That Shenstone, while surrounding himself with the floral beauties of Paradise, exciting the envy and admiration and imitation of persons of taste throughout England, lived in utter wretchedness and misery. That Swift, with all his resources of wit and wisdom, died, to use his own language, "in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole." That the thoughtful, cast-iron essays of John Foster were originally written as love epistles to the lady who became his wife. That the only person who could make George Washington laugh was an officer in the army so obscure in rank and character as not to be even mentioned in popular history. That the man whom Daniel Webster pronounced the best conversationalist he ever knew, is now unknown or forgotten outside of his neighborhood. That the pious Cowper attempted suicide; and had as intimate associate the swearing Lord Chancellor Thurlow,--with whom, he confesses, he spent three years, "giggling and making giggle." That Lord Chancellor Eldon, who, while simple John Scott, son of a Newcastle coal-fitter, ran away with Bessy Surtees, daughter of a prosperous banker of the same town, and who was so proud of the exploit that he never tired of referring to it, when his eldest daughter, Lady Elizabeth, gave her hand, without his consent, to an ardent lover of respectable character and good education, but not of much wealth, permitted years to roll away before he would forgive her. That not long after the elopement referred to, while a law student at Oxford, having been appointed to read to the class at a small salary, the lectures of one of the professors who was then absent in the East Indies, it happened that the first lecture he had to read was upon the statute (4 & 5 P. & M. c. 8) "Of young men running away with maidens." ("Fancy me," he said, "reading, with a hundred and forty boys and young men all giggling.") That Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who was never married at all, was so outraged at the love marriage, against his consent, of his third and favorite daughter, that though he became reconciled to her, he never would consent to see her husband. That, according to John Lord Campbell, so many of the most important points in the law of real property have been settled in suits upon the construction of the wills of eminent judges. That "the religious, the moral, the immaculate" Sir Matthew Hale, when chief justice of the king's bench, allowed the infamous Jeffreys, who "was not redeemed from his vices by one single solid virtue," to gain, in the opinion of Roger North, "as great an ascendant over him as ever counsel had over a judge." That the gentle Charles and Mary Lamb were confined in a mad-house, and that the latter cut the throat of her mother at the dinner-table. That Tasso lamented the publication of Jerusalem Delivered, and that its publication was the one great cause of his insanity. That Thomson, the poet of the Seasons, composed so much of his classic and vigorous verse in bed; or was seen