good repute,
his freedom even from my own livelier manner, his calm and reasonable
kindness. It was not any particular talent that attracted me to him
or anything striking whatsoever. I should say in one word, it was
his goodness. I doubt whether he ever had a conception of a tithe of
the regard and respect I entertained for him; and I smile to think
of the perplexity (though he never showed it) which he probably felt
sometimes at my enthusiastic expressions; for I thought him a kind of
angel. It is no exaggeration to say, that, take away the unspiritual
part of it--the genius and the knowledge--and there is no height of
conceit indulged in by the most romantic character in Shakspeare,
which surpassed what I felt toward the merits I ascribed to him, and
the delight which I took in his society. With the other boys I played
antics, and rioted in fantastic jests; but in his society, or whenever
I thought of him, I fell into a kind of Sabbath state of bliss; and I
am sure I could have died for him.

* * * * *

ANECDOTE OF MATHEWS.--One morning, after stopping all night at this
pleasant house, I was getting up to breakfast, when I heard the noise
of a little boy having his face washed. Our host was a merry bachelor,
and to the rosiness of a priest might, for aught I knew, have added
the paternity; but I had never heard of it, and still less expected
to find a child in his house. More obvious and obstreperous proofs,
however, of the existence of a boy with a dirty face, could not have
been met with. You heard the child crying and objecting; then the
woman remonstrating; then the cries of the child snubbed and swallowed
up in the hard towel; and at intervals out came his voice bubbling
and deploring, and was again swallowed up. At breakfast, the child
being pitied, I ventured to speak about it, and was laughing and
sympathizing in perfect good faith, when Mathews came in, and I found
that the little urchin was he.

* * * * *

SHELLEY'S GENEROSITY.--As an instance of Shelley's extraordinary
generosity, a friend of his, a man of letters, enjoyed from him
at that period a pension of a hundred a year, though he had but
a thousand of his own; and he continued to enjoy it till fortune
rendered it superfluous. But the princeliness of his disposition
was seen most in his behavior to another friend, the writer of this
memoir, who is proud to relate that, with money rai