desired, would not probably have had any difficulty in obtaining such a living as would have placed him in independent circumstances. Resolved, however, to devote himself to the muses, after a long ramble over the Continent he withdrew to the mountains of Cumberland, where his life was, thenceforward, chiefly spent, and depended for a time entirely on a sum bequeathed to him by a friend who died in early life. Slowly, but surely, Wordsworth's poetical works forced their way into public estimation; and, before his death, at the advanced age of eighty, he had received nearly as many honours and practical evidences of the high appreciation of his genius as ever fell to the lot of a poet so retired, and so little inclined to aim at popular favour. From the residence of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Wilson, among the Cumberland Lakes, they were styled, along with one or two contemporaries of somewhat similar style, "The Lake Poets;" but the term, which was originally employed in ridicule, has long ceased to bear any such construction.

SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART.

BORN, 1771; DIED, 1832.

SCOTT is now less remembered as the poet than as the great novelist. Nevertheless, his poetry is justly valued for its truthfulness to nature, and would have sufficed to secure for him an enduring fame, had it not been eclipsed by his later and more popular prose writings. He was the younger son of an Edinburgh writer, and had not his ambition to found a family, and become a landed proprietor, tempted him to involve himself in large trading

speculations as a printer and publisher, the direct rewards of his literary labours, added to the advantages which they secured for him through the influence of powerful friends, would have enabled him to live in the style of a Scottish gentleman. As Sheriff of Selkirkshire, he had an annual income of £300. As Clerk of the Court of Session, he obtained a still larger sum; and, such was the value of his writings, that by the sale of "Woodstock" alone, one of the least valued of them, and the product of only three months' labour, his creditors realised the sum of £8000. The romance, however, which gave such value to his writings, was a most dangerous element in the practical business of life. By indulging in his romantic and ambitious visions of worldly dignity and honour, he sacrificed the substance for a most illusory shadow; and when, in the disastrous failure of Constable and Ballantyne, in 1826, his connection with these houses could no longer be concealed, his personal liabilities amounted to upwards of £100,000. Then it was that his noble heroism and integrity became manifest. He set himself to work, when he might have looked forward to the wellearned honours of old age, to redeem his fair fame, and to right all who had suffered by his dreams of romantic ambition. His exertions were great, and the amount of his success wonderful; but the task he had set himself was beyond his powers; and after a voyage to Italy, in the vain hope of restoring his shattered constitution, he only returned to die on the banks of the Tweed, in the mansion which he had reared with so much pride. 1820, he was created a Baronet by George IV., and his great ambition was to perpetuate its hereditary honours in his family; but already, before his contemporaries have followed him to the grave, his splendid dream of family rank

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and hereditary distinctions appears to have nearly faded like an unsubstantial vision, though his own name will not soon be forgot among the most distinguished of those which adorn the literary annals of the nineteenth century.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
BORN, 1772; DIED, 1834.

COLERIDGE was the youngest son of a vicar of St. Mary Ottery, Devonshire. His early years were spent at Bristol, and he received the rudiments of his education there. From thence he went to Christ's Church Hospital, London, where he greatly distinguished himself, as he afterwards did at Jesus College, Cambridge. After a life strangely chequered by the aberrations and inconsistencies which so frequently mar the full manifestations of true genius, he died at Highgate, in the house of Mr. Gilman, a benevolent surgeon, under whose care the latter years of his life were passed.

ROBERT SOUTHEY, LL.D.

BORN, 1773; DIED, 1835.

SOUTHEY, the son of a draper in Bristol, is distinguished as one of the most voluminous writers of his age. His learning was great, and the copiousness of his mind seemed nearly inexhaustible. He and Coleridge married sisters, and, after a brief stay, first at Lisbon, and then in London, Southey settled on the banks of the Greta, near Keswick, where he passed a laborious literary life,

characterized by remarkable perseverance, and cheered by a long continuance of domestic happiness, chiefly due to his own amiable and kindly disposition. The last years of his life were clouded by domestic sorrow, followed by the sad failure of a mind long overtasked by the demands of his unwearied literary activity. His genius was fitly recognised by a pension from the Crown; and on the Laureatship becoming vacant, in 1813, he was induced to accept the honorary post, which his reputation served to redeem from some degree of ridicule which had latterly attached to it, as is proved by its subsequent acceptance by Wordsworth and his successor, Tennyson; who now so honourably fills a post which we may hope will not again be disposed of otherwise than as a mark of the just estimate of high poetic genius.

THOMAS CAMPBELL, LL.D.

BORN, 1777; DIED, 1844.

THE author of the "Pleasures of Hope" drew his early inspiration from nature, in the Western Highlands of Argyleshire, where his family had once held ancient hereditary possessions. His father was a Glasgow merchant, who, before his youngest, gifted son was able to claim from him the advantages of an education suited to his fine intellectual powers, had been reduced to poverty. His noble poem, "The Pleasures of Hope," was published when he was only twenty-one years of age, and the reception which it met with determined him in the choice of literature for his profession, instead of entering the church, or studying the law, both of which he had in view.

For a literary man, his career may be considered to have been a prosperous one. He married a cousin, Miss Matilda Sinclair, and his domestic life appears to have been a peculiarly happy one, till the death of one son, and the madness of another, followed by the loss of his wife, cast a dark shadow over his later years.

Campbell enjoyed a pension from Government in his later years, and the remuneration he received for most of his literary labours was liberal, so that he had an income abundantly sufficient to maintain him in ease and comfort. He appears, however, to have been utterly destitute of the gift of managing his pecuniary means with prudence or discretion, and the difficulties he thus brought himself into were often very embarrassing, and occasionally ludicrous. His generosity also was very great. His mother owed her chief support to him in her latter years, and his sisters and other relatives shared largely in the fruits of his success. He appears to have been greatly esteemed and loved by all who knew him, though, unhappily, in the deep sorrows which clouded his later years, he sometimes sought that relief from wine, which he knew was only to be found in a far different source. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, where a beautiful marble statue has been erected in his honour.