received in battle. But the attraction of my volume is, that, at the
foot of the title-page, in beautiful neat script, appear the words,
"Robert Southey. Paris. 17 May 1817,"--being the year in which Southey
stayed at Como with Walter Savage Landor. Here are the _Works_ of
mock-heroic John Philips, 1720, whose _Blenheim_ the Tories pitted
against Addison's _Campaign_, and whose _Splendid Shilling_ still shines
lucidly among eighteenth-century parodies. This copy bears--also on the
title-page--the autograph of James Thomson, not yet the author of _The
Seasons_; and includes the book-plate of Lord Prestongrange,--that
"Lord Advocate Grant" of whom you may read in the _Kidnapped_ of
"R.L.S." Here again is an edition (the first) of Hazlitt's _Lectures on
the English Comic Writers_, annotated copiously in MS. by a contemporary
reader who was certainly not an admirer; and upon whom W.H.'s
cockneyisms, Gallicisms, egotisms, and "_ille_-isms" generally, seem to
have had the effect of a red rag upon an inveterately insular bull. "A
very ingenious but pert, dogmatical, and Prejudiced Writer" is his
uncomplimentary addition to the author's name. Then here is Cunningham's
_Goldsmith_ of 1854, vol. i., castigated with equal energy by that
Alaric Alexander Watts,[2] of whose egregious strictures upon Wordsworth
we read not long since in the _Cornhill Magazine_, and who will not
allow Goldsmith to say, in the _Haunch of Venison_, "the porter and
eatables followed behind." "They could scarcely have followed
before,"--he objects, in the very accents of Boeotia. Nor will he pass
"the hollow-sounding bittern" of the _Deserted Village_. A barrel may
sound hollow, but not a bird--this wiseacre acquaints us.

Note:

[2] So he was christened. But Lockhart chose to insist that his
second pre-name should properly be "Attila," and thenceforth he was