age, that is, three hundred years more modern than it ought to have been. you saw me. More than once have I been on the point of writing to you, and as often prevented by some disquieting or distressing circumstance. Within this week I have deposited in yonder churchyard, the little girl who was newly born when I had not ceased to thank God for the preservation of my only boy, who had been saved from the croup, when this visitation befell us, and I do not cease to thank him now. Edith has happily an infant at the breast, a better comforter than I could be; still it will be long before she recovers from the stroke, which was as unexpected as it was severe. The Mr. Townshend of whom you speak was to me a new name, for Cumberland's Review has not travelled here, and I suppose will not long travel anywhere, some of his assistants having applied for employment to the Quarterly. I entreat you, read Wordsworth's pamphlet upon the affairs of Spain, just published by Longman. Only Burke equals it in eloquence, and he only by fits and flashes; but there shines through this the light of truth and of nature and of God, a light of which nothing more than the dim and discolored reflection ever shone upon Burke. God bless you. We shall be glad to hear R. SOUTHEY. Date of this letter, June 3, 1809. MY DEAR MISS BETHAM, -I ought long since to have written to you, and thanked you for your verses. I felt them as you would wish me to feel them; but I haven't yet ventured to put them into Edith's hand, and perhaps she had better not see them till they appear in print, when time shall have blunted the edge of pain. Believe me, I thank you sincerely for them, nor could you have gratified me more. They bear your stamp- the stamp of the lawful mint of the muses. My I go on Thursday next to Durham, to visit my brother, who is just married. My absence from home will not exceed a fortnight. The sooner you arrive after my return the better, for the delight of the country is in the long evenings at midsummer, and I shall be sorry if you miss them. The straight road from London is to Penrith, one stage short of Carlisle, and eighteen miles from Keswick. From thence there is a stage which runs through this place Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. But if you reach Penrith early enough to come by chaise it is less wearisome to proceed to a house where you will feel yourself at home than to pass a night at an inn, for this stage leaves Penrith in the morning. If you come by way of Leeds or ManThere needs no apology about "The Lay of chester there is no stage nearer than Kendal, Marie;" rather, there does need one, but it is which is thirty miles from hence. It is a long journey, but if you start from London the least on my part, and you will readily excuse me for not having sooner executed my intention. fatiguing plan is to take the mail; remember, I will certainly write an account of it for the not that which goes by Manchester to Carlisle, number after that which is now far advanced for that takes in the unwary passengers for in the press, but I cannot answer for its inser some thirty additional miles, and for a spell of tion; that must depend on the editor. two hours in the dead of night at a Manches- influence and efforts shall not be wanting, and, ter inn, waiting to be turned over to another as I have some influence with one other recoach; but the Carlisle mail, which goes by view, I will lose no time in recommending it Newark and Doncaster. I enter into these there. That stanza in my lay which made you particulars because some of my friends have been deceived by bookkeepers and sent the sorry will make others angry; but the occasion required it. I cannot forgive the Dismore circuitous route. Allen was at school with me: I remember him well, but never had senters for leaguing with the Catholics against the Church, the original cause of dissent any intimacy with him. John Dolignon was being that the Church retained too many one of my earliest playmates, and while I was popish ceremonies. They have no common at Westminster his mother's house was my principle but that of hatred to the Establishhome every Saturday and Sunday. chances and changes of the world have thrownment, and a union formed upon that principle us far asunder, the more so perhaps because is abominable. But Church and State will be overthrown before this generation pass away ever since we ceased to associate, we must unless the government awaken to a sense of have grown more unlike each other. I used its danger. I suppose I shall be called a to shoot with him, fish with him, and lay Methodist, with just as much propriety as I snares for rabbits. These things I could not have formerly been called an atheist. do now. Were I, however, to meet Dolignon Love from all. God bless you. (and I would turn fifty miles from my way for the sake of meeting him) my first feeling June 24. Keswick. would be like that of a brother -we should both shed tears at thinking of his dear mother and of his sister, and when that sympathy was over I should begin to feel a weight at my heart from perceiving how little other sympathy was left us. I know what the feeling is by experience, and there are few feelings more Dainful. The R. S. The pictures have arrived. Dyer's picture is a most happy likeness. He does me wrong if he supposes that I do not set great value upon it, for I have a great regard for him, and so much respect for his On the death of Herbert Southey. better part, that I never lose sight of it even when his oddities and weaknesses provoke a smile. It is melancholy to see so many of the ingredients both of genius and happiness existing in that man's mind, and spoilt in the mixing, and think how trifling an alteration in his character would have made him as useful as he is good, and as happy as useful. The frames look well, but by no means so well as they would have done if the gilding had been broader. It was a little disappointment not to find Moon's picture among them, because we remembered it as the happiest likeness; the better way of sending it will be in a frank, sufficiently enveloped. Dyer will convey it to Rickman's, and then, no matter what may be the weight, it is hardly possible that he should lose a second charge of the same kind. "Kehama" has been finished this month, is half transcribed, gone to the printer's, and I expect the first proof in the course of the week. Early in the spring I hope to send it you. This is written hastily, merely to announce the arrival of the box-alas! that it should not be the safe arrival. I must not forget thanks from below stairs for the feathers. The children often talk of you. "When will she come again?" is the constant question. I shall be likely to see you in the course of next year. My uncle has the living of Streatham given him, and will reside there; he gives up for it some Herefordshire preferment, and I do not think the exchange in any other degree advantageous than that his new residence will be more conveniently situated for my visits than his old one. I sent nobody to give you any other trouble than that of exhibiting the family group, nor have I heard who has taken the pains of going to see them except Bedford and Neville White (Henry's brother). He thought the last year's picture of myself a better likeness than this. God bless you. Very truly yours, R. SOUTHEY. Dec. 27, 1809. I am afraid my letter did not reach John Dolignon, for it has received no answer; and it was such a letter concerning old times, and remembered intimacy and friends who are gone, that I am sure he must have replied to it had it reached him. Keswick: May 15, 1814. First to the first part of your letter. Very glad should I be if I could point out to you any profitable employment in literature; but they who know most of such things best know how exceeding difficult this is. Nothing is so likely to succeed as a dramatic attempt, and I should think it very possible you might adapt some of our old plays to the stage. Of these the emolument would be considerable. Next to this, the most promising attempt would be to versify some popular tale; better still, to manufacture one with a melodrama or grand spectacle for the stage. These are things which may be talked over at leisure when you come to us; we shall all rejoice to see you, What you have sent me promises well; and you may be assured that it will give me great pleasure to see it in its progress, and com ment upon it as far as any remarks are likely to be of use, or can be made without a knowledge of the plan. I think I know whom you mean, a Marie somewhat, whose name and history I will look for. It would be very desirable that you should see her lays; the writing is likely not to be difficult, as it probably was written in an age when scrawling was not common; but I dare say George Dyer would lend you his eyes, if your own should be puzzled. Go with him some day and reconnoitre them. If they are not very numerous, you will insure an antiquarian value to your book by inserting them. Why have you not noticed the most important part of my last note, that wherein Edith asked when we might expect you? You must come and make rhyme sketches from nature for your poem. Love from all, great and small. Who was that lady who came with you to Smith the sculptor's, and wanted to hear more of "Roderick" than I had time to read? I like her face well enough to ask who it be longs to, for I did not catch her name. Keswick: July 23, 1815. I am the worst dealer in the world, and therefore very unfit for an adviser in concerns of business. My own books are published upon no better terms than those of sharing the profits with the publisher, and I have never yet been successful enough in the sale way to feel authorized in demanding more. But there has been another cause for this; my hands have been tied, more, perhaps, from a point of feeling on my own part than from any actual necessity. You see I am rambling from your concerns to my own; but my statement may serve to show that an arrangement for sharing the eventual profits is not an unfavorable one, and that any bargain which se cures to you half eventually, and puts you in immediate possession of any part in advance, may be considered a good one. You must see more of the country than you did on your former visit, and therefore I shall delay some purposed expeditions till you arrive. Why do you make any sort of apologies for what can stand in need of none? You know me by this time well enough to know that I am a plain speaker, and you ought to believe confess that he was a little disappointed in his tell me about your sisters and brothers, your S. COLERIDGE. These are among the most interesting letters belonging to this bright period. Fortune smiled upon the young artist and poetess, and she was warmly welcomed in me when I say that we were very sorry to part with you, and shall be right heartily glad to see you again. If any apologies were needed it would be on our part, that we did not amuse you better and show you more of the country. When next you come, we will hope for better weather; and when my fortune improves, I may one day afford to keep a cart. As for my hesitation or slowness at professions, do you not know how I hate professors of fine feeling, and how I suspect all sentimentalists? I dare not promise as much for Edith; it is her in-literary and artistic circles. In Vol. I. of curable fault that she scarcely on any possible occasion can be induced to write to any person except her sister and me. The cart's tail might perhaps have remedied this some years ago, and you know I could find employment for a cart in this way, as well as in jaunting about the lakes. I perfectly understand why she dislikes letter-writing, and how exceedingly foolish her dislike is; but of what use is it, like a physician, to understand the nature of what you know you cannot cure? I am too busy to fill the paper, so farewell. Keswick: Oct. 14. The following is from Mrs. Coleridge: the Retrospective Review, four women are mentioned as having honorably distin guished themselves in poetry, viz., Joanna Baillie, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Hemans, and Matilda Betham. Family circumstances and misfortunes, however, combined with a general breakdown of health, cut off these fair prospects. She gave up her house, left London for some years, and the promise of her youth was never fulfilled. She did not lose sight of the Lambs, for many years after comes the following: DEAR MISS BETHAM,-I sit down, very poorly, to write to you, being come to Mr. Walden's, Church Street, Edmonton, to be altogether with poor Mary, who is very ill, as usual, only that her illnesses are now as many months as they used to be weeks in duration - the reason your letter only just found me. I am saddened with the havoc death has made in your family. I do not know how to appreciate the kind regard of dear Anne; Mary will understand it two months hence, I hope; but neither she nor I would rob you, if the legacy will be of use to, or comfort to you. My hand shakes so I can hardly write. On Saturday week I must come to town, and will call on you in the morning before one o'clock. Till when I take kindest leave. Your old Friend, C. LAMB. My brother and sister Southey are just returned from Durham; they have left the lieutenant behind with the doctor. Coleridge has been with us for some time past in good health, spirits, and humor, but "The Friend" for some unaccountable reason, or for no reason at all, is utterly silent. This, you will easily believe, is matter of perpetual grief to me, but I am not only obliged to be silent on the subject, although ever uppermost in my thoughts, but I am obliged to bear about a cheerful countenance, knowing as I do by sad experience that to expostulate, or even to hazard one anxious look, would soon drive him hence. Coleridge sends you his best thanks for the elegant little book; I shall not, however, let it be carried over to Grasmere, for Her declining years were spent in Lonthere it would soon be soiled, for the Words- don. At certain literary gatherings of a worths are woful destroyers of good books, as past generation, the oddly-dressed old our poor library will witness. Mrs. Words- woman, who was wont to enter leaning on worth is now confined of her fifth child, a son; a stick, her face beaming with animation and our friends the Lloyds have just lost one and intelligence, was usually surrounded of theirs by the croup. We expect another little Southey in July. Have you ever heard by a little court. "I would rather talk to any tidings of the Indiaman? I fear not; I Matilda Betham than to the most beautishall only distress you by asking. Coleridge ful young woman in the world," said one begs me to repeat to you his great regret at of her youthful admirers of the other sex, not having seen you in this country; he likes the pictures of the two Ediths much; nay, very, very much. I must at the same time The Anne mentioned in this letter was a sister of Matilda's, who had left the Lambs a small legacy. And did not Providence ordain That we should soon be laid as low, No reason could survive the blow. in her old age; and those who listened to her bright sallies, her piquant stories, her apt quotations, forgot that she was no longer the Matilda of former days. From her father, who lived to be ninety-two, and possessed his faculties unclouded to the last, she seems to have inherited her ready wit. Almost the last words he uttered were a witticism. He was walking up and down the room leaning on his youngest daughter's arm, the day before he died, and said smiling, "I am walking slowly, yet I am going fast." "The wise must die as well as the foolish, and I won't be poisoned," said Matilda Betham in her declining years, and no persuasion or entreaty could ever induce her to touch physic. She died in 1852, and was buried at High-one abused. In some of hers was written : gate Cemetery. Like the romantic poetry of Miss Landon, "The Lay of Marie" belonged to a fashion which was destined to pass away; but some of the smaller pieces at the end of the volume possess a touching grace and pathos, deserving of a better fate; the following, for instance, which has been translated into German. How solemn is the sick man's room In silent heaviness and fear! How sad, his feeble hand in thine, The start of every pulse to share; To turn aside the full fraught eye, Lest it should reach that wakeful ear! In the dread stillness of the night, To lose the faint, faint sound of breath; To listen in restrain'd affright, To deprecate each thought of death! And, when a movement chased that fear, And gave thy heart's blood leave to flow, The prayer of him whose holy tongue The whole dependence of thy youth; I have known friends, but who can feel I served him still with tender zeal, The historian of "Celebrated Women" may not herself find a niche in future temples accorded to her sex by hands as loving as her own; but she was the last person to desire what she did not deserve, or to over-estimate the applause of the world. Misfortune and disappointment had no power to sour that sweet temper or embitter that genial mind. She was every whit as bright and beaming in her lonely old age as in her fêted and flattered youth, and to the last loved books so much that she could not bear to hear even a bad "Matilda Betham, with Charles Lamb's old love" and such friendships were indeed her title of honor. M. B.-E. From The Fortnightly Review. DAVOS IN WINTER. IT has long been acknowledged that high Alpine air in summer is beneficial to people suffering from lung disease, but only of late years, and in one locality, has the experiment of a winter residence at a considerable elevation above the sea been made. The general results of that experiment are so satisfactory that the conditions of life in winter at Davos, and the advantages it offers to invalids, ought to be fairly set before the English public. My own experience of eight months spent at Davos, between August, 1877, and April 1878, enables me to speak with some confidence; while a long previous familiarity with the health stations of the Riviera - Cannes, Bordighera, Nice, Mentone, and San Remo - furnishes a standard of comparison between two methods of cure at first sight radically opposite. Accustomed as we are to think that warmth is essential to the satisfactory treatment of pulmonary complaints, it requires no little courage to face the severity of winter in an Alpine valley, where the snow lies for seven months, and where the thermometer frequently falls to ten or fifteen degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Nor is it easy, by any stretch of the imagination, to realize the fact that, in spite of this intense cold, the most sensitive invalids can drive in open sledges with impu nity, expose themselves without risk to falling snow through hours of exercise, or Davos is the name given to a district, the principal village of which is Davos-amPlatz, situated at an elevation of five thousand two hundred feet above the sea. It sit upon their bedroom balconies, basking | formed the independent state of the Grauin a hot sun, with the world all white bünden. The mountaineers are a hardy, around them, and a spiky row of icicles sober, frugal race of peasants, owning above their heads. Yet such is a state of their own land, and sending the superfluthings which a few months spent in Davos ous members of each family, for whom no renders quite familiar; and perhaps the work can be found at home, forth into the best way of making it intelligible is to world. In old days the Davosers predescribe diffusely, without any scientific ferred military service. I have before me pretence or display of theory, what sort of the pedigree of one family, called Buol, place Davos is, and what manner of life who now own a large hotel at Davos. I sick people may lead there. find from it that between the years 1400 and 1800, thirty-eight of its members held various offices in the French, Austrian, Venetian, Dutch, Milanese, Spanish, English, and Neapolitan armies, varying from the rank of general down to that of private soldier. Nearly as many served their country as governors of districts, captains, generals, and ambassadors. A curious history might be written of this family's vicissitudes, and a strange list of its honors might be drawn up; for it claims one Austrian earldom, and two German baronies, as well as a French title of nobility, dating from the reign of Henry IV. Nor is this a solitary instance. Several Grisons families have old historic names; and, were they not republicans, would bear titles as ancient as any but a select few of the English peerage. They are, however, simple peasants now, and, instead of seeking glory in foreign service, they content themselves with trades and commerce. Until the year 1865 Davos remained in the hands of its own people, who lived substantially and soberly, each family in its great farm-house of stone or fir-wood, at a discreet distance from its neighbors. Platz was the capital of the district, where the church with its tall sharp spire stands, where the public business of the Landschaft is transacted in the ancient Rathhaus, and where in those old days there was but one primitive little inn. In that year a German physician of repute and experience, Dr. Unger, determined to try whether high Alpine air was really a cure for serious lung disease. The district physician of that epoch, Dr. Spengler, who is now one of the most popular Kur-aerzte of Davos, had previously observed, first, that phthisis was unknown among the inhabitants of the valley; and secondly, that those Davosers who had contracted pulmonary complaints in foreign countries, made rapid and easy cures on their return. He published the results of his observations in the Deutsche Klinik for 1862, and the reading of his paper impelled Dr. Unger to test the truth of his opinion by personal experience. Fortunately for the future of Davos, Dr. is an open and tolerably broad valley, lying almost exactly south and north, and so placed as, roughly speaking, to be parallel with the Upper Engadine, on the one side, and the Rheinthal, between Chur and Landquart, on the other. The mountains which enclose it are of no commanding altitude; only one insignificant glacier can be seen from any point in the valley, but the position of great rocky masses both to south and north is such that the most disagreeable winds, whether the keen north wind or the relaxing south-wester, known by the dreaded name of föhn, are fairly excluded. Comparative stillness is, indeed, a great merit of Davos; the best nights and days of winter present a cloudless sky, clear frost, and absolutely unstirred atmosphere. At the same time, it would be ridiculous to say that there is no wind in this happy valley. March there, as elsewhere, is apt to be disturbed and stormy; and during the summer months the valley-wind, which rises regularly every morning and blows for several hours, will cause discomfort to invalids who have not learned how to avoid it by taking refuge in the pine woods or frequenting sheltered promenades. All travellers in Switzerland are well aware that where there is a broad valley lying north and south__they will meet with a Thalwind. At Davos it is not nearly so strong as in the Upper Engadine or the Rhonthal; nor is it at all dreaded for their patients by the physicians. Colds, strange to say, are rarely caught at Davos, and, if caught, are easily got rid of; and for my own part, I can say with certainty that no wind there ever plagued me or imperilled my recovery so much as a mistral at San Remo or a sirocco at Palermo. Davos was settled in the middle of the thirteenth century by the Austrians, who held it till the people freed themselves in the sixteenth century, and, together with the population of the neighboring valleys, |