ller had refused to pay me the fifty
guineas, according to agreement."

This claims a tear! Never were the agonies of literary disappointment
more pathetically told.

But as it is impossible to have known poor deluded Stockdale, and not
to have laughed at him more than to have wept for him--so the
catastrophe of this author's literary life is as finely in character
as all the acts. That catastrophe, of course, is his last poem.

After many years his poetical demon having been chained from the
world, suddenly broke forth on the reports of a French invasion. The
narrative shall proceed in his own inimitable manner.

"My poetical spirit excited me to write my poem of 'The Invincible
Island.' I never found myself in a happier disposition to compose, nor
ever wrote with more pleasure. I presumed warmly to hope that unless
_inveterate prejudice and malice_ were as invincible as our island
itself, it would have _the diffusive circulation_ which I earnestly
desired.

"Flushed with this idea--borne impetuously along _by ambition and by
hope, though they had often deluded me_, I set off in the mail-coach
from Durham for London, on the 9th of December, 1797, at midnight, and
in a severe storm. On my arrival in town my poem was advertised,
printed, and published with great expedition. It was printed for
Clarke in New Bond-street. For several days the sale was very
promising; and my bookseller as well as myself entertained sanguine
hopes; _but the demand for the poem relaxed gradually_! From this last
of many literary misfortunes, I inferred that _prejudice_ and
_malignity_, in my fate as an _author_, seemed, indeed, to be
invincible."

The catastrophe of the poet is much better told than anything in the
poem, which had not merit enough to support that interest which the
temporary subject had excited.

Let the fate of Stockdale instruct some, and he will not have written
in vain the "Memoirs of his Life and Writings." I have only turned the
literary feature to our eye; it was combined with others, equally
striking, from the same mould in which that was cast. Stockdale
imagined he possessed an intuitive knowledge of human nature. He says,
"everything that constituted my nature, my acquirements, my habits,
and my fortune, conspired to let in upon me a complete knowledge of
human nature." A most striking proof of this knowledge is his
parallel, after the manner of Plutarch, between Charles XII. and
himself! He frankly confess