Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

one who has not. But I have come across so many parodies of it and so many references to it in various books and a

th their priggishness they were manly boys, and there was something fine in their ideals of honour. No doubt they were largely modelled on their author, Thomas Day, who when he was a schoolboy starte

rested in Day himself than in his one famous book, and has made me number 36 Wellclose Squar

e way and another acquired lofty Stoic principles and a somewhat original philosophy that he lived up to obstinately all his life through, in spite of many rebuffs and a good deal of ridicule. He dressed carelessly, was indifferent to appearances, and scorned the "admiration of splendour which dazzles and enslaves mankind." He preferred the society of his inferiors because they were more unconventional, less artificial than the ladies and gentlemen of his own rank; he was awkward in the company of

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his friend Edgeworth, and gave guarantees to the authorities that within one year he would make a decision between the two and pay a premium of a hundred pounds to apprentice one to a suitable trade, and send the other to be properly educated with the ultimate object of marrying her. The girls were about twelve years old. In order that they should not be influenced with wrong ideas by the people about them, he took them into France, where, as they only understood English, they could talk with nobody but himself; and there he proceeded to teach them reading and writing, and by ridicule, explanation, and reasoning sought "to imbue them with a deep hatred for dress, for luxury, for fine people, for fashion and titles, all of which inspired his

But she disappointed him; he endeavoured in vain to steel her against shrinking from pain and the fear of danger. "When he dropped melting sealing-wax on her arms she did not endure it heroically; nor when he fired pistols at her petticoats which she believed to be charged with balls could she help starting aside or suppress her screams." She was not f

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had categorically put his requirements to her, and she had consented to dispense with all luxuries, to cut herself off from social gaieties, and reside in the country with him, restricted in every way to the bare necessaries of existence, working and spending for the behoof of the poor and needy, he ventured to make her Mrs. Day, and never had occasion to regret it. Sabrina eventually mar

Anyhow, he thought for himself, and had opinions of his own, and was not afraid to act upon them. And such men are so uncommonly rare that I think the County C

the only one that survives in its original condition is that at No. 4 Bennet Street, St. James's. Here he had rooms on the first floor in 1813 and the early months of 1814, and it was in those rooms that he wrote The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, and The Corsair. Writing to Moore from here on the 28th July 1813, he says, "I am training to dine with Sheridan and Rogers this evening"; and in t

times the parent." In another of the same September 1813, evidently replying to one of hers, he protests: "'Gay' but not 'content'-very true.... You have detected a laughter 'false to the heart'-allowed-yet I have been tolerably sincere with you, and I fear sometimes troublesome." In November he writes to her, "I perceive by part of your last letter that you are still inclined to believe me a gloomy personage. Those who pass so much of their time entirely alone c

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yle to the lackadaisical"; and he relates an anecdote in illustration of Byron's extreme sensitiveness: "Like Rousseau, he was apt to be very suspicious, and a plain, downright steadiness of manner was the true mode to maintain his good opinion. Will Rose told me that once, while sitting with Byron, he fixed insensibly his eyes on his feet, one of which, it must be remembered, was deformed. Looking up suddenly, he saw Byron regarding him with a look of concentrated and deep displeasure, wh

often mentioned in connection with his told a friend of mine that when she first saw Byron it was in a crowded room, and she did not know who it was, but her eyes were instantly nailed, and she said to herself, 'That pale face is my fate.' And, poor soul, if a god-like face and god-like powers could have made excuse for devilry, to be sure she had one." He said on the same occasion, "As for poets, I have seen,

ady in the following September, and was rejected again, and almost immediately afterwards he called on Miss Milbanke at her father's house, 29 Portland Place, and in the library there passionately renewed his suit, and this time was su

ains; and so, too, does No. 8 St. James's Street, where he lived in 1809, when his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers took the town

time and another he spent quite a large part of his life in the metropolis. He was at school with Lamb, of course, at Christ's Hospital; and are not Lamb's letters strewn with yearning remembrances of the glorious evenings he and Coleridge and Hazlitt and others passed, in later years, in the smoky parlour of "The Salutation and Cat," in Newgate Street? At various dates, he li

the close-"Coleridge is in town, or at least at Hammersmith. He is writing or going to write in the Courier against Cobbett and in favour of paper money." Byron wrote to a friend in the succeeding year, "Coleridge is lecturing. 'Many an old fool,' said Hannibal to some such lecturer, 'but such as this, never'"; and to the same friend two days later, "Coleridge has been lecturing against Campbell. Rogers was p

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heard me preach?" he asked Lamb, and Lamb replied with his whimsical stammer, "I never heard you do anything else!" But you remember that fine essay of Hazlitt's in which he recounts his first acquaintance with Coleridge?-how he rose before daylight and walked ten miles in the mud to hear him preach. "When I got there, the organ was playing the hundredth psalm, and when it was done Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text, 'And he went up into the mountain to pray, Himself, alone.' As he gave out his text his voice 'rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,' and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the uni

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in dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge." That was when Coleridge was twenty-six and Hazlitt twenty. These twelve years after that, when Coleridge was lecturing in London, his fancy and imagination were as dazzling and as powerful as ever, and his voice and language had lost none of their magic. But his thoughts were pe

ues were quite unintelligible, not only to myself, but to others. Wordsworth and I called upon him one afternoon, when he was in a lodging off Pall Mall. He talked uninterruptedly for about two hours, during which Wordsworth listened to him with profound atten

n. Yet I am told that my eye, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good." De Quincey says there was a peculiar haze or dimness mixed with the light of his eyes; and when he was roused to animation Lamb thought he looked like "an archangel a little damaged." But whether that haze of his eyes got into his talk, whe

Coleridge; he

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