"Ah, what a lesson to a thoughtless man," &c.
[92] All which inimitable graces of nature have, by the hands of mechanic art, by solid masonry, by whitewashing, &c., been exterminated, as a growth of weeds and nuisances, for thirty years.—August 17, 1853.
[93] That most accomplished, and to Coleridge most pious daughter, whose recent death afflicted so very many who knew her only by her writings. She had married her cousin, Mr. Serjeant Coleridge, and in that way retained her illustrious maiden name as a wife. At seventeen, when last I saw her, she was the most perfect of all pensive, nun-like, intellectual beauties that I have seen in real breathing life. The upper parts of her face were verily divine. See, for an artist's opinion, the Life of that admirable man Collins, by his son.
[94] Mary Hutchinson, who became Wordsworth's wife in October 1802, had been known to him since 1777, when she was his fellow-pupil in a Dame's school at Penrith.—M.
[95] Once for all, I say—on recollecting that Coleridge's verses to Sara were made transferable to any Sara who reigned at the time. At least three Saras appropriated them; all three long since in the grave.
[96] Vol. iv. p. 793 (Dec. 1837).—So De Quincey notes; but I may add that the paper in Tait referred to was a Review of Books of the Season, one of them being "Tilt's Medallion Portraits of Modern English Authors, with Illustrative notices by H. F. Chorley." The reviewer's words were "The finest head, in every way, in the series, is that of Charles Lamb."—M.
[97] Lockhart's famous publication of 1819 under the name of Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk.—M.
[98] Jonathan Richardson (born about 1665, died 1745) published in 1734 a volume of Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Paradise Lost, with a Life of Milton, containing particulars which Richardson had collected about Milton personally.—M.
[99] It was between 1721 and 1725, when Mrs. Deborah Clarke, Milton's youngest and only surviving daughter, was living in old age and in very humble circumstances in Moorfields, London, that the engraver Vertue and others went to see her for the special purpose of consulting her about portraits of her father. Some that were shown her she rejected at once; but one "crayon drawing" moved her in the manner which De Quincey reports. This is the portrait which came into Richardson's possession; and after Richardson's death in 1745 it was acquired by Jacob Tonson tertius, of the Tonson publishing family. There seems to be little doubt that it was a drawing of Milton from the life by Faithorne about 1670, when Milton's History of Britain appeared with that portrait of him by Faithorne which is the only authentic print of him in later life, and worth all the other current portraits put together. Faithorne seems to have made two drawings, closely resembling each other, of Milton,—that (now lost) from which the engraving was made for the History of Britain, and this other "crayon drawing" which Richardson possessed. Richardson's reproduction of it in his book is spoilt by a laureate wreath and other flummery about the head; and the only genuine copy of it known to me is a beautiful one prefixed to Mr. Leigh Sotheby's sumptuous volume entitled Ramblings in Elucidation of the Autograph of Milton, published in 1871. The face there is identically the same in essentials as that in the Faithorne engraving of 1670, though somewhat less sad in expression; and the two drawings must have been by the same hand.—M.
[100] Into his 81st only.—M.