grandest things ever done by human minds, have been done by minds that were incurable screws.  Think of the magnificent service done to humankind by James Watt.  It is positively impossible to calculate what we all owe to the man that gave us iho steam-engine.  It is sober truth that the inscription in Westminster Abbey tells, when it speaks of him as among the ‘best benefactors’ of the race.  Yet what an unsound organization that great man had!  Mentally, what a screw!  Through most of his life, he suffered the deepest misery from desperate depression of spirits; he was always fancying that his mind was breaking down:  he has himself recorded that he often thought of casting off, by suicide, the unendurable burden of life.  And Still, what work the rickety machine got through!  With tearing headaches, with a sunken chest, with the least muscular of limbs, with the most melancholy of temperaments, worried and tormented by piracies of his great inventions, yet doing so much and doing it so nobly, was not James Watt like the lame race-horse that won the Derby?  As for Byron, he was unquestionably a very great man; and as a poet, he is in his own school without a rival.  Still, he was a screw.  There was something morbid and unsound about his entire development.  In many respects he was extremely silly.  It was extremely silly to take pains to represent that he was morally much worse than he really was.  The greatest blockheads I know are distinguished by the same characteristic.  Oh, empty-headed Noodle! who have more than once dropped hints in my presence as to the awful badness of your life, and the unhappy insight which your life has given you into the moral rottenness of society, don’t do it again.  I always thought you a contemptible fool:  but next time I mean to tell you so.  Wordsworth was a screw.  Though one of the greatest of poets, he was dreadfully twisted by inordinate egotism and vanity:  the result partly of original constitution, and partly of living a great deal too much alone in that damp and misty lake country. lie was like a spavined horse.  Coleridge, again, was a jibber.  He never would pull in the team of life.  There is something unsound in the mind of the man who fancies that because he is a genius, he need not support his wife and children.  Even the sensible and exemplary Southey was a little unsound in the matter of a crotchety temper, needlessly ready to take offence.  He was always quarrelling with his associates in the Quarterly Review:  with the editor and the publisher.  Perhaps you remember how on one occasion he wrought himself up into a fever of wrath with Mr. Murray, because that gentleman suggested a subject on which he wished Southey to write for the Quarterly, and begged him to put his whole strength to it, the subject being one which was just then of great interest and importance.  ‘Flagrant insolence,’ exclaimed Southey.  ’Think of the fellow bidding me put my whole strength to an article in his six-shilling Review!’