And it comes, in that dismal, miserable upper chamber that you can see when you go there;--his wife ill; his little children wandering aimlessly about; it comes sharply; he is on his back--"uneasy" the nurse said, and "chafing"; when suddenly by a great effort--as if at last he would shake off all the beleaguerments of sense, and the haunting phantoms swarming about him--he rallied all his powers--rose to his full height from the bed--tottered for a moment, then fell prone forward a dead man. This was in the month of July, 1796; Burns being then only thirty-seven. Walter Scott, a young fellow of twenty-five, living in Edinboro', had just printed his translation of _Leonora_. Wordsworth--unknown save for a thin booklet of indifferent verse--was living down in Dorsetshire, enjoying the "winding wood-walks green," with that sister Dorothy, who "added sunshine to his daylight." These two had not as yet made the acquaintance of that coming man, S. T. Coleridge, who is living at Clevedon, over by Bristol Channel, with that newly married wife, who has decoyed him from his schemes of American migration; {299} and the poet of the Ancient Mariner (as yet unwritten) has published his little booklet with Mr. Cottle, of Bristol, in which are some modest verses signed C. L. And Charles Lamb (for whom those initials stand) is just now in his twenty-first year, and is living in humble lodgings in Little Queen Street, London, from which he writes to Coleridge, saying that "Burns was a God of my idolatry." And in that very year (1796) the dismalest of tragedies is to overshadow those humble lodgings of Little Queen Street. Of this and of Coleridge and of Wordsworth, we shall have somewhat to say in the chapter we open upon next. [1] Gilbert White, b. 1720; d. 1793. Oxford man; Fellow in 1744; curate of Faringdon 1758; after 1784, at Selborne. [2] A charmingly illustrated edition of _The Natural History of Selborne_--showing his ivy-covered home and other objects of interest, was published by Macmillan & Co. in 1875 (edited by Frank Buckland). I am indebted for a copy to my friend, Wm. Robinson, of the London _Garden_. [3] Jane Austen, b. 1775; d. 1817. _Sense and Sensibility_, published 1811. Life was written by her nephew J. Austen-Leigh. Her _Letters_, edited by Lord Brabourne, 1884. [4] Not the dreadful, seamy, photographic reproduction of an old oil painting that Lord Brabourne gives, which must be wholly unfair to her; but the earlier engravings. [5] Thomas Day, b. 1748; d. 1789. Oxford man; married, 1778; _Sandford and Merton_ published 1783. [6] Mrs. Barbauld (Anna Letitia Aikin), b. 1743; d. 1825. There is a pleasant sketch of Mrs. Barbauld and (for a wonder) an approving and commendatory notice of her in Miss Martineau's _Autobiography_, vol. i., pp. 228-39. Miss Martineau's father, it appears, had been a pupil of Mrs. Barbauld. [7] Boswell's Johnson, vol. vi., p. 28. [8] The circumstances are given in _Crabb Robinson's Diary_.