REMEMBER dining the first time with Canning at Lord Mulgrave's, in 1808. There were present Lord Dartmouth, Sir Charles and Lady Long, General and Mrs. Phipps, Angerstein, Lady Harrington, and Charles Bagot, Canning's private secretary. Canning said nothing important. He appeared to me a little overbearing. He quizzed Dr. Parr for believing in Ireland's play; and the conversation turning upon geometrical staircases, "What is the principle?" said Lord Mulgrave to Canning. After thinking a moment, he blushed deeply, and said, "I really do not know." They then began on politics, in which of course they were all au fait. Napoleon was spoken of with a sort of conviction of his power. Lord Mulgrave had been sent out to Austrian headquarters on a mission by Mr. Pitt, when Bonaparte was in the Tyrol, and he urged the Archduke Charles to attack Bonaparte. Lord Mulgrave used to say that, had the Archduke attacked, Bonaparte's destruction was certain. Mrs. Hun, Canning's mother, I knew well. She was a great friend of my father's, a woman of masculine habits of mind, very clever, and a great talker. Canning's father was disinherited by his father for marrying her.

Never was a mind more adapted for its purpose in art than Wilkie's. Among a thousand instances I select the following. When with me at Cheddar (1809), we visited the tremendous

rocks and cavern. There was something terrific in their appearance; a wild, ferocious sullen tone, with a burst of light in the sky behind, which showed their proportion sharply. Wilkie felt nothing of this. He was much more interested in studying John Cobley, my uncle, the very essence of simplicity and good faith. We then went into the cavern, through which runs a silent stream of water that vanishes imperceptibly among distant rocks. We fixed two bits of lighted candle on something buoyant, and hiding our own candles, sent our little lightships floating down the stream. Nothing could be more exquisitely poetical than their silent floating away, now illumining the vast cavern, now lost behind some rugged projection, now reappearing, suspended as it were in the air, for the surface of the water could no longer be seen, then glimmering in the far distance, clinging to the rocky roof like a fond memory to our minds, yet irresistibly swept along further and fainter, till they faded away into silent obscurity. They were like helpless spirits borne along the Styx.

We tried another, and it upset and sputtered. Wilkie, who had been apparently unconcerned before, now burst forth in an ecstasy of delight, and cried out, “What a capital subject for a picture; a number of persons and children setting off these things, and some fizzling and sputtering in the water!"

I recollect once at Lord Elgin's, when I thought he was lost in admiration at the Marbles, he said, on coming out: "I have been thinking of a capital subject—a parcel of boys, with one of those things they water the gardens with, spouting water over one another!" Nothing refined or grand, or even solemn, ever drew his attention for one moment from his own ludicrous conceptions. When he went to West's funeral, and was standing by the side of the grave, at the most beautiful moment in our Service for the Dead, the costume of one of the officials caught Wilkie's eye; he nudged the man next to him, “Just look at that cocked hat. Isn't it grand!"

Never ridicule personal defects, when telling a story, until you have first thrown your eye round the company.

When I hear of a great or noble action, I always thank God for giving me the blessings of existence. It consoles me for the meanness and malignity of the rest of mankind.

Some persons are so devotional they have not one bit of true religion in them.

Marshal Lannes, Duke of Montebello, is dead. (June 16, 1809.) The Bulletin says that Bonaparte passed an hour with him. What a fine scene this would make! Supposing Bonaparte's fortunes to be on the decline, as I suppose, I think this must give his mind a shock. This is the first of his early friends he has lost and the first serious defeat he has met with. I should like to have been invisible at their meeting. Lannes dying, weak and nervous, advising Bonaparte, must have made him think more seriously of his mortality than anything that ever happened to him before. I see the ghosts of D'Enghien, Palm, Toussaint, Palafox's friend shot at Saragossa, hovering round their heads, and smiling as if the age of power, murder, and destruction was coming to its end. . . . I feel convinced when I survey the state of Europe at this period, and compare it with the state two years ago, that Bonaparte has lost ground, and the historian hereafter may with propriety date his downfall from his invasion of Spain. Could anything on earth be more impolitic? He has not only lost the use of the Spanish armies and fleets, but he has divided his own forces. given a shock to his power he will never recover.1

He has

This is a proof of Haydon's political foresight. In 1809 such a view was ridiculed. No one believed in it. The year following, when Napoleon held his famous Court at Erfurt, his power seemed more firmly established than at any period in his history. The splendor and magnificence he displayed on that occasion surpassed anything that had ever been seen in Europe. "Come to Erfurt," he wrote to his favorite actor Talma, "Come to Erfurt, and you shall play before a pit full of kings!" Yet amidst all this display of grandeur and authority, Haydon never swerved from his opinion, and declared him a lost man unless he abandoned Spain. Subsequent events fully justified this view, and modern writers have adopted it. In 1812, Lord Wellesley, referring in a speech to the state of Europe, said of Napoleon, "He is one of an order of minds that by nature make for themselves great reverses." But that was three years later, after

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One day (1809), driving in the coach from Exeter to Wells, I was excessively amused by a sailor who had belonged to the "Victory," and was at Trafalgar. What he told me had all the simplicity of truth. He said as they were going into action, Lord Nelson came round to them, and told them not to fire until they were sure of their object. "When he came down," said he, 66 we were skylarking, as everything was ready, and guns double-shotted." "What do ye mean by skylarking?" said I. "Jumping over each other's heads," he answered, amuse ourselves till we were near enough to fire." He was a robust, fine weather-beaten fellow. At some inn we changed at, there was a well-pipeclayed, and clean, but spindle-legged local militia-man, smoking his pipe. Jack and he soon came to a misunderstanding of course. "If I was thee," said the militia-man, "I would have put on a cleaner handkercher about my neck." your eyes, what d'ye ask for your legs?" said the sailor. No human being could help roaring with laughter, and Jack enjoyed a complete triumph, as he deserved, after being four years at sea.

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Rigo, a French artist, who accompanied Denon to the cataracts of the Nile in Napoleon's Egyptian expedition (1799), spent last evening with me (May 6, 1811). I was curious to get out every anecdote about Napoleon from one who had seen him repeatedly, and indeed had always been with him during the Egyptian expedition. Rigo said the night before the battle of Aboukir, he lay on the ground in the same tent with Bonaparte. About midnight, Bonaparte told Berthier and the rest to go to sleep in their cloaks till daybreak. Rigo said he was never near Bonaparte, but he was attracted by his physiognomy: there was something in his face so acute, so thoughtful, so terrible, that it always impressed him, and that this night, when all the rest were buried in sleep, he could not help watching him. In a little time he observed Napoleon take the

some successes of Wellington in Spain, and when war between Russia and France was certain. In 1809 it required no ordinary sagacity to detect the character and bearing of the "Spanish ulcer," which really destroyed Napoleon.-ED.