be met with in the whole compass of English literature for two hundred years; nor was it till after the lapse of three centuries that his poems were collected and published--to secure him the reputation, among his own countrymen, of being one of the greatest of Scotland's poets. This neglect or inability to acknowledge contemporary genius was humorously hinted at by Coleridge in one of his lectures. The lecture being extemporaneous, he now and then took up scraps of paper on which he had noted the leading points of his subject, and made use of books that were about him for quotation. On turning to one of these (a work of his own), he said, "As this is a secret which I confided to the public a year or two ago, and which, to do the public justice, has been very faithfully kept, I may be permitted to read you a passage from it." Tom Taylor's anecdote of Bott, the barrister, illustrates the uncertainty of literary recognition. Bott occupied the rooms opposite to Goldsmith's in Brick Court; he lent the needy author money, drove him in his gig to the Shoemakers' Paradise, eight miles down the Edgeware Road, and occasionally periled both their necks in a ditch. Reynolds painted this good-natured barrister, who runs a better chance of reaching posterity in that gig of his alongside of Goldsmith, than by virtue of the Treatise on the Poor Laws which Goldsmith is said to have written up for him. And as if the uncertainty of literary fame were not great enough, authors themselves sometimes strive to increase it by most extraordinary means. You remember Southey's attempt to hoax Theodore Hook regarding the authorship of The Doctor. At Hook's death a packet of letters was found addressed to him, as the author of The Doctor, and acknowledging presentation copies--one from Southey among the rest. They had been forwarded from the publisher, and were intended, it is presumed, if they were intended for anything, as a trap for Hook's vanity. Sydney Smith positively denied all connection with the Plymley Letters in one edition, and published them in a collection of his acknowledged works some months after. Sir Walter Scott, being taxed at a dinner-table as the author of Old Mortality, not only denied being the author, but said to Murray, the publisher, who was present, "In order to convince you that I am not the author, I will review the book for you in the Quarterly,"--which he actually did, and Murray retained the manuscript after Sir Walter's death.