done the honour to mistake for an officer, and to treat like a gentleman.  He turned out to be neither,—­like many other with medals, and in uniform; but he paid for his brutality with a severe and dangerous wound, inflicted by nobody knows whom, for, of three suspected, and two arrested, they have been able to identify neither; which is strange, since he was wounded in the presence of thousands, in a public street, during a feast-day and full promenade.  —­But to return to things more analogous to the ‘Literary Character,’ I wish to say, that had I known that the book was to fall into your hands, or that the Ms. notes you have thought worthy of publication would have attracted your attention, I would have made them more copious, and perhaps not so careless.

“I really cannot know whether I am, or am not, the genius you are pleased to call me,—­but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one.  It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be, till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, have sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.

“Mr. Murray is in possession of a Ms. memoir of mine (not to be published till I am in my grave), which, strange as it may seem, I never read over since it was written, and have no desire to read over again.  In it I have told what, as far as I know, is the truth—­not the whole truth—­for if I had done so, I must have involved much private, and some dissipated history:  but, nevertheless, nothing but truth, as far as regard for others permitted it to appear.

“I do not know whether you have seen those MSS.; but, as you are curious in such things as relate to the human mind, I should feel gratified if you had.  I also sent him (Murray), a few days since, a Common-place Book, by my friend Lord Clare, containing a few things, which may perhaps aid his publication in case of his surviving me.  If there are any questions which you would like to ask me, as connected with your philosophy of the literary mind (if mine be a literary mind), I will answer them fairly, or give a reason for not, good—­bad—­or indifferent.  At present, I am paying the penalty of having helped to spoil the public taste; for, as long as I wrote in the false exaggerated style of youth and the times in which we live, they applauded me to the very echo; and within these few years, when I have endeavoured at better things, and written what I suspect to have the principle of duration in it:  the Church, the Chancellor, and all men, even to my grand patron, Francis Jeffrey, Esq., of the Edinburgh Review, have risen up against me, and my later publications.  Such is Truth! men dare not look her in the face, except by degrees; they mistake her for a Gorgon, instead of knowing her to be Minerva.  I do not mean to apply this mythological simile to my own endeavours,