spector, for December 27, 1806, published in New York:

"On Christmas Eve, a party of banditti, amounting, it is stated, to forty or fifty members of an association calling themselves High-Binders,' assembled in front of St. Peter's Church in Barclay Street, expecting that the Catholic ritual would be performed with a degree of pomp and splendor which has usually been omitted in this city. These ceremonies, however, not taking place, the High-Binders manifested great displeasure."

In a subsequent number the association are called "Hide-Binders." They were Irish.

CLXIV

Perhaps Mr. Barrow is right after all, and the dearth of genius in America is owing to the continual teasing of the mosquitoes.

CLXV

The title of this book deceives us. It is by no means "talk" as men understand it, not that true talk of which Boswell has been the best historiographer. In a word, it is not gossip, which has been never better defined than by Basil, who calls it "talk for talk's sake," nor more thoroughly comprehended

1 Voyage to Cochin China.

Coleridge's Table-Talk

than by Horace Walpole and Mary Wortley Montagu, who made it a profession and a purpose. Embracing all things, it has neither beginning, middle, nor end. Thus of the gossiper it was not properly said that “he commences his discourse by jumping in medias res." For, clearly, your gossiper commences not at all. He is begun. He is already begun. He is always begun. In the matter of end he is indeterminate. And by these extremes shall ye know him to be of the Cæsars -porphyrogenitus, of the right vein, of the true blood -of the blue blood-of the sangre azul. As for laws, he is cognizant of but one, the invariable absence of all. And for his road, were it as straight as the Appia and as broad as that "which leadeth to destruction," nevertheless would he be malcontent without a frequent hop-skip-and-jump over the hedges into the tempting pastures of digression beyond. Such is the gossiper, and of such alone is the true "talk." But when Coleridge asked Lamb if he had ever heard him preach, the answer was quite happy, "I have never heard you do anything else." The truth is that "Table Discourse" might have answered as a title to this book; but its character can be fully conveyed only in "Post-Prandial Sub-Sermons" or "Three Bottle

Sermonoids."

CLXVI

A rather bold and quite unnecessary plagiarism, from a book too well known to promise impunity: