operation of some known fact in the man's peculiar situation. Southey (he was by nature something of an old bachelor) had his house filled with pretty articles--_bijouterie_, and so forth; and, naturally, he wished his books to be kept up to the same level--burnished and bright for show. Sir George Beaumont--this peculiarly elegant and accomplished man--was an old and most affectionate friend of Wordsworth's. Sir George Beaumont never had any children; if he had been so blessed, they, by familiarizing him with the spectacle of books ill used--stained, torn, mutilated, &c.--would have lowered the standard of his requisitions. The short solution of the whole case was--and it illustrated the nature of his education--he had never lived in a regular family at a time when habits are moulded. From boyhood to manhood he had been _sui juris_. [129] It is not known to the English, but it is a fact which I can vouch for, from my six or seven years' residence in Scotland [written in 1839], that the Scotch, one and all, believe it to be an inalienable characteristic of an Englishman to be fond of good eating. What indignation have I, and how many a time, had occasion to feel and utter on this subject? But of this at some other time. Meantime, the Man of Feeling had this creed in excess; and, in some paper (of _The Mirror_ or _The Lounger_), he describes an English tourist in Scotland by saying--"I would not wish to be thought national; yet, in mere reverence for truth, I am bound to say, and to declare to all the world (let who will be offended), that the first innkeeper in Scotland under whose roof we met with genuine buttered toast was an Englishman." [130] Meantime, if it did not disturb _him_, it ought to disturb _us_, his immediate successors, who are at once the most likely to retrieve these _losses_ by direct efforts, and the least likely to benefit by any casual or indirect retrievals, such as will be produced by time. Surely a subscription should be set on foot to recover all books enriched by his marginal notes. I would subscribe; and I know others who would largely. * * * * *