his chair overwhelmed and disconcerted.  I could not have thought such treatment possible to such a person at such a meeting.  Hallam, author of the Literary History of the Middle Ages, who sat by me on this occasion, marked the mortification of the poet, and it excited his generous sympathy.  Being shortly afterward on the floor to reply to a toast, he took occasion to advert to the recent remarks of Campbell, and in so doing called up in review all his eminent achievements in the world of letters, and drew such a picture of his claims upon popular gratitude and popular admiration, as to convict the assembly of the glaring impropriety they had been guilty of—­to soothe the wounded sensibility of the poet, and send him home to, I trust, a quiet pillow.’

“Now, the very same facts are seen by different observers in a different point of view.  It so happened that we ourselves were present at this dinner, which took place in 1842; and the painful circumstance alluded to by Mr. Irving did not produce the effect on us, that it appears to have produced on him.  Without making a long story about a trifle, we can call to mind no appearance of hostility or ill-will manifested on that occasion; and on the contrary, recollect, in our immediate neighborhood, a mournful sense of distress at the scene exhibited, and sufficiently hinted in the few unpleasant words we have italicized.  A muster of Englishmen preferred coughing down their favorite bard, to allowing him to mouth out maudlin twaddle, before the Prince, then first formally introduced to the public, and before a meeting whereat “was collected much of the prominent talent of the kingdom.”  Mr. Irving, himself most deservedly a man of mark, looked on with much, surprise.  Looking on ourselves then, and writing now, as one of the public, and as one of the many to whom Campbell’s name and fame are inexpressibly dear, we honestly think that of two evils the lesser was chosen.  We think Mr. Hallam’s lecture must have been inaudible to the greater part of the company.”

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The Archbishop of Lemburgh has prohibited his clergy from wearing long hair like the peasants, and from smoking in public, “like demagogues and sons of Baal.”

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The Persians have a saying, that “Ten measures of talk were sent down upon the earth, and the women took nine.”

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AUTHORS AND BOOKS

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No man is more enshrined in the heart of the French people than the poet BERANGER.  A few weeks since he went one evening with one of his nephews to the Clos des Lilas, a garden in the students’ quarter devoted to dancing in the open air, intending to look for a few minutes upon a scene he had not visited since his youth, and then withdraw.  But he found it impossible to remain unknown and unobserved.