y. One of these was
the writer of the Life of Thomas Baker, the Cambridge Antiquary, who
prognosticated all the evil he among others was to endure; and,
writhing in fancy under the whip not yet untwisted, justly enough
exclaims in his agony, "The attempt to keep these characters from the
public till the subjects of them shall be no more, seems to be
peculiarly cruel and ungenerous, since it is precluding them from
vindicating themselves from such injurious aspersions, as their
friends, perhaps however willing, may at that distance of time be
incapable of removing." With this author, Mr. Masters, Cole had
quarrelled so often, that Masters writes, "I am well acquainted with
the fickleness of his disposition for more than forty years past."

When the lid was removed from this Pandora's box, it happened that
some of his intimate friends were alive to perceive in what strange
figures they were exhibited by their quondam admirer!

COLE, however, bequeathed to the nation, among his unpublished works,
a vast mass of antiquities and historical collections, and one
valuable legacy of literary materials. When I turned over the papers
of this literary antiquary, I found the recorded cries of a literary
martyr.

COLE had passed a long life in the pertinacious labour of forming an
"Athenae Cantabrigienses," and other literary collections--designed as
a companion to the work of Anthony Wood. These mighty labours exist in
more than fifty folio volumes in his own writing. He began these
collections about the year 1745; in a fly-leaf of 1777 I found the
following melancholy state of his feelings and a literary confession,
as forcibly expressed as it is painful to read, when we consider that
they are the wailings of a most zealous votary:

"In good truth, whoever undertakes this drudgery of an 'Athenae
Cantabrigienses' must be contented with no prospect of credit and
reputation to himself, and with the mortifying reflection that after
all his pains and study, through life, he must be looked upon in a
humble light, and only as a journeyman to Anthony Wood, whose
excellent book of the same sort will ever preclude any other, who
shall follow him in the same track, from all hopes of fame; and will
only represent him as an imitator of so original a pattern. For, at
this time of day, all great characters, both Cantabrigians and
Oxonians, are already published to the world, either in his book, or
various others; so that the collection, unle