ossessed of the peculiar vein of that
poet."

Such is the very accurate case drawn up by a medical writer. I can
conceive nothing in it to warrant the charge of insanity; Mr. Haslam,
not being a poet, seems to have mistaken the common orgasm of poetry
for insanity itself.

Of such poets, one was the late PERCIVAL STOCKDALE, who, with the most
entertaining simplicity, has, in "The Memoirs of his Life and
Writings," presented us with a full-length figure of this class of
poets; those whom the perpetual pursuits of poetry, however
indifferent, involve in a perpetual illusion; they are only discovered
in their profound obscurity by the piteous cries they sometimes utter;
they live on querulously, which is an evil for themselves, and to no
purpose of life, which is an evil to others.

I remember in my youth Percival Stockdale as a condemned poet of the
times, of whom the bookseller Flexney complained that, whenever this
poet came to town, it cost him twenty pounds. Flexney had been the
publisher of Churchill's works; and, never forgetting the time when he
published "The Rosciad," which at first did not sell, and afterwards
became the most popular poem, he was speculating all his life for
another Churchill, and another quarto poem. Stockdale usually brought
him what he wanted--and Flexney found the workman, but never the
work.

Many a year had passed in silence, and Stockdale could hardly be
considered alive, when, to the amazement of some curious observers of
our literature, a venerable man, about his eightieth year, a vivacious
spectre, with a cheerful voice, seemed as if throwing aside his shroud
in gaiety--to come to assure us of the immortality of one of the worst
poets of the time.

To have taken this portrait from the life would have been difficult;
but the artist has painted himself, and manufactured his own colours;
else had our ordinary ones but faintly copied this Chinese grotesque
picture--the glare and the glow must be borrowed from his own
palette.

Our self-biographer announces his "Life" with prospective rapture, at
the moment he is turning a sad retrospect on his "Writings;" for this
was the chequered countenance of his character, a smile while he was
writing, a tear when he had published! "I know," he exclaims, "that
this book will live and _escape the havoc that has been made of my
literary fame_." Again--"Before I die, I _think my literary fame may
be fixed on an adamantine foundation_." Our old a