cousin Kitty, who seems to have run the risk of admiring him to excess,
he always spoke well: but the Basil Montagues, to whose hospitality and
friendship he was made welcome, he has maligned in such a manner as to
justify the retaliatory pamphlet of the sharp-tongued eldest daughter
of the house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By letter and
"reminiscence" he is equally reckless in invective against almost all the
eminent men of letters with whom he then came in contact, and also,
in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt,
Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in
some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being
addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of
well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain
on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he
writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in
the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature."
And a fortnight later, from Irving's house at Pentonville, he sends to
his mother an account of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him
two alternatives--to go with the family to France or to remain in the
country preparing the eldest boy for Cambridge. He declined both, and
they parted, shaking hands with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a
sentence that recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge, "that I have done
with them ... I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for L200 a
year."

[Footnote: _Vide_ Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_ (1st ed. 1851), chap. viii.
p. 79.]

There followed eight weeks of residence in or about Birmingham, with a
friend called 'Badams, who undertook to cure dyspepsia by a new method
and failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others,