeatedly exhibited after the delicate school-boy had grown up into one of the most renowned generals of his time. Thus, after the abdication of Napoleon in 1814, when Lord Hill accompanied his friend, Lord Combermere, on his entry into Chester, where he himself received a greeting all the more cordial from his having spent some of his earlier years at a Chester school, as he passed along the streets of the city in a triumphal procession, it was observed that his eye singled out among the applauding throng, one on whom he bestowed the kindest recognition. It was Mrs. Winfield whom he had thus distinguished: he had never forgotten her kindness to him when a boy.

The same love of horticulture, the same fondness for pet animals, which characterized Hill in after-life, had already been exhibited by him at school, where his little garden prospered, and his favorites throve, better than those of any of his companions. But there is another characteristic of his, which comes with something like surprise upon those who have been in the habit of associating the name of Hill so closely with the battle-field. "His sensibility," says Mrs. Winfield, "was almost feminine." One of the boys happened to cut his finger, and was brought by Rowland Hill to have it dressed; but her attention was soon drawn from the wound to Rowland, who had fainted.

And even after his military career had commenced, when it happened that a prize-fight was exhibited near the windows of his lodgings, such was the effect produced on him by the brutality of the scene, that he was carried fainting out of his room. So little does there require to be in common between the most heroic courage and the coarse and vulgar attribute of insensibility to the sight of blood and suffering. He explained afterward, in reference to the carnage which he had witnessed in war, that he had still the same feelings as at first, "but in the excitement of battle all individual sensation was lost sight of."

Young Hill entered the army in 1790, and upon leave of

absence went to a military academy at Strasburg, where he remained till 1791, when he obtained a lieutenancy. Lord Hill greatly distinguished himself at the battle of Waterloo, and was there exposed to the greatest personal danger: his horse was shot under him, and fell wounded in five places; he himself was rolled over and severely bruised, and for half an hour, in the mêlée, it was feared by his troops that he had been killed. But he rejoined them to their great delight, and was at their head to the close of the day.

COLERIDGE AT CHRIST'S HOSPITAL AND CAMBRIDge.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "logician, metaphysician, bard," may be said to have commanded a larger number of zealous admirers than any other literary man in England since Dr. Johnson. Coleridge was a native of Devonshire, and was born in 1772, at St. Mary Ottery, of which parish his father was vicar. From 1775, he tells us in his Biographia Literaria, he continued at the reading-school, because he was too little to be trusted among his father's school-boys. He relates further, how, through the jealousy of a brother, he was in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyments of muscular activity by play, to take refuge by his mother's side, on his little stool, to read his little book, and listen to the talk of his elders. In 1782, he was sent to Christ's Hospital; and after passing six weeks in the branch school at Hertford, little Coleridge, already regarded by his relations as a talking prodigy, came up to the great school in London, where he continued for eight years, with Bowyer for his teacher, and Charles Lamb for his associate; Coleridge being "the poor friendless boy" in Elia's "Christ's Hospital Five-and-thirty Years Ago." Here Coleridge made very great progress in his classical studies; for he had before his fifteenth year translated the hymns of Synesius into English Anacreontics. His choice of these hymns for translation is explained by his having even at that early age, plunged deeply into metaphysics. He says: "At a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics and theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History and particular facts lost all interest in my mind. Poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me." From such pursuits, Coleridge was, however, weaned for a time by the reading of Mr. Lisle Bowles's Sonnets, which had just then been published, and made a powerful influence upon his mind.

He describes himself as being, from eight to fourteen, “a playless dreamer, a heluo librorum (a glutton of books)." A stranger, whom he accidentally met one day in the streets of

London, and who was struck with his conversation, made him free of a circulating library, and he read through the collection, folios and all. At fourteen, he At fourteen, he had, like Gibbon, a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a school-boy would have been ashamed. He had no ambition: his father was dead; and he would have apprenticed himself to a shoemaker who lived near the school, had not the head-master prevented him.

He has left some interesting recollections of Christ's Hospital in his time. "The discipline," he says, "was ultra-Spartan: all domestic ties were to be put aside. 'Boy,' I remember Boyer saying to me once, when I was crying, the first day of my return after the holidays,Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first-cousin and your second-cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying.'"

Coleridge became deputy-Grecian, or head-scholar, and obtained an exhibition or presentation from Christ's Hospital to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1791. While at the University, he did not turn his attention at all to mathematics; but obtained a prize for a Greek ode on the Slave-trade, and distinguished himself in a contest for the Craven scholarship, in which Dr. Butler, afterward Bishop of Lichfield, was the successful candidate.

"Coleridge," says a school-fellow of his, who followed him to Cambridge in 1792, "was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise; but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind to conversation; and for the sake of this, his room (the ground-fleor room on the right hand of the staircase, facing the great gate) was a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends, I will not call them loungers, for they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What evenings have I spent in tho e rooms! What suppers, or sizings, as they were called, have I enjoyed, when Aschy lus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day! Ever and anon a paniphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us :-Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbatim.”

Coleridge did not take a degree. During the second year of his residence, he suddenly left the University in a fit of despondency; and after wandering for a while about the streets of London, in extreme pecuniary distress, terminated his adventure by enlisting in the 15th Dragoons, under the assumed name of Comberbach. He made but a poor dragoon, and never advanced beyond the awkward squad. He wrote letters, however, for all his comrades, and they attended to his horse and accoutrements. In four months his history and circumstances became known: he had written under his saddle, on the stable-wall, a Latin sentence, (Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem !) which led to an inquiry by the captain of his troop; and Coleridge was discharged and restored to his family and friends. He returned to Cambridge; and shortly afterward went on a visit to an old school-fellow at Oxford, where an introduction to Southey, then an undergraduate at Balliol College, became

the hinge on which a large part of his after-life was destined

to turn.

Charles Lamb, in his "Christ's Hospital Five-and-thirty Years Ago," has this delightful recollection of his fellow-Blue:

Come back into my memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of my fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee-the dark pillar not yet turned-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar-while the walls of the old Gray Friars re-echoed the accents of the inspired charityboy-Many were the "wit combats" (to dally awhile with the words of old Fuller) between him and . V. Le G "which two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon, and an English man-of-war; Master Coleridge, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. C. V. L, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention."- The Essays of Elia.

ROBERT SOUTHEY AT HIS SCHOOLS, AND AT oxford. Robert Southey, the business of whose life was the pursuit of literature, and the first and last joy of his heart, was born in the city of Bristol, in 1774, and was the son of a small tradesman.* His childhood, however, was not passed at home, but from the age of two to six, at the house of Miss Tyler, his aunt, in Bath. He had no playmates; he was never permitted to do anything in which by any possibility he might contract dirt; he was kept up late at night in dramatic society, and kept in bed late in the morning at the side of his aunt; and his chief pastime-for neither at this time nor at a later period had Southey any propensity for boyish sports-was pricking holes in playbills-an amusement, of course, suggested to him by Miss Tyler, and witnessed by her with infinite delight. As soon as the child could read, his aunt's friends furnished him with books. The son of Francis Newbery, of St. Paul's Churchyard, and the well-known publisher of Goody Two Shoes,† Giles Gingerbread, "and other such delectable histories in sixpenny books for children, splendidly bound in the flowered and gilt Dutch paper of former days," sent the child twenty such volumes.

"This," says Southey, in his autobiography, "was a rich present, and may have been more instrumental than I am aware in

*For the materials of this sketch the writer is greatly indebted to the first volume of the Life and Letters of Robert Southey. Edited by his Son, the Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey, M.A. 1849. In this work, the narrative in the exquisite fragment of Autobiography ceases at Westminster School, when Southey had hardly attained his fifteenth

year.

↑ "Godwin, the author of Caleb Williams, who had been a child's publisher himself, had always a strong persuasion that Goldsmith wrote Goody Two Shoes; and if so, the effort belongs to 1763; Mrs. Margery, radiant with gold and gingerbread, and rich in pictures as extravagantly ill-drawn as they are dear and well remembered, made her appearance at Christmas."-Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith. By John Foster. 1848. Page 300.