The chapter on Crabbe is well done. There is one anecdote given about Lord Thurlow, which had escaped our memory. When he presented Crabbe a couple of livings in the church, he accompanied it by the characteristic remark—“By —, you are as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen.” The account of Coleridge is replete with anecdotes of his earlier life and his family. His father, an Episcopal clergyman, was a miracle of absent mindedness. His wife once directed him, when he went on a journey, to put on a clean shirt every day. He followed her orders literally, but forgot to remove the one underneath. He came back six-shirt deep. In his sermons he gained vast reputation among the poor and ignorant by quoting Hebrew liberally, they thinking themselves especially favored in hearing “the very words the Spirit spoke in.” For his successor, who addressed them in simple English, they entertained a kind of contempt. At school young Coleridge was very miserable. The author of Cristobel was there a martyr to the itch. His appearance as a boy is indicated by the opinion expressed of him by his master after a whipping. “The lad was so ordinary a looking lad, with his black head, that I generally gave him at the end of a flogging an extra cut; for,” said he, turning to Coleridge, “you are such an ugly fellow.” Coleridge’s first attempt at verse was in commemoration of his maladies at the age of ten: O Lord, have mercy on me! For I am very sad! For why, good Lord! I’ve got the itch, And eke I’ve got the tad! Tad is schoolboy_ese_ for ringworm. When Coleridge left college he enlisted as a common soldier in the dragoons, under the name of Silas Tomken Comberbache. “Do you think,” said the examining officer, “you could run a Frenchman through the body?” “I don’t know,” replied Coleridge, “as I never tried; but I’ll let a Frenchman run me through before I’ll run away.” “That will do,” was the answer of the officer. He was so bad a horseman that the drill-sergeant had continually to warn the members of his squad—“Take care of that Comberbache! take care of him, for he will rids over you!” In the chapter on Wordsworth there is a very ingenious attempt to prove the poet a Quaker, both in the doctrine and spirit of his poetry. This is altogether the best thing in the book, and to a high-churchman, like Wordsworth, must be very gratifying. Howitt makes out a good case. At the end he asserts that the writings of the old Quakers “are one mass of Wordsworthianisms.” In some particulars, it is asserted Wordsworth hath not reached the moral elevation of his masters; as in regard to war, “he is martial, and thinks Slaughter God’s daughter. They, very sensibly, set Slaughter down as the daughter of a very opposite personage.”