tt and Dundas. Yet _why_, we
never could understand. We once heard him tell a story upon
Windermere, to the late Mr Curwen, then M.P. for Workington, which was
meant, apparently, to account for this feeling. The story amounted to
this: that, when a freshman at Cambridge, Mr Pitt had wantonly amused
himself at a dinner party in Trinity, in smashing with filberts
(discharged in showers like grape-shot) a most costly dessert set of
cut glass, from which Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued a principle of
destructiveness in his _cerebellum_. Now, if this dessert set belonged
to some poor suffering Trinitarian, and not to himself, we are of
opinion that he was faulty, and ought, upon his own great subsequent
maxim, to have been coerced into "indemnity for the past, and security
for the future." But, besides that this glassy _mythus_ belongs to an
aera fifteen years earlier than Coleridge's, so as to justify a shadow
of scepticism, we really cannot find, in such an _escapade_ under the
boiling blood of youth, any sufficient justification of that withering
malignity towards the name of Pitt, which runs through Coleridge's
famous _Fire, Famine, and Slaughter_. As this little viperous
_jeu-d'esprit_ (published anonymously) subsequently became the subject
of a celebrated after-dinner discussion in London, at which Coleridge
(_comme de raison_) was the chief speaker, the reader of this
generation may wish to know the question at issue; and in order to
judge of _that_, he must know the outline of this devil's squib. The
writer brings upon the scene three pleasant young ladies, viz. Miss
Fire, Miss Famine, and Miss Slaughter. "What are you up to? What's the
row?"--we may suppose to be the introductory question of the poet. And
the answer of the ladies makes us aware that they are fresh from
larking in Ireland, and in France. A glorious spree they had; lots of
fun; and laughter _a discretion_. At all times _gratus puellae risus ab
angulo_; so that we listen to their little gossip with interest. They
had been setting men, it seems, by the ears; and the drollest little
atrocities they do certainly report. Not but we have seen better in
the Nenagh paper, so far as Ireland is concerned. But the pet little
joke was in La Vendee. Miss Famine, who is the girl for our money,
raises the question--whether any of them can tell the name of the
leader and prompter to these high jinks of hell--if so, let her
whisper it.

"Whisper it, sister, so and s