“I have been called in as mediator, or second, at least twenty times, in violent quarrels, and have always contrived to settle the business without compromising the honour of the parties, or leading them to mortal consequences, and this, too, sometimes in very difficult and delicate circumstances, and having to deal with very hot and haughty spirits,—­Irishmen, gamesters, guardsmen, captains, and cornets of horse, and the like.  This was, of course, in my youth, when I lived in hot-headed company.  I have had to carry challenges from gentlemen to noblemen, from captains to captains, from lawyers to counsellors, and once from a clergyman to an officer in the Life Guards; but I found the latter by far the most difficult,—­

                    “’to compose
    The bloody duel without blows,’—­

the business being about a woman:  I must add, too, that I never saw a woman behave so ill, like a cold-blooded, heartless b——­ as she was,—­but very handsome for all that.  A certain Susan C * * was she called.  I never saw her but once; and that was to induce her but to say two words (which in no degree compromised herself), and which would have had the effect of saving a priest or a lieutenant of cavalry.  She would not say them, and neither N * * nor myself (the son of Sir E. N * *, and a friend to one of the parties,) could prevail upon her to say them, though both of us used to deal in some sort with womankind.  At last I managed to quiet the combatants without her talisman, and, I believe, to her great disappointment:  she was the damnedest b——­ that I ever saw, and I have seen a great many.  Though my clergyman was sure to lose either his life or his living, he was as warlike as the Bishop of Beauvais, and would hardly be pacified; but then he was in love, and that is a martial passion.”

However disagreeable it was to find the consequences of his Satire thus rising up against him in a hostile shape, he was far more embarrassed in those cases where the retribution took a friendly form.  Being now daily in the habit of meeting and receiving kindnesses from persons who, either in themselves, or through their relatives, had been wounded by his pen, he felt every fresh instance of courtesy from such quarters to be, (as he sometimes, in the strong language of Scripture, expressed it,) like “heaping coals of fire upon his head.”  He was, indeed, in a remarkable degree, sensitive to the kindness or displeasure of those he lived with; and had he passed a life subject to the immediate influence of society, it may be doubted whether he ever would have ventured upon those unbridled bursts of energy in which he at once demonstrated and abused his power.  At the period when he ran riot in his Satire, society had not yet caught him within its pale; and in the time of his Cains and Don Juans, he had again broken loose from it.  Hence, his instinct towards a life of solitude and independence, as the true element of his strength.  In his own domain of imagination