party of under-graduates, many of them freshmen and strangers, take up a
poker to one of them, and heard him use language as blackguard as his
action. I have seen Sheridan drunk, too, with all the world; but his
intoxication was that of Bacchus, and Porson's that of Silenus. Of all the
disgusting brutes, sulky, abusive, and intolerable, Porson was the most
bestial, as far as the few times that I saw him went which were only at
William Bankes's (the Nubian discoverer's) rooms. I saw him once go away
in a rage, because nobody knew the name of the 'Cobbler of Messina,'
insulting their ignorance with the most vulgar terms of reprobation. He
was tolerated in this state amongst the young men for his talents, as the
Turks think a madman inspired, and bear with him. He used to recite, or
rather vomit pages of all languages, and could hiccup Greek like a Helot;
and certainly Sparta never shocked her children with a grosser exhibition
than this man's intoxication.

"I perceive, in the book you sent me, a long account of him, which is very
savage. I cannot judge, as I never saw him sober, except in _hall_ or
combination room; and then I was never near enough to hear, and hardly to
see him. Of his drunken deportment, I can be sure, because I saw it."


THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI.

It was about the time (1819) when the foregoing letter was written, and
when, like the first return of reason after intoxication, a full
consciousness of some of the evils of his late libertine course of life
had broken upon him, that an attachment differing altogether, both in
duration and devotion, from any of those that, since the dream of his
boyhood, had inspired him, gained an influence over his mind which lasted
through his few remaining years; and, undeniably wrong and immoral (even