useless, he said, to try to force so huge an _os frontis_ through so narrow a collar. All had given up, when lo! the servant girl turned the collar upside down, and slipped it off in an instant, to the inconceivable wonder and humiliation of the poets, who proceeded to solace themselves with the brown bread, the lettuces, and a jug of sparkling water. Who, knowing the subsequent fate of the tenants of Stowey, would not love to dwell on these delightful pictures of their better days? “It must not be supposed, however, that the tempter never entered into this Eden; but when he did so, it was generally through the mischief-making pranks of Coleridge, who constantly kept his friends in hot water. He and Lamb had just published a joint volume of poems, and Coleridge could not refrain from satirising and parodying their offspring in the newspapers. Take this epigram as a specimen:-- ‘TO THE AUTHOR OF THE ANCIENT MARINER. ‘Your poem must eternal be-- Dear Sir, it cannot fail; For ’tis incomprehensible, And without head or tail.’ Of course nobody could suspect Coleridge of this; and, indeed, to his infinite amusement, a vain fellow affected to hesitate about being introduced to him, on the ground that he had mortally injured him by the writing of this very epigram! But Lamb could not fail to observe the doings of the poet-metaphysician more closely, and the result was a quarrel, which induced that ‘gentle creature’ to send him an unnaturally bitter series of theological questions, such as--‘Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual representment, to each individual angel, of his own present attainments and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?’ Troubles from without added to this confusion within. The village wiseacres, to whom the habits of Wordsworth and his eccentric friend were totally incomprehensible, had decided that they were terrible scoundrels, who required to be looked after. One sage had seen Wordsworth look strangely at the moon; another had overheard him mutter in some unintelligible and outlandish brogue. Some thought him a conjuror; some a smuggler, from his perpetually haunting the sea-beach; some asserted that he kept a snug private still in his cellar, as they knew by their noses at a hundred yards distance; while others where convinced that he was ‘surely a desperate French Jacobin, for he was so silent nobody ever heard him say one word about politics.’ While the saturnine and stately Wordsworth was thus slanderously assailed, his fluent and witty associate could not expect to escape. One day, accordingly while on a pedestrian excursion, Coleridge met a woman who, not knowing who he was, abused him to himself in unmeasured Billingsgate for a whole hour, as a vile Jacobin villain, who had misled George Burnet of her parish. ‘I listened,’ wrote the poet to a friend, ‘very