Another stand-by of his was _The Champion_, to his work in which he owed a not unprofitable connexion with _The Edinburgh_; yet another, _The Examiner_, to which, with much dramatic criticism, he contributed, at Leigh Hunt’s suggestion, the set of essays reprinted as _The Round Table_, and in which he may therefore be said to have discovered his avocation, and given the measure of his best quality. Then, in 1817, he published his _Characters of Shakespeare_, which he dedicated to Charles Lamb; in 1818 he reprinted a series of lectures (at the Surrey Institute) on the English poets;[14] in 1819–20 he delivered from the same platform two courses more—on the Comic Writers and the Age of Elizabeth. He wrote for _The Liberal_, _The Yellow Dwarf_, _The London Magazine_—(to which he may very well have introduced the unknown Elia)—_Colburn’s New Monthly_; he returned to the _Chronicle_ in 1824; in 1825 he published _The Spirit of the Age_, in 1826 _The Plain Speaker_, the _Boswell Redivivus_ in 1827; and in this last year he set to work, at Winterslow, on a life of Napoleon. That was the beginning of the end. He had no turn for history, nor none for research; his methods were personal, his results singular and brief; he was as it were an accidental writer, whose true material was in himself. His health broke, and worsened; his publishers went bankrupt; he lost the best part of the £500 which he had hoped to earn by his work; and though, consulting none but anti-English authorities, he lived to complete a book containing much strong thinking and not a few striking passages, it was a thing foredoomed to failure: a matter in which the nation, still hating its tremendous enemy, and still rejoicing in the man and the battle which had brought him to the ground, would not, and could not take an interest. Two volumes were published in 1828 (Sir Walter’s _Napoleon_ appeared in 1827), and two more in 1830; but the work of writing them killed the writer.[15] His digestion, always feeble, was ruined; and in the September of 1830 he died. He was largely, I should say, a sacrifice to tea, which he drank, in vast quantities, of extraordinary strength. However this be, his ending was (as he’d have loved to put it) ‘as a Chrissom child’s.’[16] IV