e
sat two Oxonians, one of them helping me, and loudly and laughingly
differing with the other, who did not at all like the rocking of the
boat, and who assured me, to the manifest contradiction of such senses
as I had left, that there was no room. This gentleman is now no more,
and I shall not mention his name, because I might do injustice to the
memory of a brave man struck with a panic. The name of his companion, if
I mistake not, was Russell. I hope he was related to an illustrious
person of the same name, to whom I have lately been indebted for what
may have been another prolongation of my life.

On returning to town, which I did on the top of an Oxford coach, I was
relating this story to the singular person who then drove it (Bobart,
who had been a collegian), when a man who was sitting behind surprised
us with the excess of his laughter. On asking him the reason, he touched
his hat, and said, "Sir, I'm his footman." Such were the delicacies of
the livery, and the glorifications of their masters with which they
entertain the kitchen.--_From the Autobiography of Leigh Hunt._

WILLIAM PITT.

BY S. T. COLERIDGE.

The following very graphic and very severe critical estimate of WILLIAM
PITT, the great Prime Minister of England during the stormy era of the
French Revolution, was written by COLERIDGE for the London Morning Post,
with which he was then connected. It appeared in the number of that
paper, dated Wednesday, March 19, 1800. We copy it from COLERIDGE'S
"Essays on His Own Times," just published in London.

* * * * *

PLUTARCH, in his comparative biography of Rome and Greece, has generally
chosen for each pair of lives the two contemporaries who most nearly
resemble each other. His work would, perhaps have been more interesting,
if he had adopted the contrary arrangement and selected those rather,
who had attained to the possession of similar influence or similar fame,
by means, actions, and talents, the most dissimilar. For power is the
sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature:
and in the one equally as in the other, we understand it more
intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we have
observed it co-exist. In our days the two persons, who appear to have
influenced the interests and actions of men the most deeply and the most
diffusively are beyond doubt the Chief Consul of France, and the Prime
Minister of Great Bri