"Insert too,"
he suggested, "a few more poems--any that you have, except _Christabel_,
for that is of too much value. And write _now_ that character of
Bonaparte, announced in former times for 'to-morrow, and to-morrow,
and to-morrow.'" It was too late, however, for good advice to be of
any avail: the _Friend_ was past praying for. It lingered on
till its twenty-eighth number, and expired, unlike the Watchman,
without any farewell to its friends, in the third week of March 1810.
The republication of this periodical, or rather selections
from it, which appeared in 1818, is hardly perhaps described with
justice in De Quincey's words as "altogether and absolutely a new
work." A reader can, at any rate, form a pretty fair estimate from it
of the style and probable public attractions of the original issue; and
a perusal of it, considered in its character as a bid for the patronage
of the general reader, is certainly calculated to excite an
astonishment too deep for words. We have, of course, to bear in mind
that the standard of the readable in our grandfathers' days was a more
liberal and tolerant one than it is in our own. In those days of
leisurely communications and slowly moving events there was relatively
at least a far larger public for a weekly issue of moral and
philosophical essays, under the name of a periodical, than it would be
found easy to secure at present, when even a monthly discourse upon
things in general requires Mr.
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