though it mattered little to the rest, because they were well appointed in life. De Quincy says that, a regular succession of similar, but superior, God-sends fell upon Wordsworth, to enable him to sustain his expenditure duly, as it grew with the growing claims upon his purse; and after enumerating the three items of “good luck,” mentioned above, he adds:--and “fourthly, some worthy uncle of Mrs. Wordsworth’s was pleased to betake himself to a better world; leaving to various nieces, and especially to Mrs. W., something or other, I forget what, but it was expressed by thousands of pounds. At this moment Wordsworth’s family had begun to increase; and the worthy old uncle, like every body else in Wordsworth’s case (I wish I could say the same in my own), finding his property clearly ‘wanted,’ and as people would tell him ‘bespoke,’ felt how very indelicate it would look for him to stay any longer, and so he moved off. But Wordsworth’s family, and the wants of that family, still continued to increase; and the next person, being the fifth, who stood in the way, and must, therefore, have considered himself rapidly growing into a nuisance, was the Stamp-Distributor for the county of Westmorland. About March, 1814, I think it was, that this very comfortable situation was vacated. Probably it took a month for the news to reach him; because in April, and not before, feeling that he had received a proper notice to quit, he, good man--this Stamp-Distributor--like all the rest, distributed himself and his offices into two different places,--the latter falling of course into the hands of Wordsworth. “This office, which it was Wordsworth’s pleasure to speak of as a _little_ one, yielded, I believe, somewhere about £500 a year. Gradually even that, with all former sources of income, became insufficient; which ought not to surprise anybody; for a son at Oxford, as a gentleman-commoner, could spend at least £300 per annum; and there were other children. Still it is wrong to say, that it had become insufficient; as usual it had not come to that; but, on the first symptoms arising that it would soon come to that, somebody, of course, had notice to consider himself a sort of nuisance elect,--and in this case it was the Distributor of Stamps for the county of Cumberland.” And in this strain of good-humoured banter--stimulated no doubt by his own precarious circumstances, in a measure, circumstances which ought not in his case to be precarious,--De Quincy relates how another £400 a year was added to the poet’s income from the increase of his district as Stamp-Distributor. In 1842, since De Quincy wrote the above, Wordsworth resigned this office, and it was bestowed upon his son,--whilst he (the poet,) was put down upon the Civil-list for £300 a year, and finally made Poet Laureate.