Meantime, on reviewing this story, as generally adopted by the learned in literary scandal, one demur rises up. Dr. Parr, a lisping Whig pedant, without personal dignity or conspicuous power of mind, was a frequent and privileged inmate at Mr. Montagu's. Him now--this Parr--there was no conceivable motive for enduring; that point is satisfactorily settled by the pompous inanities of his works. Yet, on the other hand, his habits were in their own nature far less endurable than Samuel Taylor Coleridge's; for the monster smoked;--and how? How did the "Birmingham Doctor"[83] smoke? Not as you, or I, or other civilized people smoke, with a gentle cigar--but with the very coarsest tobacco. And those who know how that abomination lodges and nestles in the draperies of window-curtains will guess the horror and detestation in which the old Whig's memory is held by all enlightened women. Surely, in a house where the Doctor had any toleration at all, Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have enjoyed an unlimited toleration.[84] [83] "_Birmingham Doctor_":--This was a _sobriquet_ imposed on Dr. Parr by "The Pursuits of Literature," that most popular of satires at the end of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries. The name had a mixed reference to the Doctor's personal connexion with Warwickshire, but chiefly to the Doctor's spurious and windy imitation of Dr. Johnson. He was viewed as the Birmingham (or mock) Dr. Johnson. Why the word _Birmingham_ has come for the last sixty or seventy years to indicate in every class of articles the spurious in opposition to the genuine, I suppose to have arisen from the Birmingham habit of reproducing all sorts of London or Paris trinkets, _bijouterie_, &c., in cheaper materials and with inferior workmanship. [84] It is at this point that De Quincey's revised reprint in 1854 of his Recollections of Coleridge stops. What follows is from the unrevised sequel in _Tait's Magazine_ for January 1835. See note, _ante_, p. 138.--M. * * * * *