My habits are changing, I think,—­i.e., from drunk to sober.  Whether I shall be happier or not, remains to be proved.  I shall certainly be more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat and the marrow and the kidneys,—­i.e., the night,—­glorious, care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright 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!