The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 06 (of 12) (part 3 of 3)

The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 06 (of 12) (part 3 of 3)

N.—It is all, or nearly all, taken from my account, and yet the author misrepresents or contradicts every thing I say, I suppose to show that he is under no obligation to me. I cannot understand the drift of his work; nor who it is he means to please. He finds fault with Sir Joshua, among a number of other things, for not noticing Hogarth. Why, it was not his business to notice Hogarth any more than it was to notice Fielding. Both of them were great wits and describers of manners in common life, but neither of them came under the article of painting. What Hogarth had was his own, and nobody will ever have it again in the same degree. But all that did not depend on his own genius was detestable, both as to his subjects and his execution. Was Sir Joshua to recommend these as models to the student? No, we are to imitate only what is best, and that in which even failure is honourable; not that where only originality and the highest point of success can at all excuse the attempt. Cunningham (the writer of the Life), pretends to cry up Hogarth as a painter; but this is not true. He moulded little figures and placed them to see how the lights fell and how the drapery came in, which gave a certain look of reality and relief; but this was not enough to give breadth or grace, and his figures look like puppets after all, or like dolls dressed up. Who would compare any of these little, miserable, deformed caricatures of men and women, to the figure of St. Paul preaching at Athens? What we justly admire and emulate is that which raises human nature, not that which degrades and holds it up to scorn. We may laugh to see a person rolled in the kennel, but we are ashamed of ourselves for doing so. We are amused with Tom Jones; but we rise from the perusal of Clarissa with higher feelings and better resolutions than we had before. St. Giles’s is not the only school of art. It is nature, to be sure; but we must select nature. Ask the meanest person in the gallery at a play-house which he likes best, the tragedy or the farce? And he will tell you, without hesitation, the tragedy—and will prefer Mrs. Siddons to the most exquisite buffoon. He feels an ambition to be placed in the situations, and to be associated with the characters, described in tragedy, and none to be connected with those in a farce; because he feels a greater sense of power and dignity in contemplating the one, and only sees his own weakness and littleness reflected and ridiculed in the other. Even the poetry, the blank verse, pleases the most illiterate, which it would not do if it were not natural. The world do not receive monsters. This was what I used to contest with Sir Joshua. He insisted that the blank verse in tragedy was purely artificial—a thing got up for the occasion. But surely every one must feel that he delivers an important piece of information, or asks a common question in a different tone of voice. If it were not for this, the audience would laugh at the measured speech or step of a tragic actor as burlesque, just as they are inclined to do at an Opera. Old Mr. Tolcher used to say of the famous Pulteney—‘My Lord Bath always speaks in blank verse!’ The stately march of his ideas, no doubt, made it natural to him. Mr. Cunningham will never persuade the world that Hogarth is superior to Raphael or Reynolds. Common sense is against it. I don’t know where he picked up the notion.

H.—Probably from Mr. Lamb, who endeavours to set up Hogarth as a great tragic as well as comic genius, not inferior in either respect to Shakspeare.

N.—I can’t tell where he got such an opinion; but I know it is great nonsense. Cunningham gives a wrong account of an anecdote which he has taken from me. Dr. Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, had said at a meeting of the Society of Arts, that ‘a pin-maker was a more important member of society than Raphael.’ Sir Joshua had written some remark on this assertion in an old copy-book which fell into my hands and which nobody probably ever saw but myself. Cunningham states that Sir Joshua was present when Dean Tucker made the speech at the Society, and that he immediately rose up, and with great irritation answered him on the spot, which is contrary both to the fact and to Sir Joshua’s character. He would never have thought of rising to contradict any one in a public assembly for not agreeing with him on the importance of his own profession. In one part of the new Life, it is said that Sir Joshua, seeing the ill-effects that Hogarth’s honesty and bluntness had had upon his prospects as a portrait-painter, had learnt the art to make himself agreeable to his sitters, and to mix up the oil of flattery with his discourse as assiduously as with his colours. This is far from the truth. Sir Joshua’s manners were indeed affable and obliging, but he flattered nobody; and instead of gossiping or making it his study to amuse his sitters, minded only his own business. I remember being in the next room the first time the Duchess of Cumberland came to sit, and I can vouch that scarce a word was spoken for near two hours. Another thing remarkable to show how little Sir Joshua crouched to the Great is, that he never even gave them their proper titles. I never heard the words ‘your lordship or your ladyship,’ come from his mouth; nor did he ever say Sir in speaking to any one but Dr. Johnson: and when he did not hear distinctly what the latter said (which often happened) he would then say ‘Sir?’ that he might repeat it. He was in this respect like a Quaker, not from any scruples or affectation of independence, but possibly from some awkwardness and confusion in addressing the variety of characters he met with, or at his first entrance on his profession. His biographer is also unjust to Sir Joshua in stating that his table was scantily supplied out of penuriousness. The truth is, Sir Joshua would ask a certain number and order a dinner to be provided; and then in the course of the morning, two or three other persons would drop in, and he would say, ‘I have got so and so to dinner, will you join us?’ which they being always ready to do, there were sometimes more guests than seats, but nobody complained of this or was unwilling to come again. If Sir Joshua had really grudged his guests, they would not have repeated their visits twice, and there would have been plenty of room and of provisions the next time. Sir Joshua never gave the smallest attention to such matters; all he cared about was his painting in the morning, and the conversation at his table, to which last he sacrificed his interest; for his associating with men like Burke, who was at that time a great oppositionist, did him no good at court. Sir Joshua was equally free from meanness or ostentation and encroachment on others; no one knew himself better or more uniformly kept his place in society.

H.—It is a pity to mar the idea of Sir Joshua’s dinner-parties, which are one of the pleasantest instances on record of a cordial intercourse between persons of distinguished pretensions of all sorts. But some people do not care what they spoil, so that they can tell disagreeable truth.

N.—In the present case there is not even that excuse. The statement answers no good end, while it throws a very unfounded slur on Sir Joshua’s hospitality and love of good cheer. It is insinuated that he was sparing of his wine, which is not true. Again, I am blamed for not approving of Dr. Johnson’s speech to Sir Joshua at the Miss Cottrells’, when the Duchess of Argyll came in, and he thought himself neglected—‘How much do you think you and I could earn in a week, if we were to work as hard as we could?’ This was a rude and unmerited insult. The Miss Cottrells were the daughters of an Admiral and people of fashion, as well as the Duchess of Argyll; and they naturally enough fell into conversation about persons and things that they knew, though Dr. Johnson had not been used to hear of them. He therefore thought it affectation and insolence, whereas the vulgarity and insolence were on his own side. If I had any fault to find with Sir Joshua, it would be that he was a very bad master in the art. Of all his pupils, I am the only one who ever did any thing at all. He was like the boy teaching the other to swim. ‘How do you do when you want to turn?’—‘How must you do when you turn? Why, you must look that way!’ Sir Joshua’s instructions amounted to little more. People talk of the instinct of animals as if a blind reason were an absurdity: whereas whatever men can do best, they understand and can explain least. Your son was looking at that picture of the lap-dog the other evening. There is a curious story about that. The dog was walking out with me one day, and was set upon and bit by a strange dog, for all dogs know and hate a favourite. He was a long time in recovering from the wound; and one day when Mr. P. H. called, he ran up to him, leaped up quite over-joyed, then lay down, began to whine, patted the place where he had been hurt with his paws, and went through the whole history of his misfortune. It was a perfect pantomime. I will not tell the story to G—, for the philosopher would be jealous of the sagacity of the cur.

H.—There was Jack Spines, the racket-player: he excelled in what is called the half-volley. Some amateurs of the game were one day disputing what this term of art meant. Spines was appealed to. ‘Why, gentlemen,’ says he, ‘I really can’t say exactly; but I should think, the half-volley is something between the volley and the half-volley.’ This definition was not quite the thing. The celebrated John Davies, the finest player in the world, could give no account of his proficiency that way. It is a game which no one thinks of playing without putting on a flannel jacket; and after you have been engaged in it for ten minutes, you are just as if you had been dipped in a mill-pond. John Davies never pulled off his coat; and merely buttoning it that it might not be in his way, would go down into the Fives-court and play two of the best players of the day, and at the end of the match you could not perceive that a hair of his head was wet. Powell, the keeper of the court (why does not Sir B. Nash, among so many innovations, rebuild it?) said he never seemed to follow the ball, but that it came to him—he did every thing with such ease.

N.—Then every motion of that man was perfect grace: there was not a muscle in his body that did not contribute its share to the game. So, when they begin to learn the piano-forte, at first they use only the fingers, and are soon tired to death: then the muscles of the arm come into play, which relieves them a little; and at last the whole frame is called into action, so as to produce the effect with entire ease and gracefulness. It is the same in every thing: and he is indeed a poor creature who cannot do more, from habit or natural genius, than he can give any rational account of.

(Some remarks having been made on the foregoing conversation, Mr. Northcote, the next time I saw him, took up the subject nearly as follows.)

N.—The newspaper critic asks with an air of triumph as if he had found a mare’s nest—‘What! are Sophia Western and Allworthy, St. Giles’s?’ Why, they are the very ones: they are Tower-stamp! Blifil, and Black George, and Square are not—they have some sense and spirit in them and are so far redeemed, for Fielding put his own cleverness and ingenuity into them; but as to his refined characters, they are an essence of vulgarity and insipidity. Sophia is a poor doll; and as to Allworthy he has not the soul of a goose: and how does he behave to the young man that he has brought up and pampered with the expectations of a fortune and of being a fine gentleman? Does he not turn him out to starve or rob on the highway without the shadow of an excuse, on a mere maudlin sermonizing pretext of morality, and with as little generosity as principle? No, Fielding did not know what virtue or refinement meant. As Richardson said, he should have thought his books were written by an ostler; or Sir John Hawkins has expressed it still better, that the virtues of his heroes are the virtues of dogs and horses—he does not go beyond that—nor indeed so far, for his Tom Jones is not so good as Lord Byron’s Newfoundland dog. I have known Newfoundland dogs with twenty times his understanding and good-nature. That is where Richardson has the advantage over Fielding—the virtues of his characters are not the virtues of animals—Clarissa holds her head in the skies, a ‘bright particular star;’ for whatever may be said, we have such ideas—and thanks to those who sustain and nourish them, and woe to those critics who would confound them with the dirt under our feet and Grub-street jargon! No, that is what we want—to have the line made as black and as broad as possible that separates what we have in common with the animals from what we pretend (at least) to have above them. That is where the newspaper critic is wrong in saying that the blackguard in the play is equal to Mrs. Siddons. No, he is not equal to Mrs. Siddons, any more than a baited bull or an over-drove ox is equal to Mrs. Siddons. There is the same animal fury in Tyke that there is in the maddened brute, with the same want of any ideas beyond himself and his own mechanical and coarse impulses—it is the lowest stage of human capacity and feeling violently acted upon by circumstances. Lady Macbeth, if she is the demon, is not the brute; she has the intellectual part, and is hurried away no less by the violence of her will than by a wide scope of imagination and a lofty ambition. Take away all dignity and grandeur from poetry and art, and you make Emery equal to Mrs. Siddons, and Hogarth to Raphael, but not else. Emery’s Tyke, in his extremity, calls for brandy—Mrs. Siddons does not, like Queen Dollalolla, call for a glass of gin. Why not? Gin is as natural a drink as poison; but if Capella Bianca, instead of swallowing the poison herself, when she found it was not given to her enemy, had merely got drunk for spite, in the manner of Hogarth’s heroines, she would not have been recorded in history. There is then a foundation for the distinction between the heroic and the natural, which I am not bound to explain any more than I am to account why black is not white.

H.—If Emery is equal to Mrs. Siddons, Morton is equal to Shakspeare; though it would be difficult to bring such persons to that conclusion.

N.—I ‘ll tell you why Emery in not equal to Mrs. Siddons; there are a thousand Emerys to one Mrs. Siddons; the stage is always full of six or seven comic actors at a time, so that you cannot tell which is best, Emery, Fawcett, Munden, Lewis—but in my time I have seen but Garrick and Mrs. Siddons, who have left a gap behind them that I shall not live to see filled up. Emery is the first blackguard or stage-coach driver you see in a row in the street; but if you had not seen Mrs. Siddons, you could have no idea of her; nor can you convey it to any one who has not. She was like a preternatural being descended to the earth. I cannot say Sir Joshua has done her justice. I regret Mrs. Abington too—she was the Grosvenor-Square of comedy, if you please. I am glad that Hogarth did not paint her; it would have been a thing to spit upon. If the correspondent of the newspaper wants to know where my Grosvenor-Square of art is, he’ll find it in the Provoked Husband, in Lord and Lady Townly, not in the History of a Foundling, or in the pompous, swag-bellied peer, with his dangling pedigree, or his gawky son-in-law, or his dawdling malkin of a wife from the city, playing with the ring like an idiot, in the Marriage à la Mode! There may be vice and folly enough in Vanbrugh’s scenes; but it is not the vice of St. Giles’s, it does not savour of the kennel. Not that I would have my interrogator suppose that I think all is vice in St. Giles’s. On the contrary, I could find at this moment instances of more virtue, refinement, sense, and beauty there, than there are in his Sophy. No, nature is the same everywhere; there are as many handsome children born in St. Giles’s as in Grosvener-Square; but the same care is not taken of them; and in general they grow up greater beauties in the one than the other. A child in St. Giles’s is left to run wild; it thrusts its fingers into its mouth or pulls its nose about; but if a child of people of fashion play any tricks of this kind, it is told immediately, ‘You must not do this, unless you would have your mouth reach from ear to ear; you must not say that; you must not sit in such a manner, or you’ll grow double.’ This seems like art; but it is only giving nature fair play. No one was allowed to touch the Princess Charlotte when a child. She was taken care of like something precious. The sister of the Duke of — had her nose broke when a child in a quarrel with her sister, who flung a tea-basin at her; but all the doctors were immediately called in, and every remedy was applied, so that when she grew up, there was no appearance of the accident left. If the same thing had happened to a poor child, she would have carried the marks of it to her grave. So you see a number of crooked people and twisted legs among the lower classes. This was what made Lord Byron so mad—that he had mis-shapen feet. Don’t you think so?

H.—Yes; T. M. told a person I know that that was the cause of all his misanthropy—he wanted to be an Adonis, and could not.

N.—Aye, and of his genius too; it made him write verses in revenge. There is no knowing the effect of such sort of things, of defects we wish to balance. Do you suppose we owe nothing to Pope’s deformity? He said to himself, ‘If my person be crooked, my verses shall be strait.’ I myself have felt this in passing along the street, when I have heard rude remarks made on my personal appearance. I then go home and paint: but I should not do this, if I thought all that there is in art was contained in Hogarth—I should then feel neither pride nor consolation in it. But if I thought, instead of his doll-like figures cut in two with their insipid, dough-baked faces, I should do something like Sir Joshua’s Iphigene, with all that delights the sense in richness of colour and luxuriance of form; or instead of the women spouting the liquor in one another’s faces, in the Rake’s Progress, I could give the purity, and grace, and real elegance (appearing under all the incumbrance of the fashionable dresses of the day) of Lady Sarah Bunbury or of the Miss Hornecks, sacrificing to the Graces, or of Lady Essex, with her long waist and ruffles, but looking a pattern of the female character in all its relations, and breathing dignity and virtue, then I should think this an object worth living for; or (as you have expressed it very properly) should even be proud of having failed. This is the opinion the world have always entertained of the matter. Sir Joshua’s name is repeated with more respect than Hogarth’s. It is not for his talents, but for his taste and the direction of them. In meeting Sir Joshua (merely from a knowledge of his works) you would expect to meet a gentleman—not so of Hogarth. And yet Sir Joshua’s claims and possessions in art were not of the highest order.

H.—But he was decent, and did not profess the arts and accomplishments of a Merry-Andrew.

N.—I assure you, it was not for want for [of] ability either. When he was young, he did a number of caricatures of different persons, and could have got any price for them. But he found it necessary to give up the practice. Leonardo da Vinci, a mighty man, and who had titles manifold, had a great turn for drawing laughable and grotesque likenesses of his acquaintances; but he threw them all in the fire. It was to him a kind of profanation of the art. Sir Joshua would almost as soon have forged as he would have set his name to a caricature. Gilray (whom you speak of) was eminent in this way; but he had other talents as well. In the Embassy to China, he has drawn the Emperor of China a complete Eastern voluptuary, fat and supine, with all the effects of climate and situation evident upon his person, and Lord Macartney is an elegant youth, a real Apollo; then, indeed, come Punch and the puppet-show after him, to throw the whole into ridicule. In the Revolutionists’ Jolly-boat, after the Opposition were defeated, he has placed Fox, and Sheridan, and the rest escaping from the wreck: Dante could not have described them as looking more sullen and gloomy. He was a great man in his way. Why does not Mr. Lamb write an essay on the Two-penny Whist? Yet it was against his conscience, for he had been on the other side, and was bought over. The minister sent to ask him to do them half a dozen at a certain price, which he agreed to, and took them to the treasury; but there being some demur about the payment, he took them back with some saucy reply. He had not been long at home, before a messenger was sent after him with the money.

CONVERSATION THE TWENTY-FIRST

N.—G. and I had a dispute lately about the capacity of animals. He appeared to consider them as little better than machines. He made it the distinguishing mark of superiority in man that he is the only animal that can transmit his thoughts to future generations. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘for future generations to take no sort of notice of them.’ I allowed that there were a few extraordinary geniuses that every one must look up to—and I mentioned the names of Shakspeare and Dryden. But he would not hear of Dryden, and began to pull him in pieces immediately. ‘Why then,’ I answered, ‘if you cannot agree among yourselves even with respect to four or five of the most eminent, how can there be the vast and overwhelming superiority you pretend to?’ I observed that instinct in animals answered very much to what we call genius. I spoke of the wonderful powers of smell, and the sagacity of dogs, and the memory shown by horses in finding a road that they have once travelled; but I made no way with G—; he still went back to Lear and Othello.

H.—I think he was so far right; for as this is what he understands best and has to imitate, it is fit he should admire and dwell upon it most. He cannot acquire the smell of the dog or the sagacity of the horse, and therefore it is of no use to think about them; but he may, by dint of study and emulation, become a better poet or philosopher. The question is not merely what is best in itself (of that we are hardly judges) but what sort of excellence we understand best and can make our own; for otherwise, in affecting to admire we know not what, we may admire a nonentity or a deformity. Abraham Tucker has remarked very well on this subject, that a swine wallowing in the mire may, for what he can tell, be as happy as a philosopher in writing an essay, but that is no reason why he (the philosopher) should exchange occupations or tastes with the brute, unless he could first exchange natures. We may suspend our judgments in such cases as a matter of speculation or conjecture, but that is different from the habitual or practical feeling. So I remember W— being nettled at D— (who affected a fashionable taste) for saying, on coming out of the Marquis of Stafford’s gallery, ‘A very noble art, very superior to poetry!’ If it were so, W— observed, he could know nothing about it, who had never seen any fine pictures before. It was like an European adventurer saying to an African chieftain, ‘A very fine boy, Sir, your black son—very superior to my white one!’ This is mere affectation; we might as well pretend to be thrown into rapture by a poem written in a language we are not acquainted with. We may notwithstanding believe that it is very fine, and have no wish to hang up the writer, because he is not an Englishman. A spider may be a greater mechanic than Watt or Arkwright; but the effects are not brought home to us in the same manner, and we cannot help estimating the cause by the effect. A friend of mine teazes me with questions, ‘Which was the greatest man, Sir Isaac Newton or a first-rate chess-player?’ It refers itself to the head of the Illustrious Obscure. A club of chess-players might give it in favour of the Great Unknown; but all the rest of the world, who have heard of the one and not of the other, will give it against him. We cannot set aside those prejudices which are founded on the limitation of our faculties or the constitution of society; only that we need not lay them down as abstract or demonstrable truths. It is there the bigotry and error begin. The language of taste and moderation is, I prefer this, because it is best to me; the language of dogmatism and intolerance is, Because I prefer it, it is best in itself, and I will allow no one else to be of a different opinion.

N.—I find in the last conversation I saw, you make me an admirer of Fielding, and so I am; but I find great fault with him too. I grant he is one of those writers that I remember; he stamps his characters, whether good or bad, on the reader’s mind. This is more than I can say of every one. For instance, when G— plagues me about my not having sufficient admiration of W—’s poetry, the answer I give is, that it is not my fault, for I have utterly forgotten it; it seemed to me like the ravelings of poetry. But to say nothing of Fielding’s immorality, and his fancying himself a fine gentleman in the midst of all his coarseness, he has oftener described habits than character. For example, Western is no character; it is merely the language, manners, and pursuits of the country-squire of that day; and the proof of this is, that there is no ‘Squire Western now. Manners and customs wear out, but characters last forever. I remember making this remark to Holcroft, and he asked me, What was the difference? Are you not surprised at that?

H.—Not in him. If you mentioned the word character, he stopped you short by saying, that it was merely the difference of circumstances; or if you hinted at the difference of natural capacity, he said, ‘Then, Sir, you must believe in innate ideas.’ He surrendered his own feelings and better judgment to a set of cant-phrases, called the modern philosophy.

N.—I need not explain the difference to you. Character is the ground-work, the natural stamina of the mind, on which circumstances only act. You see it in St. Giles’s—there are characters there that in the midst of filth, and vice, and ignorance, retain some traces of their original goodness, and struggle with their situation to the last: as in St. James’s, you will find wretches that would disgrace a halter. Gil Blas has character.

H.—I thought he only gave professions and classes, players, footmen, sharpers, courtesans, but not the individual, as Fielding often does, though we should strip Western of his scarlet hunting-dress and jockey phrases. There is Square, Blifil, Black George, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Parson Adams; and a still greater cluster of them in the one that is least read, the noble peer, the lodging-house-keeper, Mrs. Bennet, and Colonel Bath.

N.—You mean Amelia. I have not read that, but will get it. I allow in part what you say; but in the best there is something too local and belonging to the time. But what I chiefly object to in Fielding is his conceit, his consciousness of what he is doing, his everlasting recommendation and puffing of his own wit and sagacity. His introductory chapters make me sick.

H.—Why, perhaps, Fielding is to be excused as a disappointed man. All his success was late in life, for he died in 1754; and Joseph Andrews (the first work of his that was popular) was published in 1748. All the rest of his life he had been drudging for the booksellers, or bringing out unsuccessful comedies. He probably anticipated the same result in his novels, and wished to bespeak the favour of the reader by putting himself too much forward. His prefaces are like Ben Jonson’s prologues, and from the same cause, mortified vanity; though it seems odd to say so at present, after the run his writings have had; but he could not foresee that, and only lived a short time to witness it.

N.—I can bear any thing but that conscious look—it is to me like the lump of soot in the broth, that spoils the whole mess. Fielding was one of the swaggerers.

H.—But he had much to boast of.

N.—He certainly was not idle in his time. Idleness would have ruined a greater man.

H.—Then you do not agree to a maxim I have sometimes thought might be laid down, that no one is idle who can do any thing.

N.—No, certainly.

H.—I conceive it may be illustrated from Wilson, who was charged with idleness, and who, after painting a little, used to say, as soon as any friend dropped in, ‘Now let us go somewhere,’—meaning to the alehouse. All that Wilson could do, he did, and that finely too, with a few well-disposed masses and strokes of the pencil; but he could not finish, or he would have staid within all the morning to work up his pictures to the perfection of Claude’s. He thought it better to go to the alehouse than to spoil what he had already done. I have in my own mind made this excuse for —, that he could only make a first sketch, and was obliged to lose the greatest part of his time in waiting for windfalls of heads and studies. I have sat to him twice, and each time I offered to come again, and he said he would let me know, but I heard no more of it. The sketch went as it was—of course in a very unfinished state.

N.—But he might have remedied this by diligence and practice.

H.—I do not know that he could: one might say that there is the same abruptness and crudity in his character throughout, in his conversation, his walk, and look—great force and spirit, but neither softness nor refinement.

N.—If he had more humility, he might have seen all that in the works of others, and have strove to imitate it.

H.—What I mean is, that it was his not having the sense of these refinements in himself that prevented his perceiving them in others, or taking pains to supply a defect to which he was blind.

N.—I do not think that under any circumstances he would have made a Raphael. But your reasoning goes too much to what Dr. Johnson ridiculed in poetry—fits of inspiration, and a greater flow of ideas in the autumn than the spring. Sir Joshua used to work at all times, whether he was in the humour or not.

H.—And so would every one else with his motives and ability to excel. Lawyers without fees are accused of idleness, but this goes off when the briefs pour in.

N.—Did you see the newspaper accounts of the election of the new Pope? It appears that nothing could exceed his repugnance to be chosen. He begged and even wept to be let off. You are to consider, he is an old man labouring under a mortal disease (which is one circumstance that led to his elevation)—to be taken from the situation of Cardinal (in itself a very enviable one) and thrust violently into a mass of business, of questions and cabals which will distract him, and where he can get no thanks and may incur every kind of odium. It is true, he has an opportunity of making the fortunes of his family; and if he prefers them to himself, it is all very well, but not else. To persons of a restless and aspiring turn of mind, ambition and grandeur are very fine things, but to others they are the most intolerable tax. There is our own King—there is no conceiving the punishment that those processions and public show-days are to him—and then as to all the pomp and glitter that we so much admire, it is to those who are accustomed to it and who see behind the curtain, like so much cast-off rags and tinsel or Monmouth-street finery. They hold it in inconceivable scorn, and yet they can hardly do without it, from the slavery of habit. Then the time of such people is never their own—they are always performing a part (and generally a forced and irksome one) in what no way interests or concerns them. The late King, to whom rank was a real drudgery, used to stand buried in a pile of papers, so that you could not see those on the other side of the table, which he had merely to sign. It is no wonder kings are sometimes seen to retire to a monastery where religion leaves this asylum open to them, or are glad to return to their shepherd’s crook again. No situation can boast of complete ease or freedom; and even that would have its disadvantages. And then again, look at those labourers at the top of the house yonder, working from morning till night, and exposed to all weathers for a bare pittance, without hope to sweeten their toil, and driven on by hunger and necessity! When we turn to others, whether those above or below us, we have little reason to be dissatisfied with our own situation in life. But, in all cases it is necessary to employ means to ends, be the object what it may; and where the first have not been taken, it is both unjust and foolish to repine at the want of success. The common expression, ‘Fortune’s Fools,’ may seem to convey a slur on the order of Providence; but it rather shows the equality of its distributions. Are the men of capacity to have all the good things to themselves? They are proud of their supposed superiority: why are they not contented with it? If a fool is not to grow rich, the next thing would be, that none but men of genius should have a coat to their backs, or be thought fit to live. If it were left to them to provide food or clothes, they would have none for themselves. It is urged as a striking inequality that enterprising manufacturers, for instance, should rise to great wealth and honours, while thousands of their dependants are labouring hard at one or two shillings a-day: but we are to recollect, that if it had not been for men like these, the working classes would have been perishing for want: they collect the others together, give a direction and find a vent for their industry, and may be said to exercise a part of sovereign capacity. Every thing has its place and due subordination. If authors had the direction of the world, nothing would be left standing but printing-presses.

N.—What do you think of that portrait?

H.—It is very lady-like, and, I should imagine, a good likeness.

N.—J— said I might go on painting yet—he saw no falling-off. They are pleased with it. I have painted almost the whole family, and the girls would let their mother sit to nobody else. But Lord! every thing one can do seems to fall so short of nature: whether it is the want of skill or the imperfection of the art that cannot give the successive movements of expression and changes of countenance, I am always ready to beg pardon of my sitters after I have done, and to say I hope they’ll excuse it. The more one knows of the art, and indeed the better one can do, the less one is satisfied. This made Titian write under his pictures faciebat, signifying that they were only in progress. I remember, Burke came in one day when Sir Joshua had been painting one of the Lennoxes; he was quite struck with the beauty of the performance, and said he hoped Sir Joshua would not touch it again: to which the latter replied, that if he had seen the original, he would have thought little of the picture, and that there was a look which it was hardly in the power of art to give. No! all we can do is to produce something that makes a distant approach to nature, and that serves as a faint relic of the individual. A portrait is only a little better memorial than the parings of the nails or a lock of the hair.

H.—Who is it?

N.—It is a Lady W—: you have heard me speak of her before. She is a person of great sense and spirit, and combines very opposite qualities from a sort of natural strength of character. She has shown the greatest feeling and firmness united: no one can have more tenderness in her domestic connexions, and yet she has borne the loss of some of them with exemplary fortitude. Perhaps, the one is a consequence of the other; for where the attachment or even the regret is left, all is not lost. The mind has still a link to connect it with the beloved object. She has no affectation; and therefore yields to unavoidable circumstances as they arise. Inconsolable grief is often mere cant, and a trick to impose on ourselves and others. People of any real strength of character are seldom affected: those who have not the clue of their own feelings to guide them, do not know what to do, and study only how to produce an effect. I recollect one of the Miss B—s, Lord Orford’s favourites, whom I met with at a party formerly, using the expression—‘That seal of mediocrity, affectation!’ Don’t you think this striking?

H.—Yes; but not quite free from the vice it describes.

N.—Oh! they had plenty of that: they were regular blue-stockings, I assure you; or they would not have been so entirely to his lordship’s taste, who was a mighty coxcomb. But there is none of that in the person I have been speaking of: she has very delightful, genteel, easy manners.

H.—That is the only thing I envy in people in that class.

N.—But you are not to suppose they all have it: it is only those who are born with it, and who would have had it in a less degree in every situation of life. Vulgarity is the growth of courts as well as of the hovel. We may be deceived by a certain artificial or conventional manner in persons of rank and fashion; but they themselves see plainly enough into the natural character. I remember Lady W— told me, as an instance to this purpose, that when she was a girl, she and her sister were introduced at court; and it was then the fashion to stand in a circle, and the Queen came round and spoke to the different persons in turn. There was some high lady who came in after them, and pushed rudely into the circle so as to get before them. But the Queen, who saw the circumstance, went up and spoke to them first, and then passed on (as a just punishment) without taking any notice whatever of the forward intruder. I forget how it arose the other day, but she asked me—‘Pray, Mr. Northcote, is Discretion reckoned one of the cardinal virtues?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it is not one of them, for it is all!’ If we had discretion at all times, we should never do wrong: but we are taken off our guard by being thrown into new and difficult situations, and have not time to weigh the consequences or to summon resolution to our aid. That is what Opie used to say when he had been engaged in an argument over-night, what excellent answers he could give the next day—and was vexed with himself for not having thought of them. No! if we had sufficient presence of mind to foresee the consequences of our actions on the spot, we should very rarely have occasion to repent of them afterwards.

H.—You put me in mind of Cicero’s account of the cardinal virtues, in his Offices, who makes them out to be four; and then says they are all referable to the first, which is Prudence.

N.—Ay; do you recollect what they are?

H.—Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude.

N.—They are too much alike. The most distinct is Fortitude.

H.—I never could make much of Cicero, except his two treatises on Friendship and Old Age, which are most amiable gossiping. I see that Canning borrowed his tautology from Cicero, who runs on with such expressions as ‘I will bear, I will suffer, I will endure any extremity.’ This is bad enough in the original: it is inexcusable in the copy. Cicero’s style, however, answered to the elegance of his finely-turned features; and in his long, graceful neck you may trace his winding and involuted periods.

N.—Do you believe in that sort of stuff?

H.—Not more than I can help.

CONVERSATION THE TWENTY-SECOND

N.—I ought to cross myself like the Catholics, when I see you. You terrify me by repeating what I say. But I see you have regulated yourself. There is nothing personally offensive, except what relates to Sir Walter. You make him swear too, which he did not do. He would never use the expression Egad. These little things mark the gentleman. I am afraid, if he sees it, he’ll say I am a babbler. That is what they dread so at court, that the least word should transpire.

H.—They may have their reasons for caution. At least, they can gain nothing, and might possibly lose equally by truth or falsehood, as it must be difficult to convey an adequate idea of royalty. But authors are glad to be talked about. If Sir W. Scott has an objection to having his name mentioned, he is singularly unlucky. Enough was said in his praise; and I do not believe he is captious. I fancy he takes the rough with the smooth. I did not well know what to do. You seemed to express a wish that the conversations should proceed, and yet you are startled at particular phrases, or I would have brought you what I had done to show you. I thought it best to take my chance of the general impression.

N.—Why, if kept to be published as a diary after my death, they might do: nobody could then come to ask me questions about them. But I cannot say they appear very striking to me. One reason may be, what I observe myself cannot be very new to me. If others are pleased, they are the best judges. It seems very odd that you who are acquainted with some of the greatest authors of the day cannot find any thing of theirs worth setting down.

H.—That by no means pleases them. I understand G— is angry at the liberty I take with you. He is quite safe in this respect. I might answer him much in the manner of the fellow in the Country Girl when his friend introduces his mistress and he salutes her—‘Why, I suppose if I were to introduce my grandmother to you’—‘Sir,’ replies the other, ‘I should treat her with the utmost respect.’ So I shall never think of repeating any of G—’s conversations. My indifference may arise in part, as you say, from their not being very new to me. G— might, I dare say, argue very well on the doctrine of philosophical necessity or many other questions; but then I have read all this before in Hume or other writers, and I am very little edified, because I have myself had access to the same sources that he has drawn from. But you, as an artist, have been pushed into an intercourse with the world as well as an observation of nature; and combine a sufficient knowledge of general subjects with living illustrations of them. I do not like the conversation of mere men of the world or anecdote-mongers, for there is nothing to bind it together, and the other sort is pedantic and tiresome from repetition, so that there is nobody but you I can come to.

N.—You do not go enough into society, or you would be cured of what I cannot help regarding as a whim. You would there find many people of sense and information whose names you never heard of. It is not those who have made most noise in the world who are persons of the greatest general capacity. It is the making the most of a little, or the being determined to get before others in some one thing (perhaps for want of other recommendations) that brings men into notice. Individuals gain a reputation as they make a fortune, by application and by having set their minds upon it. But you have set out (like other people brought up among books) with such exclusive notions of authors and literary fame, that if you find the least glimmering of common sense out of this pale, you think it a prodigy, and run into the opposite extreme. I do not say that you have not a perception of character, or have not thought as far as you have observed; but you have not had the opportunities. You turn your back on the world, and fancy that they turn their backs on you. This is a very dangerous principle. You become reckless of consequences. It leads to an abandonment of character. By setting the opinion of others at defiance, you lose your self-respect. It is of no use that you still say, you will do what is right; your passions usurp the place of reason, and whisper you, that whatever you are bent upon doing is right. You cannot put this deception on the public, however false or prejudiced their standard may be; and the opinion of the world, therefore, acts as a seasonable check upon wilfulness and eccentricity.

H.—What you have stated is the best excuse I could make for my own faults or blunders. When one is found fault with for nothing, or for doing one’s best, one is apt to give the world their revenge. All the former part of my life I was treated as a cipher; and since I have got into notice, I have been set upon as a wild beast. When this is the case, and you can expect as little justice as candour, you naturally in self-defence take refuge in a sort of misanthropy and cynical contempt for mankind. One is disposed to humour them, and to furnish them with some ground for their idle and malevolent censures.

N.—But you should not. If you do nothing to confirm them in their first prejudices, they will come round in time. They are slow to admit claims, because they are not sure of their validity; and they thwart and cross-examine you to try what temper you are made of. Without some such ordeal or difficulty thrown in the way, every upstart and pretender must be swallowed whole. That would never do. But if you have patience to stand the test, justice is rendered at last, and you are stamped for as much as you are worth. You certainly have not spared others: why should you expect nothing but ‘the milk of human kindness?’ Look to those men behind you (a collection of portraits on the same frame)—there is Pope and Dryden—did they fare better than living authors? Had not Dryden his Shadwell, and Pope his Dennis, who fretted him to a shadow, and galled him almost to death? There was Dr. Johnson, who in his writings was a pattern of wisdom and morality—he declared that he had been hunted down as if he had been the great enemy of mankind. But he had strength of mind to look down upon it. Not to do this, is either infirmity of temper, or shows a conscious want of any claims that are worth carrying up to a higher tribunal than the cabal and clamour of the moment. Sir Joshua always despised malicious reports; he knew they would blow over: at the same time, he as little regarded exaggerated praise. Nothing you could say had any effect, if he was not satisfied with himself. He had a great game to play, and only looked to the result. He had studied himself thoroughly; and, besides, had great equanimity of temper, which, to be sure, it is difficult to acquire, if it is not natural. You have two faults: one is a feud or quarrel with the world, which makes you despair, and prevents you taking all the pains you might: the other is a carelessness and mismanagement, which makes you throw away the little you actually do, and brings you into difficulties that way. Sir Joshua used to say it was as wrong for a man to think too little as too much of himself: if the one ran him into extravagance and presumption, the other sank him in sloth and insignificance. You see the same thing in horses: if they cannot stir a load at the first effort, they give it up as a hopeless task; and nothing can rouse them from their sluggish obstinacy but blows and ill-treatment.

H.—I confess all this, but I hardly know how to remedy it; nor do I feel any strong inducement. Taking one thing with another, I have no great cause to complain. If I had been a merchant, a bookseller, or the proprietor of a newspaper, instead of what I am, I might have had more money or possessed a town and countryhouse, instead of lodging in a first or second floor, as it may happen. But what then? I see how the man of business and fortune passes his time. He is up and in the city by eight, swallows his breakfast in haste, attends a meeting of creditors, must read Lloyd’s lists, consult the price of consols, study the markets, look into his accounts, pay his workmen, and superintend his clerks: he has hardly a minute in the day to himself, and perhaps in the four-and-twenty hours does not do a single thing that he would do if he could help it. Surely, this sacrifice of time and inclination requires some compensation, which it meets with. But how am I entitled to make my fortune (which cannot be done without all this anxiety and drudgery) who do hardly any thing at all, and never any thing but what I like to do? I rise when I please, breakfast at length, write what comes into my head, and after taking a mutton-chop and a dish of strong tea, go to the play, and thus my time passes. Mr. — has no time to go to the play. It was but the other day that I had to get up a little earlier than usual to go into the city about some money transaction, which appeared to me a prodigious hardship: if so, it was plain that I must lead a tolerably easy life: nor should I object to passing mine over again. Till I was twenty, I had no idea of any thing but books, and thought every thing else was worthless and mechanical. The having to study painting about this time, and finding the difficulties and beauties it unfolded, opened a new field to me, and I began to conclude that there might be a number of ‘other things between heaven and earth that were never dreamt of in my philosophy.’ Ask G—, or any other literary man who has never been taken out of the leading-strings of learning, and you will perceive that they hold for a settled truth that the universe is built of words. G— has no interest but in literary fame, of which he is a worshipper: he cannot believe that any one is clever, or has even common sense, who has not written a book. If you talk to him of Italian cities, where great poets and patriots lived, he heaves a sigh; and if I were possessed of a fortune, he should go and visit the house where Galileo lived or the tower where Ugolino was imprisoned. He can see with the eyes of his mind. To all else he is marble. It is like speaking to him of the objects of a sixth sense; every other language seems dumb and inarticulate.

The end of CONVERSATIONS OF JAMES NORTHCOTE, ESQ., R.A.

NOTES

TABLE TALK

PAGE

2. An Advertisement, etc. The advertisement to the Paris edition of Table Talk was as follows:—

‘The work here offered to the public is a selection from the four volumes of Table Talk, printed in London. Should it meet with success, it will be followed by two other volumes of the same description, which will include all that the author wishes to preserve of his writings in this kind. The title may perhaps serve to explain what there is of peculiarity in the style or mode of treating the subjects. I had remarked that when I had written or thought upon a particular topic, and afterwards had occasion to speak of it with a friend, the conversation generally took a much wider range, and branched off into a number of indirect and collateral questions, which were not strictly connected with the original view of the subject, but which often threw a curious and striking light upon it, or upon human life in general. It therefore occurred to me as possible to combine the advantages of these two styles, the literary and the conversational; or after stating and enforcing some leading idea, to follow it up by such observations and reflections as would probably suggest themselves in discussing the same question in company with others. This seemed to me to promise a greater variety and richness, and perhaps a greater sincerity, than could be attained by a more precise and scholastic method. The same consideration had an influence on the familiarity and conversational idiom of the style which I have used. How far the plan was feasible, or how far I have succeeded in the execution of it must be left to others to decide. I am also afraid of having too frequently attempted to give a popular air and effect to subtle distinctions and trains of thought; so that I shall be considered as too metaphysical by the careless reader, while by the more severe and scrupulous inquirer my style will be complained of as too light and desultory. To all this I can only answer that I have done not what I wished, but the best I could do; and I heartily wish it had been better.’

ESSAY I. ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING

This and the following essay are from The London Magazine for December 1820 (Vol. II. pp. 597–607), No. V. of a series entitled Table Talk.

5. ‘There is a pleasure,’ etc. Cf. vol. I. note to p. 76.

‘No juggling here.’ Cf. ‘Here is such patchery, such juggling, and such knavery.’ Troilus and Cressida, Act II. Scene 3.

‘Study with joy,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, III. 227–8.

6. ‘More tedious,’ etc. King John, Act III. Scene 4.

‘My mind to me,’ etc. The first line of the well-known poem attributed to Sir Edward Dyer (d. 1607).

6. Note. See The Sorrows of Young Werther (Novels and Tales, Bohn, p. 254).

7. ‘Pure in the last recesses of the mind.’ Dryden’s translation of the Second Satire of Persius, l. 133. According to Frances Reynolds (Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, II. 272), the lines were quoted by Johnson at the end of an eloquent eulogium of Mrs. Thrale.

‘Palpable to feeling,’ etc. Cf. ‘If ’tis not gross in sense ... ’tis probable and palpable to thinking.’ Othello, Act I. Scene 2.

8. ‘Light thickened.’

‘Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood.’ Macbeth, Act III. Scene 2.

Wilson. Richard Wilson (1714–1782). See Conversations of Northcote, ante, pp. 380, 438, 458.

It was not so Claude, etc. Claude finally settled in Rome in 1627 and remained there till his death in 1682.

The first head, etc. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, l. 108 note. The picture, which seems to have been painted near Manchester in 1803, is still in the possession of Hazlitt’s family.

9. With Sir Joshua. Cf. the second of Hazlitt’s Essays on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, ante, pp. 131 et seq.

‘As in a glass darkly‘, etc. I Corinthians, xiii. 12.

10. ‘Sees into the life of things.’ Wordsworth, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

Jan Steen, or Gerard Dow. Jan Steen (1626–1679), and Gerard Dow (1613–1675).

‘Mist,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 435–6.

Richardson. The Essays of Jonathan Richardson (1665–1745), which originally appeared in 1715 and 1719, were published in two volumes in 1725, and in one volume, edited by his son, in 1773. See pp. 297–8 of the one volume edition. Vasari tells this story of Michael Angelo and the Pope.

11. ‘That you might almost say,’ etc.

‘—— so distinctly wrought That one might almost say, her body thought.’ John Donne, An Anatomy of the World, Second Anniversary, 245–6.

12. Old Abraham Tucker. See vol. iv. pp. 371–385.

‘The source,’ &c. See Northcote’s Life of Reynolds, II. 286.

A picture of my father. Exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1806. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I. III.

Gribelin’s etchings. In the second (1714) and subsequent editions of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics.

‘Riches fineless.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

‘Ever in the haunch of winter sings.’ Henry IV., Part II. Act IV. Scene 4.

13. ‘I also am a painter.’ See Vasari’s Lives (ed. Blashfield and Hopkins), III. 32, note 28.

Mr. Skeffington. Sir Lumley St. George Skeffington (1771–1850), author of The Sleeping Beauty and other plays, and a friend of the Regent’s, succeeded his father as baronet in 1815.

The battle of Austerlitz. December 2, 1805.

He himself is gone to rest. Hazlitt’s father died on July 16, 1820.

ESSAY III. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

13. ‘Whate’er Lorraine,’ etc. Thomson, The Castle of Indolence, Canto I. Stanza 38.

Lord Radnor’s park. For a fuller account of the collections here referred to, see the volume in the present edition containing Hazlitt’s Fine Art Criticisms.

14. ‘Bosomed high,’ etc. L’Allegro, 78.

‘Hands that the rod,’ etc. Gray, Elegy, 47.

‘A forked mountain,’ etc. Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV. Scene 14.

‘Signifying nothing.’ Macbeth, Act V. Scene 5,

15. When I went to the Louvre. In 1802. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I. 84 et seq.

Titian’s Mistress. The picture so called is in the Louvre. It is in fact a portrait of Alphonso of Ferrara and Laura Dianti.

The Transfiguration, etc. On the fall of Napoleon, Raphael’s Transfiguration, and Domenichino’s Communion of St. Jerome were restored to Rome; Titian’s St. Peter Martyr to Venice, and his Hippolito de Medici to Florence. The St. Peter Martyr was destroyed by fire in 1867. Hazlitt’s copy of ‘A young Nobleman with a glove’ is still in the possession of Mr. W. C. Hazlitt.

16. ‘If thou hast not seen,’ etc. Cf. ‘Wast ever in court, shepherd?—No, truly.—Then thou art damned.’ As You Like It, Act III., Scene 2.

The Elgin marbles. See Vol. i. p. 143 and note.

‘Hard money.’ Specie opposed to paper currency. Cf. ‘Your mother has a hundred pounds in hard money’ etc. Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, Act IV. Scene 3.

‘Number numberless.’ Paradise Regained, III. 310 [numbers].

‘Casual fruition,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 766–7.

17. W—. Richard Wilson.

18. A friend of mine. Northcote, presumably, whose Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds had been praised in The Edinburgh Review (vol. xxiii. pp. 263 et seq.)

A friend had bought, etc. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt suggests that this was Haydon.

19. Richardson, in his Essays. A Discourse on the Science of a Connoisseur (Essays, 1773, pp. 327 et seq.)

20. ‘Guido Reni,’ etc. Richardson, Essays, 1773, pp. 217–8.

21. Gandy. William Gandy (died 1729). See Hazlitt’s Conversations of James Northcote, ante, p. 345. A short Memoir of Gandy forms the Appendix to Northcote’s Life of Reynolds.

Poor Dan. Stringer. Cf. ante, pp. 345–6.

‘Swallowing the tailor’s news.’ King John, Act IV., Scene 2.

‘Bastards of his genius,’ etc. Cf. Vol. iv. p. 209.

ESSAY III. ON THE PAST AND FUTURE.

22. When Sterne in the Sentimental Journey. A Sentimental Journey, ‘Character. Versailles.’

23. ‘The thoughts of which,’ etc. Cf. ‘Yet loss of thee would never from my heart.’ Paradise Lost, IX. 912.

‘What though the radiance,’ etc. Wordsworth, Ode, Intimations of Immortality, 179 et seq.

‘Retrace its footsteps,’ etc. Paradise Lost, XI. 329–333.

‘And see how dark,’ etc. Wordsworth, Lines written while sailing in a boat at evening.

23. ‘In our heart’s tables.’ All’s Well that Ends Well, Act I. Scene 1.

‘All the life of life was flown.’

‘In weary being now I pine, For a’ the life of life is dead,’ Burns, Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn, Stanza 6.

Cf. also ‘Till youth and genial years are flown, And all the life of life is gone,’

from Thomson’s song addressed to Fortune and beginning—

‘For ever, Fortune, wilt thou prove,’ etc.

Norman Court. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, II. 14–15. and W. Hazlitt the younger’s Preface to the 1850 edition of Winterslow.

25. ‘Running through the story,’ etc. Othello, Act I. Scene 3.

‘Beguiled them,’ etc. Ib.

Posthæc meminisse juvabit. Virgil, Æneid, I. 203.

26. ‘Calm contemplation,’ etc. Wordsworth, Laodamia, 72.

27. ‘Catch glimpses,’ etc. Wordsworth, Sonnet, ‘The world is too much with us.’

‘I also was an Arcadian.’ This saying, or its Latin equivalent, ‘et ego in Arcadia,’ often quoted by Hazlitt in connection with Poussin’s picture, has been much discussed in Notes and Queries. See 4th Ser., I. 509, 561, etc. Goethe adopted it as a motto for his Travels in Italy.

‘Que peu de chose,’ etc. Cf. ‘Je vous exhorte à jouir, autant que vous pourrez, de la vie qui est peu de chose,’ etc. Voltaire, Letter to Madame du Deffand, Oct. 13, 1759.

Respice finem. A tag, quoted in The Comedy of Errors, Act IV. Scene 4. See Notes and Queries, 5th Series, VI. 313, where the line ‘si quid agas prudenter agas, et respice finem’ is quoted from the fable ‘De accipitre et columbis’ in Fabulae Variorum Auctorum (Francof. 1560), p. 503.

‘The high endeavour,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, V. 901.

‘Oh God! methinks,’ etc. Henry VI., Part III. Act II. Scene 5.

29. ‘The tear forgot,’ etc. Gray, On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, Stanza 5.

30. Recorded by Spence. Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men. Collected from the Conversation of Mr. Pope, etc. (edit. 1820), pp. 116–7.

ESSAY IV. ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE.

33. Mr. Burke, by whom, etc. Cf. Conversations of James Northcote, ante, p. 366.

Windham in one of his Speeches. Speech on the Conduct of the Duke of York, March 14, 1809. Speeches, III. 205.

34. One of the persons, etc. No doubt John Thelwall (1764–1834), who was acquitted in December, 1794, and retired to Brecon in 1798. Hazlitt afterwards became acquainted with him. Among his Poems (1801) is an epic entitled ‘Edwin of Northumbria.’

35. Note. ‘Sound it,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

36. ‘Make assurance,’ etc. Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 1.

‘Shuts the gates,’ etc. Gray, Elegy, Stanza 17.

Mr. Burke said. Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 102).

37. Come home to the business, etc. Bacon, Dedication to the Essays.

Ultima ratio regum. See vol. III., note to p. 44.

‘There’s the rub,’ etc. ‘There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

37. ‘A compost heap.’ Cf. ‘A new accession to the loaded compost heap of corrupt influence.’ Burke, Speech on Economical Reform (Works, Bohn, II. 109).

39. ‘What! man,’ etc. Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 3.

The passage in the same play. Ib., Act I. Scene 6.

40. The Judgment of Solomon. In the Louvre Gallery.

‘Sure trailing.’ Cf.

‘And I do think, or else this brain of mine Hunts not the trail of policy so sure As it hath used to do.’ Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

‘As if his will,’ etc. Hazlitt quotes from one of his own notices of Kean’s Richard (Morning Chronicle, Feb. 15, 1814).

Painter in his fight with Oliver. Edward Painter (1784–1852) was defeated by Tom Oliver (1782–1864) in May 1814, but defeated him in July 1820.

41. The figure of Elymas. In one of the Cartoons.

ESSAY V. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

42. ‘As one, in suffering,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

‘Knew all qualities,’ etc. Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

‘A pipe for the Muse’s finger,’ etc. Cf. ‘That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger to sound what stop she please.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

43. ‘To descry new lands,’ etc. Paradise Lost, I. 290–1.

‘Fierce extremes,’ etc. Ib. II. 599.

‘Of the earth, earthy.’ I Corinthians, XV. 47.

‘Darkness that may be felt.’ Exodus, X. 21.

‘Palpable obscure.’ Paradise Lost, II. 406.

44. ‘Look abroad into universality.’ Bacon, ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, Book I.

‘Content with riches fineless.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

‘Poor as Winter.’ Ib.

‘Self-involved, not dark.’ Cf. ‘Pensive, not sad; in thought involved, not dark.’ Thomson, The Castle of Indolence, Canto I. Stanza 57.

‘Enjoys bright day.’ Comus, 382.

‘Kept the noiseless tenour of his way.’ Gray’s Elegy, Stanza 19.

‘Finds tongues,’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 1.

‘The meanest flow’r,’ etc. Wordsworth, Ode, Intimations of Immortality.

45. ‘Yet I’ll remember thee,’ etc. Burns, Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, in endeavouring, etc. Cf. the essays ‘On Certain Inconsistencies in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, ante, pp. 122 et seq.

46. The admirable Crichton. James Crichton (1560–1585?).

Jedediah Buxton. For Jedidiah Buxton (1707–1772) see Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1754.

Note. ‘The force of dulness,’ etc. Cf. ‘The force of Nature could no further go.’ Dryden, Under Mr. Milton’s Picture.

49. Mediocribus esse, etc. Horace, Ars Poetica, 372–3.

I find from Adam Smith. Wealth of Nations, Book I. chap. i.

Those nonsensical stories about Lopez de Vega. See Lord Holland’s Some Account of the life and writings of Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1806), pp. 75–82.

50. Why does Mr. Kean, etc. See the volume containing Hazlitt’s theatrical criticisms.

ESSAY VI. CHARACTER OF COBBETT

58. This essay was afterwards republished in the second edition of The Spirit of the Age. See vol. IV. pp. 334–343, and notes thereto.

ESSAY VII. ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA

59. Major C—. John Cartwright (1740–1824), major in the Nottinghamshire Militia, and author of a large number of tracts, chiefly on parliamentary reform.

60. Like the story of the Cosmogony. The Vicar of Wakefield, chap. xiv.

Nihil humani, etc. Terence, Heautontimorumenos, Act I. Scene 1.

‘A fee-grief’ etc. Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 3.

61. As Cicero says of study. ‘Haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant,’ etc. Cicero, Pro Archia, VII. 16.

As Sancho, etc. Don Quixote, Second Part, Book II. chap. xxxi.

Dulce ridentem, etc. Horace, Odes, I. xxii., 23–4.

‘Rings the world,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, III. 129–130.

62. Abernethy. John Abernethy (1764–1831), whose chief work, An Essay on the Constitutional Origin of Local Diseases, appeared in 1806.

63. Alderman Wood. Sir Matthew Wood (1768–1843), lord mayor 1815–16, and member for the city from 1817 till his death, had recently (1820) made himself notorious as a champion of Queen Caroline.

A conceited fellow about town, etc. Hazlitt probably refers to Wirgmann, the goldsmith, of whom Crabb Robinson gives an amusing account in his Diary (1872 ed.) Vol. I. pp. 310–311.

A friend of mine. John Fearn (1768–1837), of whom Hazlitt gives some account in the following page. The essay referred to was An Essay on Consciousness (2nd ed. 4to, 1812). Hazlitt quotes a long passage from the Essay in Why Distant Objects Please. See ante, pp. 260–2.

64. ‘Poor, unfledged,’ etc. Cymbeline, Act III. Scene 3.

65. As Goldsmith said. See Boswell’s Life of Johnson (ed. G. B. Hill), III. 252.

Yet his Treatise on Human Nature, etc. ‘Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press,’ etc. The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself.

A celebrated lyrical writer. Wordsworth.

The motto in the title-page.

‘For why? Because the good old rule Sufficeth them: the simple plan, That they should take, who have the power, And they should keep who can.’ Wordsworth, Rob Roy’s Grave.

Note 1. The Excursion was published in a 4to volume in 1814.

Note 2. Talk we of one Master Launcelot. Merchant of Venice, Act II. Scene 2.

66. Mr. Owen. See Political Essays, vol. III. pp. 121 et seq.

‘Nor Alps,’ etc. John Dennis, Ode on the Battle of Aghrim, St. 3. See The Art of Sinking in Poetry (Pope’s Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope, X. 382). ‘Apennines’ should be ‘Pyrenæaus.’

67. Letter to Mr. William Smith. See Political Essays, vol. III. 210–232.

‘That he puts his hand,’ etc. See The Fudge Family in Paris, Letter II. note 2.

‘I love to talk,’ etc. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 517–8.

‘A collusion,’ etc. ‘’Tis true indeed: the collusion holds in the exchange.’ Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act IV. Scene 2.

68. Why must a man, etc. Hazlitt is referring to Wordsworth. Cf. The Spirit of the Age, vol. IV. p. 276 and note.

‘Virtue extant.’ Henry IV. Part I., Act II. Scene 4.

‘Men were brutes without them.’ Cf.

‘O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee To temper man: we had been brutes without you.’ Otway, Venice Preserved, Act I. Scene 1.

Moody in the Country Girl. Garrick’s Country Girl, altered from Wycherley’s Country Wife, was produced in 1766.

M—. Lamb’s friend, Thomas Manning (1772–1840).

L. H. Leigh Hunt.

69. ‘Stand accountant,’ etc. Othello, Act II. Scene 1.

‘Its palaces,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, I. 643–4.

‘With them conversing,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 639–40.

ESSAY VIII. ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED

First published in the Scots’ Magazine (New Series), July 1818, vol. III. pp. 55 et seq. Hazlitt refers to this essay in A Letter to William Gifford (vol. I., p. 382).

70. ‘For the more languages,’ etc. Satire upon the Abuse of Human Learning, 57–68.

‘Spectacles.’ Dryden says of Shakespeare, ‘he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature.’ Essay of Dramatic Poesy (Essays, ed. Ker, I. 80).

71. ‘Leave me to my repose.’ ‘Leave me, leave me to repose,’ the refrain of the Prophetess in Gray’s The Vegtam’s Kivitha. The line is quoted by Burke in A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 112).

‘Take up his bed and walk.’ St. Matthew, ix. 6.

‘Enfeebles all internal strength of thought.’ Goldsmith, The Traveller, 270.

‘Sweats in the eye of Phœbus.’ Henry V., Act IV. Scene 1.

72. ‘Th’ enthusiast Fancy,’ etc. ‘The truant fancy was a wanderer ever.’ Lamb, Fancy Employed on Divine Subjects, I. 1.

The least respectable character. Hazlitt is probably referring to Canning.

73. A person of this class. Charles Burney, D.D. (1757–1817), whose Remarks on the Greek Verses of Milton appeared in 1790.

Dr. —. Hazlitt refers to Charles Burney (see last note) and Dr. Parr. Cf. a similar passage in The Examiner, vol. I. p. 425.

74. ‘The mighty world of eye and ear.’ Wordsworth, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, 105–6.

‘Knowledge quite shut out.’ ‘And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.’ Paradise Lost, III. 50.

‘Of the colouring of Titian,’ etc. Tristram Shandy, III. 12.

The Elgin marbles. See The Round Table, vol. I. p. 143 and note.

‘Knows no touch of it.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

‘The art and practique,’ etc. Henry V., Act I. Scene 1.

‘Has no skill in surgery.’ Henry IV., Part I., Act V. Scene 1.

76. Baxter. Cf. the essay ‘On People of Sense’ in the Plain Speaker, vol. VII. p. 243.

‘Wink and shut,’ etc. Prologue to Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (History of Antonio and Mellida, Part II.).

Laud, etc. William Laud (1573–1645), and John Whitgift (1530?–1604), Archbishops of Canterbury; George Bull (1634–1710), Bishop of St. David’s, author of Defensio Fidei Nicenae (1685) and other theological works; Daniel Waterland (1683–1740), whose works were edited in eleven vols. in 1823–1828, was not a bishop; Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724), whose Old and New Testament connected ... to the Time of Christ first appeared in two folio volumes 1716–1718; Isaac de Beausobre (1659–1738), the Huguenot writer; Augustine Calmet (1672–1757); Samuel, Baron von Puffendorf (1632–1694) and Eméric de Vattel (1714–1767), the jurists; Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609); Jerome Cardan (1501–1576), and Kaspar Schoppe (1576–1649).

76. ‘Gone to the vault of all the Capulets.’ See vol. I. note to p. 150.

ESSAY IX. THE INDIAN JUGGLERS

79. Note. It was at Truro that Opie, who had already acquired some practice as a portrait painter, met with John Wolcot (1738–1819).

80. I was at that time employed, etc. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I. xvi.

‘In argument,’ etc. The Deserted Village, 211–2.

81. ‘To allow for the wind.’ Ivanhoe, chap. xiii.

‘Human face divine.’ Paradise Lost, III. 44.

82. H—s and H—s. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in his edition of Table Talk prints ‘Haydons and H—s.’

‘In tones and gestures hit.’ ‘In tones and numbers hit.’ Paradise Regained, IV. 255.

To snatch this grace, etc. An unacknowledged quotation from Pope, Essay on Criticism, 153.

‘Commercing with the skies.’ Il Penseroso, 39.

83. ‘Thrills in each nerve,’ etc. Cf.

‘a sudden horror chill Ran through each nerve, and thrilled in ev’ry vein.’ Addison, Milton’s Style Imitated, 123–4.

‘Half flying, half on foot.’ ‘Half on foot, half flying.’ Paradise Lost, II. 941–2.

I know an individual. Leigh Hunt, no doubt. Hazlitt’s son dedicated the third edition of Table Talk ‘to Leigh Hunt, whom the author alike admired and esteemed; the “Rochester without the vice, the modern Surrey,” whom he celebrates in one of these Essays.’

84. Nugæ canoræ. Horace, Ars Poetica, 322.

Themistocles said. See North’s Plutarch (ed. Rouse, Temple Classics, II. 3). Hazlitt probably read the story in Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book I.

85. Napier’s bones. Hazlitt refers, apparently, to John Napier (1550–1617), the inventor of logarithms.

‘He dies,’ etc.

‘Lady, you are the cruell’st she alive, If you will lead these graces to the grave And leave the world no copy.’ Twelfth Night, Act I. Scene 5.

John Hunter. John Hunter (1728–1793).

Sir Humphry Davy. Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829).

86. ‘Great scholar’s memory,’ etc. Cf. ‘Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

87. ‘Care mounted,’ etc. ‘Post equitem sedet atra cura.’ Horace, Odes, III. l. 40.

‘In the instant.’

‘And I feel now The future in the instant.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

87. ‘Domestic treason,’ etc. Ib. Act III. Scene 2.

88. Rosemary Branch. A much frequented tavern at Peckham.

Copenhagen-house. A tavern and tea-garden ‘in the fields north of the metropolis, between Maiden-lane, the old road to Highgate on the west, and the very ancient north road, or bridle-way, called Hogbush-lane, on the east.’ See Hone’s Every Day Book (I. 858 et seq.), where an interesting account of the house is given, and the greater part of Hazlitt’s account of Cavanagh is reproduced.

89. The Fleet or King’s Bench. The Fleet Prison in Farringdon Street and the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark, where there were open ground racket courts.

‘Who enters here.’ Hazlitt may have been recalling the lines in The Dunciad, (IV. 518–9):

‘Which whoso tastes, forgets his former friends, Sire, Ancestors, Himself,’ etc.

Sutton. Charles Manners Sutton, first Viscount Canterbury (1780–1845), was elected Speaker on June 2, 1817.

‘Let no rude hand,’ etc.

‘May no rude hand deface it, And its forlorn hic jacet.’ Wordsworth, Ellen Irwin, 55–6.

ESSAY X. ON LIVING TO ONE’S-SELF

90. ‘Remote, unfriended,’ etc. Goldsmith, The Traveller, l. 1.

Winterslow. Hazlitt’s wife inherited some cottages at Winterslow, a small village six or seven miles from Salisbury on the Andover road, and in one of these cottages a part of their early married life was spent. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I. 168 et seq., where an account is given of a visit paid to Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt by Charles and Mary Lamb. After 1819 (see Memoirs II. 16) Hazlitt began to frequent Winterslow Hut or the Pheasant Inn, where many of his essays (collected under the title of ‘Winterslow’) were written.

‘While Heavn’s chancel-vault,’ etc. Cf.

‘When the chill rain begins at shut of eve In dull November, and their chancel vault, The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.’ Keats, Hyperion, II. 36–8.

91. He hears the tumult, etc.

‘I behold The tumult and am still.’ Cowper, The Task, IV. 99–100.

‘The man whose eye,’ etc. Wordsworth, Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree, etc. (‘Poems written in youth’) ll. 55–9.

92. ‘To see the children,’ etc. Wordsworth, Ode, Intimations of Immortality, 170–1.

Nicholson. William Nicholson (1753–1815).

‘Never ending, still beginning.’ Dryden, Alexander’s Feast, l. 102.

‘The witchery of the soft blue sky.’ Wordsworth, Peter Bell, l. 265.

93. Goldsmith, etc. Hazlitt had probably read the story in Northcote’s Life of Reynolds, where the scene is laid at Antwerp. The incident really occurred at Lisle, while Goldsmith was on his way to Paris with the Hornecks. We have Miss Horneck’s authority for believing that the story, as told by Northcote, and here repeated by Hazlitt, is much exaggerated. See Prior’s Life of Goldsmith, II. 290–1; Forster’s Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, II. 217; and Boswell’s Life of Johnson (ed. G. B. Hill), I. 414 and note.

93. ‘Whose top to climb,’ etc. Cymbeline, Act III. Scene 3.

Exclaimed Cromwell. Speech XVIII., Feb. 4, 1658. See Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches.

94. ‘The insolence of office,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

‘After the heart-aches,’ etc. Ibid.

‘A mouse,’ etc. Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Act IV. Scene 1.

Says Rousseau. La Nouvelle Héloïse, V. Lettre III. (édit. Firmin-Didot, p. 529 note).

‘Some demon,’ etc. Pope, Moral Essays, IV. 16.

95. Canaletti. Antonio Canal (1697–1768), the Venetian painter, or Bernardo Bellotto (1724?–1780), his nephew.

‘Virgined it e’er since.’ Coriolanus, Act V. Scene 3.

The Clandestine Marriage. By George Colman the elder, and Garrick; first produced in 1766.

96. ‘The baby of a girl.’ Macbeth, Act III. Scene 4.

‘With what a waving air,’ etc. B. W. Procter’s (Barry Cornwall’s) Mirandola, Act I. Scene 3. Hazlitt quoted the lines in Liber Amoris (see vol. II. p. 334), and it is clear that here as in many other parts of Table Talk he is referring to the story recorded in that book.

‘The fly that sips treacle,’ etc. The Beggar’s Opera, Act II. Scene 2.

‘For either,’ etc. Paradise Lost, X. 898–908.

97. The madman in Don Quixote. ‘He loved and was abhorred; he adored, and was scorned; he courted a savage; he solicited a statue; he pursued the wind; he called aloud to the desert,’ etc. Don Quixote (trans. Jarvis), Part I. Book II. chap. xiii.

‘I have not loved the world,’ etc. Byron, Childe Harold, Canto III, Stanzas 113 and 114.

Note. Gray says the same thing about Shenstone in a letter to Norton Nicholls, June 24, 1769 (Works, ed. Gosse, III. 344–5) quoted by Johnson in his Life of Shenstone. As to Gray’s dislike to having his portrait prefixed to his works, see his letter to Horace Walpole, January 1753 (Works, ed. Gosse, II. 233 et seq.), where he says: ‘This I know, if you suffer my head to be printed, you will infallibly put me out of mine’; and again—‘I do assure you, if I had received such a book, with such a frontispiece, without any warning, I believe it would have given me a palsy.’

98. The man in the Hartz mountains. Hazlitt refers to the well-known mirage of the Brocken.

‘Listening its fears.’ ‘Listening their fear, I could not say “Amen.”’ Macbeth, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Still, small voice.’ 1 Kings, xix. 12.

After the Quarterly Review came out. The review of Characters of Shakespear’s Plays appeared in the Quarterly for Jan. 1818 (vol. XVIII. p. 458). Taylor and Hessey were the publishers of the Characters.

The Cockney School. The phrase seems to have been first used in an article by Lockhart entitled ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry,’ which appeared in the first number (Oct. 1817) of the new series of Blackwood’s Magazine. That article dealt almost exclusively with Leigh Hunt, but the expression became popular, and was afterwards applied, not only by Blackwood’s Magazine, but by The Quarterly Review, to Keats, Lamb, Shelley, and Hazlitt among others. See Lang’s Life of Lockhart, I. 146 et seq., and Mrs. Oliphant’s William Blackwood and his Sons, I. 132 et seq. and 164–7, where a letter from Lockhart and Wilson to John Murray is printed, in which the writers refer to ‘that happy name which you and all the reviews are now borrowing.’ The attacks on Keats referred to by Hazlitt appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine for Aug. 1818 (the 4th of the ‘Cockney School’ Series), and in The Quarterly Review for April 1818, published in September. It is not known who wrote the Blackwood article; the review in the Quarterly was by Croker. Much has been written as to the effect of these attacks on Keats’s health and happiness, but it is obviously impossible to come to any definite conclusion. Keats died in Rome on the 23rd Feb. 1821.

98. ‘A bud bit,’ etc. Romeo and Juliet, Act I. Scene 1.

‘A huge-sized monster,’ etc. ‘A great-sized monster of ingratitudes.’ Troilus and Cressida, Act III. Scene 3.

100. The celebrated Bub Doddington. The Diary of George Bubb Dodington (1691–1762), created Lord Melcombe in 1761, was posthumously published in 1784.

My soul, turn from them. Hazlitt quotes elsewhere the line (165) from Goldsmith’s The Traveller. ‘My soul, turn from them, turn we to survey.’

‘Far from the madding strife.’ ‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.’ Gray’s Elegy, l. 73.

Bolingbroke’s Reflections on Exile. Written in 1716, published in 1752.

101. Note. See Plutarch, Morals (of Banishment), and Virgil, Georgics, I. 6.

ESSAY XI. ON THOUGHT AND ACTION

Abraham Tucker. For Tucker, see vol. IV. pp. 371–385 and notes.

102. Louvet. The Girondin, Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray (1760–1797), author of Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas.

Note. Cf. Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon (ed. 1894), III. 298.

Tull’s Husbandry. An edition of Jethro Tull’s (1674–1741) Horse-hoing Husbandry (1733) was brought out by Cobbett in 1822.

‘Tut! will you baulk a man,’ etc. ‘Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humour?’ Much Ado About Nothing, Act II. Scene 3.

‘No figures,’ etc. Julius Cæsar, Act II. Scene 1.

104. Chapter of Accidents. Apparently Lord Chesterfield (Letter, Feb. 16, 1753) was the first person who is known to have used this phrase. Southey in The Doctor (chap. cxviii.) attributes to John Wilkes the saying, similar to Hazlitt’s, that ‘the chapter of accidents is the longest chapter in the book.’

And — — for love! Possibly Hazlitt refers to himself.

105. ‘Measure with a two-foot rule,’ etc. Burke, Regicide Peace (ed. Payne), p. 105.

Quicquid agit, etc. See note to vol. II. p. 331.

‘Curtailing him,’ etc. Cf.

‘I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,’ etc. Richard III., Act I. Scene 1.

107. Arbela. The city which gives its name to the battle in which Alexander finally defeated Darius (B.C. 331).

109. ‘To be wise,’ etc. Cf. ‘Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.’ Coriolanus, Act V. Scene 3.

Any more than St. Augustine was, etc. The allusion is to an incident which took place at the house of Boileau, when La Fontaine, Racine, and Boileau’s brother were present. The latter had been holding forth on the merits of St. Augustine, when La Fontaine, who had been listening half asleep, said: ‘Was he as witty as Rabelais?’ Boileau’s brother replied, ‘Be careful, M. la Fontaine, one of your stockings is wrong side out.’

‘All tranquillity and smiles.’ Cowper, The Task, IV. 49.

110. Abraham Cowley has left, etc. ‘A Vision, concerning his late pretended Highness, Cromwell the Wicked,’ etc. (1661).

‘Sharp and sweet.’ ‘And be as sharp as sweet.’ All’s Well that Ends Well, Act IV. Scene 4.

111. William Mudford (1782–1848), at this time editor of The Courier, afterwards a well-known contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, published in 1817, An Historical Account of the Campaign in the Netherlands in 1815, under the Duke of Wellington and Prince Blucher, in which he was assisted by the Duke.

Nor does Horace seem to give, etc. See Odes, II. 7, where he tells us that he left his shield ingloriously behind him at Philippi, and Epod. I. where he describes himself as ‘imbellis ac firmus parum.’

‘From every work,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book I. Canto iv. Stanza 20.

‘Better be lord,’ etc.

‘And to be lord of those that riches have Than them to have my selfe, and be their servile sclave.’ Ib. Book II. Canto vii. Stanza 33.

112. Sir William —. Sir William Curtis (1752–1829), a staunch Tory and friend of George IV., Lord Mayor (1795–1796) and Member for the City (1790–1817 and 1820–1826).

Alderman —. Robert Waithman (1764–1833), perhaps, Curtis’s radical opponent for the representation of the City.

Note. ‘Dish of skimmed milk.’ ‘O, I could divide myself, and go to buffets, for moving such a dish of skim milk with so honourable an action.’ Henry IV., Part I. Act II. Scene 3.

113. The cave of Mammon. The Faerie Queene, Book II. Canto vii.

The founder of Guy’s Hospital. Thomas Guy (1645–1724), bookseller in Cornhill, is said to have begun by importing English Bibles printed in Holland. The bulk of his fortune was made by successful dealings in South Sea stock. The residue of his estate, devoted to the founding of the hospital, amounted to £200,000.

ESSAY XII. ON WILL-MAKING

116. A will of one of the Thellussons. The famous will of Peter Thellusson (1737–1797), who directed the income of his property to be accumulated during the lives of all his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, living at the time of his death. The will was upheld, but an Act, commonly called the Thellusson Act (39 and 40 George III. c. 98) was passed to prevent the repetition of such accumulations.

117. I have heard of a singular instance, etc. In Notes and Queries (1st Series, X. 531) a correspondent, signing himself ‘W. M. T.’, states that in a volume of Hazlitt’s Works in his possession the Essay ‘On Will-making’ has a marginal note in the handwriting of Wordsworth. The note is as follows:—‘This story must have come from me. It is exaggerated here. The person was a school-fellow of mine, and I had the particulars of his will from a brother of one his executors. He did not bequeath large estates, etc., but very considerable sums of money to different relatives and friends; without being possessed of a sixpence, or having reason to believe that he was. W. Wordsworth.’

118. Diamond cut Diamond. As old at any rate as Ford. See The Lover’s Melancholy, Act I. Scene 3.

Ben Jonson’s Volpone. First acted in 1605.

The will of Nicholas Gimcrack. The Tatler, No. 216 (By Addison).

120. ‘Even from the tomb,’ etc. Gray’s Elegy, 91–2.

Memoirs of an Heiress. Frances Burney’s Cecilia, or The Memoirs of an Heiress (1782).

Dyot-Street. This name was restored in 1877. The street was named after Richard Dyot. Wheatley and Cunningham’s London Past and Present, I. 544.

‘The foxes,’ etc. St. Matthew, viii. 20.

Lord Camelford. Thomas Pitt, second Lord Camelford (1775–1804), killed in a duel. The war rendered it impossible for his body to be taken to Switzerland.

Sir Francis Bourgeois. Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois (1756–1811), the painter, bequeathed a large number of pictures to Dulwich College.

Note. Kellerman. François Christophe, Duke of Valmy (1735–1820).

Note. As the basil-tree grew, etc. Boccaccio, The Decameron, Fourth Day, Novel 5.

ESSAY XIII. ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS’S DISCOURSES

Cf. six papers which Hazlitt contributed to The Champion (Oct. 30, Nov. 6, Nov. 27, Dec. 4, Dec. 25, 1814, and Jan. 8, 1815) on Reynolds as a painter and a critic.

123. ‘You take my house,’ etc. Merchant of Venice, Act IV. Scene 1.

124. ‘Ascending the brightest heaven of invention.’ Henry V., Prologue. Carlo Maratti. 1625–1713.

128. ‘It loses some colour.’ Othello, Act I. Scene 1.

130. ‘Not once perceive,’ etc. Comus, 74–5.

Note. Boucher. François Boucher (1703–1770).

ESSAY XIV. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

131. Two papers in the Idler. Nos. 76 and 82.

133. Denner’s style. Balthasar Denner (1685–1749), the German painter, whose too minute detail is often referred to by Hazlitt.

134. ‘Of late reformed,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

‘What word,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IX. 1144.

136. What was said of Virgil. Addison, in his Essay on Virgil’s Georgics, says:—‘He breaks the clods and tosses the dung about with an air of gracefulness.’ Cf. also

‘Hence mighty Virgil’s said, of old, From dung to have extracted gold,’ etc. Butler, Satire upon Plagiaries, 87 et seq.

145. Dr. Johnson’s Irene. Produced at Drury Lane in 1749.

ESSAY XV. ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE

146. ‘Putting in one scale,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, IV. 484–6.

147. ‘Apprehensive, forgetive.’ Henry IV. Part II. Act IV. Scene 3.

148. ‘The powers that be.’ Romans, XIII. 1.

Holy Oil. The coronation of George IV. (July 19, 1821) was imminent.

‘All trivial, fond records.’ Hamlet, Act I. Scene 5.

‘He never is,’ etc. A variation of Pope’s well-known line, Essay on Man, I. 96.

The author of the Prometheus Unbound, etc. The passage which follows on Shelley led to a quarrel between Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt (II. 305 et seq.), where two letters from Hunt to Hazlitt and one from Hunt to Shelley are published; and Four Generations of a Literary Family (I. 130–135), where a long letter from Hazlitt to Hunt is published for the first time. The quarrel was made up, but Hazlitt never cared for Shelley’s poetry. See his article in The Edinburgh Review (July 1824) on Shelley’s Posthumous Poems.

‘And in its liquid texture,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VI. 348–9.

149. ‘Seas of pearl,’ etc. Cf. ‘Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber.’ Otway, Venice Preserved, Act V. Scene 2. Coleridge more than once quoted the line as an example of fanciful delirium. See Biographia Literaria (chap. iv.) and Crabb Robinson’s Diary (Nov. 15, 1810).

Play round the head, etc. ‘Plays round the head, but comes not to the heart.’ Pope, Essay on Man, IV. 254.

150. ‘At the horizon.’ ‘Their humanity is at their horizon.’ Burke, A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 142).

‘While you are talking of marrying,’ etc. The Beggar’s Opera, Act II. Scene 2.

151. The present poet-laureate. Southey.

‘Poets (as it has been said)’ etc. Hazlitt quotes from his own review of Coleridge’s Literary Life in The Edinburgh Review for August, 1817 (Vol. XXVIII. pp. 514–5).

‘Such seething brains.’ Cf.

‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,’ etc. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V. Scene 1.

152. Note. Twice have the dastard, vaunting, venal crew, etc. The reference is of course to Southey and Wordsworth. See many passages in Political Essays.

Note. Like Cacus’s oxen. Æneid, VIII. 209 et seq.

Note. ‘Rout on rout,’ etc. Paradise Lost, II. 995–6.

Note. ‘Deliverance for mankind.’ Southey’s Carmen Triumphale.

Note. ‘The Camomil,’ etc. ‘The camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows.’ Henry IV., Part I. Act II. Scene 4.

153. Note. Troja fuit. ‘Et Thebae steterunt, altaque Troja fuit.’ Propertius, Elegies, II. 8.

154. Like Mr. Cobbett’s ‘Gold against Paper.’ The first of Cobbett’s articles on ‘Paper against Gold’ appeared in the Political Register on Sept. 1, 1810. The articles were afterwards collected and published in separate form.

Lord Bacon’s axiom. Advancement of Learning, Book I. V. 1.

‘But of this be sure,’ etc. Paradise Lost, I. 158–9.

155. ‘Ambling and lisping,’ etc. ‘You jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God’s creatures.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

156. Edgar’s exaggerations to Gloster. King Lear, Act IV. Scene 6.

Mr. Montgomery. James Montgomery (1771–1854), while editor of The Sheffield Iris, suffered two terms of imprisonment (1795–1796), but not in connection with the Duke of Richmond’s Letter on Reform, which was originally published in 1783.

Spain, as Ferdinand, etc. In March 1820, in consequence of a revolution in Spain, Ferdinand VII. was forced to accept the constitution of 1812, and the suppression of the Inquisition, but in October of the same year, as the result of French intervention, absolutism was restored. This essay would appear to have been written between these two dates.

ESSAY XVI. ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION

‘Thin partitions,’ etc. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, Part I. 164.

157. ‘A feather will turn,’ etc. Cf. ‘The weight of a hair will turn the scales between their avoirdupois’ (Henry IV., Part II. Act II. Scene 4), and ‘Go to, sir; you weigh equally; a feather will turn the scale’ (Measure for Measure, Act IV. Scene 2).

‘Great Vulgar and the Small.’ Cowley, Horace, Odes, III. 1.

159. ‘Have eyes and see them.’ ‘Eyes have they, but they see not.’ Psalms, CXV. 5.

‘Lovers of low company.’ ‘Kings are naturally lovers of low company.’ Burke, Speech on Economical Reform (Works, Bohn, II. 106).

160. ‘I like it,’ etc. The reference seems to be to Evelina, Letter XXI.

Janus Weathercock, Esq. One of the pseudonyms of the notorious poisoner Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1852). He and Hazlitt were in 1820 fellow-contributors to The London Magazine. For the matters referred to in this paragraph of the text, see Hazlitt’s Dramatic Essays, especially the essay reprinted from The London Magazine for July 1820. For an account of Wainewright see the introduction to Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s selection of Wainewright’s Essays and Criticisms (1880). The article to which Hazlitt replies had appeared in The London Magazine for June 1820 (vol. I. p. 630) under the title of ‘Janus’s Jumble.’

Note. ‘Dip it in the ocean,’ etc. The Sentimental Journey, The Wig, Paris.

161. Milaine ‘with the foot of fire.’ See Hazlitt’s Dramatic Essays.

‘Swallows total grist,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, VI. 108.

Emery’s Yorkshireman. The character of Tyke in Morton’s The School for Reform. Cf. Hazlitt’s Dramatic Essays.

162. ‘A stamp,’ etc. ‘A stamp exclusive and professional.’ Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini, III. 32.

‘Gabble most brutishly.’

‘But wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish.’ The Tempest, Act I. Scene 2.

162. ‘His speech bewrayeth him.’ St. Matthew, xxvi. 73.

Servum pecus imitatorum. ‘O imitatores, servum pecus.’ Horace, Epistles, I. xix. 19.

‘An author,’ etc. Young, Epistles to Mr. Pope, II. 15–16.

163. Odi profanum vulgus, etc. Horace, Odes, III. 1.

Vice by losing, etc. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne), II. 89.

164. ‘Making mops and mows.’ The Tempest, Act IV. Scene 1.

‘Go thou,’ etc. St. Luke, x. 37.

Eastward Hoe. Published in 1605. The authors were sent to prison for this comedy.

165. Millamant. In Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700).

‘Worn in their newest gloss.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 7.

‘And all was conscience,’ etc. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 150.

166. Note. New Way to pay Old Debts. Massinger’s famous Comedy, published in 1633.

167. Hogarth’s Merveilleuses in Bedlam. Hazlitt refers to the eighth plate of The Rake’s Progress. Cf. his Essay ‘On the Works of Hogarth,’ vol. viii. p. 143.

Cuckold’s Point. Not on the coast of Essex, but near Deptford in Kent. It was the meeting-place for the riotous mobs who afterwards marched to the Horn-Fair at Charlton on Oct. 18. See Brand’s Popular Antiquities, II. 194.

168. The proverbs about the mistress’s eye. ‘The mistress’s eye feeds the capon.’ ‘The master’s eye makes the horse fat.’ See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (1882).

ESSAY XVII. ON A LANDSCAPE OF NICOLAS POUSSIN

‘Table Talk, No. XI.,’ from The London Magazine, August 1821 (vol. IV. p. 176).

‘And blind Orion,’ etc. Keats, Endymion, II. 198.

‘A hunter of shadows,’ etc. Cf.

‘The huge Orion, of portentous size, Swift through the gloom a giant-hunter flies.’ Pope, Homer’s Odyssey, XI. 703–4.

And having lost an eye, etc. For offering violence to Merope, Orion was blinded by her father Oenopion with the assistance of Dionysus.

‘Grey dawn,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VII. 373–4.

169. ‘Shadowy sets off.’

‘Full-orbed the moon, and, with more pleasing light, Shadowy sets off the face of things.’ Paradise Lost, V. 42–3.

‘Denote a foregone conclusion.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

‘Take up the isles,’ etc. Isaiah, xl. 15.

‘So potent art.’ The Tempest, Act V. Scene 1.

170. ‘More than natural.’ Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Gives to airy nothing,’ etc. Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V. Scene 1.

Note. His Life lately published. Mrs. Graham’s (Lady Callcott’s) Memoirs of the Life of Nicholas Poussin (1820). See pp. 35–6.

Note. Mr. West. Benjamin West (1738–1820) succeeded Reynolds as president of the Royal Academy in 1792.

171. His Plague of Athens. The Plague at Ashdod, in the Louvre. A repetition of this picture, formerly in the Colonna Palace at Rome, was presented to the National Gallery in 1838.

His picture of the Deluge. In the Louvre.

‘O’er-informed.’ ‘And o’er-inform’d the tenement of clay.’ Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, Part I. 158.

‘The very stones,’ etc. Macbeth, Act II. Scene 1.

A picture of Aurora. ‘Cephalus and Aurora’ now in the National Gallery.

172. ‘Leaping like wanton kids,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book I. Canto vi. Stanza 14.

His picture of the shepherds. In the Louvre, a picture often referred to by Hazlitt.

‘The valleys low,’ etc. ‘Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use.’ Lycidas, 136.

‘Within the book and volume,’ etc. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 5.

‘The sober certainty,’ etc. Comus, 263.

‘He who knows of these delights,’ etc.

‘He who of those delights can judge, and spare To interpose them oft, is not unwise.’ Milton, Sonnet (No. XX.) To Mr. Lawrence.

173. ‘Old Genius,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book III. Canto vi. Stanzas 31 and 32.

174. Pictures are scattered, etc.

‘Thus pleasure is spread through the earth In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.’ Wordsworth, Stray Pleasures.

The collections at Blenheim, etc. See the volume containing Hazlitt’s art criticisms.

Since the Louvre is stripped, etc. The art treasures which Napoleon had pillaged from the various countries of Europe, especially from Italy, were restored in 1815.

The hunter of greatness, etc. Cf. ante, p. 168. Napoleon died on May 5, 1821.

ESSAY XVIII. ON MILTON’S SONNETS

Published in The New Monthly Magazine (1822), vol. IV. p. 238, under the title of ‘Table Talk, No. III.’

‘Some fee-grief,’ etc.

‘Or is it a fee-grief Due to some single breast?’ Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 3.

‘To the height,’ etc. Paradise Lost, l. 24.

‘Most musical,’ etc. Il Penseroso, 62.

175. ‘Very tolerable,’ etc. ‘To babble and to talk is most tolerable and not to be endured.’ Much Ado About Nothing, Act III. Scene 3.

‘The divine,’ etc. Pope, Imitations of Horace, Book II. Ep. i. 69.

‘From you have I been absent,’ etc. Shakespeare, Sonnet XCVIII.

Warton’s Sonnets. The poems of Thomas Warton (1728–1790) were first collected in 1777, and more fully in 1791.

176. Said to be sacred to Liberty. The sonnets of which Hazlitt speaks formed part of the ‘Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty,’ published in the Poems of 1807.

176. ‘Oh Virtue,’ etc. Quoted by Wordsworth in The Excursion, Book III. 775–7.

‘The poet blind and bold.’ ‘When I beheld the Poet, blind, yet bold.’ Andrew Marvell, On Paradise Lost, I.

‘Such recantation,’ etc. Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book III. 778.

‘No longer to Kings,’ etc. Southey, Vision of Judgment, IX.

177. ‘On evil days,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VII. 26.

‘Cyriac, this three years’ day,’ etc. Sonnet No. XXII.

Those to Cromwell, to Fairfax and to the younger Vane. Nos. XV., XVI., and XVII.

On the late Massacre in Piedmont. No. XVIII.

179. Those to Mr. Henry Lawes, etc. Nos. XIII. and XX.

On his deceased Wife. No. XXIII.

180. To suppose that Milton only shone, etc. Dr. Johnson in his famous Life of Milton says: ‘Milton never learnt the art of doing little things with grace,’ etc.; and to Hannah More he said (Boswell, ed. G. B. Hill, IV. 305): ‘Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.’

His Letters to Donatus. Hazlitt perhaps refers to Milton’s letters to Charles Diodati.

‘Severe in youthful virtue unreproved.’

‘and his grave rebuke Severe in youthful beauty, added grace Invincible.’ Paradise Lost, IV, 844–6.

ESSAY XIX. ON GOING A JOURNEY

Published in The New Monthly Magazine (1822, vol. IV. p. 73) under the heading ‘Table Talk, No. 1.’ Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in his edition of Table Talk gives some variations between the printed text of this essay and the original MS.

181. ‘The fields his study,’ etc. Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy, Spring, 31.

‘A friend in my retreat,’ etc. Cowper, Retirement, 741–2.

‘May plume her feathers,’ etc. Comus, 378–80.

182. ‘Sunken wrack,’ etc. ‘With sunken wreck and sumless treasuries,’ Henry V., Act I. Scene 2.

‘Leave, oh, leave me,’ etc. See ante, note to p. 71.

‘The very stuff of conscience.’ Othello, Act I. Scene 2.

‘Out upon such half-faced fellowship.’ Henry IV., Part I. Act I. Scene 3.

183. ‘Give it an understanding,’ etc. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 2.

My old friend C—. Coleridge. Cf. the essay on ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets.’

‘He talked far above singing.’ ‘I did hear you talk far above singing.’ Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster, Act V. Scene 5.

‘That fine madness,’ etc.

‘For that fine madness still he did retain, Which rightly should possess a Poet’s brain.’ Drayton, Censure of Poets.

‘Here be woods as green,’ etc. John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, Act I. Scene 3.

184. L—. Lamb.

184. ‘Take one’s ease at one’s inn.’ ‘Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?’ Henry IV., Part I. Act III. Scene 3.

‘The cups that cheer,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, IV. 39–40.

185. Procul, etc. Aeneid, VI. 258.

‘Unhoused free condition,’ etc. Othello, Act I. Scene 2.

‘Lord of one’s-self,’ etc. ‘Lord of yourself, uncumber’d with a wife.’ Dryden, Epistle to John Driden, 18.

Gribelin’s engravings, etc. Simon Gribelin’s (1661–1733) engravings of the cartoons were published in 1707.

186. Paul and Virginia. Bernardin de St. Pierre’s famous romance (1788).

At Bridgewater. In the course of his visit to Coleridge who lived at Nether Stowey. See ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets.’

Madame D’Arblay’s Camilla. Published in 1796.

The letter I chose, etc. La Nouvelle Héloïse, Part IV. Letter XVII.

‘Green upland swells,’ etc. Coleridge, Ode on the Departing Year, VII. 5–6.

‘Glittered green,’ etc. Ib. VII. 4.

187. ‘Beyond Hyde Park,’ etc. In Sir George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (Act V. Scene 2) Harriet says to Dorimant: ‘I know all beyond Hyde Park is a desert to you, and that no gallantry can draw you farther.’

188. ‘The mind in its own place.’ Paradise Lost, I. 254.

I once took a party, etc. Hazlitt went with Charles and Mary Lamb to Oxford in August, 1810. Cf. Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Conversation of Authors’ in The Plain Speaker, and Memoirs of William Hazlitt, l. 172.

‘With glistering spires,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 550.

At Blenheim. Lamb refers to this visit to Blenheim in a letter to Hazlitt, August 9, 1810. Letters, ed. Ainger, I. 251.

189. Dr. Johnson remarked. See Boswell’s Life, ed. G. B. Hill, III. 352.

ESSAY XX. ON COFFEE-HOUSE POLITICIANS

Some variations from the MS. are given in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s edition of Table Talk.

190. ‘They live and move,’ etc. Acts, xvii. 28.

The Queen, etc. Queen Caroline returned to England in June 1820, and died on August 7, 1821. During that time her case was of course the chief topic of conversation in London. George IV. was crowned on July 19, 1821.

‘That of an hour’s age,’ etc. Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 3.

The Two-penny Post-Bag. Moore’s, published in 1813.

The Westminster Election. Two memorable elections took place in Westminster in 1819 and 1820. In the first Hobhouse was defeated by George Lamb; in the second he was successful.

Have nothing farther to say. In the MS. this sentence is followed by ‘They are like an oyster at the ebb of the tide, gaping for fresh tidings.’

The Bridge Street Association. The Constitutional Association or, as it was called by its opponents, ‘The Bridge Street Gang,’ founded in 1821 ‘to support the laws for suppressing seditious publications, and for defending the country from the fatal influence of disloyalty and sedition.’ The Association was an ill-conducted party organisation and created so much opposition by its imprudent prosecutions that it very soon disappeared. See an article in The Edinburgh Review for June, 1822. (Vol. XXXVII. p. 110).

Mr. Cobbett’s Letter. Cobbett’s Letter ‘To Mr. James Cropper, a Quaker Merchant of Liverpool, on his letter to Mr. Wilberforce relating to East India and West India Sugar,’ appeared in the Weekly Register on July 21, 1821 (Vol. XL. p. 1.)

191. ‘Any six of these men in buckram.’ See Henry IV. Part I., Act II. Scene 4.

Note. This note is not in the MS., but the words ‘Draper’ and ‘Radical Tobacco’ are jotted down in the text.

As Trim blew up the army, etc. Tristram Shandy, III. 20.

Note. ‘Dream on, blest pair,’ etc.

‘Sleep on, Blest pair! and O! yet happiest, if ye seek No happier state, and know to know no more.’ Paradise Lost, IV. 773–5.

192. Beaumont in his verses to Ben Jonson. First published in 1647.

The S—. The Southampton Coffee House in Southampton Buildings, at the corner of Chancery Lane. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt I. 291–300.

M—. George Mounsey, of Mounsey and Gray, Solicitors in Staple Inn.

Signor Friscobaldo. In Dekker’s The Honest Whore. Cf. Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (vol. V. pp. 335 et seq.).

The clerk of St. Andrews. Webster is said to have been clerk of the parish of St. Andrews, Holborn.

‘Within the red-leaved tables of the heart.’ Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, Act II. Scene 3.

‘Writ in water.’ A phrase used by Shakespeare (‘their virtues we write in water,’ Henry VIII., Act IV. Scene 2) and other Elizabethan dramatists, and now chiefly remembered in connection with Keats’s epitaph on himself: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’

193. ‘Wit-skirmishes.’ ‘They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.’ Much Ado About Nothing, Act I. Scene 1.

‘Brave sublunary things.’ [translunary.] Drayton, Elegy to Henry Reynolds, Esq.

‘Nothing but vanity, chaotic vanity.’ Cf. ‘O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Mis-shapen chaos!’ Romeo and Juliet, Act I. Scene 1.

The Globe. In Fleet Street, formerly frequented by Goldsmith.

The Rainbow. No. 15 Fleet Street. The tavern still exists.

The Mitre. Johnson’s Mitre, usually supposed to be the one in Mitre Court, Fleet Street. The older Mitre Tavern of Elizabethan days was further west on the site of Messrs. Hoares’ Bank.

194. G—. George Kirkpatrick.

Note. A complete Master Stephen. In Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour.

195. Misconceiving what they say. In the top-margin of the MS. the following words are jotted down: ‘Bostock, unruffled, Paine, Knight, Hope.’ It would seem that Hazlitt had in his mind Richard Payne Knight (see The Round Table, vol. I. p. 143), and possibly the physician John Bostock the younger and Thomas Hope the author of Anastasius.

‘So shall their anticipation,’ etc. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

The Mourning Bride. Congreve’s tragedy which contains (Act II. Scene 3) the famous description of a temple which Johnson thought ‘the finest poetical passage he had ever read’ (Boswell’s Life, ed. G. B. Hill, II. 85).

No Michael Cassio.

‘a great arithmetician, One Michael Cassio, a Florentine.’ Othello, Act I. Scene 1.

195. R—. Roger Kirkpatrick.

Old S—. Sarratt, the chess-player. See p. 196 note.

M—. Mounsey.

H— and A—. Hume and Ayrton. Joseph Hume of the Pipe Office, not the Radical M.P. (See ‘Lamb’s Letters,’ ed. W. C. Hazlitt, I. 361, note 1), and William Ayrton, twice Director of the Music at the King’s Theatre (where he produced Don Giovanni), better known as a regular attendant at Lamb’s Wednesday Evenings. Instead of this sentence the ms. reads:—‘H— and A— taking their friendly stroll in the Park of a morning like a couple of old post-horses put out to grass. Him of Cockayne who went to Margate by water to save charges, and another of that ilk who went by land for the better display of his person.’ Lamb describes his voyage to Margate in ‘The Old Margate Hoy.’

196. M— B—. Lamb’s friend Martin Burney, the son of Admiral Burney.

M—df—rd. William Mudford, editor of The Courier (see ante, p. 111), wrote The Contemplatist, or Series of Essays upon Morals and Literature. (1811).

‘As is the ribbed sea-sand.’ Coleridge says that for the lines in The Ancient Mariner (Part IV. Stanza 1)

‘And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand,’

he was indebted to Wordsworth.

‘For Kais is fled,’ etc. Hazlitt seems to be recalling an opera entitled ‘Kais; or Love in the Deserts’ (1808 Drury Lane) by Isaac Brandon, founded on Isaac Disraeli’s romance, ‘Mejnoun and Leila.’

The death of Buonaparte. May 5, 1821.

Dr. L—. Dr. Whittle.

198. Mr. Canning’s pension. Cf. Political Essays, Vol. III. note to p. 301.

199. M—. Mounsey.

Mrs. Battle. Essays of Elia, ed. Ainger, p. 49. The essay had recently (Feb. 1821) appeared in The London Magazine.

Tobin. John Tobin (1770–1804), author of The Honey-Moon (see Vol V. p. 345).

The Cider-Cellar. No. 20 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden.

The London Institution. Now in Finsbury Circus, established in 1806 in Old Jewry. Porson was the first librarian and died there in 1808.

200. W—. Charles Jeremiah Wells (1799?–1879) a solicitor, shortly after the date of this essay produced Stories after Nature (1822) and the dramatic poem Joseph and his Brethren (1824). This last was long afterwards warmly praised by D. G. Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne (Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1875), and was republished in 1876 by Mr. Buxton Forman. Wells in 1830 placed a memorial to Hazlitt in St. Anne’s, Soho. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s Four Generations of a Literary Family, l. 159–162.

That of Killigrew’s country-cousin. Memoirs of Count Grammont, chap. 9.

The Chevalier Hamilton’s assignation. Ib. chap. 9.

Jacob Hall’s prowess. Ib. chap. 6.

Miss Stuart’s garters. Ib. chap. 8.

Miss Churchill is first introduced. Ib. chap. 10.

‘Fear and niceness,’ etc. Cymbeline, Act III. Scene 4.

201. Mr. H— and Mr. A—. Hume and Ayrton.

Such a one, etc. As You Like It, Act III. Scene 1.

202. Variety is indispensable. In the MS. opposite this sentence is written ‘Jacky Taylor.—Mr. Tomkins the penman.’

‘Yet so as with a difference.’ Cf. ‘You must wear your rue with a difference,’ Hamlet, Act IV. Scene 5.

Randall’s. ‘The Hole in the Wall’ in Chancery Lane, kept by Jack Randall, the pugilist. See Hazlitt’s essay ‘The Fight,’ and ‘On Londoners and Country People’ in The Plain Speaker (vol. VII. p. 66).

Long’s. No. 16 New Bond Street, rebuilt and enlarged in 1888.

H—’s conversation. Leigh Hunt’s. Cf. a passage in The Round Table, vol. I. p. 43.

He is nearly the best. ‘Nearly’ was added in proof.

‘Or like a gate of steel,’ etc. Troilus and Cressida, Act III. Scene 3.

203. B— C—’s. Barry Cornwall’s.

A young literary bookseller. John Martin, perhaps, of the firm of Rodwell and Martin, Holles Street, Cavendish Square. See Keats’s Complete Works, ed. H. Buxton Forman (1901), Vol. IV. p. 34 note.

A ‘Circean herd.’ Cf. Comus, 152–3 and Paradise Lost, IX. 522.

ESSAY XXI. ON THE ARISTOCRACY OF LETTERS

205. ‘Ha! here’s three of us,’ etc. King Lear, Act III. Scene 4.

Stat nominis umbra. ‘Stat magni nominis umbra.’ Lucan, Pharsalia, I. 135.

— House. Holland House. Cf. Political Essays (vol. III. p. 44).

‘Continents have most,’ etc. Hobbes, Human Nature (Works, ed. Molesworth), IV. 50.

‘O that mine enemy,’ etc. Job, xxxi. 35.

Note. Lord H—. The third Lord Holland.

Note. Sir J— M—. Sir James Mackintosh.

Note. ‘The first row of the rubric.’ Cf. ‘The first row of the pious chanson will show you more.’ Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

206. A third makes the indecency pass, etc. The reference is clearly to Richard Payne Knight whose first publication (1786) was An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus lately existing in Isernia, etc., and who in 1816 gave evidence before a select committee of the House of Commons against the national acquisition of the Elgin Marbles.

207. ‘Cannot command it,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

‘Monster’d.’ ‘To hear my nothings monster’d.’ Coriolanus, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Ducks to the learned fool.’ Timon of Athens, Act IV. Scene 3.

‘He that is but able,’ etc. Satire upon the Abuse of Human Learning, 67–70.

208. ‘’Twas mine,’ etc. Cf. ‘’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

The Cider-cellar. See ante, p. 199.

The Hole in the Wall. In Chancery Lane. See ante, note to p. 202.

209. The B— family. The Burneys.

‘In numbers numberless.’ Paradise Regained, III. 310.

The founder of it. Dr. Charles Burney (1726–1814), the friend of Johnson and author of A History of Music (4 vols. 1776–1789).

Madame D—. Frances Burney (1752–1840), Madame D’Arblay, Dr. Burney’s daughter, author of Evelina and Cecilia.

The rest have done nothing, etc. ‘The rest’ include Dr. Burney’s two sons, Charles Burney the younger (1757–1817), the Greek scholar, referred to by Hazlitt more than once, especially in connection with his Remarks on the Greek Verses of Milton (1790), and James Burney (1750–1821), familiar to readers of Lamb’s Letters as Captain and Admiral Burney, author of A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean (5 vols. 1803–1817), part of which is famous as The Buccaneers of America; Sarah Harriet Burney (1770–1844), Dr. Burney’s youngest daughter, author of Clarentine (1796) and other novels and tales; and Martin Charles Burney, Lamb’s friend, the son of Admiral Burney.

209. The most celebrated author, etc. Sir Walter Scott, created a baronet by George IV. in 1820.

Lord Byron complains. See the Preface to Marino Faliero (1820).

‘Let but a lord,’ etc. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 420–1.

210. Decorum, which Milton declares, etc. On Education, Works, 1738, I. 140.

‘Bears a charmed reputation,’ etc.

‘I bear a charmed life, which must not yield To one of woman born.’ Macbeth, Act V. Scene 8.

‘Leave no rubs,’ etc. ‘To leave no rubs nor botches in the work.’ Ib. Act III. Scene 1.

That strange letter about Pope. Byron wrote two Letters to * * * *—* * * * * * [John Murray], on the Rev. Wm. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, the first of which (referred to by Hazlitt) was published in 1821. The second did not appear till 1835. Both letters and a full account of the whole controversy are given in Byron’s Letters and Journals (ed. Prothero), V. Appendix iii.

Why did he pronounce, etc. ‘These two writers [Pope and Cowper], for Cowper is no poet, come into comparison in one great work, the translation of Homer.’ Byron’s Letters and Journals (ed. Prothero), V. 557.

‘Finding out a borrowed line,’ etc. See The Spirit of the Age, vol. IV. p. 346 and note.

A rich merchant, etc. Hazlitt perhaps refers to ‘Anastasius’ Hope, Rogers, Byron, and Burns.

‘What should such fellows,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

‘Coining our hearts,’ etc.

‘By heaven, I had rather coin my heart, And drop my blood for drachmas,’ etc. Julius Caesar, Act IV. Scene 3.

‘Sent back like hallowmas,’ etc. ‘Sent back like Hallowmas or short’st of day.’ Richard II., Act V. Scene 1.

211. ‘With wine of Attic taste,’

‘What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, Of Attic taste, with wine,’ etc. Milton, Sonnet XX. (to Mr. Lawrence).

Poor Keats. See ante, p. 99.

‘The fairest flowers,’ etc.

‘the fairest flowers o’ the season Are our carnations and streak’d gillyvors.’ Winter’s Tale, Act IV. Scene 4.

‘Rue for remembrance,’ etc. ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance: pray you, love, remember: and there’s pansies, that’s for thoughts.’ Hamlet, Act IV. Scene 5.

211. ‘Nor could the Muse,’ etc.

‘nor could the Muse defend Her son.’ Paradise Lost, VII. 37.

M—’s shop. The shop of John Murray, publisher of The Quarterly Review.

T—. Mr. W. Hazlitt, the younger, in his edition of Table Talk, filled up this blank with the name of Tom Hill (1760–1840), a well-known figure in the literary society of the time. The Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica (1815) was chiefly based on his collection of poets.

213. —, the responsible conductor, etc. Mr. W. Hazlitt, the younger, filled this blank with the name of John Britton (1771–1857), the antiquary and topographer, author or part author of many topographical works, of which The Beauties of England and Wales (1801–1816) and Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain (1805–1814) are the best known.

Learned lumber. ‘With loads of learned lumber in his head.’ Pope, Essay on Criticism, 613.

Jack T. of the Sun. John Taylor (1757–1832), proprietor of the Sun, author of Monsieur Tonson. In 1832 he published Records of my Life (2 vols.).

‘The Sun of our table.’ ‘This bottle’s the sun of our table.’ Sheridan, The Duenna, Act III. Scene 5.

Peter Pindar. Dr. John Wolcot (1738–1819), the Satirist.

Mr. Tomkins the penman. Thomas Tomkins (1743–1816), caligrapher.

Sir Joshua’s picture of him. Bequeathed by Tomkins to the City of London.

ESSAY XXII. ON CRITICISM

214. De omni scibile, etc. The origin of this saying seems obscure. See Notes and Queries, 7th Ser. IX. 500 and Larousse, Fleurs Latines, 94.

We may sometimes see articles of this sort. Hazlitt had himself suffered from this form of reviewing. See notes to Reply to Malthus, vol. IV. p. 399.

215. ‘As when a well-graced actor,’ etc. Richard II., Act V. Scene 2.

Much as Peter Pounce, etc. Joseph Andrews, Book III. Chap. 13.

‘Assumes the rod,’ etc.

‘Assumes the god, Affects to nod, And seems to shake the spheres.’ Dryden, Alexander’s Feast, 39–41.

216. The most admired of our Reviews. The Edinburgh Review.

The Monthly Review. Founded by Ralph Griffiths in 1749. The Review ran through three series and came to an end in 1845.

‘Sole sovereign sway,’ etc. Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

‘Outdoing termagant,’ etc. ‘I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

‘And of their port,’ etc. ‘And of his port as meke as is a mayde.’ Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 69.

216. Drawcansir work. See the Duke of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, Act V. Scene 1., where Drawcansir says:

‘Others may boast a single man to kill: But I the blood of thousands daily kill,’ etc.

Tristram Shandy. Tristram Shandy was violently attacked by Griffiths in The Monthly Review.

Note. Rev. Dr. Kippis. Andrew Kippis (1724–1795), Nonconformist divine and editor of the 2nd edition of Biographia Britannica (5 vols. 1778–1793).

The Monthly Review for Feb. 1751 (Vol. IV. p. 309), in its ‘Monthly Catalogue’ contained the following notice: ‘An Elegy wrote in a country churchyard. 4to. Dodsley, 6^d. Seven pages. The excellence of this little piece amply compensates for its want of quantity.’ A full review followed in June, 1753 (Vol. VIII. p. 477).

217. Dryden’s Prefaces. Dryden’s principal essays on literary subjects have recently been edited by Prof. Ker (2 vols. 1900). See also Prof. Saintsbury’s History of Criticism, vol. II. pp. 371–391.

Note. For Dryden’s comparison between Ovid and Virgil, see his Dedication of the Aeneid (1697—Essays, ed. Ker, II. 154 et seq.), and for his character of Shakespeare An Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668—ib. I. 79–80). Cf. Lectures on the English Poets, vol. V. p. 82, note.

218. Dryden had no other way, etc. Dryden’s Opera The State of Innocence, founded upon Paradise Lost, was published in 1674.

‘Graces snatched,’ etc. Pope, Essay on Criticism, 155.

219. ‘Looks commercing with the skies.’ Il Penseroso, 39.

‘The limbs and flourishes,’ etc.

‘Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,’ etc. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

As Lord Byron asserts, etc. In his Letter to John Murray, referred to above (p. 210, note), Byron says: ‘The poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of art.’ (Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V. 553).

220. Mrs. Dickons. Maria Dickons (1770?–1833) made her first appearance in London in 1793. She sang at the Drury Lane oratorios in 1813 and 1815, and retired in 1820. Like Miss Stephens (see A View of the English Stage) she played Polly in The Beggar’s Opera.

Madame Catalani. Angelica Catalani (1779–1849), the most famous prima donna of her time. She was in England in 1821 and sang ‘God Save the King’ on the 16th of July, shortly before the King’s coronation.

‘Such sweet thunder.’ Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV. Scene 1.

‘The very milk of human kindness.’ ‘It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

‘Beauty out of favour,’ etc. Hazlitt refers to Gifford’s lines on Mrs. Robinson. See A Letter to William Gifford, vol. I. p. 378 and note.

221. Like Justice Woodcock. In Bickerstaffe’s Love in a Village (1762).

Rifle the flowers, etc. See A Letter to William Gifford, vol. I.

The Great Cat Rodilardus. In Rabelais, Pantagruel, IV. 67.

‘Demure-looking,’ etc. ‘The grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers.’ Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 142.)

221. Note. Tom Jones, Book VI. chap. 14.

222. What silenced the masked battery, etc. It is now well known that Sir Walter Scott strongly disapproved of Lockhart’s connection with Blackwood’s Magazine long before the attacks of John Scott in The London Magazine for 1820 and 1821. See Mr. Lang’s Life of Lockhart (vol. I. chap, ix.), for an account of the whole matter.

‘Pilloried on infamy’s high stage.’ Cowper, Hope, 556.

223. The controversy about Pope. The controversy on the question as to whether or not Pope was a poet began with the publication of Bowles’s edition of Pope’s Works (10 vols. 1806) and had recently reached an acute stage in consequence of Byron’s letter to John Murray. See Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, V. 522–592, where a full account is given of the whole controversy. Hazlitt had contributed to The Edinburgh Magazine (Feb. 1818) an essay ‘On the question whether Pope was a poet’ reproduced with a few alterations in his lecture on Dryden and Pope (see vol. V. pp. 69 et seq.), and to The London Magazine (June, 1821) a long essay (republished for the first time in the present edition) entitled ‘Pope, Lord Byron, and Mr. Bowles.’

224. ‘Crib and cabin in,’ ‘Now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confined.’ Macbeth, Act III. Scene 4.

‘Lack-lustre eye.’ As You Like It, Act II. Scene 7.

The late Joseph Fawcett. Hazlitt frequently refers to this early friend. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I. 75–79. Fawcett was well known as a Sunday evening lecturer at the old Jewry, and published some volumes of Sermons and Poems. He died in 1804, and it was at one time reported that Hazlitt intended to write his life.

‘I have heard my mother Circe,’ etc. Comus, ll. 252 et seq.

‘Heard others read their own.’ Hazlitt no doubt refers to Wordsworth and Coleridge.

225. He was not exceptious. Hazlitt elsewhere complains of Lamb for being what he here describes as ‘exceptious.’ See The Plain Speaker, ‘On the Conversation of Authors.’

‘That had I all knowledge,’ etc. See I Corinthians, xiii. 1 and 2.

The Occult School. Hazlitt clearly refers to Coleridge. See The Plain Speaker, (‘On the Conversation of Authors’), where he says: ‘C— [Coleridge] withholds his tribute of applause from every person in whom any mortal but himself can descry the least glimpse of understanding,’ etc.

226. ‘An ounce of sour,’ etc. ‘A dram of sweete is worth a pound of sowre,’ The Faerie Queene, Book I. Canto III. Stanza 30.

Caviare to the multitude. ‘’Twas caviare to the general.’ Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

Verbal critics, etc. Such as Gifford. Cf. A Letter to William Gifford, vol. I. p. 368.

Note. See Ib. note to p. 368.

ESSAY XXII. ON GREAT AND LITTLE THINGS

Published in The New Monthly Magazine (1822), vol. IV. p. 127, under the title of ‘Table Talk No. II.’

‘These little things,’ etc. Goldsmith, The Traveller, l. 42.

227. ‘Some trick not worth an egg.’ Coriolanus, Act IV. Scene 4. Paper in the Tatler. No. 79 (by Steele).

229. ‘Anon as patient,’ etc. Hamlet, Act V. Scene 1.

The swaggering of Pistol. See especially the Second Part of Henry IV.

King Cambyses’ vein. Henry IV., Part I. Act II. Scene 4.

230. Si Pergama dextra, etc. Aeneid, II. 291–2.

230. Note. That is, shortly before Napoleon’s death on May 5, 1821.

232. The maxim, which the wise man, etc. ‘For, as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, “That that is is,”’ etc. Twelfth Night, Act IV. Scene 2.

When L—’s farce, etc. Lamb’s farce Mr. H— was performed at Drury Lane on December 10, 1806.

Gentleman Lewis. William Thomas Lewis (1748?–1811), ‘Gentleman Lewis,’ belonged to ‘the other House,’ Covent Garden.

The Prologue. Spoken by Elliston who would have tried the farce again.

The Travellers. By Andrew Cherry (1762–1812), first produced at Drury Lane on January 22, 1806.

‘Wit-skirmishes.’ See ante, note to p. 193.

233. ‘Subject to all the skyey influences.’ ‘Servile to all the skyey influences.’ Measure for Measure, Act III. Scene 1,

234. ‘Pleased with a feather,’ etc. ‘Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.’ Pope’s Essay on Man, II. 276.

Will Wimble. See The Spectator, No. 108 (by Addison).

Some poets compose and sing their own verses. Moore, for example.

235. ‘Misfortune,’ etc. ‘Misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows.’ The Tempest, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Take care of the pence,’ etc. Quoted by Lord Chesterfield (Letters to his Son, Nov. 6, 1747, and Feb. 5, 1750) as the saying of ‘a very covetous sordid fellow,’ William Lowndes, Secretary of the Treasury 1695–1724.

But shouldst thou ever, my Infelice, etc. An invocation to Sarah Walker. See Liber Amoris, vol. II.

236. Madame V—. Madame Vestris (1797–1856), the famous actress, afterwards the wife of the younger Mathews.

A gallery equal to Cowley’s. See Cowley’s The Chronicle, A Ballad.

Mr. Davison. Thomas Davison, of Whitefriars, printer of the first edition of Table Talk.

236. D’un pathétique, etc. ‘Nous nous écrivions d’un pathétique à faire fendre les rochers.’ Rousseau, Confessions, Liv. I.

‘Hunt the wind,’ etc. See ante, note to p. 97.

237. The Death of Clorinda. From a picture of Lodovic Lana. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt (Table Talk, p. 331) says that the copy was made in 1802. It is still in his possession.

238. They succeed best in fiction. Cf. Vol. III., note to p. 49.

Berenice’s locks and Ariadne’s crown. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt quotes:

‘We put on Berenice’s hair, And sit in Cassiopeia’s chair.’ Dixon’s Canidia, or The Witches.

‘Ariadne’s crowne and Cassiopeia’s chayre.’ Randolph’s Poems, 1640, p. 14.

Cf. also:

‘Not Berenice’s locks first rose so bright.’ Pope, Rape of the Lock, v. 129.

‘Anthony Codrus Urceus,’ etc. This paragraph is taken from a paper in the Round Table Series (No. 9, The Examiner, Feb. 26, 1815) which was republished in Winterslow (1839) under the title of ‘Mind and Motive.’

239. The Story of Sir Isaac Newton. The story is familiar, but the dog’s name was ‘Diamond.’

240. ‘Like the fly on the wheel.’ Æsop’s Fables (No. 270).

241. Mr. Bone’s enamels. Henry Bone (1755–1834), the celebrated painter on enamel, elected R.A. in 1811. He executed eighty-five ‘Portraits of Illustrious Englishmen’ copied from pictures in the royal and other collections.

Denner. See ante, p. 133.

243. ‘First row of the rubric.’ See ante, note to p. 205 note.

ESSAY XXIV. ON FAMILIAR STYLE

A few variations of the text from the MS. are given in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s edition of Table Talk.

245. His papers under the signature of Elia. In The London Magazine. The first, ‘Recollections of the South Sea House,’ appeared in August 1820.

Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist. The London Magazine, Feb. 1821.

‘A well of native English undefiled.’

‘Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, On Fame’s eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.’ Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book IV. Canto ii. Stanza 32.

Erasmus’s Colloquies. The Colloquia, which appeared in 1519.

246. ‘What do you read?’ etc. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

Sermo humi obrepens. Cf.

‘Nec sermones ego mallem Repentes per humum quam res componere gestas.’ Horace, Epistles, II. i. 250–1.

‘Ambition is more lowly.’ Cf.

‘My affections Are then most humble; I have no ambition To see a goodlier man.’ The Tempest, Act I. Scene 2.

‘Unconsidered trifles.’ A Winter’s Tale, Act IV. Scene 3.

‘That strut,’ etc. Macbeth, Act V. Scene 5.

‘‘And on their pens,’ etc. Cf.

‘And on his crest Sat Horror plumed.’ Paradise Lost, IV. 988–9.

247. ‘Nature’s own sweet,’ etc. Twelfth Night, Act I. Scene 5.

248. Cowper’s description.

‘’Twas transient in its nature, as in show ’Twas durable: as worthless as it seemed Intrinsically precious; to the foot Treacherous and false; it smiled, and it was cold.’ The Task, V. 173–6.

ESSAY XXV. ON EFFEMINACY OF CHARACTER

248. ‘The gossamer,’ etc.

‘the gossamer That idles in the wanton summer air.’ Romeo and Juliet, Act II. Scene 6.

‘Rolls o’er Elysian flowers,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 359.

249. ‘Die of a rose,’ etc. Pope, Essay on Man, I. 200.

‘Oh, leave me to my repose.’ See ante, note to p. 71.

‘They shall discourse,’ etc. Cymbeline, Act III. Scene 3.

‘Bide the pelting,’ etc. King Lear, Act III. Scene 4.

‘They take no thought,’ etc. St. Matthew, vi. 34.

‘Get up to be hanged.’ Measure for Measure, Act IV. Scene 3.

250. ‘A cell of ignorance.’ Cymbeline, Act III. Scene 3.

‘Oh! blindness,’ etc. Pope, Essay on Man, I. 85–6.

251. ‘And let us muse,’ etc. Wordsworth, Lines written while sailing in a boat at evening (published in the Lyrical Ballads, 1798), ll. 13–16.

But oh thou! Hazlitt apostrophises Coleridge. See the essay, ‘My first acquaintance with Poets.’

253. ‘A dish of skimmed milk.’ Henry IV., Part I. Act II. Scene 3.

‘A generous friendship,’ etc. Pope, Homer’s Iliad, IX. 725–6.

254. ‘Calm, peaceable writers.’ Dryden. An Essay of Dramatic Poesy. (Essays, ed. Ker, I. 31.)

255. ‘‘Vernal delight and joy.’ Paradise Lost, IV. 155.

‘‘Like Maia’s son,’ etc. Ib., V. 285–6.

ESSAY XXVI. WHY DISTANT OBJECTS PLEASE

‘Descry new lands,’ etc. Paradise Lost, I. 290–1.

Ethereal mould, sky-tinctured. Phrases borrowed without acknowledgment from Milton (Paradise Lost, II. 139, and V. 285).

‘But thou, oh Hope,’ etc. Collins, The Passions, 29–32.

256. I lived within sight, etc. At Wem, in Shropshire, within sight of the Welsh hills. Cf. a passage in the first paragraph of ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets.’

‘Yarrow unvisited.’ Wordsworth’s three poems, Yarrow Unvisited, Yarrow Visited, and Yarrow Revisited, were published in 1807, 1814, and 1835 respectively.

‘Unmould their essence.’ Cf. ‘Unmoulding reason’s mintage.’ Comus, 529.

‘A mighty stream of tendency.’ Wordsworth, The Excursion, IX. 87.

‘A tide in the affairs of men.’ Julius Caesar, Act IV. Scene 3.

‘With sails and tackle torn.’ ‘Though shrouds and tackle torn.’ Paradise Lost, II. 1044.

‘Such tricks hath,’ etc. Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V. Scene 1.

257. ‘Hangs upon the beatings,’ etc. Wordsworth, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, 54.

‘Come thronging soft desires.’ ‘Come thronging soft and delicate desires.’ Much Ado About Nothing, Act I. Scene 1.

‘Bring back the hour,’ etc. Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality.

‘That first garden of my innocence.’ ‘In that first garden of our simplenesse.’ Daniel, Hymen’s Triumph.

258. ‘Like the sweet south.’ Twelfth Night, Act I. Scene 1.

W—m. Wem.

258. ‘Thing of life.’ ‘She walks the waters like a thing of life,’ Byron, The Corsair, Canto I. Scene 3.

‘Like some gay creature,’ etc. Comus, 299.

Mr. Leigh Hunt has treated it, etc. In an essay entitled ‘A nearer view of some of the shops,’ The Indicator (1850 edition), Part I. p. 81. The Indicator ran from Oct. 13, 1819, to March 21, 1821.

259. After an interval of thirty years. See Introduction, vol. I. p. 9.

‘How silver-sweet,’ etc. Romeo and Juliet, Act II. Scene 2.

Note. Wilkie’s Blind Fiddler. In the National Gallery.

260. ‘Like an exhalation,’ etc. ‘Rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,’ Comus, 556.

Mr. Fearn’s Essay. See ante, pp. 63–65.

263. ‘There’s sympathy.’ The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II. Scene 1.

—, the editor of a Scotch magazine. The reference here and three lines below seems to be to Lockhart, who was accused of being editor of Blackwood’s Magazine. See Mr. Lang’s Life of Lockhart, vol. I. chap. ix.

‘Those faultless monsters,’ etc. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, Essay on Poetry.

‘The web of our lives,’ etc. All’s Well that Ends Well, Act IV. Scene 3.

ESSAY XXVII. ON CORPORATE BODIES

Many instances of variation between the MS. and the text of this essay are given by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in his edition of Table Talk. ‘The MS. and the printed copy’ (he says, p. 380) ‘scarcely correspond in two consecutive words.’

264. ‘Corporate bodies have no soul.’ ‘They [corporations] cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed nor excommunicate, for they have no souls.’ Sir Edward Coke, Case of Sutton’s Hospital, 10 Rep. 32.

‘Self-love and social.’ Pope, Essay on Man, IV. 396.

‘A pestilent fellow.’ Cf. ‘What a pestilent slave is this same!’ Romeo and Juliet, Act IV. Scene 5.

265. The town-hall reels, etc. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt says that ‘it appears from a rough memorandum on the back of one of the leaves of the MS. that the Mayor’s Feast at Basingstoke was in the writer’s mind when he wrote this,’

‘The very stones prate.’ Macbeth, Act II. Scene 1.

‘Dressed in a little brief authority.’ Measure for Measure, Act II. Scene 2.

266. ‘Compunctious visitings,’ etc. Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

‘Motley’s his proper wear.’ ‘Motley’s the only wear.’ As You Like It, Act II. Scene 7.

‘Diseases are turned,’ etc. Henry IV., Part II. Act I. Scene 2.

Note. ‘Sacred pity,’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 7.

267. ‘Disembowel himself,’ etc. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 101).

268. Hitherto, etc. Job, xxxviii. 11.

‘In spite of,’ etc. ‘And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite.’ Pope, Essay on Man, I. 293.

270. The Barrys, etc. James Barry (1741–1806) quarrelled with his brother Academicians and was expelled in 1799; Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846), to whom Hazlitt probably refers as ‘H—,’ also quarrelled with the Royal Academy, and was never made a member; Charles Cotton (1728–1798), coach-painter to George III., was by him nominated one of the foundation members of the Academy.

270. ‘Wipes out,’ etc. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 5.

‘The Raphael grace,’ etc. Cf. Tristram Shandy, III. 12.

‘Must live within,’ etc. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 5.

‘Dandled,’ etc. ‘I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator.’ Burke, A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 124).

Sir Thomas Lawrence, etc. Lawrence had been commissioned to paint the members of the Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, and had afterwards visited Rome. He returned to England in 1820.

Mr. Dawe. George Dawe (1781–1829) who went to Russia in 1819 and painted for the Emperor a great number of portraits. Lamb contributed an account of him to _The Englishman’s Magazine_ (Sept. 1831) entitled _Recollections of A Late Royal Academician_.

Mr. Canning somewhere, etc. See his Speeches on the occasion of his reelection at Liverpool, March, 1820.

271. ‘All honourable men.’ Julius Caesar, Act III. Scene 2.

ESSAY XXVIII. WHETHER ACTORS OUGHT TO SIT IN THE BOXES

‘By his so potent art.’ The Tempest, Act V. Scene 1.

272. ‘Pile millions,’ etc.

‘Be buried quick with her, and so will I: And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us,’ etc. Hamlet, Act V. Scene 1.

273. Mr. Matthews, in his ‘At Home.’ Probably Hazlitt refers to ‘The Trip to Paris,’ by James Smith and John Poole, Mathews’s second At Home, produced in 1819.

‘O’er the stage,’ etc.

‘Dread o’er the scene, the ghost of Hamlet stalks; Othello rages; poor Monimia mourns; And Belvidera pours her soul in love.’ Thomson, The Seasons, Winter, 646–8.

‘No; let him pass,’ etc.

‘Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer.’ King Lear, Act V. Scene 3.

Abel Drugger. In Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, one of Garrick’s great parts.

274. ‘Sir, do you think,’ etc. ‘Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?’ Hamlet, Act V. Scene 1.

‘With a bare bodkin.’ Ib., Act III. Scene 1.

‘Steal most guilty-like away.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

Omne ignotum, etc. Tacitus, Agricola, XXX.

‘A voice potential.’ Othello, Act I. Scene 2.

‘Shuffled off,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

Aut Caesar, etc. The motto of Caesar Borgia.

‘That players may jet through.’ Adapted from Cymbeline, Act III. Scene 3.

The top-tragedian. John Philip Kemble.

274. Him with the falcon eye. Coriolanus, perhaps, one of Kemble’s most famous parts.

275. ‘The graves yawn,’ etc. A composite quotation from Much Ado About Nothing (Act V. Scene 3) and Macbeth (Act III. Scene 4).

The Copper Captain, etc. In Fletcher’s Rule a Wife and have a Wife; Bobadil, in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour; Ranger, in Hoadly’s The Suspicious Husband; Young Rapid, in Morton’s A Cure for the Heart-Ache; Lord Foppington, in Vanbrugh’s The Relapse.

‘My brain would have been,’ etc. ‘I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, mine are more like a smoke-jack!’ Tristram Shandy, vol. III. chap. 18.

‘Then sweet,’ etc. ‘Then sweet, now sad to mention.’ Paradise Lost, II. 820.

Mrs. Garrick. Mrs. Garrick died in 1822 at the age of 98.

276. ‘A little more than kin,’ etc. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 2.

277. ‘Instinct with fire.’ Paradise Lost, II. 937.

278. Sterne’s stop-watch. Tristram Shandy, vol. III. chap. 12.

‘Cried out upon,’ etc. Cf. ‘An eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question.’ Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

Note. See The Spectator, No. 235. Mr. Smirke, afterwards Sir Robert Smirke (1781–1867) rebuilt Covent Garden Theatre (1809), and Benjamin Dean Wyatt (1775–1850?) rebuilt Drury Lane Theatre (1811). Hazlitt implies that at both theatres the galleries commanded an imperfect view of the stage. At Covent Garden this was one of the grievances which led to the O. P. riots of 1809.

279. Grimaldi. Joseph Grimaldi (1779–1837).

ESSAY XXIX. ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF INTELLECTUAL SUPERIORITY

280. Petrarch complains, etc. In the sonnet lamenting the death of Laura, beginning ‘Gli occhi di ch’ io parlai si caldamente.’

‘To be honest,’ etc. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

‘How now,’ etc. Henry VI. Part II., Act IV. Scene 2.

‘Stand all astonied,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book vii. Canto VI. Stanza 28.

281. C—. Coleridge.

283. Otium cum dignitate. Cicero, Pro Publio Sextio, XLV.

‘I am nothing,’ etc. Othello, Act II. Scene 1.

284. In the —. The Quarterly Review.

‘This is the unkindest,’ etc. ‘This was the most unkindest cut of all!’ Julius Cæsar, Act III. Scene 2.

Prince Maurice’s Parrot, etc. These two papers were published in Political Essays, vol. III. pp. 101 and 305.

285. A motto from Butler.

‘Yet he that is but able to express No sense at all in several languages, Will pass for learneder than he that’s known, etc. Butler, Satire upon the Abuse of Human Learning, ll. 65–7.

L—. Lamb.

L. H. Leigh Hunt.

A person of this over-weening turn. Probably Leigh Hunt, his friend S— being Shelley.

285. Count Stendhal. Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842).

‘Germane to the matter.’ Hamlet, Act V. Scene 2.

My answers to Vetus. Contributed to The Morning Chronicle in 1813 and republished in Political Essays. See vol. III.

286. Digito monstrari. Horace, Odes, IV. iii. 22.

Mr. Powell’s court. In St. Martin’s Street. Cf. ante, p. 88.

Mr. Knight’s performance of Filch. For reference to Edward Knight (‘Little Knight’) and for Hazlitt’s remark on Simmons’s Filch, see the volume containing dramatic criticisms. The article in The Examiner appeared on Nov. 6, 1815.

One Cavanagh. See ante, pp. 86–89.

A character of him. See Political Essays, vol. III. p, 325.

287. ‘Lively, audible,’ etc. ‘It’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent.’ Coriolanus, Act IV. Scene 5.

The conversation between Angelica and Foresight. Love for Love, Act II. Scene 3.

‘So shalt thou find me,’ etc. Sardanapalus, Act IV. Scene 1.

288. Scholars should be sworn at Highgate. See Brand’s Popular Antiquities, II. 195. Part of the oath taken by the person sworn was ‘never to kiss the maid when he could kiss the mistress.’

‘Not pierceable,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book I. Canto I. Stanza 7.

‘To succeed at the gaming-table,’ etc. The sentiment is Peachum’s. See The Beggar’s Opera, Act I. Scene 1.

‘To have a good face,’ etc. ‘To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.’ Much Ado About Nothing, Act III. Scene 3.

ESSAY XXX. ON PATRONAGE AND PUFFING

289. ‘A gentle husher,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book I. Canto iv. Stanza 13.

‘Puff direct.’ Sheridan, The Critic, Act I. Scene 2.

290. Groundling. ‘To split the ears of the groundlings.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

291. Parolles and his drum. All’s Well that Ends Well.

Another friend of mine. Lamb.

Even Lord Byron, etc. Byron was said to have written puffs of Warren’s Blacking. See W. F. Deacon’s volume of parodies, Warreniana (1824).

‘Deathless date.’ Cf. ‘Short is my date, but deathless my renown.’ Pope, Homer’s Iliad, IX. 535.

292. When I formerly, etc. For the matters referred to in this and the two succeeding paragraphs, cf. the volume containing Hazlitt’s dramatic criticisms.

Poor Perry. James Perry (1756–1821), editor and proprietor of The Morning Chronicle. See Hazlitt’s A View of the English Stage for his article on Miss Stephens as Polly.

Mrs. Billington. Elizabeth Billington (1768–1818), the great singer.

‘Life knows no return of spring.’ The song (Act II. Scene 1) begins ‘Let us drink and sport to-day.’

‘My final hopes,’ etc. A characteristic reference to the fall of Napoleon.

293. ‘Hope, thou nurse,’ etc. Bickerstaffe’s Love in a Village, Act I. Scene 1.

‘Bought golden opinions,’ etc. Macbeth, Act I. Scene 7.

‘On such a day,’ etc. Merchant of Venice, Act I. Scene 3.

Note. Mr. M—. William Mudford. See ante, p. 111.

Note. ‘Liked you lean,’ etc. Cf. ‘Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.’ Julius Caesar, Act I. Scene 2.

294. Master Betty’s acting. See The Spirit of the Age, vol. IV. p. 233.

‘Some gay creature,’ etc. Comus, 299.

‘And in my mind,’ etc. Home’s Douglas, Act IV. Scene 1.

Enfield’s Speaker. William Enfield’s The Speaker, or Miscellaneous Pieces selected from the best English Writers, originally published in 1774 and frequently reprinted.

Mrs. Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest. See English Comic Writers, vol. VIII. p. 125.

Coleridge returned from Italy. In August, 1806.

295. Katterfelto.

‘And Katterfelto, with his hair on end At his own wonders, wondering for his bread.’ Cowper, The Task, IV. 86–87.

296. ‘It only is when,’ etc. ‘’Twas only that, when he was off, he was acting.’ Goldsmith, Retaliation, 102.

‘Do me your offices.’ Henry IV., Part II., Act II. Scene 1.

Mr. N—. Northcote.

297. ‘The first row of the rubric.’ See ante, note to p. 205 note.

298. ‘All the world’s a stage,’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 7.

‘Some followers of mine own.’ Richard III., Act III. Scene 7.

299. ‘Holloa, you pampered jades,’ etc. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part II., Act IV. Scene 4.

‘Cry him up,’ etc. Cf. ante, p. 278.

Rari nantes, etc. Aeneid, I. 118.

300. ‘Aiery of children,’ etc. Cf. ante, note to p. 278.

301. Dr. Johnson was asked, etc. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (ed. G. B. Hill), IV. 116.

302. Beechey. Sir William Beechey (1753–1839), portrait painter to Queen Charlotte.

Note. Sharp. Michael William Sharp (d. 1840) a pupil of Beechey.

ESSAY XXXI. ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHARACTER

303. ‘Speech,’ said a celebrated wit, etc. Hazlitt probably refers to Voltaire (Le Chapon et la Poularde), but the saying is older.

Lord Chesterfield advises us, etc. See note to vol. I. p. 42.

Note. Othello, Act III. Scene 4.

304. A rude half-effaced outline, etc. The portrait of Donne by W. Marshall, taken from a painting in 1591, when Donne was 18.

The Duke of W—. The Duke of Wellington.

305. C—’s face. Coleridge.

‘Create a soul,’ etc. Comus, 562.

A little, demure, etc. Sarah Walker, the heroine of Liber Amoris.

306. I know a person. Hazlitt himself.

‘Compliments extern.’ Othello, Act I. Scene 1.

307. ‘If the French have a fault,’ etc. A Sentimental Journey, Character, Versailles.

309. Service is no inheritance. ‘Service is no heritage.’ All’s Well that Ends Well, Act I. Scene 3.

‘Subtle as the fox,’ etc. Cymbeline, Act III. Scene 3.

310. ‘Bitter bad judges.’ The Beggar’s Opera, Act I. Scene 1.

I never knew but one clever man, etc. Leigh Hunt?

310. ‘The way of woman’s will, etc.’ Cf. Samson Agonistes, 1011–13.

311. Oh! thou, etc. Sarah Walker.

312. The son, for instance, etc. Hazlitt is clearly speaking of his own experience.

‘Rembrandts,’ etc. ‘Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff.’ Goldsmith, Retaliation, 145.

‘Infinite agitation,’ etc. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book I., IV. 5.

314. ‘In the trade of war.’ Othello, I., 2.

‘So as with a difference.’ Cf. ante, note to p. 202.

‘Pure defecated evil.’ Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 141).

‘Whatever is, is right.’ Pope, Essay on Man, I., 294.

‘Amen stuck in his throat.’ Macbeth, Act II. Scene 2.

‘No malice in the case,’ etc. The Beggar’s Opera, Act I. Scene 1.

Remorse. See Osorio, of which Remorse was a recast. Works, (ed. J. D. Campbell), p. 496.

315. ‘I count myself,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

316. ‘Who knew all qualities,’ etc. Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

ESSAY XXXII. ON THE PICTURESQUE AND IDEAL

318. Mr. Northcote’s study of Gadshill. Cf. Conversations of Northcote, ante, p. 403.

‘Of no mark,’ etc. Henry IV., Part I. Act III. Scene 2.

319. The Marriage of Cana. The Marriage at Cana in the Louvre.

Madame M—. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt fills this blank with the name of Mérimée. When Hazlitt went to Paris in 1802 he took with him a letter of introduction from Holcroft to Mérimée the painter, whose son Prosper was born in the following year, 1803.

320. ‘See how the moonlight,’ etc. Merchant of Venice, Act V. Scene 1.

321. ‘My bounty,’ etc. Romeo and Juliet, Act II. Scene 2.

ESSAY XXXIII. ON THE FEAR OF DEATH

‘And our little life,’ etc. The Tempest, Act IV. Scene 1.

322. When Bickerstaff wrote his essays. In The Tatler, 1709–11.

The firing at Bunker’s hill. June 17, 1775.

‘The gorge rises at.’ Hamlet, Act V. Scene 1.

323. ‘The wars,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book II. Canto IX. Stanza 56.

‘The present eye,’ etc. ‘The present eye praises the present object.’ Troilus and Cressida, Act III. Scene 3.

324. ‘Makes calamity,’ etc. HAMLET, Act III. Scene 1.

‘Oh! thou strong heart,’ etc. Webster’s The White Devil; or Vittoria Corombona, Act V. Scene 1.

‘Content man’s natural desire.’ ‘To be, contents his natural desire.’ Pope, Essay on Man, I. 109.

‘On this bank,’ etc. Macbeth, Act I. Scene 1.

‘This sensible,’ etc. Measure for Measure, Act III. Scene 1.

‘Turns to withered,’ etc. Paradise Lost, XI. 540.

Note. Young’s Night Thoughts, I. 424.

325. ‘The sear, the yellow leaf.’ Macbeth, Act V. Scene 3.

Gone into the wastes of time. ‘That thou among the wastes of time must go.’ Shakespeare, Sonnet No. XII.

326. Zanetto, etc. Rousseau’s Confessions, Part II. liv. 7.

326. I have never seen death but once. See MEMOIRS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT, I. 170.

At my breast. A paragraph in the MS. of this essay is here omitted:

‘I did not see my father after he was dead, but I saw death shake him by the palsied hand, and stare him in the face. He made as good an end as Falstaff; though different as became him. After repeating the name of his R(edeemer) often, he took my mother’s hand, and, looking up, put it in my sister’s, and so expired. There was something graceful and gracious in his nature, which showed itself in his last act.’

Chantry’s monument, etc. Chantrey’s ‘Sleeping Children’ in Lichfield Cathedral.

327. ‘Still from the tomb,’ etc. Gray’s Elegy, 91–2.

328. ‘A little rule,’ etc. Dyer’s Grongar Hill, 89–92.

‘A great man’s memory,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

329. ‘At a pin’s fee.’ Ib., Act I. Scene 4.

‘Sea-sick, weary bark,’ etc. Romeo and Juliet, Act V. Scene 3.

‘To lose it afterwards,’ etc.

‘To lose it, may be, at last in a lewd quarrel For some new friend.’ Otway, Venice Preserved, Act IV. Scene 2.

MR. NORTHCOTE’S CONVERSATIONS

James Northcote (1746–1831), was the son of Samuel Northcote, a Plymouth watchmaker. He was brought to the notice of Sir Joshua Reynolds by the Mudges of Plymouth (see note to p. 366). Sir Joshua befriended him and he sat as one of the figures in Ugolino. After study in London and abroad he began to acquire reputation as a portrait-painter. He exhibited at the Royal Academy first in 1781, and of that body he was elected an Associate in 1786, and an Academician on Feb. 13, 1787. He painted many historical and sacred subjects, but his reputation will rest upon his portraits, many of which may be seen in the National Portrait Gallery. He wrote the Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1813–15) wherein several of the anecdotes which occur in the conversations first appear, and was helped in two other pieces of literary work by Hazlitt, viz., The Life of Titian, with Anecdotes of the Distinguished Persons of his Time (1830), and One Hundred Fables, Original and Selected (1828), the wood-cuts to which, by William Harvey, from Northcote’s designs, are of value with respect to the art of English wood-engraving. A Second Series was issued in 1833, after his death. He spoke Devonshire all his life and never married. See Memorials of an Eighteenth Century Painter (James Northcote): by Stephen Gwynn, 1898; Conversations of James Northcote, R.A., with James Ward on Art and Artists: edited by Ernest Fletcher, 1901; P. G. Patmore’s My Friends and Acquaintances; Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Old Age of Artists’ in The Plain Speaker; Ruskin’s Præterita; and The Examiner, May 4th, 1833.

The circumstances under which the ‘Conversations’ were reported and printed will be found set forth in the ‘Memoirs of William Hazlitt,’ vol. II. pp. 198–213. After six issues had appeared in The New Monthly Magazine a Mr. Rosdew protested on behalf of the Mudges against some remarks that appeared therein. The passages, which are given below in the Notes for the first time since they appeared in the Magazine (they were omitted when Hazlitt collected the papers for a volume), may explain this protest. The publication of further issues seems to have been stopped by the Editor, Thomas Campbell. Four Conversations (see note to p. 394), were contributed to Richardson’s London Weekly Review, and their existence there does not seem to have been noted until the present edition. Their publication was transferred to The Atlas (see note to p. 420), and finished therein. Unfortunately, the British Museum file of The Atlas is defective, and it has not so far been possible to check every ‘Conversation’ with its first appearance in magazine form. Where possible, however, this has been done, and a few passages are given below which were not reprinted by Hazlitt.

333. Conversations I.-VI. first appeared in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal. They begin in vol. 17, 1826, Part II. ‘Original Papers,’ under the title of ‘Boswell Redivivus’ and may be found as follows:—

No. I. August vol. 17 No. 68 „ II. September „ „ „ 69 „ III. October „ „ „ 70 „ IV. November „ „ „ 71 „ V. February „ 19 „ 74 (1827, ‘Original Papers,’ Part I.) „ VI. March „ „ „ 75

The motto (‘The precepts here,’ etc.) appears at the head of No. I.

The following explanatory footnote was not reproduced when the Conversations were published in volume form:—

‘I differ from my great original and predecessor (James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck), in this, that whereas he is supposed to have invented nothing, I have feigned whatever I pleased. I have forgotten, mistaken, mis-stated, altered, transposed a number of things. All that can be relied upon for certain is a striking anecdote or a sterling remark or two in each page. These belong as a matter of right to my principal speaker: the rest I have made for him by interpolating or paraphrasing what he said. My object was to catch the tone and manner, rather than to repeat the exact expressions, or even opinions; just as it is possible to recognise the voice of an acquaintance without distinguishing the particular words he uses. Sometimes I have allowed an acute or a severe remark to stand without the accompanying softenings or explanations, for the sake of effect; and at other times added whole passages without any foundation, to fill up space. For instance, there is a dissertation on pp. 75–6, the particulars and the Tory turn of which are entirely my own. My friend Mr. N— is a determined Whig. I have, however, generally taken him as my lay-figure or model, and worked upon it, selon mon gré, by fancying how he would express himself on any occasion, and making up a conversation according to this preconception in my mind. I have also introduced little incidental details that never happened; thus, by lying, giving a greater air of truth to the scene—an art understood by most historians! In a word, Mr. N— is only answerable for the wit, sense, and spirit, there may be in these papers: I take all the dullness, impertinence, and malice upon myself. He has furnished the text—I fear I have often spoiled it by the commentary. Or (to give it a more favourable turn) I have expanded him into a book, as another friend[98] has continued the history of the Honeycombs down to the present period. My Dialogues are done much upon the same principle as the Family Journal: I shall be more than satisfied if they are thought to possess but half the spirit and verisimilitude,’

‘J. B. R.’

333. Cosway. Richard Cosway, R.A. (1740–1821), painter in water-colour, oil and miniature.

Miss Reynolds. Frances Reynolds (1729–1807), youngest sister of Sir Joshua. She also was an artist and wrote an ‘Essay on Taste’ of which Dr. Johnson thought highly.

Burying Lord Byron in Poet’s Corner. The application of Lord Byron’s relatives that he should be buried in Westminster Abbey was refused, and he lies in the church of Hucknall-Torkard, near Newstead. The Abbey would not receive even his statue by Thorwaldsen, which is now in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

334. Hoppner. John Hoppner, R.A. (1758–1810). He and Sir Thomas Lawrence took the places of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Romney as fashionable portrait painters.

G—. William Godwin (1756–1836). ‘His daughter’ would probably be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who returned to England after Shelley’s death. As the initial occurs constantly throughout the Conversations it will save some repetition in the notes if for G— Godwin is always understood, except where otherwise stated.

H—. Leigh Hunt. His Recollections of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries appeared in 1828, but this Conversation appeared in the New Monthly Magazine in 1826. In the Magazine the initial is F— not H—.

Mr. S—. Shelley.

Like the tree in Virgil. Aeneid, III. 37–40.

Mr. Moore has just written a book. Moore’s Life of Byron was published in 1830. This note was added when the Conversations were collected into a volume.

336. H—. For Benjamin Robert Haydon, historical painter (1786–1846) see the volume containing Hazlitt’s art criticism.

Fuseli. Heinrich Fuessly, or Henry Fuseli, portrait painter and art critic (1741–1825).

W—. Wordsworth. The name is given in full in the Magazine.

337. Armed all in proof. Richard III., Act V. Scene 3.

Stat nominis umbra. ‘Stat magni nominis umbra.’ Lucan, Pharsalia, I. 135.

Tom Paine. The opposition to Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–1792) was so great that it involved those circulating it in imprisonment. Paine’s escape to Paris saved him.

338. Dr. Watts ... the encomiums passed on him by Dr. Johnson. See Dr. Johnson’s Letter to Mr. Edward Dilly, July 7, 1777: ‘his name has long been held by me in veneration.... I wish to distinguish Watts, a man who never wrote but for a good purpose.’

339. Mr. Northcote ... a portrait of himself. A portrait of Northcote, painted by himself in 1821, is in the National Portrait Gallery. There are two or three others in existence.

340. West, Barry. Benjamin West (1738–1820), historical painter, and James Barry (1741–1806), whom Allan Cunningham described as ‘the greatest enthusiast in art which this country ever produced.’

341. Boaden. (B. in the Magazine.) James Boaden (1762–1839), dramatic critic and author of lives of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons.

341. Henderson. John Henderson (1747–1785), the ‘Bath Roscius.’

342. Master Betty. William Henry West Betty or the Young Roscius (1791–1874) who began to act at the age of eleven. Pitt adjourned the House of Commons to enable the members to see his impersonation of Hamlet. See Vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, p. 233 and note. Northcote painted his portrait.

Humphreys (the artist). The remark was probably made by Ozias Humphry (1742–1810); ‘Master Betty’ acted as a boy eight years before Humphry’s death, and the conversation is concerned with Betty’s acting when a boy. See also Conversations of James Northcote, R.A., with James Ward, page 86: ‘Can you tell me,’ said Ward, ‘if Betty the boy-actor—the young Roscius—was as extraordinary as some people have represented, for I myself never had an opportunity of seeing him act?’ ‘His gracefulness,’ replied Northcote, ‘was exquisite; I never saw anything like it before. When Humphry saw him, he cried out, “Oh, ’tis the young Apollo come down from his pedestal!”’ The only doubt lies in the fact that Humphry’s eyesight seems to have failed in 1797.

Mr. Harley. George Davies Harley (Davies was his real name), author and actor, who never rose above useful work, and who died in 1811. He wrote ‘An Authentic Biographical Sketch of the Life, Education, and Personal Character of William Henry West Betty, the Celebrated Young Roscius’ (1802).

Alexander the Great. The sub-title of Nat. Lee’s tragedy (1655–1692) The Rival Queens (1677).

Romney. George Romney (1734–1802), portrait painter. Lord Thurlow said that the town was divided into two factions—Romney and Reynolds.

343. Opie. John Opie (1761–1807), portrait and historical painter, of Cornish birth. He was discovered by Dr. Wolcot (Peter Pindar), himself a west-countryman.

Miss C—. Possibly Miss Cotterell. See note to p. 450.

345. Gandy. William Gandy (born second half seventeenth century, d. 1729), portrait painter. He was the son of James Gandy, also a portrait painter (1619–1689). See ante, p. 21 and note.

Hudson. Thomas Hudson, portrait painter (1701–1779), the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Mengs. Anton Rafael Mengs, of Bohemian birth (1728–1779), portrait and fresco painter.

The Duke of Ormond. James Butler, second Duke of Ormonde (1665–1746).

Stringer. Daniel Stringer, portrait painter, a student of the Royal Academy about 1770.

346. Cignani. Conte Carlo Cignani, a painter of the Lombard School (1628–1719).

Going with Wilkie to Angerstein’s. Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841). John Julius Angerstein (1735–1823), who acquired an immense fortune ‘in the city,’ and made the collection of pictures in his house in Pall-Mall which developed into the National Gallery by the purchase of them by the government after his death for some £60,000.

Edwards. Edward Edwards, historical painter (1738–1806).

Masaccio. Tommaso Guidi, or Masaccio (= Slovenly Tommy, from his careless manners) (1401–1428), Florentine painter, noted especially for his works on the walls of the Carmine church.

Note. ‘The blacksmith swallowing the tailor’s news.’ King John, Act IV. Scene 2.

347. Prince Hoare. Portrait and historical painter and dramatist (1755–1834), son of William Hoare, R.A. Haydon said of his timid expression of face, that ‘when he laughed heartily he seemed to be crying.’

347. Day. Alexander Day, miniature painter and picture-dealer (1772–1841). He brought from Italy several old masters which are now in the National Gallery.

349. Lord B— to dine with Dr. Johnson. In the Magazine the name is given in full as that of Lord Boringdon. John Parker (1735–1788), first Baron Boringdon, father of the first Earl of Morley.

One of the cages at Exeter-’Change. See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, note to p. 223.

The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz. These Mémoires appeared in 1717, and English translations were published soon after. They throw much light on the time of the Wars of the Fronde, and are excellent in character-drawing.

350. F. Reynolds. Dramatist (1764–1841).

Matthews, the comedian. Charles Mathews (1776–1835), actor and, above all, mimic.

The Prince leaving Sheridan to die in absolute want. Although Sheridan was the ‘official mouthpiece’ of the Prince Regent, he was allowed to die in extreme poverty and with the bailiffs in his house.

351. Do you believe the modern periodicals. These are specified in the Magazine as ‘John Bull’ and ‘Blackwood,’ the former the Tory paper started in 1820 by Theodore Hook. See vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, note to p. 217.

H—me. Probably Joseph Hume of the Pipe Office. See ante, note to p. 195.

352. Kelly’s ‘Reminiscences.’ Michael Kelly’s ‘Reminiscences, including a period of nearly half a Century; with Original Anecdotes of many Distinguished Personages,’ appeared in 1820. A second edition was published in 1826. It is a valuable store-house for the historian of the English theatre.

Mrs. Crouch. Anna Maria Crouch (1763–1805), the beautiful vocalist, whose ‘appearance was that of a meteor, it dazzled, from excess of brilliancy, every spectator.’

Love in a Village. Isaac Bickerstaffe’s operatic farce, with music by Arne (1762).

353. Canova. Antonio Canova, a sculptor and painter after the manner of the Venetian School (1757–1822).

Bernini. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, sculptor and architect (1598–1680).

Mandeville. Bernard de Mandeville, satirist (1670–1733), author of ‘The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices as Public Benefits’ (1705–1723), an ironical attack upon Shaftesbury’s theories of virtue, the fallacy of which, according to Dr. Johnson, consisted in that Mandeville defined neither vices nor benefits. He it was who described Addison as ‘a parson in a tye-wig.’

354. The Ireland controversy ... Dr. Parr. Dr. Samuel Parr (1747–1825), clergyman and schoolmaster, and possessed of an inexplicable reputation for scholarship, was one of the believers in the Shakespeare forgeries of Samuel William Henry Ireland (1777–1835). Northcote uses the same phrase about Dr. Parr in a conversation with James Ward. See his Conversations with James Ward, p. 88.

Tresham. Henry Tresham, painter and amateur picture dealer (1749–1814).

Caleb Whitefoord (1734–1810), wit and diplomatist. See the epitaph Goldsmith left among his papers for ‘Retaliation.’

357. Tongues in the trees, etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 1.

358. Mr. — the poet. Probably Tom Moore.

358. Start back with affright. After this sentence the following passage occurs in the Magazine:—‘This has often struck me in West, how happy it was for him that he lived and died in the belief that he was the greatest painter that had ever appeared on the face of the earth. Nothing could shake him in this opinion, nor did he ever lose sight of it. It was always “My Wolfe, my Wolfe”:—I do assure you literally, you could not be with him for five minutes at any time, without his alluding to this subject: whatever else was mentioned, he always brought it round to that. He thought Wolfe owed all his fame to the picture: it was he who had immortalized Wolfe, not Wolfe who had immortalized him.’

Woollett. William Woollett (1735–1785), a great engraver. He is said to have begun his career by a careful study of a Turk’s Head on a pewter-pot in his father’s public-house; he was also credited with the habit of firing a cannon from the roof of his house when he had finished a great plate. On his mean tombstone in Old St. Pancras churchyard some one wrote:—

‘Here Woollett rests, expecting to be saved; He graved well, but is not well engraved.’

There is now a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey.

359. Dance. Sir Nathaniel Dance Holland, Bart. (1734–1811), portrait and landscape painter, son of George Dance, builder of the Mansion House. Since Angelica Kauffmann would not marry him, he married a rich widow, took the name of Holland, became a baronet, entered Parliament and gave up art.

Farington. Joseph Farington, landscape painter (1747–1821).

‘As you do sometimes?’ After this sentence the following passage occurs in the Magazine:—‘But the thing that provoked me was, I knew West was only thinking of the engraving of Wolfe, who had already a monument erected to him in the most select part of Westminster Abbey, and West thought, if he could get a monument to Woollett there also, he should come in between them.’

Round his gallery. Add the following from the Magazine:— ‘And yet,’ said N.—,’he thought in his pictures he had accumulated an invaluable property, and that they would be caught up at his death like so many Correggios. It was this that kept him alive. If he could have seen how much he wanted, he would, perhaps, have done nothing.’

360. The death of poor —. The Magazine gives the initial F, which indicates, in all probability, Thomas Foster, Irish portrait-painter (1798–1826), who committed suicide.

C—. John Wilson Croker (1780–1857), who was appointed Secretary of the Admiralty in 1809, for his services to the Duke of York.

Poor Bird. Edward Bird (1762 or 72–1819), genre painter, who began life as an ornamenter of tea-trays.

If — was likely to have succeeded. The Magazine gives the initial F. See first note to this page.

Mr. Locke (of Norbury Park). William Locke (1732–1810), a wealthy art amateur, on whose estate at Norbury, near Mickleham, Surrey, Fanny Burney built ‘Camilla Cottage.’ His son, William Locke (1767–1847), was an amateur artist, and his grandson also, William Locke the third (1804–1832).

Old Dr. Moore. Dr. John Moore (1729–1802), physician, and author of the novel, Zeluco: Various Views of Human Nature, taken from Life and Manners, Foreign and Domestic (1786), which suggested to Byron the idea of Childe Harold (see Preface to this latter).

361. The wrapt soul sitting in the eyes. Il Penseroso, 40 [rapt].

362. Old Alderman Boydell. John Boydell (1719–1804), engraver. His book of plates of views in England and Wales was the first book, so he said, that ever made a Lord Mayor of London. He was a good friend to young artists, and greatly furthered the art of engraving in England.

Sir R. P—. Sir Richard Phillips (1767–1840), author, bookseller and publisher. He established The Monthly Magazine in 1796.

363. Annibal Caracci. Annibal Caracci (1560–1609), the decorator of the Farnese Palace, Rome, and painter of the celebrated picture of ‘Christ being taken down from the Cross.’

Ludovico Caracci. Ludovico Caracci (1555–1619), uncle of the above.

Angelica Kauffmann. Maria Anna Angelica Catharina Kauffmann (1741–1807), portrait painter and etcher.

364. Simple Story ... Nature and Art. Elizabeth Inchbald’s (1753–1821) books were published in 1791 and 1796 respectively.

Mrs. Centlivre. Susannah Centlivre (c. 1667–1723), the authoress of nineteen vivacious plays. See The Dunciad, Book II. 411 and note: ‘wife to Mr. Centlivre, Yeoman of the Mouth to His Majesty. She writ many Plays, and a Song (says Mr. Jacob) before she was seven years old. She also writ a Ballad against Mr. Pope’s Homer before he began it. P.’

364. Old Baxter. Richard Baxter, the Nonconformist Divine (1615–1691). The same illustration is used in The Plain Speaker, p. 243.

A Dissenting Minister (a Mr. Fox of Plymouth). John Fox (1693–1763). He was given in charge of his father’s first cousin, Isaac Gilling, minister at Newton Abbot, to see if Gilling could remove his objections to the ministry. After many shifts he got his license on Oct. 17, 1717, and he began to preach, but apparently he was never ordained. He gave up the ministry after his father’s death, married Isaac Gilling’s daughter and turned biographer.

365. An early picture of H—’s. Haydon’s. The Magazine gives this in full.

366. Malone. Edmond Malone (1741–1812), the editor of Shakespeare.

Old Mr. M—. Given in the Magazine as Mudge. The Mudges of Plymouth were the family by whose means Northcote was introduced to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Zachariah Mudge (1694–1769), divine, Sir Joshua described as the wisest man he had met in his life, and he painted his portrait three times. His ‘character’ was written by Dr. Johnson in the London Chronicle, June 2, 1769. He taught at a school kept by John Reynolds (grandfather of the painter), at Exeter, hence the acquaintance between the two families. He was a friend of Smeaton’s, the builder of the Eddystone lighthouse, and it was he who joined Smeaton in the lantern, upon its completion, in chanting the Old Hundredth. The first Mrs. Mudge was the lady who remonstrated with Dr. Johnson when he proceeded to his eighteenth cup of tea. ‘What, another!’ she said; and the Doctor replied: ‘Madam, you are rude,’ and proceeded to his twenty-fifth. John Mudge (1721–1793), physician, was the fourth and youngest son of the above.

I heard no more of the Life. Add the following from the Magazine, p. 85:—‘for it contained stories of Mudge having run away from the Academy where he was brought up, because Moll Faux, the housemaid, would not have him; of his sleeping in a sugar-cask all night at Wapping, finding a halfpenny in the street, with which he bought a loaf to prevent himself from starving, and returning home in the greatest distress, where he soon after left the dissenters to go over to the church, because the former would not give him some situation that he wanted.’ N— said, ‘Sir Joshua took no further notice, and I believe he burned my MS., for it was not to be found among his papers at his death, though Malone at my request had made every search for it. The truth is, they were mortified to find one whom they had been in the habit of crying up not only as a person of the highest capacity (which he was) but as a saint and the model of a Christian pastor, turn out little better than a vagabond and mountebank. It was besides an imputation on their own sagacity.’

366. Kneller. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bart. (or Kniller), 1646–1723. He painted portraits of nearly every person of importance in his day.

It would do for anybody. Add the following from the Magazine:— ‘N— then showed me a print of him after Sir Joshua, which appeared to me a complete high-priest, bullying and insincere. His wife (the same Moll Faux, whom he afterwards married, and who continued a violent Dissenter to the last) used to say—“There he gets up into the pulpit, and prates away as if he knew all the secrets of heaven and earth, and all the time does not believe one word of it.” My father who knew him, said there was always to him a look of insincerity in his very high-flown orthodoxy, for once when Smeaton, the great engineer, was making a remark on some circumstance in the Old Testament, he cut him short by saying, “Oh! if you give up any part, the whole must follow!” He used also to say, in speaking of the arguments on natural religion, that in an infinity of chances everything was possible. If he had been at Rome, he would have got to be a Cardinal as sure as I am standing here. He had ambition and abilities enough for any thing. Yet it was like pride in a corner too. His wife would always put a brick behind the fire to keep it low, and would come in and boil the saucepan by his study-fire, just as when they had been in poverty and mean circumstances, and yet he never objected. He grew indolent at last, and spent his time in playing at cards with old ladies who were rich and pious. He hated writing sermons (though it was what he was chiefly admired for), and preached the same set over and over again, till the congregation nearly had them by heart. I said it was what he did not feel, and he therefore set about it reluctantly.’

367. Dunning, Gay, Lord Chancellor King. John Dunning, first Baron Ashburton (1731–1783), Solicitor-General in 1768, and one of the most powerful orators of his day.

John Gay (1685–1732), of Barnstaple, the poet.

Peter King (first Lord King, Baron of Ockham in Surrey) 1669–1734, lord chancellor 1725.

Pope’s Lord Lansdowne, ‘What Muse for Granville,’ etc. George Granville or Grenville (1667–1735), follower of Waller in English verse. He was created Lord Lansdowne in 1711. He was a descendant of Charles I’s general, Sir Richard Granville (1600–1658). See Pope’s Windsor Forest.

Foster, the celebrated preacher. James Foster (1697–1753) who was appointed in 1728 Sunday Evening Lecturer at the Old Jewry.

Lord Chancellor Hardwicke. Philip Yorke (1690–1764), first Earl of Hardwicke.

Let modest Foster. Pope’s Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue, lines 131–2. After the couplet the following passage may be inserted from the Magazine:—‘I had made,’ said N—, ‘a pretty picture of the worthies of the Devon, till — spoiled it by making me stick his ugly boy in it, and would not have it after all.’ ‘I asked if the family of the Mudges still continued; and he said they did, but were not equal to the two that he had mentioned, old Zachary Mudge, and Dr. Mudge his son, who was a physician. The last had been his father’s most intimate friend, and he remembered him perfectly well.’

368. Warburton ... Dr. Doddridge ... the Divine Legation of Moses. William Warburton (1698–1779). The Divine Legation of Moses (1738–40) was described by Gibbon as ‘a monument, already crumbling in the dust, of the vigour and weakness of the human mind.’ Philip Doddridge (1702–1751), eminent nonconformist divine and twentieth child of an oilman.

Female Seducers. One of the Fables for the Female Sex (1744) published by Edward Moore (1712–1757), the fabulist. This particular Fable was the work of Henry Brooke, author of The Fool of Quality.

369. Mr. Agar. Welbore Ellis Agar, referred to by Boswell (ed. G. B. Hill, III. 118 note), in a note to a letter to Johnson (July 9, 1777). In the Magazine the name is given as Ellis only.

An expression of Coleridge’s. The remark seems to have been made in a lecture delivered by Coleridge on Jan. 27, 1818, on the ‘General Character of the Gothic Mind in the Middle Ages.’ See ‘Mr. Green’s note taken at the delivery’ in Coleridge’s Literary Remains vol. I., p. 69, 1836.

370. The beautiful Mrs. G—. Mary Horneck, the ‘Jessamy Bride’ of Goldsmith, married to Colonel Gwyn. Her elder sister Goldsmith nicknamed ‘Little Comedy.’

Ninon de l’Enclos (1616–1706). A famous French beauty, who lives in her letters to St. Evremond. She had many lovers and read Montaigne at the age of ten.

371. The description of Cymon. ‘Cymon and Iphigenia, from Boccace.’

Mr. P—. Peter George Patmore (1786–1855), journalist, author and father of Coventry Patmore. See his _My Friends and Acquaintances_ (1854).

372. As Swift said. ‘But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.’ Letter to Pope, Sept. 29, 1725.

The same complaint was made of the Academy in Barry’s time. James Barry was not able to agree with his brother Academicians and he was expelled in 1799.

373. Lord G.— ? Robert Grosvenor, second Earl Grosvenor and first Marquis of Westminster (1767–1845). He shocked the House of Commons in his first speech by quoting Greek and he added the Agar collection of pictures to the Gallery at Grosvenor House.

Nollekens. Joseph Nollekens (1737–1823), who modelled busts of nearly all the ‘persons of importance’ in his day.

Giardini. Felice Giardini, a Piedmontese musician, who flourished in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Northcote seems to have been much impressed with Giardini’s statement. He repeated it to James Ward. See Conversations of James Northcote, R.A., with James Ward on Art and Artists (1901) p. 219.

Mr. P. H. Here and elsewhere, Mr. Prince Hoare.

374. Dance. See ante, note to p. 359,

375. W—. Probably West.

376. R—, the engraver. Samuel William Reynolds, mezzotint engraver (1773–1835).

Lord John Boringdon. See ante, note to p. 349. Lord Boringdon added many valuable pictures to the collection at his family seat, Saltram, near Plymouth.

Sir John Leicester’s. Sir John Fleming Leicester, First Lord de Tabley (1762–1827), art patron. He often allowed the public to see his fine collection of British pictures, in his house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square.

378. Life of Chaucer. Published 1803.

379. Mrs. Radcliffe’s Italian. ‘The Italian’ (1797) by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823).

Wilson. Richard Wilson, landscape painter (1714–1782). He inherited a small estate in Wales from his brother and died there.

380. Barrett. George Barret (1728/32–1784) landscape painter and decorator of the great room at Norbury Park. His son George ‘the younger’ (1774–1842) was one of the first members of the Water Colour Society.

Pirated by an Irish bookseller. The copyright act was not extended to Ireland until the Union.

CONVERSATION THE NINTH appeared in the London Weekly Review (Richardson’s), under the heading ‘REAL CONVERSATIONS,’ March 14, 1829, from the beginning of the Conversation to ‘to obtain redress’ on p. 384. The names are disguised, Northcote as A; G as F.

H—. Haydon.

Admiral Blake. Robert Blake (1599–1657) one of the greatest of English Admirals and a supporter of the Commonwealth, hence the reference.

G—. Godwin and on the next page also.

381. Baretti. Giuseppe Marc Antonio Baretti, (1719–1789) Italian lexicographer and friend of Dr. Johnson.

383. Zara, Mahomet. Voltaire’s tragedy Zaïre (1733) was Englished by Hill in 1735 and his Mahomet (1738) by Miller in 1740.

384. ‘We pay,’ continued Northcote. This forms the beginning of ‘REAL CONVERSATIONS’ in the London Weekly Review, April 11, 1829. The names are disguised as before, Northcote under A. I—’s, on p. 385 is given in full, Irving’s. The failure of a great bookseller is, briefly, ‘Constable’s failure.’

Poor Goblet. Alexander Goblet, Nollekens’ carver.

Oh! ho, quoth Time to Thomas Hearne. Thomas Hearne (1678–1735), a dull but learned antiquarian, of whom Gibbon wrote: ‘His minute and obscure diligence, his voracious and undistinguishing appetite, and the coarse vulgarity of his taste and style, have exposed him to the ridicule of idle wits.’ See The Dunciad, III. 185.

385. Mr. Moore (brother of the general). Sir Graham Moore, admiral (1764–1843).

The Pilot. James Fenimore Cooper’s (1789–1851) novel was published in 1823.

I—. Washington Irving (1783–1859). His History of New York, Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall and Tales of a Traveller, had appeared when this criticism was uttered. See also vol. IV. The Spirit of the Age, p. 367.

386. Mr. Alderman Wood. Sir Matthew Wood (1768–1843), M.P. for the City from 1817 till his death—notorious as the champion of Queen Caroline.

Suffered a sea-change, etc. The Tempest, Act I. Scene 2. [rich and strange].

He did not do so well. Add from the London Weekly Review—‘But the whole was so thoroughly Yankee in grain (even the hardness and dryness), that I was surprised to find the writer was the son of the celebrated Cooper of Manchester. The father was himself, however, of a very stern republican genius.’[99]

386. Horrors accumulating on horror’s head. Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

Brown’s Romances. Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), said to be the first American who adopted literature as a profession. His novels (Wieland, Ormund, Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, Clara Howard and Janet Talbot) are full of imagination.

Zoffani. Johann Zauffely or Zoffany (1733–1810), portrait painter, especially of actors in character.

The Queen’s trial, and the scenes at Brandenburg House. Lord Liverpool’s bill of pains and penalties against the Queen was abandoned in 1820 much to the people’s delight. Brandenburg House, which was formerly on the banks of the Thames, where the Middlesex entrance to Hammersmith Bridge now is, was occupied by Queen Caroline, who died there in 1821.

387. Our maid’s aunt of Brentford. Merry Wives of Windsor, Act IV. Scene 2.

Mr. R—, of Liverpool. The name is given in full in the London Weekly Review as Roscoe, but Mr. W. C. Hazlitt says it should be Railton.

His book was burnt by the common hangman. The grand jury of Middlesex ‘presented the book as a nuisance,’ July 1723.

388. Dignum the singer. Charles Dignum (1765?–1872). He was connected with Drury Lane nearly all his life.

B—. Sir William Beechey (1753–1839), portrait painter.

389. Dressed in a little brief authority. Measure for Measure, Act II. Scene 2.

390. Andrew Taffi. Andrea Tafi, a fourteenth century Florentine painter.

393. He that can endure. Antony and Cleopatra, Act III. Scene 3.

394. CONVERSATION THE ELEVENTH. This is the first of the ‘REAL CONVERSATIONS’ which appeared in the London Weekly Review, March 7, 1829. After the title occurs the following explanatory note:—‘The Conversations here presented to the reader are real not ‘Imaginary.’ How we became possessed of them, it is not necessary to disclose. Suffice it that they are set down almost exactly as they passed from the lips of the speakers; and that those speakers are living persons, sufficiently distinguished from the crowd by their name, talents, and acquirements, to render whatever they may have to say worthy attention, on whatever topic their talk may turn. We will only add, that the Conversations here reported were entirely unpremeditated, and consequently spoken without the remotest view to anything but their immediate effect on the person addressed.—ED.’

Northcote is disguised as usual under A.

Kendall’s Letters on Ireland. ‘Letters to a friend on the State of Ireland,’ 1826. By Edward Augustus Kendall (? 1776–1842), founder in 1819 of The Literary Chronicle, which was afterwards incorporated with the Athenæum.

A thing no more difficile. Butler’s Hudibras, Part 1. Canto I. ll. 53 and 54.

395. Old Mr. Tolcher. Henry Tolcher, alderman of Plymouth and friend of Northcote’s father. Northcote left an unfinished portrait of him.

Canning’s assertion. In a debate in the House of Commons, on March 1st, 1826, on a Petition for the Abolition of Slavery in the Colonies (Hansard’s Parl. Deb. XIV. 973, et seq.).

396. Smites us on one cheek. S. Luke, vi. 29.

397. CONVERSATION THE TWELFTH. No. IV. of ‘REAL CONVERSATIONS’ in the London Weekly Review, April 18, 1829. Northcote as usual is A.

397. B——. Beechey.

M——’s, the landscape painter. Given as ‘Martin’s’ in the London Weekly Review. John Martin, landscape and historical painter (1789–1854), whom Lytton characterised as more original than Raphael and Michael Angelo. He had a lifelong struggle with the British Academy and was one of the founders of the Society of British Artists, at whose gallery he exhibited for many years.

398. X——. Almost certainly Haydon, who married in October, 1821, a beautiful widow, Mary Hymans (See p. 399).

Sir Peter Lely. 1617–1680, painter of the beauties of the Court of Charles II.

399. Brambletye-House. By Horace Smith (1779–1849): it was published in 1826.

400. Maria Cosway. Maria Hadfield, wife of Richard Cosway R.A. She also was an artist.

401. Mrs. G——. Gwyn, see note to p. 370.

‘Retaliation.’ Goldsmith’s poem (1774) wherein, amongst other ‘characters’ are the famous lines on Burke:—

‘Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.’

403. Grandi, the Italian colour-grinder. Sebastiano Grandi, who was imported from Italy to be Sir Joshua Reynolds’s colour-grinder. He is ‘Warwick’ in the ‘Death of Cardinal Beaufort.’

L——. Sir Thomas Lawrence, (1769–1830) portrait painter and President of the Royal Academy.

Some demon whisper’d. Pope’s ‘Epistle IV. to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington,’ l. 16.

404. Raphael Smith. John Raphael Smith (1752–1812), painter and mezzotint engraver. His Life and Works by Julia Frankau have recently been published in two vols. by Messrs. Macmillan.

Signora Cecilia Davies (1750?–1836). After a brilliant career, especially abroad (she was the first Englishwoman to appear on the Italian stage), she died ignored, deserted and forgotten.

Madame Catalani. Angelica Catalani (1779–1849) retired from the stage in 1827.

Storace. Anne Selina Storace or Storache (1766–1817), a favourite singer and actress. Her brother Stephano Storace (1763–1796) was composer to Drury Lane Theatre.

405. Cried up in the top of the compass. Cf. Hamlet, III. 2. ‘You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.’

Sheridan’s beautiful lines. ‘Verses to the Memory of Garrick, spoken as a Monody, at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.’ Dated March 25, 1779.

406. The Duchess of ——. Possibly Elizabeth Chudleigh, afterwards Countess of Bristol and soi-disant Duchess of Kingston. Reynolds told Northcote he had never seen so delicate a beauty.

The Three Tuns. A famous tavern in Guildhall Yard. See Webster’s A Cure for a Cuckold, Act IV. Scene 1.

The Judge (Lord Kenyon). Lloyd Kenyon, First Lord Kenyon (1732–1802) Master of the Rolls. It is said that no judge who presided so long in the King’s bench has been as seldom over-ruled.

407. Bitter bad judges. Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, Act I. Scene 1.

A poem with engravings of Dartmoor. Possibly Noel and Thomas Carrington’s ‘Dartmoor, a Descriptive Poem’ with notes by the late W. Burt, Esq., and twelve prints, 1826. [W. C. H.].

407. The Panorama of the North Pole. Possibly at Burford’s ‘Panorama,’ now the Catholic Church in Leicester Square. It was erected in 1793 and was originally Robert Barker’s (d. 1806). Views of famous places were printed on the inner surface of a hollow cylinder, the spectators occupying a central platform.

408. The Fables. Northcote’s (and Hazlitt’s) Fables were published in 1828. See the beginning of these notes, p. 504.

Like the enchanted money in the Arabian Nights. ‘The Story of the Barber’s Fourth Brother.’

Caleb Williams. William Godwin’s novel (1794).

410. Lavender. A Bow Street runner. See vol. VII. The Plain Speaker, p. 83.

411. So Johnson cried up Savage. See his Life of Richard Savage (1744).

412. Savage the architect. James Savage (1779–1852) architect of St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea (where he is buried) and many other churches.

As the showman says in Goldsmith’s comedy. She Stoops to Conquer, Act I.

413. The Seven Champions of Christendom, Guy of Warwick. ‘The Seven Champions’ by Richard Johnson (1573–1659?) published 1596–7; Guy of Warwick, the hero of many romantic adventures: see Drayton’s Polyolbion.

Richardson (Sheridan’s friend). William Richardson (1743–1814) author of ‘Essays on Some of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters’ (1774–1812). See vol. I. Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, p. 171.

Note, a paper ... in the Tatler. No 95, November 17, 1709.

414. Vanbrugh. Sir John Vanbrugh (c. 1666–1726) dramatist and architect. His comedy The Provoked Husband was left unfinished. He built Castle Howard in Yorkshire.

Richards (the scene painter). John Inigo Richards (born first half of eighteenth century, d. 1810). He was one of the original members of The Royal Academy. His reputation was greatest as scene painter at Covent Garden and especially in one of the scenes for The Maid of the Mill which Woollett engraved.

‘The City-Wives Confederacy.’ The Confederacy was first played at the Haymarket in 1705.

‘The Trip to Scarborough.’ Sheridan’s adaptation (acted 1777, printed 1786) of Vanbrugh’s Relapse.

Let loose the grey-hound. The Relapse, Act III., Scenes 3 and 4.

Lord Mansfield. William Murray Earl of Mansfield, (1704–1793) Lord Chief-Justice.

415. Mademoiselle Brocard. Suzanne Brocard (1798–1855) a popular French actress at the Odéon and at the Comédie Française.

A certain poet. Robert Southey, whose Curse of Kehama was published in 1810.

‘The Artist.’ A weekly periodical edited by Prince Hoare.

‘No Song no Supper.’ A farce of Prince Hoare’s with music by Storace. First acted at Drury Lane, April 16, 1790.

Madame Storace. See ante, p. 404 and note.

‘My grandmother.’ A musical farce by Prince Hoare and Storace produced at the Haymarket, Dec. 16, 1793.

417. O’Keefe. John O’Keeffe (1747–1833).

Bowkitt the dancing-master. In O’Keeffe’s Son-in-Law (1779). See under Edwin in The Dictionary of National Biography for a tale of his acting in the part.

Edwin. John Edwin the elder (1749–1790).

Lingo. In O’Keeffe’s comedy Agreeable Surprise.

417. Mrs. Wells. Mrs. Mary Wells, afterwards Mrs. Sumbel (fl. 1781–1812). She was the first actress of ‘Cowslip’ in O’Keeffe’s Agreeable Surprise, Sept. 3, 1781.

‘Peeping Tom of Coventry.’ A Comic Opera by John O’Keeffe, a success at the Haymarket, 1784.

B—. John Bannister.

‘Lenitive in the Prize.’ A musical farce by Prince Hoare, produced at the Haymarket, March 11, 1793.

Liston. John Liston (1776–1846).

418. Munden. Joseph Shepherd Munden (1758–1836). See Lamb’s Elia, ed. Ainger, p. 201, ‘On the Acting of Munden.’

Weston. Thomas Weston (1737–1776).

Scrub. In The Beaux Stratagem (1707) by George Farquhar (1678–1707).

Dr. L. Foote and Bickerstaffe’s farce, Dr. Last in his chariot (1769).

Abel Drugger. In Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610).

Mr. Theodore Hook’s ‘Sayings and Doings.’ Theodore Hook’s (1788–1841) ‘Sayings and Doings’ fill nine volumes (1824–8).

Curll. Edmund Curll (1675–1747), the bookseller of whose biographies Arbuthnot said ‘They add a new terror to death.’ He was best known as a publisher of ‘curious’ literature and has his place in the Dunciad.

President Bradshaw. John Bradshaw (1602–1659), who presided over the ‘trial’ of Charles I. That post led to his being made President of the Council of State.

419. Dr. M—. Mudge.

Rosa de Tivoli. Philipp Peter Roos (1657–1705), called Rosa da Tivoli from his having established himself at Tivoli, ‘where he kept a kind of menagerie, for the purpose of drawing animals with the greater correctness.’ (Bryan.)

A whimsical production. Possibly Amory’s John Buncle; See vol. I. The Round Table, p. 51 et seq., and notes thereto.

‘Lazarillo de Tormes.’ The authorship of this romance (?1553) is generally attributed to Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503–1575), the representative of Charles V. at the Council of Trent. An English edition appeared in 1576.

Cheats of Scapin. Otway’s version (1677) of Molière’s farce (1671).

Scarron. Paul Scarron (1610–1660), author of Le Roman Comique (1651–7), the ‘only begetter’ of the novels of Le Sage, Defoe and their successors, one of the brightest, bravest cripples who ever lived. His works were translated by T. Brown, Savage and others in 1700. The sentence reads as though Molière’s comedy were attributed to Scarron.

420. CONVERSATION THE SIXTEENTH. This Conversation to ‘his infirmity’ on p. 422, was published in The Atlas, April 19, 1829, as No. 1 of ‘Conversations as good as Real’ (following the ‘Real Conversations’ in Richardson’s London Weekly Review, No. IV. of which had appeared the day before). See note to p. 397. N is J and H is T throughout. The rest of the ‘Conversation’ appeared as No. 11 in the issue for April 26, 1829.

Ramsay. Allan Ramsay (1713–1784), portrait painter, son of the poet.

J—n. John Jackson, portrait painter, (1778–1831).

W—. ? Wilkie.

421. To make assurance doubly sure. Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 1.

421. Johnson had his Lexiphanes. A parody of his style, published 1767: ‘its author was one Campbell, a Scotch purser in the Navy.’

The L— poets. The Lake poets.

422. You’re not so far out. Add, from The Atlas, after this line:—‘K— wanted him to sit on the Sunday as he was hurried for time, and I proposed it to him with some hesitation—he answered, “Oh! yes; you ‘re not to suppose that I am such a Presbyterian as to refuse to sit for my picture on the sabbath-day, I’ll sit with the greatest pleasure—after divine service.” And so he came.’

A devoted enthusiast notwithstanding. Add, from The Atlas:—‘It is not his Toryism neither, that I object to, but his manner of defending it. Neither party has a right to use poisoned weapons, or to resort to under-hand means. If the Whigs or reformers were to deal in wholesale calumny and squalid abuse against their opponents, they would be scouted as blackguards; but the Court party think themselves screened from this imputation (Sir WALTER, I am afraid, among the rest), and that they have a right to say and to do what they please, cum privilegio regis.

J. I can’t agree with you on that subject. Whenever politics are concerned, your passions run away with your understanding. I don’t believe Sir WALTER had ever any thing to do with the Blackwood set.

T. Nor with the Sentinel?[100]

J. I never heard of that.

T. Never mind, then. There are two things,’ etc.

All Europe rings with them from side to side. Milton’s Sonnet to Cyriac Skinner, II. (i.e. ‘To the same.’)

423. His Grammar? William Cobbett’s (1762–1835), A Grammar of the English Language in a Series of Letters was published in 1818.

Peter Pindar. John Wolcot (1738–1819), physician, satirist and poet.

Bastards of their art. Cf.

‘Thought characters and words merely but art And bastards of his foul adulterate heart.’ Shakespeare, ‘A Lover’s Complaint,’ ll. 174–5.

424. Not one, but all mankind’s epitome. Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, Part I. l. 546.

When Rousseau stood. Les Confessions, Partie I. Livre iii. (ed. Garnier, pp. 81–2).

425. And looked round on them with their wolfish eyes. ‘The longings of the cannibal arise (Although they spoke not) in their wolfish eyes.’ Don Juan, Canto II. 72.

426. The last. The Fair Maid of Perth published as Chronicles of the Canongate (2nd Series) in 1828.

The cask of butter in the storm. Don Juan, Canto II. 46.

Mrs. Abington. Frances Abington (1737–1815), flower-seller, street singer, cookmaid and comedy-queen.

429. Lord Exmouth (Sir Edward Pellew). Edward Pellew, Viscount Exmouth (1757–1833), whose bombardment of Algiers in 1816 procured him his title.

The Colosseum. The Colosseum in Regent’s Park was erected in 1824–6, for a panorama of London from the top of St. Paul’s, which occupied 46,000 square feet of canvas. It was demolished in 1875. Rogers said the

building was ‘finer than anything among the remains of architectural art in Italy.’

429. Lackington. James Lackington (1746–1815), whose ‘Memoirs of the Forty-Five First (sic) Years’ of his life as a bookseller was published in 1791, ‘with a Triple Dedication; 1. To the Public; 2. To respectable; 3. To sordid, Booksellers.’ His premises in Moorfields, ‘The Temple of the Muses,’ were ‘so capacious that a mail-coach and four was easily driven round the counters when it was opened.’ Adam Black, the Edinburgh publisher, gained his early experience in the house of Lackington, Allen and Co.

E— the architect. ? James Elmes (1782–1862), architect, and contributor to art and antiquarian periodicals. He was a friend of Haydon’s.

430. Drelincourt on Death ... till Defoe put a ghost-story into it. Charles Drelincourt’s The Christian’s Defence against the Fears of Death, 1675, a popular work by a Calvinist minister. Defoe’s A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal....’ is often bound up with it, but as to its influence on the sale see G. A. Aitken’s Introduction to Defoe’s ‘Due Preparations for the Plague,’ etc., 1895.

W—l. Westall, and on the next page also.

Jack T—. John Taylor (1757–1832), proprietor of The Sun, a Tory paper, from 1813 to 1825. The editor (William Jerdan), he bought out in 1817.

Payne Knight. Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), numismatist, miscellaneous writer, and art connoisseur. His collection of bronzes, now in the British Museum, to which he bequeathed it, obtained for him from Walpole the name of ‘Knight of the Brazen Milk-pot.’

431. I—g. Irving.

432. As Mr. Locke observed. An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book IV. chap. XX.

Ramsay’s picture of the Queen, i.e. Queen Charlotte. The picture is in the National Portrait Gallery.

Shield ... Flitch of Bacon. Composed (1778) by Henry Bate, afterwards the Rev. Sir Henry Bate Dudley (1745–1824), with music by William Shield (1748–1829). Its success brought the latter the post of composer to Covent Garden Theatre.

Dignum. See ante, note to p. 388.

Come unto these yellow sands. The Tempest, Act I. Scene 2.

433. The rhyming echoes in Hudibras. Part I. Canto III. 199–220.

Slender’s Mum and Budget. Merry Wives of Windsor, Act V. Scene 2.

434. Boydell. See ante, p. 362 and note.

Farquhar’s comedy. The Recruiting Officer, 1706.

435. (After a pause.) From this paragraph to the end of the ‘Conversation’ appeared in The Atlas, June 28, 1829, as ‘A Discursive Dialogue on Arts and Artists.’

Somerset-House. The rooms of the Royal Academy of Arts were here from 1780–1838, under the vestibule on the right as you enter. The last of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses was delivered here in the great room of the Academy.

436. Low Bartlemy-fair. Bartholomew Fair was held at West Smithfield, 1133–1855; it was a famous place for theatrical shows.

437. Lord Gwydir. Peter Burrell (d. 1820), created Lord Gwydyr in 1796. He married (1779) Lady Priscilla Barbara Elizabeth Bertie, daughter of the Duke of Ancaster. Wraxall (Historical and Posthumous Memoirs, ed. Wheatley, III. 352–4) refers to the ‘prosperous chain of events’ which happened to the Burrell family. Gwydyr House in Whitehall, the habitation of the Charity Commissioners, was named after him. See Wheatley and Cunningham’s London, Past and Present.

437. Mr. Peel. The great Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) the best part of whose fine collection of pictures (including The Snake in the Grass) is now in the National Gallery.

Gainsborough. Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), one of the greatest of English landscape and portrait painters.

Watteau. Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), painter of idyllic landscapes.

438. An eminent counsellor. This appears in The Atlas as ‘Loughborough,’ Alexander Wedderburn, 1st Baron Loughborough (1733–1805), Lord Chancellor 1793–1801.

C—. Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, R.A., fashionable landscape and marine painter (1779–1844).

Marchant. Nathaniel Marchant (1739–1816), gem engraver and medallist. He was engraver of gems to the Prince Regent.

440. Virtue may choose. Pope, Epilogue to Satires, Dialogue I.

When Sir Joshua. From these words to ‘Sir Walter Scott frequently,’ on p. 443, appeared in The Atlas for August 16, 1829, as No. X. of ‘Conversations as good as Real: The Immodest in Works of Art.’

Guido. Guido Reni, of the school of Bologna (1575–1642). The ‘silvery’ nature of his colouring was a characteristic of the third period of his art.

441. Albano. Francesco Albani, also of the school of Bologna (1578–1660). He was a fellow student of Guido Reni’s, and the faces of his twelve children, who were gifted with great beauty, may be seen in his subjects.

J—, of Edinburgh. ? Jeffrey.

442. Sir W. W. Given in The Atlas as Lord C—. But in all probability Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (1749–1789), 4th baronet, is meant, for whom Reynolds painted St. Cecilia and Dance Orpheus. See Leslie and Taylor’s Life of Reynolds, II. 74.

A remark of Coleridge’s. Hazlitt sat up all night at Tewkesbury, reading Paul and Virginia, when he was on his way to visit Coleridge. See ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets,’ where Coleridge’s remark is again quoted. No doubt he made it during Hazlitt’s visit.

443. C—. George Colman ‘the Elder’ (1732–1794).

444. Brother Van. See Swift’s verses on Vanbrugh’s house:—

‘Now, poets from all the quarters ran To see the house of brother Van.’

Richards, the scene painter. See ante, p. 414, and note.

‘The Journey to London.’ The name by which Vanbrugh’s unfinished comedy, The Provoked Husband (1726), was first known. It was finished by Colley Cibber.

‘Lord Foppington.’ In Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696).

‘Devin du Village.’ Rousseau’s successful opera (1753), which contains the air now known as ‘Rousseau’s Dream.’

Beattie. James Beattie, poet and essayist (1735–1803). His Essay on Truth (1770), which was enormously popular, was an attack on Hume.

445. Cibber. Colley Cibber (1671–1757), actor, dramatist and Poet Laureate (from 1730).

The Margravine of Bareuth. An English translation of the amusing ‘Memoires de Frederique Sophie Wilhelmine de Prusse, Margrave de Bareith Soeur de Frédéric-le-Grand, écrits de sa Main’ appeared in 1812. The Duchess of Kendal is attributed to George II. in The Atlas. ‘Conversations as good as Real,’ No. IX., begins with this sentence in The Atlas for August 9, 1829. And the following passage after ‘new situation’ may be added:—‘A great person is said to mimic George II., and make sport of his bad English (though it can only be from hearsay); he used to call out when he was provoked at any thing—“God d—mn what I am, God d—mn what you be.” He laid great stress on the minutest trifles, and insisted on wearing his shirts in the order in which they were numbered, and flew into a violent passion if they brought him the wrong number. “Why am I to wear No. 16, when I have not had No. 15? Why am I to do nothing that I like? Am I king of England, or am I not? That is what I want to know.” And then he would fall to kicking his hat about the room to vent his anger, and rating any of the ministers that came in in his outlandish jargon. Once he was going to kick the Duke of ARGYLL, who laid his hand upon his sword, and withdrew in high dudgeon. Meeting Sir ROBERT WALPOLE on the staircase, he complained of what had happened, to which the other replied, “Oh! that’s nothing, he has treated me so a hundred times.” “Yes, but” (said the Scotch peer) “there is some difference between JOHN, Duke of ARGYLL, and ROBERT WALPOLE.”’

447. Sir Edward Pellew. See ante, p. 429, and note.

448. The Life of Sir Joshua. Allan Cunningham’s ‘Lives of the most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects’ appeared in 1829–1833 in six vols. This is No. XII. of The Atlas ‘Conversations’ (August 20, 1829)

449. Old Mr. Tolcher. See ante, note to p. 395.

The famous Pulteney. William Pulteney, later Earl of Bath (1682–1764), Walpole’s bitterest antagonist in the House of Commons.

Mr. Lamb ... Hogarth. See the essay ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’ in The Reflector, No. 3, 1811.

Dr. Tucker, Dean of Gloucester. Josiah Tucker (1712–1799), the recipient of Butler’s remark that nations, as well as individuals, may go mad. He was a writer on Economics.

450. Sparing of his wine. Add, ‘But Sir JOSHUA was fond of the bottle himself; and no one that is so ever stints others.’

Dr. Johnson’s speech ... the Miss Cottrells. See Boswell’s Johnson 1752.

452. The newspaper critic. Conversation No. XII. in The Atlas had ended with ‘rational account of,’ four lines above, and No. XIII. began here, entitled ‘The St. Giles’ in Art,’ in the number for Sept. 13, 1829.

Sir John Hawkins (1719–1789), writer on music and predecessor of Boswell in a life of Johnson.

Bright particular star. All’s Well that Ends Well, Act I. Scene 1.

Tyke. John Emery’s (1777–1822) greatest part, a character in Morton’s comedy, The School of Reform, or How to Rule a Husband (1805). See Hazlitt’s Dramatic Essays.

453. Dollalolla. Queen Dollalolla, wife of King Arthur, in Fielding’s Comic Opera, Tom Thumb.

Capella Bianca. Bianca Cappello, Grand-duchess of Tuscany, d. 1587; mistress and then wife of Francesco de Medici, both of whom are supposed to have been poisoned by his brother Ferdinand.

Morton. Thomas Morton (1764?–1838).

453. Such persons. Or, more specifically, ‘Mr. Lamb,’ as in The Atlas.

Fawcett. Joseph Fawcett (1768–1837).

Lewis. William Thomas Lewis (1748?–1811), the ‘gentleman’ comedian.

Lord and Lady Townly. In Colley Cibber’s version of Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Husband.

The History of a Foundling. The sub-title of Tom Jones.

454. T. M. Tom Moore.

Of defects we wish to balance. Add:—‘I have known a man turn Tory to prove he was not a bastard. Lord NELSON probably performed such prodigies because, as he passed along the quay to take command of his ship, the mob sneered at him, and said, “Is that poor wisen-faced thing going to fight the French?” Do you suppose,’ etc.

454. Lady Sarah Bunbury. Lady Sarah Lennox (1745–1826), daughter of the second Duke of Richmond, married, 1762, Thomas Charles (afterwards Sir Thomas Charles) Bunbury, from whom she was divorced in 1776. In 1782 she married George Napier (son of the fifth Lord Napier), by whom she became mother of Sir Charles James and Sir William Napier. George III. was in love with her in 1761. Her Correspondence has recently been published in two vols. by Mr. Murray.

Gilray. James Gillray (1757–1815).

Lord Macartney. George, Earl Macartney (1737–1806). He was the head of the first Embassy from England to China (1792–4).

CONVERSATION THE TWENTY-FIRST. This, to ‘briefs pour in’ on p. 459, is ‘Conversation XVII.’ in The Atlas for November 8, 1829.

456. Abraham Tucker (1705–1774). His Light of Nature Pursued Hazlitt abridged and prefaced. See vol. IV. p. 370 et seq.

Marquis of Stafford’s gallery. Stafford House, in St. James’s Park, and its private collection of paintings.

Which was the greatest man. The alternative to Sir Isaac Newton in The Atlas is ‘Jack Davies, the racquet-player.’

457. W—’s poetry. Wordsworth’s.

Holcroft. Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809), whose ‘Memoirs’ Hazlitt completed. See vol. II. of the present Edition.

458. Joseph Andrews. Fielding’s novel was published in 1742, not 1748.

—. Possibly Bewick.

459. The election of the new Pope. Pius VIII. was elected in 1829.

Monmouth-Street finery. Monmouth Street, St. Giles’s, was noted in the eighteenth century for its second-hand clothes’ shops. ‘On Lord Kelly, a remarkable, red-faced, drunken lord, coming into a room in a coat much embroidered but somewhat tarnished, Foote said he was an exact representation of Monmouth Street in flames.’ Prior’s Life of Malone.

460. What do you think of that portrait. This begins ‘Conversation XIII.’ in The Atlas for Oct. 25, 1829.

461. The mind has still a link ... the beloved object. For this sentence substitute from The Atlas:—‘It was she who sat and sang to me as I painted the portrait of her son that died.’ (See p. 391).

The Miss B—s. Mary Berry (1763–1852) and her sister Agnes, who lived together for nearly eighty-eight years. Horace Walpole described Mary as ‘an angel both inside and out’ and both as his ‘twin wives.’ Their names are given in full in The Atlas.

462. CONVERSATION THE TWENTY-SECOND. ‘The last’ in The Atlas for 15th November 1829, entitled ‘Mutual Confessions and Explanations.’

The Country Girl. Garrick’s comedy, based on Wycherley’s Country Wife, itself an adaptation of Molière’s L’École des Maris, and L’École des Femmes.

464. The milk of human kindness. Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

Shadwell. Thomas Shadwell (1642?–1692), dramatist and poet-laureate.

Dennis. John Dennis (1657–1734), Pope’s antagonistic critic. See his The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and The Ground of Criticism in Poetry (1704).

465. Other things between heaven and earth. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 5.

Ugolino. The story of Ugolino, leader of the Guelfs in Pisa, and of his imprisonment in the ‘Tower of Famine’ will be found in Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale. See also Dante’s Inferno, XXXIII.

-----

Footnote 1:

There is a passage in Werter which contains a very pleasing illustration of this doctrine, and is as follows.

‘About a league from the town is a place called Walheim. It is very agreeably situated on the side of a hill: from one of the paths which leads out of the village, you have a view of the whole country; and there is a good old woman who sells wine, coffee, and tea there: but better than all this are two lime-trees before the church, which spread their branches over a little green, surrounded by barns and cottages. I have seen few places more retired and peaceful. I send for a chair and table from the old woman’s, and there I drink my coffee and read Homer. It was by accident that I discovered this place one fine afternoon: all was perfect stillness; every body was in the fields, except a little boy about four years old, who was sitting on the ground, and holding between his knees a child of about six months; he pressed it to his bosom with his little arms, which made a sort of great chair for it, and notwithstanding the vivacity which sparkled in his eyes, he sat perfectly still. Quite delighted with the scene, I sat down on a plough opposite, and had great pleasure in drawing this little picture of brotherly tenderness. I added a bit of the hedge, the barn-door, and some broken cart-wheels, without any order, just as they happened to lie; and in about an hour I found I had made a drawing of great expression and very correct design, without having put in any thing of my own. This confirmed me in the resolution I had made before, only to copy nature for the future. Nature is inexhaustible, and alone forms the greatest masters. Say what you will of rules, they alter the true features, and the natural expression.’ Page 15.

Footnote 2:

It is at present covered with a thick slough of oil and varnish (the perishable vehicle of the English school) like an envelope of gold-beaters’ skin, so as to be hardly visible.

Footnote 3:

Men in business, who are answerable with their fortunes for the consequences of their opinions, and are therefore accustomed to ascertain pretty accurately the grounds on which they act, before they commit themselves on the event, are often men of remarkably quick and sound judgments. Artists in like manner must know tolerably well what they are about, before they can bring the result of their observations to the test of ocular demonstration.

Footnote 4:

The famous Schiller used to say, that he found the great happiness of life, after all, to consist in the discharge of some mechanical duty.

Footnote 5:

The rich impasting of Titian and Giorgione combines something of the advantages of both these styles, the felicity of the one with the carefulness of the other, and is perhaps to be preferred to either.

Footnote 6:

Leonardo da Vinci.

Footnote 7:

Titian.

Footnote 8:

Michael Angelo.

Footnote 9:

Correggio.

Footnote 10:

Annibal Caracci.

Footnote 11:

Rubens.

Footnote 12:

Rafaelle.

Footnote 13:

If we take away from the present the moment that is just gone by and the moment that is next to come, how much of it will be left for this plain, practical theory to rest upon? Their solid basis of sense and reality will reduce itself to a pin’s point, a hair-line, on which our moral balance-masters will have some difficulty to maintain their footing without falling over on either side.

Footnote 14:

A treatise on the Millennium is dull; but who was ever weary of reading the fables of the Golden Age? On my once observing I should like to have been Claude, a person said, ‘they should not, for that then by this time it would have been all over with them.’ As if it could possibly signify when we live (save and excepting the present minute), or as if the value of human life decreased or increased with successive centuries. At that rate, we had better have our life still to come at some future period, and so postpone our existence century after century ad infinitum.

Footnote 15:

In like manner, though we know that an event must have taken place at a distance, long before we can hear the result, yet as long as we remain in ignorance of it, we irritate ourselves about it, and suffer all the agonies of suspense, as if it was still to come; but as soon as our uncertainty is removed, our fretful impatience vanishes, we resign ourselves to fate, and make up our minds to what has happened as well as we can.

Footnote 16:

Sentiment has the same source as that here pointed out. Thus the Ranz des Vaches, which has such an effect on the minds of the Swiss peasantry, when its well-known sound is heard, does not merely recal to them the idea of their country, but has associated with it a thousand nameless ideas, numberless touches of private affection, of early hope, romantic adventure, and national pride, all which rush in (with mingled currents) to swell the tide of fond remembrance, and make them languish or die for home. What a fine instrument the human heart is! Who shall touch it? Who shall fathom it? Who shall ‘sound it from its lowest note to the top of its compass?’ Who shall put his hand among the strings, and explain their wayward music? The heart alone, when touched by sympathy, trembles and responds to their hidden meaning!

Footnote 17:

I do not here speak of the figurative or fanciful exercise of the imagination, which consists in finding out some striking object or image to illustrate another.

Footnote 18:

Mr. Wordsworth himself should not say this, and yet I am not sure he would not.

Footnote 19:

The only good thing I ever heard come of this man’s singular faculty of memory was the following. A gentleman was mentioning his having been sent up to London from the place where he lived to see Garrick act. When he went back into the country, he was asked what he thought of the player and the play. ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘he did not know: he had only seen a little man strut about the stage, and repeat 7956 words.’ We all laughed at this, but a person in one corner of the room, holding one hand to his forehead, and seeming mightily delighted, called out, ‘Ay, indeed! And pray, was he found to be correct?’ This was the supererogation of literal matter-of-fact curiosity. Jedediah Buxton’s counting the number of words was idle enough; but here was a fellow who wanted some one to count them over again to see if he was correct.

‘The force of dulness could no farther go!’

Footnote 20:

Sir Joshua Reynolds being asked how long it had taken him to do a certain picture, made answer, ‘All his life.’

Footnote 21:

The late Lord Thurlow used to say that Cobbett was the only writer that deserved the name of a political reasoner.

Footnote 22:

Mr. Cobbett speaks almost as well as he writes. The only time I ever saw him he seemed to me a very pleasant man—easy of access, affable, clearheaded, simple and mild in his manner, deliberate and unruffled in his speech, though some of his expressions were not very qualified. His figure is tall and portly. He has a good sensible face—rather full, with little grey eyes, a hard, square forehead, a ruddy complexion, with hair grey or powdered; and had on a scarlet broad-cloth waistcoat with the flaps of the pockets hanging down, as was the custom for gentlemen-farmers in the last century, or as we see it in the pictures of Members of Parliament in the reign of George I. I certainly did not think less favourably of him for seeing him.

Footnote 23:

Quarto poetry, as well as quarto metaphysics, does not always sell. Going one day into a shop in Paternoster-row to see for some lines in Mr. Wordsworth’s Excursion to interlard some prose with, I applied to the constituted authorities, and asked if I could look at a copy of the Excursion? The answer was—‘Into which county, Sir?’

Footnote 24:

These fantastic poets are like a foolish ringer at Plymouth that Northcote tells the story of. He was proud of his ringing, and the boys who made a jest of his foible used to get him in the belfry, and ask him, ‘Well now, John, how many good ringers are there in Plymouth?’ ‘Two,’ he would say, without any hesitation. ‘Ay, indeed! and who are they?’—‘Why, first, there’s myself, that’s one: and—and’—‘Well, and who’s the other?’—‘Why there’s, there’s—Ecod, I can’t think of any other but myself.’ Talk we of one Master Launcelot. The story is of ringers: it will do for any vain, shallow, self-satisfied egotist of them all.

Footnote 25:

The celebrated Peter Pindar (Dr. Wolcot) first discovered and brought out the talents of the late Mr. Opie, the painter. He was a poor Cornish boy, and was out at work in the fields, when the poet went in search of him. ‘Well, my lad, can you go and bring me your very best picture?’ The other flew like lightning, and soon came back with what he considered as his masterpiece. The stranger looked at it, and the young artist, after waiting for some time without his giving any opinion, at length exclaimed eagerly, ‘Well, what do you think of it?’—‘Think of it?’ said Wolcot, ‘why I think you ought to be ashamed of it—that you who might do so well, do no better!’ The same answer would have applied to this artist’s latest performances, that had been suggested by one of his earliest efforts.

Footnote 26:

If two persons play against each other at any game, one of them necessarily fails.

Footnote 27:

Written at Winterslow Hut, January 18th–19th, 1821.

Footnote 28:

Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.

Footnote 29:

Shenstone and Gray were two men, one of whom pretended to live to himself, and the other really did so. Gray shrunk from the public gaze (he did not even like his portrait to be prefixed to his works) into his own thoughts and indolent musings; Shenstone affected privacy, that he might be sought out by the world; the one courted retirement in order to enjoy leisure and repose, as the other coquetted with it, merely to be interrupted with the importunity of visitors and the flatteries of absent friends.

Footnote 30:

‘Plut. of Banishment. He compares those who cannot live out of their own country, to the simple people who fancied the moon of Athens was a finer moon than that of Corinth.

—Labentem cœlo quæ ducitis annum. VIRG. GEORG.’

Footnote 31:

When Buonaparte left the Chamber of Deputies to go and fight his last fatal battle, he advised them not to be debating the forms of Constitutions when the enemy was at their gates. Benjamin Constant thought otherwise. He wanted to play a game at cat’s-cradle between the Republicans and Royalists, and lost his match. He did not care, so that he hampered a more efficient man than himself.

Footnote 32:

A thorough fitness for any end implies the means. Where there is a will, there is a way. A real passion, an entire devotion to any object, always succeeds. The strong sympathy with what we wish and imagine, realises it, dissipates all obstacles, and removes all scruples. The disappointed lover may complain as much as he pleases. He was himself to blame. He was a half witted, wishy-washy fellow. His love might be as great as he makes it out: but it was not his ruling-passion. His fear, his pride, his vanity was greater. Let any one’s whole soul be steeped in this passion, let him think and care for nothing else, let nothing divert, cool, or intimidate him, let the ideal feeling become an actual one and take possession of his whole faculties, looks, and manner, let the same voluptuous hopes and wishes govern his actions in the presence of his mistress that haunt his fancy in her absence, and I will answer for his success. But I will not answer for the success of a ‘dish of skimmed milk’ in such a case. I could always get to see a fine collection of pictures myself. The fact is, I was set upon it. Neither the surliness of porters, nor the impertinence of footmen could keep me back. I had a portrait of Titian in my eye, and nothing could put me out in my determination. If that had not (as it were) been looking on me all the time I was battling my way, I should have been irritated or disconcerted, and gone away. But my liking to the end conquered my scruples or aversion to the means. I never understood the Scotch character but on these occasions. I would not take ‘No’ for an answer. If I had wanted a place under government, or a writership to India, I could have got it from the same importunity, and on the same terms.

Footnote 33:

A poor woman at Plymouth who did not like the formality, or could not afford the expence, of a will, thought to leave what little property she had in wearing-apparel and household moveables to her friends and relations, vivá voce, and before Death stopped her breath. She gave and willed away (of her proper authority) her chair and table to one, her bed to another, an old cloak to a third, a night-cap and petticoat to a fourth, and so on. The old crones sat weeping round, and soon after carried off all they could lay their hands upon, and left their benefactress to her fate. They were no sooner gone than she unexpectedly recovered, and sent to have her things back again; but not one of them could she get, and she was left without a rag to her back, or a friend to condole with her.

Footnote 34:

The law of primogeniture has its origin in the principle here stated—the desire of perpetuating some one palpable and prominent proof of wealth and power.

Footnote 35:

It is as follows:

‘The Will of a Virtuoso,

‘I Nicholas Gimcrack, being in sound Health of Mind, but in great Weakness of Body, do by this my Last Will and Testament bequeath my worldly Goods and Chattels in Manner following:—

Imprimis, To my dear Wife,

One Box of Butterflies, One Drawer of Shells, A Female Skeleton, A dried Cockatrice.

Item, To my Daughter Elizabeth,

My Receipt for preserving dead Caterpillars. As also my preparations of Winter May-Dew, and Embrio Pickle.

Item, To my little Daughter Fanny,

Three Crocodiles’ Eggs. And upon the Birth of her first Child, if she marries with her Mother’s Consent, The Nest of a Humming-Bird.

Item, To my eldest Brother, as an Acknowledgment for the Lands he has vested in my Son Charles, I bequeath

My last Year’s Collection of Grasshoppers.

Item, To his Daughter Susanna, being his only Child, I bequeath my

English Weeds pasted on Royal Paper, With my large Folio of Indian Cabbage.

* * * * *

Having fully provided for my Nephew Isaac, by making over to him some years since

A Horned Scarabæus, The Skin of a Rattle-Snake, and The Mummy of an Egyptian King,

I make no further Provision for him in this my Will.

My eldest Son John having spoken disrespectfully of his little Sister, whom I keep by me in Spirits of Wine, and in many other Instances behaved himself undutifully towards me, I do disinherit, and wholly cut off from any Part of this my Personal Estate, by giving him a single Cockle-Shell.

To my Second Son Charles, I give and bequeath all my Flowers, Plants, Minerals, Mosses, Shells, Pebbles, Fossils, Beetles, Butterflies, Caterpillars, Grasshoppers, and Vermin, not above specified: As also all my Monsters, both wet and dry, making the said Charles whole and sole Executor of this my Last Will and Testament, he paying or causing to be paid the aforesaid Legacies within the space of Six Months after my Decease. And I do hereby revoke all other Wills whatsoever by me formerly made.’—TATLER, Vol. IV. No. 216.

Footnote 36:

Kellerman lately left his heart to be buried in the field of Valmy where the first great battle was fought in the year 1792, in which the Allies were repulsed.

Footnote 37:

How careful is Sir Joshua, even in a parenthesis, to insinuate the obligations of this great genius to others, as if he would have been nothing without them.

Footnote 38:

If Sir Joshua had had an offer to exchange a Luca Giordano in his collection for a Claude Lorraine, he would not have hesitated long about the preference.

Footnote 39:

Written in 1788.

Footnote 40:

Gainsborough.

Footnote 41:

Sir Joshua himself wanted academic skill and patience in the details of his profession. From these defects he seems to have been alternately repelled by each theory and style of art, the simply natural and elaborately scientific, as it came before him; and in his impatience of each, to have been betrayed into a tissue of inconsistencies somewhat difficult to unravel.

Footnote 42:

He had been before speaking of Boucher, Director of the French Academy, who told him that ‘when he was young, studying his art, he found it necessary to use models, but that he had left them off for many years.’

Footnote 43:

These are Sir Joshua’s words.

Footnote 44:

I do not know that: but I do not think the two passions could be expressed by expressing neither or something between both.

Footnote 45:

‘As for politics, I think poets are tories by nature, supposing them to be by nature poets. The love of an individual person or family that has worn a crown for many successions, is an inclination greatly adapted to the fanciful tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians, abstract reasoners, of no manner of attachment to persons, at least to the visible part of them, but prodigiously devoted to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally whigs. It happens agreeably enough to this maxim, that the whigs are friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.’—Shenstone’s Letters, 1746, p. 105.

Footnote 46:

To give the modern reader un petit aperçu of the tone of literary conversation about five or six and twenty years ago, I remember being present in a large party composed of men, women, and children, in which two persons of remarkable candour and ingenuity were labouring (as hard as if they had been paid for it) to prove that all prayer was a mode of dictating to the Almighty, and an arrogant assumption of superiority. A gentleman present said, with great simplicity and naïveté, that there was one prayer which did not strike him as coming exactly under this description, and being asked what that was, made answer, ‘The Samaritan’s—“Lord, be merciful to me a sinner!”’ This appeal by no means settled the sceptical dogmatism of the two disputants, and soon after the proposer of the objection went away; on which one of them observed with great marks of satisfaction and triumph.—‘I am afraid we have shocked that gentleman’s prejudices.’ This did not appear to me at that time quite the thing, and this happened in the year 1794. Twice has the iron entered my soul. Twice have the dastard, vaunting, venal crew gone over it; once as they went forth, conquering and to conquer, with reason by their side, glittering like a faulchion, trampling on prejudices and marching fearlessly on in the work of regeneration; once again, when they returned with retrograde steps, like Cacus’s oxen dragged backward by the heels, to the den of Legitimacy, ‘rout on rout, confusion worse confounded,’ with places and pensions and the Quarterly Review dangling from their pockets, and shouting ‘Deliverance for mankind,’ for ‘the worst, the second fall of man.’ Yet I have endured all this marching and countermarching of poets, philosophers, and politicians over my head as well as I could, like ‘the camomoil that thrives, the more ’tis trod upon.’ By Heavens, I think, I’ll endure it no longer!

Footnote 47:

Troja fuit.

Footnote 48:

‘If an European, when he has cut off his beard and put false hair on his head, or bound up his own natural hair in regular hard knots, as unlike nature as he can possibly make it; and after having rendered them immoveable by the help of the fat of hogs, has covered the whole with flour, laid on by a machine with the utmost regularity; if when thus attired he issues forth, and meets a Cherokee Indian, who has bestowed as much time at his toilet, and laid on with equal care and attention his yellow and red oker on particular parts of his forehead or cheeks, as he judges most becoming; whoever of these two despises the other for this attention to the fashion of his country, whichever first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian.’—Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, Vol. I. p. 231–2.

Footnote 49:

This name was originally spelt Braughton in the manuscript, and was altered to Branghton by a mistake of the printer. Branghton, however, was thought a good name for the occasion, and was suffered to stand. ‘Dip it in the ocean,’ as Sterne’s barber says of the buckle, ‘and it will stand!’

Footnote 50:

A lady of quality, in allusion to the gallantries of a reigning Prince, being told, ‘I suppose it will be your turn next!’ said, ‘No: I hope not; for you know it is impossible to refuse!’

Footnote 51:

‘Girtred. For the passion of patience, look if Sir Petronel approach. That sweet, that fine, that delicate, that — for love’s sake, tell me if he come. Oh, sister Mill, though my father be a low-capt tradesman, yet I must be a lady, and I praise God my mother must call me madam. Does he come? Off with this gown for shame’s sake, off with this gown! Let not my knight take me in the city cut, in any hand! Tear’t! Pox on’t (does he come?) tear’t off! Thus while she sleeps, I sorrow for her sake. (Sings.)

Mildred. Lord, sister, with what an immodest impatiency and disgraceful scorn do you put off your city-tire! I am sorry to think you imagine to right yourself in wronging that which hath made both you and us.

Gir. I tell you, I cannot endure it: I must be a lady: do you wear your quoiff with a London licket! your stamel petticoat with two guards! the buffin gown with the tuftafitty cap and the velvet lace! I must be a lady, and I will be a lady. I like some humours of the city dames well: to eat cherries only at an angel a pound; good: to dye rich scarlet black; pretty: to line a grogram gown clean through with velvet; tolerable: their pure linen, their smocks of three pound a smock, are to be borne withal; but your mincing niceries, taffity pipkins, durance petticoats, and silver bodkins—God’s my life! as I shall be a lady, I cannot endure it.

Mil. Well, sister, those that scorn their nest, oft fly with a sick wing.

Gir. Bow-bell! Alas, poor Mill, when I am a lady, I’ll pray for thee yet i’faith; nay, and I’ll vouchsafe to call thee sister Mill still; for though thou art not likely to be a lady as I am, yet surely thou art a creature of God’s making, and may’st peradventure be saved as soon as I (does he come?) And ever and anon she doubled in her song.

Mil. Now (lady’s my comfort) what a profane ape’s here!

Enter Sir PETRONEL FLASH, Mr. TOUCHSTONE, and Mrs. TOUCHSTONE.

Gir. Is my knight come? O the lord, my band! Sister do my cheeks look well? Give me a little box o’ the ear that I may seem to blush. Now, now! so, there, there! here he is! O my dearest delight! Lord, Lord! and how does my knight?

Touchstone. Fie, with more modesty.

Gir. Modesty! why, I am no citizen now. Modesty! am I not to be married? You’re best to keep me modest, now I am to be a lady.

Sir Petronel. Boldness is a good fashion, and court-like.

Gir. Aye, in a country lady I hope it is, as I shall be. And how chance ye came no sooner, knight?

Sir Pet. Faith, I was so entertained in the progress with one Count Epernoun, a Welsh knight: we had a match at baloon too with my Lord Whackum for four crowns.

Gir. And when shall’s be married, my knight?

Sir Pet. I am come now to consummate: and your father may call a poor knight son-in-law.

Mrs. Touchstone. Yes, that he is a knight: I know where he had money to pay the gentlemen usher and heralds their fees. Aye, that he is a knight: and so might you have been too, if you had been aught else but an ass, as well as some of your neighbours. An I thought you would not ha’ been knighted, as I am an honest woman, I would ha’ dubbed you myself. I praise God, I have wherewithal. But as for you, daughter—

Gir. Aye, mother, I must be a lady to-morrow; and by your leave, mother (I speak it not without my duty, but only in the right of my husband) I must take place of you, mother.

Mrs. Touch. That you shall, lady-daughter; and have a coach as well as I.

Gir. Yes, mother; but my coach-horses must take the wall of your coach-horses.

Touch. Come, come, the day grows low; ’tis supper-time: and, sir, respect my daughter; she has refused for you wealthy and honest matches, known good men.

Gir. Body o’ truth, citizens, citizens! Sweet knight, as soon as ever we are married, take me to thy mercy, out of this miserable city. Presently: carry me out of the scent of Newcastle coal and the hearing of Bow-bell, I beseech thee; down with me for God’s sake.’ Act i. Scene i.

This dotage on sound and show seemed characteristic of that age (see New Way to Pay Old Debts, &c.)—as if in the grossness of sense, and the absence of all intellectual and abstract topics of thought and discourse (the thin, circulating medium of the present day) the mind was attracted without the power of resistance to the tinkling sound of its own name with a title added to it, and the image of its own person tricked out in old-fashioned finery. The effect, no doubt, was also more marked and striking from the contrast between the ordinary penury and poverty of the age and the first and more extravagant demonstrations of luxury and artificial refinement.

Footnote 52:

‘Girtred. Good lord, that there are no fairies now-a-days, Syn.

Syndefy. Why, madam?

Gir. To do miracles, and bring ladies money. Sure, if we lay in a cleanly house, they would haunt it, Synne? I’ll try. I’ll sweep the chamber soon at night, and set a dish of water o’ the hearth. A fairy may come and bring a pearl or a diamond. We do not know, Synne: or there may be a pot of gold hid in the yard, if we had tools to dig for ‘t. Why may not we two rise early i’ the morning, Synne, afore any body is up, and find a jewel i’ the streets worth a hundred pounds? May not some great court-lady, as she comes from revels at midnight, look out of her coach, as ’tis running, and lose such a jewel, and we find it? ha!

Syn. They are pretty waking dreams, these.

Gir. Or may not some old usurer be drunk over-night with a bag of money, and leave it behind him on a stall? For God’s sake, Syn, lets rise to-morrow by break of day, and see. I protest, la, if I had as much money as an alderman, I would scatter some on ‘t i’ the streets, for poor ladies to find when their knights were laid up. And now I remember my song of the Golden Shower, why may not I have such a fortune? I’ll sing it, and try what luck I shall have after it.’ Act v. Scene i.

Footnote 53:

Every thing tends to show the manner in which a great artist is formed. If any person could claim an exemption from the careful imitation of individual objects, it was Nicolas Poussin. He studied the antique, but he also studied nature. ‘I have often admired,’ says Vignuel de Marville, who knew him at a late period of his life, ‘the love he had for his art. Old as he was, I frequently saw him among the ruins of ancient Rome, out in the Campagna, or along the banks of the Tyber, sketching a scene that had pleased him; and I often met him with his handkerchief full of stones, moss, or flowers, which he carried home, that he might copy them exactly from nature. One day I asked him how he had attained to such a degree of perfection, as to have gained so high a rank among the great painters of Italy? He answered, I HAVE NEGLECTED NOTHING.’—See his Life lately published. It appears from this account that he had not fallen into a recent error, that Nature puts the man of genius out. As a contrast to the foregoing description, I might mention, that I remember an old gentleman once asking Mr. West in the British Gallery, if he had ever been at Athens? To which the President made answer, No; nor did he feel any great desire to go; for that he thought he had as good an idea of the place from the Catalogue, as he could get by living there for any number of years. What would he have said, if any one had told him, he could get as good an idea of the subject of one of his great works from reading the Catalogue of it, as from seeing the picture itself! Yet the answer was characteristic of the genius of the painter.

Footnote 54:

Poussin has repeated this subject more than once, and appears to have revelled in its witcheries. I have before alluded to it, and may again. It is hard that we should not be allowed to dwell as often as we please on what delights us, when things that are disagreeable recur so often against our will.

Footnote 55:

It is not very long ago that I saw two Dissenting Ministers (the Ultima Thule of the sanguine, visionary temperament in politics) stuffing their pipes with dried currant-leaves, calling it Radical tobacco, lighting it with a lens in the rays of the sun, and at every puff fancying that they undermined the Boroughmongers, as Trim blew up the army opposed to the Allies! They had deceived the Senate. Methinks I see them now, smiling as in scorn of Corruption.

—‘Dream on, blest pair: Yet happier if you knew your happiness, And knew to know no more!’

The world of Reform that you dote on, like Berkeley’s material world, lives only in your own brain, and long may it live there! Those same Dissenting Ministers throughout the country (I mean the descendants of the old Puritans) are to this hour a sort of Fifth-monarchy men: very turbulent fellows, in my opinion altogether incorrigible, and according to the suggestions of others, should be hanged out of the way without judge or jury for the safety of church and state. Marry, hang them! they may be left to die a natural death: the race is nearly extinct of itself, and can do little more good or harm!

Footnote 56:

William, our waiter, is dressed neatly in black, takes in the TICKLER, (which many of the gentlemen like to look into) wears, I am told, a diamond-pin in his shirt-collar, has a music-master to teach him to play on the flageolet two hours before the maids are up, complains of confinement and a delicate constitution, and is a complete Master Stephen in his way.

Footnote 57:

His account of Dr. L— was prodigious—of his occult sagacity, of his eyes prominent and wild like a hare’s, fugacious of followers, of the arts by which he had left the City to lure the patients that he wanted after him to the West-End, of the ounce of tea that he purchased by stratagem as an unusual treat to his guest, and of the narrow winding staircase, from the height of which he contemplated in security the imaginary approach of duns. He was a large, plain, fair-faced Moravian preacher, turned physician. He was an honest man, but vain of he knew not what. He was once sitting where Sarratt was playing a game at chess without seeing the board; and after remaining for some time absorbed in silent wonder, he turned suddenly to me and said, ‘Do you know, Mr. H—, that I think there is something I could do?’ ‘Well, what is that?’ ‘Why perhaps you would not guess, but I think I could dance, I’m sure I could; ay, I could dance like Vestris!’—Sarratt, who was a man of various accomplishments, (among others one of the Fancy,) afterwards bared his arm to convince us of his muscular strength, and Mrs. L— going out of the room with another lady said, ‘Do you know, Madam, the Doctor is a great jumper!’ Moliere could not outdo this. Never shall I forget his pulling off his coat to eat beef-steaks on equal terms with Martin B—. Life is short, but full of mirth and pastime, did we not so soon forget what we have laughed at, perhaps that we may not remember what we have cried at!—Sarratt, the chess-player, was an extraordinary man. He had the same tenacious, epileptic faculty in other things that he had at chess, and could no more get any other ideas out of his mind than he could those of the figures on the board. He was a great reader, but had not the least taste. Indeed the violence of his memory tyrannised over and destroyed all power of selection. He could repeat Ossian by heart, without knowing the best passage from the worst; and did not perceive he was tiring you to death by giving an account of the breed, education, and manners of fighting-dogs for hours together. The sense of reality quite superseded the distinction between the pleasurable and the painful. He was altogether a mechanical philosopher.

Footnote 58:

‘Ils ne pouvoient croire qu’un corps de cette beauté fût de quelque chose au visage de Mademoiselle Churchill.’—MEMOIRES DE GRAMMONT, Vol. II. p. 254.

Footnote 59:

When I was young, I spent a good deal of my time at Manchester and Liverpool; and I confess I give the preference to the former. There you were oppressed only by the aristocracy of wealth; in the latter by the aristocracy of wealth and letters by turns. You could not help feeling that some of their great men were authors among merchants and merchants among authors. Their bread was buttered on both sides, and they had you at a disadvantage either way. The Manchester cotton-spinners, on the contrary, set up no pretensions beyond their looms, were hearty good fellows, and took any information or display of ingenuity on other subjects in good part. I remember well being introduced to a distinguished patron of art and rising merit at a little distance from Liverpool, and was received with every mark of attention and politeness, till the conversation turning on Italian literature, our host remarked that there was nothing in the English language corresponding to the severity of the Italian ode—except perhaps Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, and Pope’s St. Cecilia! I could no longer contain my desire to display my smattering in criticism, and began to maintain that Pope’s Ode was, as it appeared to me, far from an example of severity in writing. I soon perceived what I had done, but here am I writing Table-talks in consequence. Alas! I knew as little of the world then as I do now. I never could understand any thing beyond an abstract definition.

Footnote 60:

Lord H— had made a diary (in the manner of Boswell) of the conversation held at his house, and read it at the end of a week pro bono publico. Sir J— M— made a considerable figure in it, and a celebrated poet none at all, merely answering Yes and No. With this result he was by no means satisfied, and talked incessantly from that day forward. At the end of the week he asked, with some anxiety and triumph, if his Lordship had continued his diary, expecting himself to shine in ‘the first row of the rubric.’ To which his Noble Patron answered in the negative, with an intimation that it had not appeared to him worth while. Our poet was thus thrown again into the back ground, and Sir James remained master of the field!

Footnote 61:

A Mr. Rose and the Rev. Dr. Kippis were for many years its principal support. Mrs. Rose (I have heard my father say) contributed the Monthly Catalogue. There is sometimes a certain tartness and the woman’s tongue in it. It is said of Gray’s Elegy—‘This little poem, however humble its pretensions, is not without elegance or merit.’ The characters of prophet and critic are not always united.

Footnote 62:

There are some splendid exceptions to this censure. His comparison between Ovid and Virgil, and his character of Shakespear, are masterpieces of their kind.

Footnote 63:

We have critics in the present day who cannot tell what to make of the tragic writers of Queen Elizabeth’s age (except Shakespear, who passes by prescriptive right,) and are extremely puzzled to reduce the efforts of their ‘great and irregular’ power to the standard of their own slight and shewy common-places. The truth is, they had better give up the attempt to reconcile such contradictions as an artificial taste and natural genius; and repose on the admiration of verses which derive their odour from the scent of rose-leaves inserted between the pages, and their polish from the smoothness of the paper on which they are printed. They, and such writers as Deckar and Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford and Marlowe, move in different orbits of the human intellect, and need never jostle.

Footnote 64:

The intelligent reader will be pleased to understand, that there is here a tacit allusion to Squire Western’s significant phrase of Hanover Rats.

Footnote 65:

Of the two the latter alternative is more likely to happen. We abuse and imitate them. They laugh at but do not imitate us.

Footnote 66:

The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.

Footnote 67:

This Essay was written in January, 1821.

Footnote 68:

Losing gamesters thus become desperate, because the continued and violent irritation of the will against a run of ill luck drives it to extremity, and makes it bid defiance to common sense and every consideration of prudence or self-interest.

Footnote 69:

Some of the poets in the beginning of the last century would often set out on a simile by observing—‘So in Arabia have I seen a Phœnix!’ I confess my illustrations are of a more homely and humble nature.

Footnote 70:

I beg the reader to consider this passage merely as a specimen of the mock-heroic style, and as having nothing to do with any real facts or feelings.

Footnote 71:

I have heard of such a thing as an author, who makes it a rule never to admit a monosyllable into his vapid verse. Yet the charm and sweetness of Marlow’s lines depended often on their being made up almost entirely of monosyllables.

Footnote 72:

See Wilkie’s Blind Fiddler.

Footnote 73:

We sometimes see a whole play-house in tears. But the audience at a theatre, though a public assembly, are not a public body. They are not incorporated into a frame-work of exclusive, narrow-minded interests of their own. Each individual looks out of his own insignificance at a scene, ideal perhaps, and foreign to himself, but true to nature; friends, strangers, meet on the common ground of humanity, and the tears that spring from their breasts are those which ‘sacred pity has engendered.’ They are a mixed multitude melted into sympathy by remote, imaginary events, not a combination cemented by petty views, and sordid, selfish prejudices.

Footnote 74:

Mr. Munden and Mr. C— went one Sunday to Windsor, to see the King. They passed with other spectators once or twice: at last, his late majesty distinguished Munden in the crowd, and called him to him. After treating him with much cordial familiarity, the king said, ‘And, pray, who is that with you?’ Munden, with many congées, and contortions of face, replied, ‘An please your majesty, it’s Mr. C—, of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.’ ‘Oh! yes,’ said the king, ‘I know him well—a bad actor, a bad actor, a bad actor!’ Why kings should repeat what they say three times, is odd: their saying it once is quite enough. I have always liked Mr. C—’s face since I heard this anecdote, and perhaps the telling it may have the same effect on other people.

Footnote 75:

The trunk-maker, I grant, in the Spectator’s time, sat in the two-shilling gallery. But that was in the Spectator’s time, and not in the days of Mr. Smirke and Mr. Wyatt.

Footnote 76:

Jack Cade’s salutation to one who tries to recommend himself by saying he can write and read.—See HENRY VI. Part Second.

Footnote 77:

It is calculated that West cleared some hundred pounds by the catalogues that sold of his great picture of Death riding on the pale Horse.

Footnote 78:

I cannot say how in this respect it might have fared if a Mr. M—, a fat gentleman, who might not have ‘liked yon lean and hungry Roscius,’ had continued in the theatrical department of Mr. Perry’s paper at the time of this actor’s first appearance; but I had been put upon this duty just before, and afterwards Mr. M—’s spare talents were not in much request. This, I believe, is the reason why he takes pains every now and then to inform the readers of the Courier that it is impossible for any one to understand a word that I write.

Footnote 79:

I (not very long ago) had the pleasure of spending an evening with Mr. Betty, when we had some ‘good talk’ about the good old times of acting. I wanted to insinuate that I had been a sneaking admirer, but could not bring it in. As, however, we were putting on our great coats down stairs, I ventured to break the ice by saying, ‘There is one actor of that period of whom we have not made honourable mention, I mean Master Betty.’ ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘I have forgot all that.’ I replied, that he might, but that I could not forget the pleasure I had had in seeing him. On which he turned off, and shaking his sides heartily, and with no measured demand upon his lungs, called out, ‘Oh, memory! memory!’ in a way that showed he felt the full force of the allusion. I found afterwards that the subject did not offend, and we were to have drunk some Burton-ale together the following evening, but were prevented. I hope he will consider that the engagement still stands good.

Footnote 80:

Sir Joshua, who was not a vain man, purchased a tawdry sheriff’s carriage, soon after he took his house in Leicester-fields, and desired his sister to ride about in it, in order that people might ask, ‘Whose it was?’ and the answer would be, ‘It belongs to the great painter!’

Footnote 81:

Sharp became a great favourite of the king on the following occasion. It was the custom, when the king went through the lobbies of the palace, for those who preceded him to cry out, ‘Sharp, sharp, look sharp,’ in order to clear the way. Mr. Sharp, who was waiting in a room just by (preparing some colours), hearing his name repeated so urgently, ran out in great haste, and came up with all his force against the king, who was passing the door at the time. The young artist was knocked down in the encounter, and the attendants were in the greatest consternation; but the king laughed heartily at the adventure, and took great notice of the unfortunate subject of it from that time forward.

Footnote 82:

‘It is not a year or two shows us a man.’—ÆMILIA, in OTHELLO.

Footnote 83:

The bones of the murdered man were dug up in an old hermitage. On this, as one instance of the acuteness which he displayed all through the occasion, Aram remarks, ‘Where would you expect to find the bones of a man sooner than in a hermit’s cell, except you were to look for them in a cemetery?’ See NEWGATE CALENDAR for the year 1758 or 9.

Footnote 84:

‘And surely Mandricardo was no baby.’—HARRINGTON’S ARIOSTO.

Footnote 85:

‘All men think all men mortal but themselves.’—YOUNG.

Footnote 86:

I remember once, in particular, having this feeling in reading Schiller’s Don Carlos, where there is a description of death, in a degree that almost stifled me.

Footnote 87:

It has been usual to raise a very unjust clamour against the enormous salaries of public singers, actors, and so on. This matter seems reducible to a moral equation. They are paid out of money raised by voluntary contributions in the strictest sense; and if they did not bring certain sums into the treasury, the Managers would not engage them. These sums are exactly in proportion to the number of individuals to whom their performance gives an extraordinary degree of pleasure. The talents of a singer, actor, &c. are therefore worth just as much as they will fetch.

Footnote 88:

Mr. Moore has just written a book to prove the truth of the contrary opinion.

Footnote 89:

One of ‘the blacksmith swallowing the tailor’s news,’ from Shakspeare.

Footnote 90:

That is, a remarkable man.

Footnote 91:

This very interesting letter will be found in the Elegant Epistles.

Footnote 92:

Now at the Dulwich Gallery.

Footnote 93:

Barry’s Letter to the Dilettanti Society, enumerating his grievances, was published in 1798.

Footnote 94:

These people are said to be the real descendants of the ancient Romans.

Footnote 95:

‘Shakspeare’s verses are not exactly “wood-notes wild.” He was indebted to a most extensive reading at the same time as to a most transcendant genius. He did not pique himself upon originality, but sat down to write his plays for the simple purpose of the moment, and without a glimpse or an ambition of the immortality which they were to acquire. He made use of whatever he recollected and thought desirable, with the contrivance of an ordinary play-writer, and only grew original and vast and exquisite, in spite of himself. If it be true that “he wrote not for an age, but for all time,” still there was no one who knew less of that fact than he! He imagined himself writing only for the day before him; and it is to this very circumstance that we owe the ease, the flashes, and the soarings of his spirit. He was never over-powered by the intended loftiness of the occasion. He made no efforts that were laborious, because his mind was always superior to his object, and never bowed down to it. He possessed, too, that affluence of genius, which rendered him not only prodigal in its use, but almost unacquainted with its existence. He never stood upon its dignity; he was never fearful of its loss nor of its denial. The swan of Avon, like the swans from which poets derive their title, was all strength and grace and beauty, without a consciousness of either. And this character of his genius accords with that character of facility, of gentleness, and of unostentation, which his biographer ascribes to the man. He knew of nothing within himself, of which he felt it worth while to be vain. He would as soon have been vain of his power to put one foot before another, as of his power to write the Tempest or Macbeth. It belongs, in the midst of abundance, to GENIUS as BEAUTY, to be thoughtless of itself. It is only for the dull and the ugly—or at least for those in whom the claims to beauty or to genius are equivocal—to be forever contemplating either in themselves, or for ever demanding the acknowledgments of others. With the plenary possessors, the luxury is too common, too much of every-day wear, to fix their attention. The restlessness of the remainder is the restlessness of poverty, and contrasts itself with the carelessness of riches.’—Kendall’s Letters on Ireland.

Footnote 96:

See a paper on this subject in the TATLER.

Footnote 97:

The same praise may be extended to Matthews. Those who have seen this ingenious and lively actor only on the stage, do not know half his merits.

Footnote 98:

See The Family Journal; a series of papers in The New Monthly Magazine, 1825, signed Harry Honeycomb (=Leigh Hunt).

Footnote 99:

The Chinese call the Americans second-chop English [Hazlitt’s Note].

Footnote 100:

For Sir Walter Scott’s share in The Beacon and its successor The Sentinel, see chapter liv. of Lockhart’s Life.

Edinburgh: Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. P. 251, changed “uneasi-” to “uneasiness”. 2. P. 469, changed “upon particular” to “upon a particular”. 3. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling. 4. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed. 5. Footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers and collected together at the end of the last chapter. 6. Enclosed italics font in underscores. 7. Superscripts are denoted by a caret before a single superscript character, e.g. M^r.

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