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was making my way over the roof to the guard's seat. But this, from the accident which I have mentioned, of the foreign mails being piled upon the roof, was a difficult and even dangerous attempt to one cramped by nearly three hundred miles of outside travelling. And, fortunately, before I had lost much time in the attempt, our frantic horses swept round an angle of the road, which opened upon us that final stage where the collision must be accomplished, and the catastrophe sealed. All was apparently finished. The court was sitting; the case was heard; the judge had finished; and only the verdict was yet in arrear.

Before us lay an avenue, straight as an arrow, six hundred yards, perhaps, in length; and the umbrageous trees, which rose in a regular line from either side, meeting high overhead, gave to it the character of a cathedral aisle. These trees lent a deeper solemnity to the early light; but there was still light enough to perceive, at the further end of this Gothic aisle, a frail reedy gig, in which were seated a young man, and by his side a young lady. Ah, young sir! what are you about? If it is requisite that you should whisper your communications to this young lady -though really I see nobody, at an hour and on a road so solitary, likely to overhear you-is it therefore requisite that you should carry your lips forward to hers? The little carriage is creeping on at one mile an hour; and the parties within it being thus tenderly engaged, are naturally bending down their heads. Between them and eternity, to all human calculation, there is but a minute and a half. Oh, heavens ! what is it that I shall do? Speaking or acting, what help can I offer? Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale might seem laughable, that I should need a suggestion from the "Iliad" to prompt the sole resource that remained. Yet so it was. Suddenly I remembered the shout of Achilles, and its effect. But could I pretend to shout like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas? No; but then I needed not the shout that should alarm all Asia militant; such a shout would suffice as might carry terror into the hearts of two thoughtless young people, and one gig-horse. I shouted-and the young man heard me not. A second time I shouted and now he heard me, for now he raised his head.

Here, then, all had been done that, by me, could be done: more on my part was not possible. Mine had been the first step; the second was for the young man; the third was for God. If, said I, this stranger is a brave man, and if, indeed, he loves the young girl at his side-or, loving her not, if he feels the obligation, pressing upon every man worthy to be called a man, of doing his utmost for a woman confided to his protection-he will, at least, make some effort to save her. If that fails, he will not perish the more, or by a death more cruel, for having made

it; and he will die as a brave man should, with his face to the danger, and with his arm about the woman that he sought in vain to save. But, if he makes no effort, shrinking, without a strug gle, from his duty, he himself will not the less certainly perish for this baseness of poltroonery. He will die no less: and why not? Wherefore should we grieve that there is one craven less in the world? No; let him perish, without a pity. ing thought of ours wasted upon him; and, in that case, all our grief will be reserved for the fate of the helpless girl who now, upon the least shadow of failure in him, must, by the fiercest of translations-must, without time for a prayer -must, within seventy seconds, stand before the judgment-seat of God.

But craven he was not: sudden had been the call upon him, and sudden was his answer to the call. He saw, he heard, he comprehended, the ruin that was coming down: already its gloomy shadow darkened above him; and already he was measuring his strength to deal with it. Ah! what a vulgar thing does courage seem, when we see nations buying it and selling it for a shilling a day ah! what a sublime thing does courage seem, when some fearful summons on the great deeps of life carries a man, as if running before a hurricane, up to the giddy crest of some tumultuous crisis, from which lie two courses, and a voice says to him audibly, "One way lies hope; take the other, and mourn for ever!" How grand a triumph, if, even then, amidst the raving of all around him, and the frenzy of the danger, the man is able to confront his situation -is able to retire for a moment into solitude with God, and to seek his counsel from Him.

For seven seconds, it might be, of his seventy, the stranger settled his countenance steadfastly upon us, as if to search and value every element in the conflict before him. For five seconds more of his seventy he sat immovably, like one that mused on some great purpose. For five more, perhaps, he sat with eyes upraised, like one that prayed in sorrow, under some extremity of doubt, for light that should guide him to the better choice. Then suddenly he rose; stood upright; and by a powerful strain upon the reins, raising his horse's fore-feet from the ground, he slewed him round on the pivot of his hind-legs, so as to plant the little equipage in a position nearly at right angles to ours. Thus far his condition was not improved; except as a first step had been taken towards the possibility of a second. If no more were done, nothing was done; for the little carriage still occupied the very centre of our path, though in an altered direction. Yet even now it may not be too late: fifteen of the seventy seconds may still be unexhausted; and one almighty bound may avail to clear the ground. Hurry, then, hurry! for the flying moments-they hurry. Oh, hurry, hurry, my brave young man! for the cruel hoofs of our horses-they also hurry! Fast are the

As yet he dared not to look round; for he knew that, if anything remained to do, by him it could no longer be done. And as yet he knew not for certain if their safety were accomplished. But | the lady

But the lady! Oh, heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing? Figure to yourself, reader, the elements of the case; suffer me to recall before your mind the circumstances of that unparalleled situation. From the silence and deep peace of this saintly summer nightfrom the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight-from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love-suddenly as from the woods and fields-suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelation-suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crowned phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice.

flying moments, faster are the hoofs of our horses. But fear not for him, if human energy can suffice; faithful was he that drove to his terrific duty; faithful was the horse to his command. One blow, one impulse given with voice and hand, by the stranger, one rush from the horse, one bound as if in the act of rising to a fence, landed the docile creature's fore-feet upon the crown or arching centre of the road. The larger half of the little equipage had then cleared our over-towering shadow: that was evident even to my own agitated sight. But it mattered little that one wreck should float off in safety, if upon the wreck that perished were embarked the human freightage. The rear part of the carriage was that certainly beyond the line of absolute ruin? What power could answer the question? Glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel, which of these had speed enough to sweep between the question and the answer, and divide the one from the other? Light does not tread upon the steps of light more indivisibly, than did our all-conquering arrival upon the escaping efforts of the gig. That must the young man have felt too plainly. His back was now turned to us; not by sight could he any longer communicate with the peril; but by the dreadful rattle of our harness, too truly had his earling of an eye, our flying horses had carried us been instructed-that all was finished as regarded any further effort of his. Already in resignation he had rested from his struggle; and perhaps in his heart he was whispering, "Father, which art in heaven, do Thou finish above what I on earth have attempted." Faster than ever mill-race we ran past them in our inexorable flight. Oh, raving of hurricanes that must have sounded in their young ears at the moment of our transit ! Even in that moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud. Either with the swingle-bar, or with the haunches of our near leader, we had struck the off-wheel of the little gig, which stood rather obliquely, and not quite so far advanced, as to be accurately parallel with the near-wheel. The blow, from the fury of our passage, resounded terrifically. I rose in horror, to gaze upon the ruins we might have caused. From my elevated station I looked down, and looked back upon the scene, which in a moment told its own tale, and wrote all its records on my heart for

ever.

Here was the map of the passion that now had finished. The horse was planted immovably, with his fore-feet upon the paved crest of the central road. He of the whole party might be supposed untouched by the passion of death. The little cany carriage-partly, perhaps, from the violent torsion of the wheels in its recent movement, partly from the thundering blow we had given to it-as if it sympathised with human horror, was all alive with tremblings and shiverings. The young man trembled not, nor shivered. He sat like a rock. But his was the steadiness of agitation frozen into rest by horror.

The moments were numbered; the strife was finished; the vision was closed. In the twink

to the termination of the umbrageous aisle; at right angles we wheeled into our former direction, the turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever.

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NOTES FROM THE POCKET-BOOK OF A
LATE OPIUM-EATER.

WALKING STEWART.

Mr Stewart the traveller, commonly called Walking Stewart," was a man of very extraordinary genius. He has generally been treated. by those who have spoken of him in print as a madman. But this is a mistake, and must have been founded chiefly on the titles of his books. He was a man of fervid mind and of sublime aspirations; but he was no madman; or, if he was, then I say that it is so far desirable to be a madman. In 1798 or 1799, when I must have been about thirteen years old, Walking Stewart was in Bath-where my family at that time resided. He frequented the pump-room, and I believe all public places-walking up and down, and dispersing his philosophic opinions to the right and the left, like a Grecian philosopher. The first time I saw him was at a concert in the Upper Rooms; he was pointed out to me by one of my party as a very eccentric man who had walked over the habitable globe. I remember that Madame Mara was at that moment singing; and Walking Stewart, who was a true lover of music (as I afterwards came to know), was hanging upon her notes like a bee upon a jessamine flower. His countenance was striking, and ex

because his acquaintance with man civilised and
uncivilised, under all national distinctions, was
absolutely unrivalled. Meantime, this and
others of his opinions were expressed in lan-
guage that if literally construed would often
appear insane or absurd. The truth is, his long
intercourse with foreign nations had given some-
thing of a hybrid tincture to his diction; in
some of his works, for instance, he uses the
French word hélas ! uniformly for the English
alas! and apparently with no consciousness of
his mistake. He had also this singularity about
him that he was everlastingly metaphysicising
against metaphysics. To me, who was buried
in metaphysical reveries from my earliest days,
this was not likely to be an attraction; any
more than the vicious structure of his diction
was likely to please my scholar-like taste. All
grounds of disgust, however, gave way before
my sense of his powerful merits; and, as I have
said, I sought his acquaintance. Coming up to
London from Oxford about 1807 or 1808, I made
inquiries about him, and found that he usually
read the papers at a coffee-room in Piccadilly;
understanding that he was poor, it struck me
that he might not wish to receive visits at his
lodgings, and therefore I sought him at the
coffee-room. Here I took the liberty of intro-
ducing myself to him. He received me cour-
teously, and invited me to his rooms-which at
that time were in Sherrard Street, Golden
Square-a street already memorable to me.
was much struck with the eloquence of his con-
versation; and afterwards I found that Mr
Wordsworth, himself the most eloquent of men
in conversation, had been equally struck when
he had met him at Paris between the years 1790
and 1792, during the early storms of the French
revolution. In Sherrard Street I visited him re-

pressed the union of benignity with philosophic habits of thought. In such health had his pedestrian exercises preserved him, connected with his abstemious mode of living, that though he must at that time have been considerably above forty, he did not look older than twentyeight; at least the face which remained upon my recollection for some years was that of a young man. Nearly ten years afterwards I became acquainted with him. During the interval I had picked up one of his works in Bristol-viz., his "Travels to discover the Source of Moral Motion," the second volume of which is entitled "The Apocalypse of Nature." I had been greatly impressed by the sound and original views which in the first volume he had taken of the national characters throughout Europe. In particular he was the first, and so far as I know the only writer who had noticed the profound error of ascribing a phlegmatic character to the English nation. "English phlegm" is the constant expression of authors when contrasting the English with the French. Now the truth is, that, beyond that of all other nations, it has a substratum of profound passion; and, if we are to recur to the old doctrine of temperaments, the English character must be classed not under the phlegmatic but under the melancholic temperament; and the French under the sanguine. The character of a nation may be judged of in this particular by examining its idiomatic language. The French, in whom the lower forms of passion are constantly bubbling up from the shallow and superficial character of their feelings, have appropriated all the phrases of passion to the service of trivial and ordinary life; and hence they have no language of passion for the service of poetry or of occasions really demanding it; for it has been already enfeebled by continual association with cases of an unimpas-peatedly, and took notes of the conversations I sioned order. But a character of deeper passion has a perpetual standard in itself, by which as by an instinct it tries all cases, and rejects the language of passion as disproportionate and ludicrous where it is not fully justified. heavens !” or “Oh my God!" are exclamations with us so exclusively reserved for cases of profound interest-that on hearing a woman even (i.e., a person of the sex most easily excited) utter such words, we look round expecting to see her child in some situation of danger. But, in France, "Ciel!" and "Oh mon Dieu !" are uttered by every woman if a mouse does but run across the floor. The ignorant and the thoughtless, however, will continue to class the English character under the phlegmatic temperament, whilst the philosopher will perceive that it is the exact polar antithesis to a phlegmatic character. In this conclusion, though otherwise expressed and illustrated, Walking Stewart's view of the English character will be found to terminate; and his opinion is especially valuable-first and chiefly, because he was a philosopher; secondly,

had with him on various subjects. These I must have somewhere or other; and I wish I could introduce them here, as they would interest the reader. Occasionally in these conver"Ahsations, as in his books, he introduced a few notices of his private history; in particular, I remember his telling me that in the East Indies he had been a prisoner of Hyder's; that he had escaped with some difficulty; and that, in the service of one of the native princes as secretary or interpreter, he had accumulated a small fortune. This must have been too small, I fear, at that time to allow him even a philosopher's comforts; for some part of it, invested in the French funds, had been confiscated. I was grieved to see a man of so much ability, of gentlemanly manners, and refined habits, and with the infirmity of deafness, suffering under such obvious privations; and I once took the liberty, on a fit occasion presenting itself, of requesting that he would allow me to send him some books which he had been casually regretting that he did not possess; for I was at that

never see thy face again." I did not intend, at that moment, to visit London again for some years. As it happened, I was there for a short time in 1814; and then I heard, to my great satisfaction that Walking Stewart had recovered a considerable sum (about £14,000, I believe) from the East India Company; and from the abstract given in the London Magazine of the memoir by his relation, I have since learned that he applied this money most wisely to the purchase of an annuity, and that he "persisted in living" too long for the peace of an annuity office. So fare all companies east and west, and all annuity offices, that stand opposed in interest to philosophers! In 1814, however, to my great regret, I did not see him; for I was then taking a great deal of opium, and never could contrive to issue to the light of day soon enough for a morning call upon a philosopher of such early hours; and in the evening I concluded he would be generally abroad, from what he had formerly communicated to me of his own habits. It seems, however, that he afterwards held con

time in the hey-day of my worldly prosperity.half-crazy and most eloquent man! I shall This offer, however, he declined with firmness and dignity, though not unkindly. And I now mention it, because I have seen him charged in print with a selfish regard to his own pecuniary interest. On the contrary, he appeared to me a very liberal and generous man; and I well remember that, whilst he refused to accept of anything from me, he compelled me to receive as presents all the books which he published during my acquaintance with him; two of these, corrected with his own hand-viz., the "Lyre of Apollo" and the "Sophiometer"-I have lately found amongst other books left in London, and others he forwarded to me in Westmoreland. In 1809 I saw him often. In the spring of that year I happened to be in London, and Mr Wordsworth's tract on the Convention of Cintra being at that time in the printer's hands, I superintended the publication of it; and, at Mr Wordsworth's request I added a long note on Spanish affairs which is printed in the appendix. The opinions I expressed in this note on the Spanish character, at that time much calumniated on the retreat to Corunna, then fresh inversaziones at his own rooms, and did not stir the public mind-above all, the contempt I expressed for the superstition in respect to the French military prowess which was then universal and at its height, and which gave way, in fact, only to the campaigns of 1814 and 1815fell in, as it happened, with Mr Stewart's political creed in those points where at that time it met with most opposition. In 1812 it was, I think, that I saw him for the last time, and by the way, on the day of my parting with him, had an amusing proof in my own experience of that sort of ubiquity ascribed to him by a witty writer in the London Magazine. I met him and shook hands with him under Somerset House, telling him that I should leave town that evening for Westmoreland; thence I went by the very shortest road (i.e., through Moor Street, Soho, for I am learned in many quarters of London) towards a point which necessarily led me through Tottenham Court Road. I stopped nowhere, and walked fast; yet so it was that in Tottenham Court Road I was not overtaken by (that was comprehensible) but overtook Walking Stewart. Certainly, as the above writer alleges, there must have been three Walking Stewarts in London. He seemed no ways surprised at this himself, but explained to me that somewhere or other in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road there was a little theatre, at which there was dancing and occasionally good singing, between which and a neighbouring coffee-house he sometimes divided his evenings. Singing, it seems, he could hear in spite of his deafness. In this street I took my final leave of him-it turned out such-and, anticipating at the time that it would be so, I looked after his white hat at the moment it was disappearing, and exclaimed-" Farewell, thou

out to theatres quite so much. From a brother of mine, who at one time occupied rooms in the same house with him, I learned that in other respects he did not deviate in his prosperity from the philosophic tenor of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic exercises, and repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former years, to St James's Park, where he sat in contemplative ease amongst the cows, inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his philosophic reveries. He had also purchased an organ, or more than one, with which he solaced his solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy thoughts, if he ever had any.

The works of Walking Stewart must be read with some indulgence; the titles are generally too lofty and pretending and somewhat extravagant; the composition is lax and unprecise, as I have before said; and the doctrines are occasionally very bold, incautiously stated, and too hardy and high-toned for the nervous effeminacy of many modern moralists. But Walking Stewart was a man who thought nobly of human nature; he wrote therefore at times in the spirit and with the indignation of an ancient prophet against the oppressors and destroyers of the time. In particular I remember that in one or more of the pamphlets which I received from him at Grasmere he expressed himself in such terms on the subject of tyrannicide (distinguishing the cases in which it was and was not lawful) as seemed to Mr Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher; but, from the way in which that subject was treated in the House of Commons, where it was at that time occasionally introduced, it was plain that his doctrine was not fitted for the luxuries and relaxed morals of the age. Like all men who think

nobly of human nature, Walking Stewart thought of it hopefully. In some respects his hopes were wisely grounded; in others they rested too much upon certain metaphysical speculations which are untenable, and which satisfied himself only because his researches in that track had been purely self-originated and self-disciplined. He relied upon his own native strength of mind; but in questions, which the wisdom and philosophy of every age building successively upon each other have not been able to settle, no mind however strong is entitled to build wholly upon itself. In many things he shocked the religious sense-especially as it exists in unphilosophic minds: he held a sort of rude and unscientific Spinosism; and he expressed it coarsely and in the way most likely to give offence. And indeed there can be no stronger proof of the utter obscurity in which his works have slumbered than that they should all have escaped prosecution. He also allowed himself to look too lightly and indulgently on the afflicting spectacle of female prostitution as it exists in London and in all great cities. This was the only point on which I was disposed to quarrel with him; for I could not but view it as a greater reproach to human nature than the slave-trade or any sight of wretchedness that the sun looks down upon. I often told him so; and that I was at a loss to guess how a philosopher could allow himself to view it simply as part of the equipage of civil life, and as reasonably making part of the establishment and furniture of a great city as policeoffices, lamplighting, or newspapers. Waiving, however, this one instance of something like compliance with the brutal spirit of the world, on all other subjects he was eminently unworldly, child-like, simple-minded, and upright. He would flatter no man; even when addressing❘ nations, it is almost laughable to see how invariably he prefaces his counsels with such plain truths uttered in a manner so offensive as must have defeated his purpose if it had otherwise any chance of being accomplished. For instance, in addressing America, he begins thus: "People of America! since your separation from the mother-country your moral character has degenerated in the energy of thought and sense; produced by the absence of your association and intercourse with British officers and merchants; you have no moral discernment to distinguish between the protective power of England and the destructive power of France." And his letter to the Irish nation opens in this agreeable and conciliatory manner: 'People of Ireland! I address you as a true philosopher of nature, foreseeing the perpetual misery your irreflective character and total absence of moral discernment are preparing for," etc. The second sentence begins thus: "You are sacrilegiously arresting the arm of your parent kingdom fighting the cause of man and nature, when the triumph of the fiend of French police terror would be your

own instant extirpation." And the letter closes thus: "I see but one awful alternative-that Ireland will be a perpetual moral volcano, threatening the destruction of the world, if the education and instruction of thought and sense shall not be able to generate the faculty of moral discernment among a very numerous class of the population, who detest the civic calm as sailors the natural calm-and make civic rights on which they cannot reason a pretext for feuds which they delight in." As he spoke freely and boldly to others, so he spoke loftily of himself; at p. 313 of "The Harp of Apollo," on making a comparison of himself with Socrates (in which he naturally gives the preference to himself), he styles "The Harp," etc., "this unparalleled work of human energy." At p. 315, he calls it "this stupendous work;" and lower down on the same page he says: "I was turned out of school at the age of fifteen for a dunce or blockhead, because I would not stuff into my memory all the nonsense of erudition and learning; and if future ages should discover the unparalleled energies of genius in this work, it will prove my most important doctrine-that the powers of the human mind must be developed in the education of thought and sense in the study of mora opinion, not arts and science." Again, at p. 225 of his "Sophiometer," he says: "The paramount thought that dwells in my mind incessantly is a question I put to myself-whether, in the event of my personal dissolution by death, I have communicated all the discoveries my unique mind possesses in the great master-science of man and nature." In the next page he determines that he has, with the exception of one truth, viz., "the latent energy, physical and moral, of human nature as existing in the British people." But here he was surely accusing himself without ground; for to my knowledge he has not failed in any one of his numerous works to insist upon this theme at least a billion of times. Another instance of his magnificent self-estimation isthat in the title-pages of several of his works he announces himself as "John Stewart, the only man of nature that ever appeared in the world."

By this time I am afraid the reader begins to suspect that he was crazy; and certainly, when I consider everything, he must have been crazy when the wind was at N.N.E.; for who but Walking Stewart ever dated his books by a computation drawn-not from the creation, not from the flood, not from Nabonassar, or ab urbe condita, not from the Hegira-but from themselves, from their own day of publication, as

* In Bath he was surnamed "the Child of Nature: " which arose from his contrasting on every occasion the

existing man of our present experience with the ideal

or Stewartian man that might be expected to emerge in some myriads of ages, to which latter man he gave

the name of the Child of Nature.

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