old man when I was not able to bear it.

God bless him for it, and God bless you, Southey!

C. L.

[1] Leigh Hunt says: "Walton says that an angler does no hurt but to
fish; and this he counts as nothing.... Now, fancy a Genius fishing for
us. Fancy him baiting a great hook with pickled salmon, and, twitching
up old Izaac Walton from the banks of the River Lee, with the hook
through his ear. How he would go up, roaring and screaming, and thinking
the devil had got him!

"'Other joys
Are but toys.'

WALTON."

[2] See Letter VI.

XIX.

TO THOMAS MANNING [1].

_March_ 1, 1800.

I hope by this time you are prepared to say the "Falstaff's Letters" are
a bundle of the sharpest, queerest, profoundest humors of any these
juice-drained latter times have spawned. I should have advertised you
that the meaning is frequently hard to be got at,--and so are the future
guineas that now lie ripening and aurifying in the womb of some
undiscovered Potosi; but dig, dig, dig, dig, Manning! I set to with an
unconquerable propulsion to write, with a lamentable want of what to
write. My private goings on are orderly as the movements of the spheres,
and stale as their music to angels' ears. Public affairs, except as they
touch upon me, and so turn into private, I cannot whip up my mind to
feel any interest in, I grieve, indeed, that War and Nature and Mr.
Pitt, that hangs up in Lloyd's best parlour, should have conspired to
call up three necessaries, simple commoners as our fathers knew them,
into the upper house of luxuries,--bread and beer and coals, Manning.
But as to France and Frenchmen, and the Abbe Sieyes and his
constitutions, I cannot make these present times present to me. I read
histories of the past, and I live in them; although, to abstract senses,
they are far less momentous than the noises which keep Europe awake. I
am reading Burnet's "Own Times." Did you ever read that garrulous,
pleasant history? He tells his story like an old man, past political
service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in
public transactions when "his old cap was new." Full of scandal, which
all true history is. No palliatives; but all the stark wickedness that
actually gives the _momentum_ to national actors. Quite the prattle of
age and outlived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you
perpetually in _alto relievo_. Himself a party man, he makes you a party
man. None of the cursed philosophi