nonsense, it must be confessed, is poor enough in quality. It is amusing to read his correspondence with Grosvenor Bedford upon his Doctor. Bedford feared that Southey's jokes might fall a little flat in print. The success of Tristram Shandy would not, he said, justify a second assumption of the cap and bells. Southey replies by a rapturous account of his precious manuscript: the stores of reading which it is to display—the 'satire and speculation,' the mixture of truths which require the cap and bells with others which might beseem the bench and the pulpit, and withal a narrative, continuous, and yet varying from grave to gay, 'taking as wild and natural a course as one of our mountain streams.' He is so delighted with his performance that he confides his hopes to his readers and tells them that the whole world is to be racked by curiosity as to the authorship. He makes cunning little plots to throw readers upon a false scent; he imagines the 'stir and buzz and bustle' at tea-tables and booksellers' shops, and in Holland House. It cannot be Byron's or Moore's, it will be said, because it is too moral; or Wordsworth's, because an elephant does not cut capers on the slack wire; or Coleridge's, because it is intelligible throughout; or Hazlitt's, because it
