calamity. But _I_ did not pay him back in puns and epigrams, for I
valued Matthews too much myself to do so; and, even if I had not, I
should have respected his griefs.

"Long's father wrote to me to write his son's epitaph. I promised--but
I had not the heart to complete it. He was such a good amiable being
as rarely remains long in this world; with talent and accomplishments,
too, to make him the more regretted. Yet, although a cheerful
companion, he had strange melancholy thoughts sometimes. I remember
once that we were going to his uncle's, I think--I went to accompany
him to the door merely, in some Upper or Lower Grosvenor or Brook
Street, I forget which, but it was in a street leading out of some
square,--he told me that, the night before, he 'had taken up a
pistol--not knowing or examining whether it was loaded or no--and had
snapped it at his head, leaving it to chance whether it might or might
not be charged.' The letter, too, which he wrote me, on leaving
college to join the Guards, was as melancholy in its tenour as it
could well be on such an occasion. But he showed nothing of this in
his deportment, being mild and gentle;--and yet with much turn for the
ludicrous in his disposition. We were both much attached to Harrow,
and sometimes made excursions there together from London to revive our
schoolboy recollections."

These affecting remembrances are contained in a Journal which he kept
during his residence at Ravenna, in 1821, and they are rendered still
more touching and remarkable by the circumstances under which they
were noted down. Domesticated in a foreign land, and even connected
with foreign conspirators, whose arms, at the moment he was writing,
were in his house, he could yet thus wholly disengage himself from the
scene around him, and, borne away by the current of memory into other