and brilliant? O
Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time
you come to England, of not admitting any spirituous liquors into my
house, will you be my guest on such shameworthy terms? Is life, with
such limitations, worth trying? The truth is, that my liquors bring a
nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me. This is a
pitiful tale to be read at St. Gothard; but it is just now nearest
my heart.

[1] Patterdale.

XXXIX.

TO COLERIDGE,

_October_ 23, 1802.

I read daily your political essays. I was particularly pleased with
"Once a Jacobin;" though the argument is obvious enough, the style was
less swelling than your things sometimes are, and it was plausible _ad
populum_. A vessel has just arrived from Jamaica with the news of poor
Sam Le Grice's death. He died at Jamaica of the yellow fever. His course
was rapid, and he had been very foolish; but I believe there was more of
kindness and warmth in him than in almost any other of our
schoolfellows. The annual meeting of the Blues is to-morrow, at the
London Tavern, where poor Sammy dined with them two years ago, and
attracted the notice of all by the singular foppishness of his dress.
When men go off the stage so early, it scarce seems a noticeable thing
in their epitaphs, whether they had been wise or silly in
their lifetime.

I am glad the snuff and Pi-pos's books please. "Goody Two Shoes" is
almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old
classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newberry's hardly deigned to
reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for
them. Mrs. B.'s and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about.
Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B.'s books convey, it seems,
must come to the child in the _shape_ of _knowledge_, and his empty
noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learned
that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such
like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the
child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger
than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little
walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting
this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being
fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed
with geography and natural history!

Hang them!--I mean the cu