cquaintance, Blas of
Santillane, at setting out on his travels, conceived himself to be _la
huitieme merveille du monde_; but here is one, who, after the
experience of a long life, is writing a large work to prove himself
that very curious thing.

What were these mighty and unknown works? Stockdale confesses that all
his verses have been received with negligence or contempt; yet their
mediocrity, the absolute poverty of his genius, never once occurred to
the poetical patriarch.

I have said that the frequent origin of bad poets is owing to bad
critics; and it was the early friends of Stockdale, who, mistaking his
animal spirits for genius, by directing them into the walks of poetry,
bewildered him for ever. It was their hand that heedlessly fixed the
bias in the rolling bowl of his restless mind.

He tells us that while yet a boy of twelve years old, one day talking
with his father at Branxton, where the battle of Flodden was fought,
the old gentleman said to him with great emphasis--

"You may make that place remarkable for your birth, if you take care
of yourself. My father's understanding was clear and strong, and he
could penetrate human nature. He already saw that _I had natural
advantages above those of common men_."

But it seems that, at some earlier period even than his twelfth year,
some good-natured Pythian had predicted that Stockdale would be "a
poet." This ambiguous oracle was still listened to, after a lapse of
more than half a century, and the decree is still repeated with fond
credulity:--"Notwithstanding," he exclaims, "_all that is past_, O
thou god of my mind! (meaning the aforesaid Pythian) I still hope that
my future fame will decidedly _warrant the prediction_!"

Stockdale had, in truth, an excessive sensibility of temper, without
any control over it--he had all the nervous contortions of the Sybil,
without her inspiration; and shifting, in his many-shaped life,
through all characters and all pursuits, "exalting the olive of
Minerva with the grape of Bacchus," as he phrases it, he was a lover,
a tutor, a recruiting officer, a reviewer, and, at length, a
clergyman; but a poet eternally! His mind was so curved, that nothing
could stand steadily upon it. The accidents of such a life he
describes with such a face of rueful simplicity, and mixes up so much
grave drollery and merry pathos with all he says or does, and his
ubiquity is so wonderful, that he gives an idea of a character, of
whose e