expected, gentlemen, when the cool
waters of reason come in contact with red-hot aristocracy, but a
hiss?" _Euge!_

Amongst all the anecdotes, however, of this splendid man, often
trivial, often incoherent, often unauthenticated, there is one which
strikes us as both true and interesting; and we are grateful to Mr
Gillman for preserving it. We find it introduced, and partially
authenticated, by the following sentence from Coleridge
himself:--"From eight to fourteen I was a playless day-dreamer, a
_helluo librorum_; my appetite for which was indulged by a singular
incident. A stranger, who was struck by my conversation, made me free
of a circulating library in King's Street, Cheapside." The more
circumstantial explanation of Mr Gillman is this: "The incident indeed
was singular. Going down the Strand, in one of his day-dreams,
fancying himself swimming across the Hellespont, thrusting his hands
before him as in the act of swimming, his hand came in contact with a
gentleman's pocket. The gentleman seized his hand, turning round, and
looking at him with some anger--'What! so young, and yet so wicked?'
at the same time accused him of an attempt to pick his pocket. The
frightened boy sobbed out his denial of the intention, and explained
to him how he thought himself Leander swimming across the Hellespont.
The gentleman was so struck and delighted with the novelty of the
thing, and with the simplicity and intelligence of the boy, that he
subscribed, as before stated, to the library; in consequence of which
Coleridge was further enabled to indulge his love of reading."

We fear that this slovenly narrative is the very perfection of bad
story-telling. But the story itself is striking, and, by the very
oddness of the incidents, not likely to have been invented. The
effect, from the position of the two parties--on the one side, a
simple child from Devonshire, dreaming in the Strand that he was
swimming over from Sestos to Abydos, and, on the other, the
experienced man, dreaming only of this world, its knaves and its
thieves, but still kind and generous--is beautiful and picturesque.
_Oh! si sic omnia_!

But the most interesting to us of the _personalities_ connected with
Coleridge are his feuds and his personal dislikes. Incomprehensible to
us is the war of extermination which Coleridge made upon the political
economists. Did Sir James Steuart, in speaking of vine-dressers, (not
_as_ vine-dressers, but generally as cultivator