that I have envied many a man whose luck has placed him in the way of such injuries; and that man must have been a churl (though, God knows! too often this churl _has_ existed) who could have found in his heart to complain. But Wordsworth rarely, indeed, wrote on the margin of books; and, when he did, nothing could less illustrate his intellectual superiority. The comments were such as might have been made by anybody. Once, I remember, before I had ever seen Wordsworth--probably a year before--I met a person who had once enjoyed the signal honour of travelling with him to London. It was in a stage-coach. But the person in question well knew _who_ it was that had been his _compagnon de voyage_. Immediately he was glorified in my eyes. "And," said I, to this glorified gentleman (who, _par parenthése_, was also a donkey), "Now, as you travelled nearly three hundred miles in the company of Mr. Wordsworth, consequently (for this was in 1805) during two nights and two days, doubtless you must have heard many profound remarks that would inevitably fall from his lips." Nay, Coleridge had also been of the party; and, if Wordsworth _solus_ could have been dull, was it within human possibilities that these _gemini_ should have been so? "Was it possible?" I said; and perhaps my donkey, who looked like one that had been immoderately threatened, at last took courage; his eye brightened; and he intimated that he _did_ remember something that Wordsworth had said--an "observe," as the Scotch call it. "Ay, indeed; and what was it now? What did the great man say?" "Why, sir, in fact, and to make a long story short, on coming near to London, we breakfasted at Baldock--you know Baldock? It's in Hertfordshire. Well, now, sir, would you believe it, though we were quite in regular time, the breakfast was precisely good for nothing?" "And Wordsworth?" "He observed----" "What did he observe?" "That the buttered toast looked, for all the world, as if it had been soaked in hot water."