inherited also the
diviner part of his features. The upper part of her face, at seventeen,
when last we saw her, seemed to us angelic, and pathetically angelic;
for the whole countenance was suffused by a pensive nun-like beauty too
charming and too affecting ever to be forgotten. Derwent, the youngest
son, we have not seen since boyhood, but at that period he had a
handsome cast of features, and (from all we can gather) the
representative cast of the Coleridge family. But Hartley, the eldest
son, how shall we describe _him_? He was most intellectual and he was
most eccentric, and his features expressed all that in perfection.
Southey, in his domestic playfulness, used to call him the _Knave of
Spades_; and he certainly _had_ a resemblance to that well-known young
gentleman. But really we do not know that it would have been at all
better to resemble the knave of hearts. And it must be remembered that
the knave of spades may have a brother very like himself, and yet a
hundred times handsomer. There _are_ such things as handsome likenesses
of very plain people. Some folks pronounced Hartley Coleridge too
Jewish. But to be a Jew is to be an Arab. And our own feeling was, when
we met Hartley at times in solitary or desolate places of Westmoreland
and Cumberland, that here was a son of Ishmael walking in the wilderness
of Edom. The coruscating _nimbus_ of his curling and profuse black hair,
black as erebus, strengthened the Saracen impression of his features and
complexion. He wanted only a turban on his head, and a spear in his
right hand, to be perfect as a Bedouin. But it affected us as all things
are affecting which record great changes, to hear that for a long time
before his death this black hair had become white as the hair of
infancy. Much sorrow and much thought had been the worms that gnawed the
roots of that raven hair; that, in Wordsworth's fine way of expressing
the very same fact as to Mary Queen of Scots:

'Kill'd the bloom before its time,
And blanch'd, without the owner's crime,
The most resplendent hair.'

Ah, wrecks of once blooming nurseries, that from generation to
generation, from John Coleridge the apostolic to S. T. C. the sunbright,
and from S. T. C. the sunbright to Hartley the starry, lie scattered
upon every shore!

_II. MR. FINLAY'S HISTORY OF GREECE._

In attempting to appraise Mr. Finlay's work comprehensively, there is
this difficulty. It comes before us in two chara