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London: l>rinted by Stewart and Murkat, Old Bailey. PREFACE. The title of this volume, " T able-Talk," will, it is hoped, be found by the reader to be warranted by the conversational turn of the style, as well as the nature and variety of the subjects touched upon, and the manner in which they are treated. Some portion was really talked ; and it may be said of the rest, that the thoughts have, in all probability, passed the writer's lips in conver- sation; indeed, for the most part, can hardly have failed to do so. The matter consists partly of short pieces first published under the head of " Table- Talk" in the Atlas newspaper ; and partly of ^^assages of a conversational character, selected from such of my writings as have been scattered in peri- odical publications, and never before collected. vi PREFACE. The '^ Imaginary Conversations of Pope and Swift" were considered an appropriate addition to a volume of " Table-Talk," and are intended strictly to represent both the turn of style and of thinking of these two poets ; though the thoughts actually expressed are the writer's invention. On correcting the sheets for press, I am not aware of any remark that I should particularly wish to modify, with the exception of some- thing that is said of Germany in the course of the article on " Goethe." I have since become better acquainted with the great intellects of that nation; which, whatever may be thought of its present perplexities, has unquestionably produced the leading thinkers of the century. The world has yet to learn the extent of its obligations to such men as Goethe and Schil- ler, to Lessing, to Kant, to Herder, Richter, Fichte, and others. LEIGH HUNT. CONTENTS. PAGE TAELE TALK . • • • " LADIES CARYI^'G AT DI^-^-ER . • ■ • ^ A>-OMALIES or DISHES A^'D ETJRMTLTIE, &c. . • 5 TOPICS rOE. DIXNER • • • • ' ^ WILD FLOWERS, ELRZE, A^-D WIMBLEDON . 8 MISTAKES or THE PRESS ■ • • • ^- MAY-TIME . • • • • . li ^lALICE or rORTLNE . ■ • • • ^'^ BISHOPS ANT) BRAHMINS . . • ■ '^^ THE "BLESSED RESTORATION" . THE SUN •••••• BON-MOT OF A COACHMAN SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE OVID . • • • • THE VOICE OF THE ROOK DISPUTES OF PHILOSOPHERS HOW LAWYERS GO TO HEA^TIN . • • 32 COLLINS, THE POET . • • ' A FACT .••••* THE TWO CONQL'ERORS . ■ • • CLERICAL TITLES . • • • ' HORACE WALPOLE AND PINKERTON U 26 26 28 29 30 31 32 37 37 38 39 viii CONTENTS. PAGE JEWS ...... 41 SMOLLETT . . . . . .43 CHEMISTRY ...... 44 PETTY CONVENIENCES AND COMFORTS . . .46 TEARS ...... 48 DR. ALDRICH . . . . . .49 LORD MARCHMONT'S RECEIPT FOR LONGEVITY . 50 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION . . . .53 DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA .... 53 WONDER NEVER CEASES . . . .54 DALY, THE DUBLIN MANAGER ... 56 LIGHT AND COLOURS . . . . ,58 VERSIONS OF ANCIENT LYRICS ... 60 CATHERINE THE SECOND OF RUSSIA . . .62 PETRARCH AND LAURA .... 63 MORAL AND PERSONAL COURAGE . . .66 TIGHT-LACING ..... 66 GRAVITY AND INDUSTRY OF DANCERS . . .69 ADVERTISEMENTS ..... 71 SPORTSMEN AND CUSTOM . . . .72 BEARS AND THEIR HUNTERS . ... 73 SELF-STULTIFICATION . . . . .75 COWSLIPS ...... 76 APRIL FOOLS . . . . . .77 PRIVATE WAR ...... 79 BEAUMARCHAIS . . . . . .83 MOZART ...... 84 VIOLET— WITH A DIFFERENCE . . . . 85 VERBAL MISTAKES OF FOREIGNERS ... 85 HUME AND THE THREE LITTLE KINGS . . .87 A CHARMING CREATURE .... 88 BACON . . . . . . .88 SUICIDES OF BUTLERS .... 88 CONTEXTS. DUELS ..... MSTOX .... STEEPLE-CHASI>'G TURKEYS .... BAGPIPES .... C^SAR A^'D BONAPARTE PSEUDO CHRISTLAN'ITY . DYED HAIR .... EATES'G ..... POLA^'D A>*D KOSCIUSKO ENGLAXD A]ST) THE POPE (GREGORY) THE DUKE OF TVELLiyGTO>''S CO>'CERT ■WAR, DENVER, AXD THAIS" KSGBTN'G riRES AXD MARTYRDOM RESPECTABILITY USE OF THE WORD "A>'GEL," Sec. IX LOTEMAKiy( ELOQUENCE OF OMISSION GODS OF HOMER AXD LUCRETIUS AN ESTISIBLE RELIC A NATURAL iHSTAKE mortal good effects of matrimont . umbrellas .... booksellers' devices . women on the right side shenstont: mistaken . the marseilles hymn non-sequitur .... non-rhy'mes stothard .... the countenance after death . HUME ..... GIBBON .... ANGELS AND FLOWERS . X CONTENTS. PAGE AN ENVLIBLE DISTRESS .... 138 SIE THOMAS DYOT .... . 138 ANCIENT AND MODERN EXAMPLE 140 MILTON AND HIS PORTRAITS . 143 WILLIAM HAY ..... 144 BISHOP CORBET ..... . 145 HOADLY ...... 146 VOLTAIRE . . ... . 147 HANDEL . ... 147 MONTAIGNE ..... . 149 WALLER ...... 150 OTWAY ...... . 151 RAPHAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO 151 WAX AND HONEY .... . 152 ASSOCIATIONS WITH SHAKSPEARE 154 BAD GREAT MEN . ... . 155 CICERO ...... 155 ELOWERS IN T\T:NTER .... . 155 CHARLES LAMB . . . . 156 SPORTING ..... . 158 WISDOM OF THE HEAD AND OF THE HEART . 163 M^CENAS ..... . 164 LORD SHAFTESBURY'S EXPERIENCE OF MATRIMONY . 164 A PHILOSOPHER THROWN FROM HIS HORSE . 165 WORLDS OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE 165 MRS. SIDDONS ..... . 166 NON-NECESSITY OF GOOD WORDS TO MUSIC . 168 GOETHE ...... . 169 BACON AND JAMES THE FIRST 173 GOLDSMITH'S LIFE OF BEAU NASH . 174 JULIUS CMSAB. ..... 175 FENELON . 176 SPENSER AND THE MONTH OF AUGUST 177 CONTEXTS. XI PAGE ADMCE . . . . . . .179 ECLIPSES, HUMA?; BELN'GS, A^'D THE LOWER CREATION 180 EASTER-DAY KSB THE SUX, AND ENGLISH POETRY . 182 THE ITTE-POUND NOTE AND THE GENTLEMAN . 185 PAESIELLO . . . . . .188 CARDINAL ALBERONI ..... 188 SIR WILLIAM PETTY THE STATIST AND MECHANICAL PAILOSOPHER . . . . .189 NAilE OF LINN^US ..... 191 JOHN BUNCLE (THE HERO OE THE BOOK SO C.\LLED) . 191 POUSSIN ...... 192 PRIOR . . . . . . .194 BL'RKE AND PAINE ..... 194 THE DUTCH AT THE CAPE . . . .196 RUSSIAN HORN BAND .... 197 DOGS AND THEIR MASTERS . . . .198 BODY ANT) MIND ..... 200 WANT OF IMAGINATION IN THE COMFORTABLE . . 201 THE SINGING MAN KEPT BY THE BIRDS . . 205 A STRANGE HEAVEN . . . . .207 IMAGINARY C0N\T:RSATI0NS OF POPE & SWIFT: CONTTRSATION OF POPE .... 209 CON^YERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE . . 230 ERRATA. Page 29 line 14, for gravest read gayest. „ 29 last line, for lead read leads. „ 30 line 7, for rancus read raucus. „ 31 last line, for alternative read alternate. The whole of this passage, however, entitled " Disputes of Vhilosophers," was sent by accident to the printer, and is not the Author's production. Page 39 line 5, for wilingness read willingness. 47 „ 2, for Norman read Roman. 62 „ 18, for reasons read reason. 65 „ 3, dele the full stop. 81 „ 24, for most bloody nose read most logical bloody nose. 9.5 second line from bottom, for monstrous read monotonous. 133 line 5, for even of his knowledge read or even of his knowledge. TABLE-TALK. TABLE-TALK Is so natural to man, that the mouth is the organ both of eating and speaking. The tongue is set flowing by the bottle. Johnson talked best when he dined ; — Addison could not talk at all till he drank. Table and conversation interchange their metaphors. We devour wit and argument, and discuss a turkey and chine. That man must be very much absorbed in re- flection, or stupid, or sulky, or unhappy, or a mere hoof at his trouo^h, who is not moved to say something when he dines. The two men who Uved with no other companions in the Eddystone Light-house, and who would not speak to one another during their six months, must have been hard put to it, when they tapped 2 TABLE-TALK. a fresh barrel. To be sure, the greater the temptation, the greater the sulk ; but the better- natured of the two must have found it a severe struggle on a very fine or very foggy day. Table-talk, to be perfect, should be sincere without bigotry, differing without discord, some- times grave, always agreeable, touching on deep points, dwelling most on seasonable ones, and letting everybody speak and be heard. During the wine after dinner, if the door of the room be opened, there sometimes comes bursting up the drawinof-room stairs a noise like that of a tap-room. Everybody is shouting in order to make himself audible ; argument is tempted to confound itself with loudness ; and there is not one conversation going forward, but six, or a score. This is better than formality and want of spirits; but it is no more the right thing, than a scramble is a dance, or the tap-room chorus a quartette of Rossini. The perfection of conversational intercourse is when the breed- ing of high life is animated by the fervour of o;enius. Nevertheless, the man who cannot be loud, or even vociferous on occasion, is wanting on the jovial side of good-fellowship. Chesterfield, w^ith all his sense and agreeableness, was but a TABLE-TALK. 3 solemn fop when he triumphantly asked, whether anybody had " ever seen him laugh ?" It was as bad as the jealous lover in the play who says, " have / been the life of the company ? Have 1 made you all die with merriment?" And there were occasions, no doubt, when Chester- field mio-ht have been answered as the lover was, " Xo : to do you justice, you have been confoundedly stupid." Luckilv for table-talkers in general, they need be neither such fine gentlemen as Chester- field, nor such oracles as Johnson, nor such wits as Addison and Swift, provided they have na- ture and sociabihty, and are not destitute of readino; and observation. LADIES CARYIXG AT DIXXEH. Why doesn't some leader of the fashionable world put an end to this barbarous custom? What a sight, to see a dehcate little creature, or, worse perhaps, a " fine woman," in all the glory of her beauty and bedizenment, rise up with a huge knife in her hand, as if she were going to act the part of Judith, and begin heaving away at a great piece of beef I For the husband does not always think it necessary b2 4 TABLE-TALK. to take the more laborious dish on himself. Sometimes the lady grows as hot and flustered as the housewife in the Winter's Tale, "her face 6* Jire with labour." Gentlemen feel bound to offer their services, and become her sub- stitutes in that unseemly warfare. Why don't they take the business on themselves at once ? or, rather, why don't they give it to the ser- vants, who have nothing better to do, and who have eaten their own meal in comfort? A side-table is the proper place for carving. In- deed, it is used for that purpose in some great houses. Why not in all? It is favourable for additional means of keeping the dishes hot ; nobody at the dinner-table is inconvenienced; and the lady of the house is not made a spectacle of, and a subject for ridiculous con- dolements. None would regret the reforma- tion but epicures who keep on the watch for tidbits, to the disadvantage of honest diners ; and whom it would be a pleasure to see reduced from shocking oglers at the hostess into de- pendants on the plebeian carver. TABLE-TALK. 5 ANOMALIES OF DISHES AND FURNITURE, &c. Amono: the customs at table whlcli deserve to be abolished is that of serving up dishes that retain a look of ^'' life in death " — codfish with their starinsc eves, hares with their hollow countenances, &c. It is in bad taste, an in- congruity, an anomaly ; to say nothing of its effect on morbid imao-inations. Even furniture would be better without such inconsistencies. Claws, and hands, and human heads, are not suited to the dead wood of goods and chattels. A chair should not seem as if it could walk off with us ; nor a table look like a monstrous three-footed animal, with a great flat cii'cular back, and no head. It is such furniture as the devil might have had in Pandemonium — " Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire." A lady sometimes makes tea out of a ser- pent's mouth ; and a dragon serves her for a seat in a o-arden. This is makinoj a witch of her, instead of a Yenus or a Flora. Titania did not sit on a toad-stool, but on a bank full of wild-thyme and violets. This bad taste is never more remarkably 6 TABLE-TALK. exemplified than in the case of fountains. The world seems to have given fountains a privi- lege for exciting incongruous and filthy ideas ; for nobody, as far as I am aware (except Pope, by an implication), has protested against their impossible combinations and vomiting mouths ; than which nothing surely can be more ridicu- lous or revolting. A fountain should suggest nothing but feelings of purity and freshness ; yet they go to the reverse extreme, and seem to endeavour to make one sick. TOPICS EOR DINNER. What a thing it is to sit down to dinner, after readino; of the miseries in starving' coun- tries ! One fancies one has no right to eat and drink. But the thought must be diverted ; — • not because the question is to be got rid of on every other occasion ; quite the contrary ; but because having done his best for it, great or small, then, and in that case only, the con- scientious diner has a right to waive it. Dinner is a refreshment, and should be such, if possible, to everybody, and most of all to the anxious. Hence the topics fittest for table are such as are cheerful, to help digestion ; and cordial, to TABLE-TALK. 7 keep people in heart with their fellow-creatures. Lively anecdotes are of this description, good- humoured personal reminiscences, literary chat, questions as easy to crack as the nuts, quo- tations flowing as the wine, thoughts of eyes and cheeks blooming as the fruit, and beautiful as those that have looked at us over the mutual glass. The poet says— " What, and how great, the virtue of the art To Kve on little with a cheerful heart, Let 's talk, my friends, but talk before we dine !" Yes, but not even then, just before we dine. A man's in a very bad disposition for living on little before he dines. He is much more dis- posed to do 60 afterwards, particularly if he has eaten too much. The time for discussinsr anxious subjects, especially those that regard the poor, is neither at dinner, when the topic becomes almost indecent ; nor just before it, when hunger is selfish ; nor just after it, when the feelings are too self-complacent; but at moments when the pulse is lowered, without being too much so for reason ; though, indeed, if Legislators could be kept without their din- ners for some two or three days, there are occasions when people might be the better for it. Members of Parliament hardly see fair 8 TABLE-TALK. play between their dinner-bell and the calls of the many ; and when the wine is in, the per- fection of ivittenagemot wisdom is apt to be out. The prince in Voltaire thought his people happy '^ when he had dined." " Quand 11 avait dine, croyoit son peuple heureux." Luckily, we have princes, and a Parliament too (whatever be its faults), that can dine hap- pily, and yet not believe typhus and famine comfortable. WILD FLOWERS, TURZE, AND WIMBLEDON. Those flowers on the table are all wild flowers, brought out of ditches, and wood-sides, and the common ; daisies and buttercups, ground-ivy, hyacinths, violets, furze : they are nothing bet- ter. WiU all the wit of man make anything like them ? A, Yes, paintings. B, And poetry and music. C, True ; but paintings cannot be sown ; they cannot come up again every spring, fresh and fresh, beautiful as ever. A. Paintings are sown by copyists and en- gravers. TABLE-TALK. 9 C. Yery true indeed ; but still there is a dif- ference. Humphreys is not Correggio ; Lin- ton is not Rembrandt ; Strange himself is not Titian. The immortal painter does not survive in person to make even his own reds and blues immortal as his name. Yet here is the hyacinth, as fresh as when it was first created. Here is Biu'ns's " Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower," as new as if the great peasant had just turned it up with his plough. B. Poetry seems as if it would last as long as flowers ; and it has no need of renewal. C. God forbid I should undervalue his most wonderful work here on earth, — the creature who can himself create. I wonder what they have to resemble, or surpass him, in the planets Mercury and Yenus ? I suppose he gets bet- ter and better as he nears the sun ; and in the sun is the heaven we are all going to ; not the final heaven, but just a kind of celestial half- way house ; our own earth made heavenly after a human fashion, to enable us to take by de- grees to beatitude. B. There have been worse fancies about the sun than that. 10 TABLE-TALK. D. Don't condescend to mention 'em.* The very best must be unworthy of the orb whose heat and lio-ht are the instruments for makinof all tliese beautiful things. And yet, unless you would have everything there lilies and roses, can you conceive any covering fitter for the hills of the sun itself than this mao:nificent furze, as it now appears here in England, robing our heaths and commons all over the country ? There is an advertisement in the papers an- nouncing a building project at Wimbledon and Westhill. The houses are to occupy a portion of Wimbledon Park: and boards are put among the trees by the roadside, boasting of the " fine frontage." Well may they boast of it, espe- cially at this season of the year. It is a golden undulation ; a foreground, and from some points of view, a middle distance, fit to make the rich- est painter despair ; a veritable Field of Cloth of Gold. Morning (Aurora, the golden god- dess), when the dawn is of a fineness to match, must look beauty for beauty on it. Sunset is divine. The gold goes stretching away in the "* Nothing is meant here to be insinuated against speculations like those of the " Vestiges ;" compared with which, nine-teuths of all the theology that was ever theologized are but so much ignorant and often impious babble. TABLE-TALK. 11 distance towards the dark trees, like the rich evening of a poetic life. Xo wonder Linn^us, w^hen he came to England and first beheld this glorious shrub in bloom, fell down on his knees, and thanked God that he had lived to see it. Xo wonder statesmen and politi- cians o-o forth to lodore about the place for a little wdiile, to procure air and refreshment ; perhaps to get a new lease of existence ; per- haps to die where they may still find some- thing beautiful on earth— beautiful enough to comfort their mistakes about it, and to pre- pare them for a place where it is easier to look for flowers than revolutions. As to figures in the landscape, they are not many, nor discordant ; such as a horse or two, a few cattle, now and then a horseman, or a sturdy peasant on foot, or a beauty in a barouche. Sometimes the peasant is aged, but hale; or sturdy, though but a child ;— signs both of good air, and prosperity, and a true country spot. I hardly know which is the more picturesque sight,— a fine ruddy-cheeked, little peasant-boy, not beyond childhood, coming along with a wheelbarrow full of this golden furze, liis face looking like a bud a-top of it ; or a bent, hearty, old man (bent with age, not with his perquisite) 12 TABLE-TALK. carrying off a bunch of it on his back, as if he triumphed over time and youth. Sometimes you meet a lady coming with a bunch of hyacinths, sometimes a fine young fellow of a gentleman, who has not disdained to stick a bit of furze in his coat. It is not the love of flowers that makes people effeminate ; but in-door habits that produce a craving for stimulants and dread of trouble. This very Wimbledon Park was once occupied by a cul- tivator and even painter of flowers, whom nobody that didn't know him, and beheld at his gentle tasks, would have suspected to have been General Lambert, one of the boldest and inde- pendent of the officers of Cromwell. He lived there in the interval between his rival's eleva- tion to sovereign power and the return of Charles the Second, and was famous for the sums he gave for his pinks and tulips. MISTAKES OF THE PRESS. The annals of law and typography contain the remarkable fact that an edition of the Bible was once printed, in which the word not, to the horror and consternation of the religious world, was left out of the seventh commandment I — TABLE-TALK. 13 They called for its restoration with an impa- tience more creditable to their zeal than their sense of security ; while on the other hand some daring theologians (who, like the Catholics, did not think themselves tied in erery respect to those letters of the old law) doubted, whether for the sake of the commandment itself, the omission had not better remain as it was, seeino- that " in nine cases out of ten, the prohibition was the temptation." Mistakes of the press have given rise to such ludicrous combinations, that a small wit (Caleb ^Vhiteford) obtained a reputation solely by a few articles about them in a newspaper. I never, in the course of my own experience, met with one of a more astounding aspect than the following. It is innocent of all scandal, or libel, or double meaning. It was a pure mistake of the printer, ludicrously unintelligible, and tlirew the readers into agonies of conjecture. The writer had observed, that " although there is no mention either of coffee or tobacco in the Arabian Xights, the former, from association of ideas with existins; Eastern manners, alwavs reminded him of that delightful book;" and then followed this extraordinary sentence — "^s sucking does for the snow season J^ 14 TABLE-TALK. This mistake was so high, abundant, and ridiculous, that if I remember rightly (for the article Tva,tt my own) I refused to correct it. I thought it better to leave it as it stood, for a perpetual pleasure of astonishment, to all who might chance to light upon the pages in which it occurred. The proper words, however, were these: — " as smoking does for the same reason.'''* MAY-TIME. Such a delio'htful commencement as we have had of the month of May, is a perfect god-send ; for our climate is seldom so lucky. May is a pretty word ; a charming thing in books and poets ; beautiful always in some degree to look at, as far as hedges and trees go, whatever be the state of the weather ; that is to say, pro- vided you can quit the fireside, and the windows are not too misty with rain to see through. But the hedges in general succeed better than the skies. There is apt to be more blossom than sunshine ; and people lie in bed on May-morn- ing, and wonder what possessed their ancestors, to induce them to get up at dawn, and go poking about the wet bushes. TABLE-TALK. 15 I suspect it was never very easy to reckon upon a fine May-day in England. If the wind was in a good quarter, the chances were that it rained ; and if the sky was clear^ then probably the wind was in the east. " B-Ougli wiuds do shake the darling buds of May," says a lovely verse in Shakspeare. Our an- cestors, however, had more out-of-door habits than we, and seem to have cared little for east- winds. You hear a o-reat deal more of north- winds than east in the old writers. At the same time we must not forget, that our May-day comes nearly a fortnight sooner with us than it did with them. The change took place when the calendar was altered, about a hundred years back ; and the consequence was, that the May- day of our ancestors now falls on the twelfth of the month. The circumstance gave rise to some verses by Mr. Lovibond, a gentleman " about town" in the days of Chesterfield and Walpole, which the subject (and the prevailing bad taste in verses) rendered popular. They were called The Tears of Old May-day. This is the way in which ]Mr. Lovibond laments : — " Onward in conscious majesti/ she came, (To wit, poor May) — 16 TABLE-TALK. " The grateful honours of mankind to iasie^ To gather fairest wreaths oti future fame y (What is the meaning of that ?) " And blend fresh triumphs with her glorie s past. " Vain hope ! No more in choral bands unite Her virgin vot'ries ; and at early dawn. Sacred to May and Love's mysterious rite. Brush the light dew-drops from the spangled lawn. " To her no more Augusta's wealthy pride Tours the fall tribute from Potosi's mine ! ! Nor fresh-blown garlands village maids provide, A purer offspring at her rustic shrine." &c. &c. What does the reader take to have been " the full tribute from Potosi's mine ?" It was the plate which the milk-maids used to borrow, to decorate their May-pole. Compare with this stuff the fresh, impulsive verses and bright painting of Spenser : — " Then cameya'^V May, the fairest maid on ground, Deck'd all with dainties of her season's pride, And throwing flowers out of her lap around. Upon two brethren's shoulders she did ride, The twins of Leda : which, on either side, Supported her, like to their sovereign queen. Lord! how all creatures laughed when her they spied ; And leap'd and danc'd as they had ravish'd been ; And Cupid's self about her fluttered all in green!* TABLE-TALK. 17 If people^ then, have a mind to try the proper old May -day, and be up and out of doors among the blossoms when Shakspeare was, or Spenser's Rosalind, or the pretty queen of Edward the Fourth (for royalty used to go a Maying once), next Tuesday is their time, supposing the weather favourable, and good folks " in a con- catenation accordingly." Only they must take care how they are too merry ; otherwise, they will wake the tractarian old lady next door, who will think the world is going to be at an end, if people are not as sleepy and stupid as herself. MALICE or rORTUNE. Mr. Green, the aeronaut, has had an escape from a death which would have looked like a mockery. He was near being killed by his balloon, not aloft in the clouds, or by a descent like Phaeton; but in a cart, in which he was riding upon it, like the Welshman on his cheese in the Splendid Shilling. Mr. Green's courage is to be cono'ratulated on not havins^ brouo;]it him to so mock'heroical a pass. The greatest trick of this sort ever played by Fortune was the end of Bruce the traveller, who, after all his perils by flood and by field, from wars, from c 18 TABLE-TALK. Avild beasts, from deserts, from savage nations, broke his neck down his own staircase at home ! It was owing to a shp of the foot, while seeing some visitors out whom he had been entertainino*. This was the very anti-climax of adventure. BISHOPS AND BRAHMINS. I hold the church of England in great respect for several reasons. One is, that it lets me hold my own form of Christian opinion without molestation ; another, that having reformed itself once, and to no little extent — it can do so again, I have no doubt, and would to-morrow, if it had its free way, and so give the coup de grace in this country to the last pretences of Popery. A third reason is, that its clergy, upon the whole, and considering their number, are the best behaved, most learned, and most reasonable, most gentle, most truly Christian, in Europe ; the occasional excesses of individuals among them, however enormous, being far less than the crimes and catastrophes of those in Catholic nations ; originating in causes which need not be dwelt upon. But the reasonableness and well-tempered TABLE-TALK. 19 security of ordinary clerical existence in this country, give rise in some instances to scandals, injurious in proportion to their very seeming warrant. Why do bishops, who won't go to theatres, accept invitations to public dinners? They had much better be seen at the representation of Lear or Macbeth, than at a Lord Mayor's feast. It has an unseemly look at any time, espe- cially in your fat bishop, and most especially when the reports of the feast in the newspapers are followed by accounts of the starving poor. If such tremendous inequalities in the social condition are not to be remedied, why mortify the sufferers? And if they are, why exaspe- rate them? Reports of public dinners, let the guests be who they may, harmonise ill with those of the police-office and the Poor-Laws ; but when bishops are among the diners, the scandal is doubled, and one is astonished they do not see it. But a bishop seems to see no- thing else, when a dish is before him. Observe — the world would have no objection to his being fat and jolly, if he made no saintly pre- tensions ; or if he could square it with appear- ances in other respects, and his duties to the unfed. There is F., who is as fat as any one c2 20 TABLE-TALK. of them, and who has brains and activity enough for the whole bench. If they could all bestir themselves in behalf of the poor as he does, and manifest as unclouded an intellect, I am not sure the public would not rejoice in their obesity, and regard it as the right and privilege of those who endeavoured to spread a table for mankind. Who could have grudged his fat to Berkeley ? or to Luther ? or to good Bishop Jewel (if he had it)? or to that pattern of a prelate, who thought it a shame to have a hundred pounds in the hands of his steward ? But when bishops and their families grow rich, while the poor grow poorer, and when it is the rarest thing in the world (with the exception, now and then, of a Thirlwall or a Stanley,) to find them attending a public meeting but for selfish or corporate purposes, people natu- rally dislike to see them fat and feeding, espe- cially when they come in the lump together, as at these Lord Mayor's feasts. Bishops should never appear in flocks, like vultures. There is an advertiser of after-dinner pills, who re- commends the drug by long lists of his patrons, including almost the w^hole of the right reve- rend bench. The sight is laughable, to say the least of it. Many honest friends of the TABLE-TALK. 21 Establishment think it deplorable. It is a posi- tive proclamation of excess ; an ostentation of apoplexy ; a-telling the world, that to be a bishop and to want boxes of pills is the same thino-. Or if we are to take it as a mere matter of indifference and nonchalance, it becomes so much the worse. Advertiser, asking permission to boast of his ''favours." "My Lord Bishop, may 1 tell the world what good my pills do to your lordship's indig:estion ?" Bishop. " Oh, certainly." The Hindoo gentry have a custom among them of giving feeds to their bishops, the Brah- mins. It is a fashion — an emulation — and practised on great family occasions. Every nobleman tries how he can outdo the rest of his class in the number of reverend personages he can get together, and the amount of food he can induce them to swallow. If only six Brahmins are brought to the verge of apoplexy, he thinks himself ruined in the eyes of his neighbours. What will the world say if there is no sickness ? How can he hold up his head, should no clergyman be carried away senseless? Accordingly, towards the end of the entertain- ment, the host may be seen (this is no fiction) 22 TABLE-TALK. literally beseeching their lordships the Brah- mins, to get down another plate of curry. "I've eaten fourteen," says one of them, gasping. " And I fifteen," says another. " For God's sake," says the host. " Impossible," says the Brahmin. " But consider, my dear lord, you ate seven- teen at Ram Bulkee's." " You are misinformed, my dear sir." " Pardon me, they were counted, to his im- mortal honour." " Thirteen only, on — my — sacred word." " Don't favour me less, I implore you. See — only this one other mouthful." " Impracticable." " I've rolled it up, to render it the more easy." " Consider my jaws." " But, dear lord—" " Have pity on my oesophagus" " But my name, my name" "My — dear — son, stomachs have their limits." " But not your lordship's generosity." Wife (interposing). " It will be the death of my husband, if you don't oblige him." TABLE-TALK. 23 "Well, this one.' — (swallowing.) Ah — my — — dear — son ! — (aside to himself). Wh j did our caste establish this custom ? It might have been salutary once ; but now ! — oh. Ram ! Ram ! I can bear it no lono-er." o One other mouthful, however, still is got down, the host is a man of such meritorious wealth ; yet he was obliged to implore it with tears in his eyes. The Brahmins in vain pointed to their own. The host, with inexorable pathos, intreats them to consider the feelings of his wife and children. The mouthful is achieved, Ram Bulkee beaten, and the reverend feasters are carried off to bed, very nearly victimised by " the wisdom of their ancestors" and clarified butter. Such are the inconveniences that may arise from customs of our own contriving ; and such the corporate resemblances among the priest- hood of the most distant countries, which Chris- tian bishops might do well to avoid. 24 TABLE-TALK. THE "BLESSED RESTORATION." The public are beginning to show symptoms of dislike to the anniversary of what is equivo- cally called the Blessed Restoration^ and the re- tention of it in so grave a place as the church. The objection is not new ; but it comes \vith new force at a time when some antics of superstition have induced the o-rowino: intellio:ence of the community to look at the abuses of religion in general, and to wish to see it freed from every species of scandal. People have certainly been in the habit of taking strange occasions for ex- pressing their gratitude to Heaven ; and this "Blessed Restoration" is not one of the least ex- traordinary; at all events, the retention of it as a sacred day is extraordinary, when we consider how long it is since the character of Charles and his court have been a by word. But the custom was retained for the same reason that set it up — not to thank God, but to spite those who dif- fered. The gusto of the gratitude was in pro- portion to the sufferings of the enemy. Crom- well thanked God for the head of Charles the First on a scaffold, and Charles the Second thanked God for the head of Cromwell on a gibbet. The defenders of the anniversary, if TABLE-TALK. 25 ttey spoke the truth, would have vindicated themselves on the plea that thev did not thank God for Charles at all. To thank Him for Charles would have been to thank Him for Cleveland and Buckingham; for the pension from the French king, and all sorts of effron- teries and enormities. Oh, no; the decorous men hated those. It was for no vice they hated him. It was for the virtuous pleasure of gall- ing their neighbours, and of doing honour to Mother Church herself, w^ho condescended to be led back to her seat by the hand of the gay deceiver. Now, INIother Church on that occasion was not the right, unpapal, unpuritanical, unsophis- ticate Mother Church, old as no church at all, and ever young as advancement ; but one of her spurious representatives ; and society is awaking to the necessity of having no more such masqueraders, but seeing the beautiful, gentle, altogether Christian creature as she is, professing nothing that she does not beheve, and believino- nothincr that can offend the wisest. Tillotson, Berkeley, Whichcote, have had sight of her. Charles the Second's chaplains knew no more of her than Dr. Philpotts. 26 TABLE-TALK. THE SUN. No mystery in creation need sadden us, as long as we believe nothing of the invisible world inferior to what the visible proclaims. Life and geniality predominate; death is brief; pain fugi- tive ; beauty universal ; order paramount and everlasting. What a shame, to know that the sun, the greatest visible object in our universe, combines equal gentleness with power, and does us nothing but good, and at the same time to dare to think worse of its Maker ! BON-MOT OF A COACHMAN. Commendation beforehand is usually but a bad preface to a jest, or to anything else ; yet I must say that I never heard anything more to the purpose, than the reply made to a shabby fellow by the driver of an omnibus. Shabby, on hailing the omnibus, had pathetically inti- mated that he had not more than a shilling, so that he could not pay the whole fare, which was eighteenpence. This representation in forma pauperis, the driver goodnaturedly answered by desiring the gentleman to get in. The journey being ended. Shabby, who had either been too TABLE-TALK. 27 loud in his pathos before the passengers, or too happy in the success of it, to think of getting change from them as he went (for it is manifest, from what followed, that he knew he had more than he pretended), was forced to develop from his purse a criminatory half-crown! This solid body of self-refutation, without pretending any surprise on his own part at the possession of it, and thus availing himself of an obvious oppor- tunity, he hands to the coachman with a dry request for the diiference. The coachman, still too good-natured to take any verbal notice of the pleasing apparition, but too wise not to do himself justice, returns twelve-pence to Shabby. Shabby intimates his expectation of the sixpence. Coachman. My fare, you know, sir, is eighteenpence. Shabby. Yes; but you said I was to ride for a shilling. Coachman. I did ; but you gave me to un- derstand that you had no more in your pocket. Shabby. A bargain 's a bargain. Coachman. Well, then, sir, to tell you the truth, you must know that I am the greatest liar on the road^ 28 TABLE-TALK. SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE. The question respecting the mirth or melan- choly of the nightingale, which of late years is supposed to have been settled in favour of the gayer side by some fine lines of Coleridge's, surely resolves itself into a simple matter of association of ideas. Chaucer calls the notes of the bird ^' merry ;" but the word merry, in Chaucer's time, signified something alive and vigorous after its kind; as in the instance of '^ merry men" in the old ballads, and " merry England ;" which did not mean a nation or set of men always laughing and enjoying them- selves, but in good hearty condition ; a state of manhood befitting men. This point is deter- mined beyond a doubt by the same poet's application of the word to the organ, as the '' merry organ," — meaning the church-oYgan, which, surely, however noble and organic, is not merry in the modern sense of the word. The whole matter I conceive to be this. The notes of the nightingale, generally speaking, are not melancholy in themselves, but melancholy from association with night-time, and from the grave reflections which the hour naturally pro- duces. They may be said to be melancholy also TABLE-TALK. 29 in the finer sense of the word (such as Milton uses in his Penseroso), inasmuch as they ex- press the utmost intensity of vocal beauty and delight ; for the last excessive feelings of delight are always grave. Levity does not do them honour enough, nor sufficiently acknowledge the appeal they make to that finiteness of our nature which they force unconsciously upon a sense of itself, and upon a secret feeling of our own capabilities of happiness compared with the brevity of it. OTID. Ovid was the son of a Roman knio-ht, had an easy fortune, and (to use a modern phrase) was one of the gravest and most popular men about town in Rome for nearly thirty years; till, owing to some mysterious offence given to the court of Augustus, which forms one of the puzzles of biography, he was suddenly torn from house and home, without the least intimation, in the middle of the night, and sent to a remote and wintry place of exile on the banks of the Danube. Ovid was a good natured man, tall and slender, with more affections than the levity of his poetical gallantry lead us to suppose. 30 TABLE-TALK. His gallantries are worth little, and have little effect ; but his metamorphoses are a store of beautiful Greek pictures, and tend to keep alive in grown people the feelings of their boy- hood. THE VOICE OF THE ROOK. The Saxon word rook and the Latin word rancus (hoarse), appears to come from the same root ; though it is curious that neither Latins nor Italians have a name for the rook, distinct from that of crow or raven, as the English have. The same sense, however, of the hoarseness of the bird's voice seems to have furnished the names of almost all the Corvican family, — crow, rook, raven, daw, corvus, and comix (Latin), horax (Greek). When the rook is mentioned, nobody can help thinking of his voice. It is as much identified with him, as bark with the old trees. But why do naturalists never mention the kindly chuckle of the young crows ? parti- cularly pleasant, good-humoured, and infant- like ; as different from the rough note of the elders, as peel is from bark, or a baby's voice is from that of a man. TABLE-TALK. 31 DISPUTES OF PHILOSOPHERS. A pleasant story is told of tlie way a facetious French clergyman ridiculed the hot disputes that took place between the disciples of Des- cartes and those of Aristotle. This reverend wag had brought up four dogs, one of which he called Aristotle, another Descartes, giving to each a disciple, and had found means to keep up the sharpest animosity between each party. Aristotle, at the very sight of Descartes, was ready to fly at him, and tear him to pieces ; and Descartes, by his snarling, shewed that he also lono;ed to have a brush with him. The curate frequently diverted his company with the fol- lowing- scene. He called Aristotle and Des- cartes, who immediately took their proper places, Aristotle on his right hand, and Des- cartes on his left, and each of the disciples close by his master ; then the curate would speak to Aristotle, persuading him to come to some ao-reement with Descartes, who manifested the like aversion to the curate's overtures. "Well," says he, ^^ then let us try what a conference may do ; then ordering them to come near, and face each other, at first they only muttered and growled, as if it were alternative, and seemed 82 TABLE-TxVLK. to answer each other; but by degrees their voci- ferations increased, and terminated in a violent fray, two against two, so that they would have destroyed one another, if the curate, by the authority which he had been careful to main- tain, had not interfered. This, with the curate, was a natural image of scholastic contentions. HOW LAWYERS GO TO HEAVEN. There is a pleasant story of a lawyer, who, being refused entrance into heaven by St. Peter, contrived to throw his hat inside the door; and then, being permitted by the kind saint to go in and fetch it, took advantage of the latter's fixture as doorkeeper, to refuse to come back again. COLLINS, THE POET. In Mr. Pickering's edition of Collins, there is an engraved likeness of the poet, the only one that has appeared. Nothing is said for its authenticity: it is only stated to be "from a drawing formerly in the possession of William Seward, Esq. ;" but it possesses, I think, in- ternal evidence of its truth, being clouded in the midst of its beauty, with a look of pride TABLE-TALK, 33 and passion. There is also a thick- stufFecl look, in the cheeks and about the eyes, as if he had been overfed; no uncommon cause, however mean a one, of many a trouble in after life. The dreadful calamity which befel the poet has generally been attributed to pecuniary dis- tresses occasioned by early negligence, or at least to habits of indolence and irresolution which grew upon him. His biographer in this edi- tion, says, with great appearance of justice, that the irresolution was always manifest, and he attributes the calamity to a weakness of mind that was early developed. But whence arose the weakness of mind? It is desirable for the common interests of mankind, that bio- graphers should trace character and conduct to their first sources ; and it is little to say, that a w^eakness w^as the consequence of a weakness. Collins's misfortune seems to have originated in the combined causes of delicacy of bodily organization, want of guidance on the part of relations, and perhaps in something of a tendency on their part to a similar malady. His father, a hatter, is described as being "a pompous man ;" his sister pushed avarice and resentment to a pitch of tlie insane ; the father D 34- TABLE-TALK. died, while his son was a boy, the mother not long afterwards ; his uncle. Colonel Martin, though otherwise very kind, seems to have left him to his own guidance. The poet was so delicately organized, that in early life he ex- pected blindness; and this ardent and sensi- tive young man, thus left to himself, conscious of great natural powers, which he thought he might draw upon at a future day, and posses- sing the natural voluptuousness of the poetical temperament, plunged into debt and pleasure beyond recovery, and thus, from a combination of predisposing circumstances, lost his wits. I think it discernible that he had his father's pride, though in better taste ; and also, that he partook of his sister's vehemence, though as generous as she w^as stingy. We learn from Sir Egerton Brydges, that notwithstanding his delicacy of temperament, his shrieks were sometimes to be heard from the cloisters in Chichester to such an excess as to become unbearable. " Poor dear Collins ! " we involun- tarily exclaim with Dr. Johnson : — how much we owe, pity, and love him! One can love any man that is generous; one pities Collins in proportion as he has taught us to love Pity herself; and I for one, owe him some of the TABLE-TALK. 35 most deliglitful dreams of my clilldbood. Of my childhood, do I say ? Of my manhood — of my eternityhood, I hope ; for his dreams are fit to be reahzed m the next world. "Thy form," says he, in his Ode to Pity, speaking of the God of AVar : — " Thy form from out thy sweet abode O'ertook him on his blasted road, And stopp'd his wheels, and look'd his rage away !" How did this passage, by the help of the pretty design by jVIr. Kirk in Cooke's edition of the poets, affect me, and help to engage my heart for ever in the cause of humanity ! An alle- gory may be thought a cold thing by the critics; but to a child it is often the best representation of the truth which he feels within him, and the man is so far fortunate who feels like the child. I used to fancy I saw Pity's house on the road giJe, — a better Angel than those in Bunyan, — and the sweet inmate issuing forth, on one of her dewy mornings, to look into the eyes of the God of War, and turn him from his purpose. If Colhns had married and had a family, or been compelled to write not only for himself but others, it is probable that the morbidity of his temperament would have been spared its fatal consequences: the necessity of labour D 2 36 TABLE-TALK. might have varied his thoughts, and sympathy turned his very weakness into strength. A good heart can hardly be conscious of belong- ing to many others, and not distribute itself, as it were, into their being, and multiply its endurance for their sake. But Collins might have had such an opinion of his disease, as to think himself bound to remain single. It does not appear that the greatest under- standings, through whatever dangers they may pass from excess of thought, are liable to be finally borne down by it. They seize upon every help, and acquire the habit of conquest. But I suspect Collins to have been not only of a race overstocked with passion, but a spoiled child, habituated to the earliest indul- gence of his feelings; and the infirmity may have become so strong for him, as to render such a piece of self-denial at once the most painful and most reasonable of his actions. One retires with reverence before the pos- sibility of such a trial of virtue; and can only end with hoping, that the sjjirit which has given such delight to mankind, is now itself delio;hted. TABLE-TALK. 37 A EACT. The powers of the printing-press are very extraordinary; yet the imaginations even of the dull can outstrip them. A woman, I have been told, absolutely went into a bookseller's shop, said she was going further, and requested to have a Bible which should be "small in size, large in type, and printed by the time she came back." — It was to a similar application that a bookseller replied, " 1 see what you want, Madam ; a pint-pot that will hold a quart." More things of this kind have been related, probably with truth ; for there are as many strange truths of ignorance as of know- ledge. THE TWO CONaUERORS. When Goethe says that in every human con- dition, foes lie in wait for us, " invincible only by cheerfulness and equanimity," he does not mean that we can at all times be really cheer- ful, or at a moment's notice ; but that the en- deavour to look at the better side of things will produce the habit; and that this habit is the surest safe-guard against the danger of sudden evils. 88 TABLE-TALK. CLERICAL TITLES. It is a pity that the clargy do not give up the solemn trifling of some of their titles. Their titular scales and gradations of merit become very ludicrous on inspection. Thus you may have a reverence for a curate of an apostolical life, supposing it possible to have it for a poor man ; but you can have no right reverence. A bishop is the only man who is "Right Reve- rend." The curate cannot even be '^Venerable," however he may be venerated. It is the Archdeacon that is venerable. Again, a Pre- bendary is not most reverend, though he is Yery : the Dean is the only man that is Most Reverend. There is a prevailing reverence in the Prebendary : he is valde reverendus ; but the Dean is filled and saturated and overflow- ing with venerability; he is superlatively rever- end, — reverendissimus. These distinctions often take place in the same man, in the course of a minute. An Archdeacon for instance is dining, and has just swallowed his sixty-ninth mouthful. During which operation he was only Venerable. A messenger comes in, and tells him that he is a Dean ; upon which he spills the gravy for joy, and is Most Reverend. TABLE-TALK. 39 HORACE WALPOLE AND PINKEK.TON. Pinkerton was a man of an irritable and overweaning mediocrity. His correspondence with Beattie, Percy and others, is curious for little more than the lamentable evidence they afford of the wilingness of grave men to repay the flatteries of a literary tyro in a style which unquestionably did Mr. Pinkerton great harm in after life, and which is quite enough to account for the height of presumption to which it suffered his irritability to carry him. Those of Horace ^Valpole, who contributed to the mischief, are the best. Like all the letters of that celebrated person, whose genius was a victim to his rank, they are remarkable for their singular union of fine sense, foppery, and insincerity. He praises Mr. Pinkerton des- perately at first ; then gets tired of him, and mingles his praise with irony : Mr. Pinkerton finds out the irony, and complains of it ; upon which the man of quahty has the impudence to vow he is serious, and proceeds to hoax him the more. One of Mr. Pinkerton's fantastic contri- vances to supply his want of originality, was a speculation for impro^dng the English tongue, 40 TABLE-TALK. by the addition of vowels to its final consonants. The number of final s's in our lano-uai^e is cer- tainly a fault. It is a pity we do not retain the Saxon plural termination in e?i, which we still have in the word oxen, — as housen for houses, &c. But as changes for the worse grow out of circumstances, so must changes for the better ; especially upon points on which the world can feel themselves but feebly interested. What would the Stock Exchani^e care for consolso instead of consols? or the poor for breach, if they could but get bread 9 or even a lover, who has naturally a propensity to soft words, for a faira brida, provided he has the lady ? Yet upon improvements no wiser than these did Mr. Pinkerton and his correspondents busy themselves. One of them talks of quieto nyto, meaning a quiet night: and houesta sliepherda and shepherdeza ! Pinkerton sometimes encouraged Walpole himself to get in a fantastic humour. Peter Pindar says, — " My cousin Pindar in his odes Applauded liorse-jockies and gods." Walpole expressed a serious opinion that a new Pindar mio;ht do likewise, — that all the Enolish games might be rendered poetical like those of TABLE-TALK. 41 the ancients, — foro-ettino; the differences of oc- casion, custom, rehgion, and a totally different state of society. A serious panegyric on a gentleman's horse might undoubtedly be well received by the owner, and the poet invited to dinner to hear a delicious conversation on bets and chances ; but a ballad would do better than an ode. The latter would require translation into the vulorar tono;ue. JEWS. In our thoughts of old clothesmen and de- spised shop-keepers, we are accustomed to forget that the Jews came from the East, and that they still partake in their blood of the vivacity of their Eastern origin. We forget that they have had their poets and philosophers both gay and profound, and that the great Solomon was one of the most beautiful of amatory poets, of writers of Epicurean elegance, and the delight of the whole Eastern world, who exalted him into a magician. There are plentiful evidences, indeed, of the vivacity of the Jewish character in the Bible. They were liable to very fero- cious mistakes respecting their neighbours, but so have other nations been who have piqued themselves on their refinement ; but we are 43 TABLE-TALK. always reading of their feasting, dancing and singing, and harping and rejoicing. Half of David's imagery is made up of allusions to these lively manners of his countrymen. But the Bible has been read to us with such solemn faces, and associated with such false and gloomy ideas, that the Jews of old become as unpleasant thouo;h less undio'nified a multitude in our ima- ginations as the modern. We see as little of the real domestic interior of the one as of the other, even though no people have been more abundantly described to us. The moment we think of them as people of the East, this im- pression is changed, and w^e do them justice. Moses himself, who, notAvithstanding his share of the barbarism above-mentioned, was a genuine philosopher and great man, and is entitled to our eternal gratitude as the proclaimer of the Sabbath, is rescued from the degrading famili- arity into which the word Moses has been trampled, when w^e read of him in D'Herbelot as Moussa Ben Amran ; and even Solomon becomes another person as the Great Soliman or Soliman Ben Daoud, wdio had the ring that commanded the genii, and sat with twelve thou- sand seats of gold on each side of him, for his sages and great men. TABLE-TALK. 43 SMOLLETT. Though Smollett sometimes vexes us with the malicious boy's-play of his heroes, and some- times disgusts with his coarseness, he is still the Smollett whom now, as in one's boyhood, it is impossible not to heartily laugh with. He is an accomplished writer, and a masterly observer, and may be called the finest of caricaturists. His caricatures are always substantially true : it is only the complexional vehemence of his gusto that leads him to toss them up as he does, and tumble them on our plates. Then as to the objections against his morality, nobody will be hurt by it. The delicate and sentimental will look on the whole matter as a joke ; the acces- sories of the characters will deter them : w^iile readers of a coarser taste, for whom their friends might fear most, because they are most likely to be conversant with the scenes described, are, in our opinion, to be seriously benefitted by the perusal ; for it will show them, that heroes of their description are expected to have virtues as well as faults, and that they seldom get any- thing by being positively disagreeable or bad. Our author's lovers, it must be owned, are not of the most sentimental or flattering description. 44 TABLE-TALK. One of their common modes of paying their court, even to those they best love and esteem, is by writing lampoons on other women ! Smol- lett had a strong spice of pride and malice in him (greatly owing, we doubt not, to some scenes of unjust treatment he witnessed in early youth) which he imparts to his heroes ; all of wdiom, probably, are caricatures of himself, as Fielding's brawny, good-natured, idle fellows are of liini. There is no serious evil intention, however. It is all out of resentment of some evil, real or imaginary ; or is made up of pure animal spirit and the love of venting a com- plexional sense of power. It is energy, humour, and movement, not particularly amiable, but clever, entertaining, and interesting, and with- out an atom of hypocrisy in it. No man will learn to be shabby by reading Smollett's writ- ings. CHEMISTRY. "^ We eat, drink, sleep, and are clothed in things chemical ; the eye that looks at us con- tains them ; the lip that smiles at the remark is coloured by them ; we shed tears (Jiorribile dictu!) of soda water. But we need not be humiliated. TABLE-TALK. 45 Roses and dew-drops contain the same particles as we : custom cannot take away the precious mystery of the elements : the meanest com- pounds contain secrets as dignified as the most lofty. The soul remains in the midst of all, a wondrous magician, turning them to profit and beauty. A good book about chemistry is as entertain- ing as a romance. Indeed, a great deal of romance, in every sense of the term, has always been mixed up with chemistry. This most useful of the sciences arose out of the vainest ; at least the art of making gold, or the secret of the philosopher's stone (for chemistry originally meant nothing more), has hitherto had nothing to shew for itself but quackery and delusion. What discoveries the human mind may arrive at, it is impossible to say. I am not for putting bounds to its possibilities, or saying that no Columbuses are to arise in the intellectual world, who shall as far surpass the other as the universe does our hemisphere. But meanwhile chemistry supplied us with food for romances, before it took to regulating that of the stomach, or assisting us in the conquest of the world material. We owe to it the classification and famihar intimacy of the Platonical world of 46 TABLE-TALK. spirits, tlie Alchemists of Chaucer and Ben Johnson, partly even of the Rope of the Loch Paracelsus's Daemon of the stomach was the first that brought the spiritual and medical world into contact : in other words, we owe to that extraordinary person, who was an instance of the freaks played by a great understand- ing when it is destitute of moral sensibility, the first application of chemical knowledge to medicine. The amiable and delightful Cullen, in whom an extreme humanity became a pro- found wisdom (and the world are still to be indebted to him in uiorals as well as physics), was the first who enlarged the science into the universal thing which it is now. This was not a hundred years ago. To what a size has it not grown since, like the vapoury giant let out of the casket ! PETTY CONVENIENCES AND COMFORTS, The locks and keys, and articles on a par with them, in Tuscany, are, perhaps, the same now that they were in the days of Lorenzo de' Medici. The more cheerful a nation is in ordi- nary, or the happier its climate, the less it cares for those petty conveniences, which irritable TABLE-TALK. 47 people keep about them, as a set off to their want of happiness in the lump. A Xorman or a Tuscan will be g-lad enouo-h to make use of an English razor when he gets it ; but the point is, that he can do better without it than the Englishman. We have sometimes seen in the face of an Italian, when English pen-knives and other perfections of manufacture have been shewn him, an expression, mixed with his wonder, of something like paternal pity, as if the excess of the thins; was childish. It seemed to say ; — " Ah, you can make those sort of things, and we can do without them. Can you make such knick-knacks as Benvenuto Cellini did, — carkanets and caskets, full of exquisite sculpture, and worth their weight in jewels ?" ' And there is reason in this. It is convenient to have the most exquisite pen-knives ; but it is a crreater blessino; to be able to do without them. Ko reasonable man would stop the progress of manufacture, for a good will come of it beyond what is contemplated. But it is not to be denied meanwhile, that the more petty con- veniences we abound in, the more we become the slaves of them, and the more impatient at wanting them where they are not. Not having the end, we keep about us what we 48 TABLE-TALK. take for the means. Cultivators of better tempers or happier soils get at the end by shorter cuts. The only real good of the ex- cessive attention we pay to the conveniences of life, is, that the diffusion of knowledge, and the desire of advancement, proceed in company with it ; and that happier nations may ulti- mately become still happier by our discoveries, and improve us, in their turn, by those of their livelier nature. TEARS. Sympathizing and selfish people are alike given to tears, if the latter are selfish on the side of personal indulgence. The selfish get their senses into a state to be moved by any kind of excitement that stimulates their langour, and take a wonderful degree of pity on them- selves : for such is the secret of their pretended pity for others. You may always know it by the fine things they say of their own sufferings on the occasion. Sensitive people, on the other hand, of a more generous sort, though they cannot always restrain their tears, are accus- tomed to do so, partly out of shame at being taken for the others, partly because they can TABLE-TALK. 49 less afford the emotion. The sensitive selfish have the advantage in point of natural strength, being often as fat, jolly people as any, with a trick of longevity. George IV., with all his tears, and the wear and tear of his dinners to boot, lasted to a reasonable old age. If he had been shrewder, and taken more care of himself, he might have lived to a hundred. But it must be allowed, that he would then have been still more selfish than he was ; for these luxurious weepers are at least generous in imagination. They include a notion of other people somehow, and are more convertible into good people when young. The most selfish person we ever met w^ith, was upwards of a hundred, and had the glorious reputation of not being moveable by anything or anybody. He lasted, as a statue might last in a public square ; w^hich would see the whole side of it burn, w^th moveless eyes, and bowels of granite. DR. ALDRICH. Aldrich, Dean of Christchurch, built some well-known and admired structures at Oxford ; was a musician as well as architect ; wrote the famous Smoking Catch (being accomplished E 50 TABLE-TALK. in the smoking art abo) ; was the author of " Hark ! the bonny Christchurch Bells," a composition of great sprightliness and origi- nality; and has the reputation of being an elegant Latin poet. His Latin verses are to be met with in the " Musa; Anglican^e ;" but we do not remember them, unless the following hexameters be among the number : — " Si bene quid memini, causae sunt quinque bibendi ; — Hospitis adventus, prsesens sitis, atque futura, Aut vini bonitas, aut quselibet altera causa." Which has been thus translated, perhaps by the author, for the version is on a par with the original : — " If on my tbeme I rightly think, There are five reasons why men drink ; — Good wine, a friend, or being dry. Or lest we should be by and by. Or any other reason why." LORD MARCHMOKT'S RECEIPT FOR LONGEVITY. Lord Marchmont, the friend of Pope, lived to the age of eighty-six, preserving his strength and faculties to the last. He rode out only five days before he died. Sir John Sinclair, TABLE-TALK. 61 who knew him, wished to ascertain the system he pursued, and received for answer, that his lordship always lived as other people did, but that he had laid down when young one maxim, to which he rigidly adhered, and to which he attributed much of his good health, namely, — iSTow, what do you think this maxim was? Never to exceed in his eating ? Xo. Never to lie late in bed? No. Never to neglect exercise ? Never to take much physic ? Never to be rakish, to be litigious, to be ill-tempered, to give way to passion? No, none of these. It was Never to mix his Wijtes. What luxurious philosophies some people have ! My Lord Marchmont was resolved to be a long-lived, virtuous, venerable man ; and therefore he laid it down as a maxim, never to mix his wines. To get one glass of wine, in their extreme weakness, is what some human beings, bent double with age, toil, and rheuma- tism, can seldom hope for ; while another of the race, having nothing to bend him and nothing to do, shall become a glorious example of the beauty of this apostolical maxim, — " Never to mix vour wines." Lord Marchmont did accord- ingly for many years generously restrict him- E 2 52 TABLE-TALK. self to tlie use of claret ; but his physicians havino- forbidden liim to take that wine on account of its acidity, he resolved, with equal self-denial, to " confine himself to Burgundy ;" and accordingly, with a perseverance that can- not be sufficiently commended, he "took a bottle of it every day for fifteen years." The noble lord was a good man, however, and his " neat, as imported," is not to be oTudired him. All we have to lament is, that thousands, as good as he, have not an atom either of his pleasure or his leisure. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. There is something in the history of the American Revolution extremely dry and un- attractive. This is owing partly perhaps to the monied origin of it, partly to the want of personal anecdotes, to the absence of those in- teresting local and historical associations which abound in older states, and to the character of Washington ; who, however admirable a person, and fitted as if by Providence to the task Avhich he effected, was himself, personally, of a dry and unattractive a nature, an impersonation of integrity and straight-forwardness, exhibiting TABLE-TALK. 53 none of the social or romantic qualities which interest us in other great men. For similar reasons, the American Indians are the least in- teresting of savages. Their main object has been to exhibit themselves in an apathetic or stoical character, and they have suifered in human sympathy accordingly. DISCOVEEERS OF AMERICA. It is painful to reflect on the calamitous cir- cumstances under which these high-minded adventurers were accustomed to terminate their careers, however brilliant their successes by the way. They got riches and territory for others, and generally died in poverty, often of wounds and disease, sometimes by the hands of the exe- cutioner. Pinzon, who first crossed the equi- noctial line in the New Hemisphere and disco- vered Brazil, got nothing by his voyage of dis- covery but heavy losses. Xicuesa disappeared, and was supposed to have perished at sea. Val- divia was killed and eaten by cannibals. Ponce de Leon, who thought to discover the fountain of youth, died of a wound exasperated by mor- tified pride and disappointment. The lofty and romantic Don Alonzo de Ojeda died so 64. TABLE-TALK. poor, that he did not leave money enough to provide for his interment; and so broken in spirit, that with his last breath he entreated that his body might be buried in the monas- tery of San Francisco, just at the portal, in humble expiation of his past pride, that " every one who entered might tread upon his grave." And Vasco Nunez de Balboa, one of the best of the old brotherhood, perished on the scaffold, a victim, like Columbus, to envy. It is to be recollected, however, that such men accomplish the first object of their ambition — renown; and that life, and not death, is the main thing by which we are to judge of their happiness. WONDER NEVER CEASES. It might be thought that the progress of science would destroy the pleasure arising from the perusal of works of fiction, by showing us the mechanical causes of phenomena, and so leading us to conclude that the utmost wonders we could imagine might with equal reason be referred to similar causes. In other words, no wonder is greater than any other wonder ; and, if once explained, ceases to be a wonder. " Wonder/^ it has been said, " is the effect of TABLE-TALK. 55 novelty upon ignorance." Perhaps it would have been said better, that wonder is the effect of w^ant of familiarity upon ignorance : for there are many things that excite our wonder, though far from new to us or to our reflec- tions; such as life and death, the phenomena of the planets, &c. But to say nothing of the inexhaustible stock of novelties, wonders could never cease in anything, till we knew their first as well as their final causes. We must understand how it is, that substance, and mo- tion, and thought exist, before we can cease to admire them : the very power of writing a fairy tale, is as great a wonder as anything it relates : and thus, w^hile we think to frio-hten away the charms of fable and poetry with the sound of our shuttles and steam-engines, they only return the more near to us, settle smiling on the very machinery, and (to say nothing of other sympathies) demand admiration on the very same grounds. 56 TABLE-TALK. DALY, THE DUBLIN MANAGER. Daly, patentee of the Dublin Theatre, was one of those iron-hearted and brazen-faced black- guards, who, in an age when knowledge is on the increase, are not so likely to be taken for clever fellows as they used to be ; being in fact no other than scoundrels in search of a sensa- tion, and willing to gratify it, like wild beasts, at the risk of any price to the sufferer. Such fellows do not abound with courage: they merely have one of an honourable man's dravf- backs upon ferocity. To taliv of their other gallantry would be equally preposterous. Even of animal impulse they know no more than others. They only know no restraint. Give a man good health, and take from him all re- flection, and every spark of love, and you have the human wild beast called Daly. His best ex- cuse was his squint. There was some smack of salvation in that, for it looks as if he resented it. " Richard Daly, Esq., patentee of the Dublin Theatre (says Boaden^s Life of 3Irs. Jordari), was born in the county of Galway, and educated at Trinity College : as a preparation for the course he intended to run through life, he had fought sixteen duels in two years ; three with TABLE-TALK. 57 the small sword and thirteen with pistols ; and he, I suppose, imagined, like Macbeth, with equal confidence and more truth, that he bore a * charmed life ;' for he had gone through the said sixteen trials of his nerve without a single wound or scratch of much consequence. He, therefore, used to provoke such meetings on any usual and even uncertain grounds, and entered the field in pea-green, embroidered and ruffled and curled, as if he had been to hold up a very different ball, and gallantly presented his full front, conspicuously finished with an elegant brooch, quite regardless how soon the labours of the toilet ' might soil their honours in the dust.' Daly, in person, was remarkably hand- some, and his features would have been aoTee- able but for an inveterate and most distressinof squint, the consciousness of which might keep his courage eternally upon the look-out for pro- vocation ; and not seldom, from surprise alone, afibrd him an opportunity for this his favourite diversion. Like Wilkes, he must have been a very unwelcome adversary to meet with the sword, because the eye told the opposite party none of his intentions. Mr. Daly's gallantry was equal at least to his courage, and the latter was often necessary to defend him in the un- 58 TABLE-TALK. bridled indulgence that through life he per- mitted to the former. He was said to be the general lover in his theatrical company ; and, I presume, the resistance of the fair to a manager, may be somewhat modified by the danger of offending one who has the power to appoint them to parts, either striking or otherwise ; and w^ho must not be irritated, if he cannot be obliged. It has been said, too, that any of his subjects risked a great deal by an escape from either his love or his tyranny ; for he would put his bond in force upon the refractory, and condemn to a hopeless imprisonment those who, from virtue or disgust, had determined to dis- appoint him." LIGHT AKD COLOURS. Light is, perhaps, the most wonderful of all visible things ; that is to say, it has the least analogy to other bodies, and is the least subject to secondary explanations. No object of sight equals it in tenuity, in velocity, in beauty, in remoteness of origin, and closeness of approach. It has " no respect of persons." Its beneficence is most impartial. It shines equally on the jewels of an Eastern prince, and on the dust in TABLE-TALK. 59 the corner of a warehouse. Its delicacy, its power, its utility, its universality, its lovely essence, visible and yet intangible, make up somethino; o:odlike to our ima2;inations ; and thouo;h we acknowledg;e divinities more divine, we feel that ignorant as well as wise fault may be found with those who have made it an object of worship. One of the most curious thino-s with res^ard to light, is, that it is a body, by means of which we become sensible of the existence of other bodies. It is a substance ; it exists as much in the space between our eyes and the object it makes known to us, as it does in any other instance ; and yet we are made sensible of that object by means of the very substance inter- vening. When our inquiries are stopped by perplexities of this kind, no wonder that some awe-stricken philosophers have thought further inquiry forbidden : and that others have con- cluded, with Berkeley, that there is no such thing as substance but in idea, and that the phenomena of creation exist but by the will of the Great Mind, which permits certain apparent causes and solutions to take place, and to act in a uniform manner. Milton doubts whether he ought to say what he felt concerning light : — 60 TABLE-TALK. " Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born. Or of the eternal coeternal beam, May I express thee uublamed ? since God is light, And never but in unapproached light. Dwelt from eternity, dvrelt there in thee. Bright effluence of bright essence increate." And then he makes that pathetic complaint, during which we imagine him sitting with his bhnd eyes in the sun, feeling its warmth upon their lids, while he could see nothing : — " Thee I revisit safe. And feel thy sovran vital lamp ; but thou Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn." As colour is imparted solely by the different rays of light with which they are acted upon, the sun literally paints the flowers. The hues of the pink and rose literally come every day, direct from heaven. YERSIOISIS OE ANCIENT LYRICS. The more we consider Anacreon and the ancient lyrics, the more probable it seems that some degree of paraphrase is necessary, to assi- milate them in effect to the original. We are to recollect, that the ancient odes were written to be sung to music ; that the poet himself was TABLE-T.VLK. 61 the first performer ; and that the idea of words and music was probably never divided in the mind of the reader. The spirit of enjoyment is a spirit of continuousness. We may suppose what we like of Greek simplicity and brevity, es])ecially in their epigrams or inscriptions, the shortness of which was most likely prescribed, in the first instance, by the nature of the places on which they were written : but we may be pretty certain, that the shortest of Anacreon's sonscs was made three, or four, or five times as long as it appears to us, by the music with which it was accompanied. Take a song of Metastasio's, as set by Arne or Mozart, and we shall find the duration of it a very different thing in the study and the theatre. The only true wav, therefore, of translatino; an ode of Anacreon, is to sympathize as much as possible with his animal spirits, and then to let the words flow as freely as they will, w4th as musi- cal and dancing a melody as possible, so as to make the flow and continuity of the verse as great a substitute as possible for the accompani- ment of the lyre. The only versions of Ana- creon, in the English language, that are really worth anything, are those of Cowley; and these are as paraphrastic as they are joyous. 63 TABLE-TALK. CATHERINE THE SECOND OF RUSSIA. As long as she had everything her own way, Catherine could be a very pleasant, vain, de- bauched, fat -growing, all-tolerant mistress, in- terchanging little homages with the philoso- phers : but as soon as philosophy threatened to regard the human race as of more consequence than one woman, adieu to flattery and to France. The French then were only w^orthy of being " drubbed." Catherine was a clever German, with a great deal of will, among a nation of barbarians. This is the clue to her ascendancy. In a more southern country she would probably have been little thought of, in comparison with what she was reputed as the "mother" of her great clownish family of Russians. Note, — That the arbitrary have always had a tendency to grow fat, for the same reasons that inclines them to be furious. The same people who can deny others everything, are famous for refusing themselves nothing. TABLE-TALK. 63 PETRAP.CH AXD LAURA. There is plenty of evidence in her lover's poetry, to show that Laura portioned out the shade and sunshine of her countenance in a manner that had the instinctive eftect of artifice, though we do not believe there was any intention to practise it. And this is a reasonable conclu- sion, warranted by the experience of the world. It is not necessary to suppose Laura a perfect character, in order to excite the love of so imao;inative a heart as Petrarch's. A sfood half, or two-thirds of the love, may have been assio'nable to the imao-ination. Part of it was avowedly attributable to the extraordinary fidelity with which she kept her marriage vow to a disagreeable husband, in a city so licentious as Avignon, and, therefore, partook of that not very complimentary astonishment, and that willingness to be at an unusual disadvantage, which makes chastity cut so remarkable a figure amidst the rakeries of Beaumont and Fletcher. Furthermore, Laura may have not understood the etherialities of Petrarch. It is possible that less homao-e mio-ht have had a greater effect upon her ; and it is highly probable (as Petrarch, though he speaks well of her natural talents, says she had not been well educated), that she 64 TABLE-TALK. had that instinctive misgiving of the fine qualities attributed to her, which is produced, even in the vainest of women, by flights to which they are unaccustomed. It makes them resent their incompetency, upon the lover who thus strangely reminds them of it. Most women, however, would naturally be unwilling to lose such an admirer, especially as they found the admiration of him extend in the world : and Laura is described by her lover as manifestly aifected by it. Upon the whole, I should guess her to have been a very beautiful, well mean- ing woman, far from insensible to public homage of any sort (she was a splendid dresser, for instance), and neither so wise nor so foolish, as to make her seriously responsible for any little coquetries she practised, or wanting in sufficient address to practise them well. Her history is a lofty comment upon the line in the Beggars' Opera, — " By keeping men off, you keep tliera on " As to the sonnets with which this great man immortalized his love, and which are full of the most wonderful beauties, small and great (the versification being surprisingly various and charming, and the conceits of which they have been accused being for the most part as natural TABLE-TALK. 65 and delightful as anything in them, from a pro- pensity which a real lover has to associate his mistress with everything he sees). Justice has been done to their gentler beauties, but not, I think, to their intensity and passion. Romeo should have written a criticism on Petrarch's sonnets. He would have done justice both to their " conceits" and their fervour. I think it is Ugo Foscolo who remarks, that Petrarch has given evidence of passion felt in solitude, amounting even to the terrible. His tempera- ment partook of that morbid cast which makes people haunted by their ideas, and which, in men of genius, subjects them sometimes to a kind of delirium of feeling, without destroying the truth of their perceptions. Petrarch more than once represents himself in these sonnets, as struggling with a propensity to suicide ; nor do we know anything more affecting in the record of a man's struggles with unhappiness, than the one containing a prayer of humiliation to God on account of his passion, beginning " Padre del ciel, dopo i perduti giorni " — (Father of heaven, after the lost days). The commentators tell us that it was written on a Good Friday, exactly eleven years from the commencement of his love. F 66 TABLE-TALK. MORAL AND PERSONAL COURAGE. In all moral courage there is a degree of personal : personal is sometimes totally deficient in moral. The reason is, that moral courage is a result of the intellectual perceptions and of conscience ; whereas a man totally deficient in those, may have nerves or gall enough to face any danger which his body feels itself competent to oppose. When the physically couraireous man comes into the reo-ion of mind and speculation, or when the question is purely one of right or wrong, he is apt to feel himself in the condition of the sailor who confessed that he was afraid of ghosts, because he *' did not understand their tackle." When moral courage feels that it is in the right, there is no personal daring of which it is incapable. TIGHT-LACING. It is a frequent matter of astonishment, why females should persist in tight-lacing when so much is said against it, and how it happens that they should take what is really a deformity for something handsome. The first part of this mystery is answered by the second : they think TABLE-TALE.. 67 the waist proclaced by tight-lacing a beauty ; and the reason why they think so is, that they know a small waist to be object of admiration, and they feel that they can never persuade you it is small without forcing the smallness upon your eyes, and thus forcing you to acknow- ledge it. On the contrary, the spectator feels that if the waist were really small, so much pains would not be taken to convince him of it. But this the poor creatures will not consider. Every one thinks that there will be an exception in her favour. Other women, she allows, make themselves ridiculous, and attempt to impose upon us ; — with herself the case is different : — everybody must see that her waist is really small. Therefore she ijoes lacino; and lacins: o o o on, till she becomes like a wasp : and every- body who follows her in the street, laughs at her. Some of these waists are of such frightful tenuity, as to strike the least thinking observer with their U2:liness. The other dav there was a young lady walking before me in the street, whose waist literally seemed no thicker than a large arm. The poor girl had marked herself for death. Some of the most vital parts of her body must have been fairly lapped over one f2 68 TABLE-TALK. another, or squeezed into a mass. My first sensation, on seeing this phenomenon, was horror at the monstrosity ; the second was vexation with the poor silly girl ; the third was pity. The ground of the stupid custom is sympathy, however mistaken. The poor sim- pletons wish for our admiration, and do not know how hard they try to gain our contempt. We ought to be the less provoked, because in all these yearnings after social approbation, there is the germ of a great preferment for the community ; since the same people, who now make themselves so ridiculous, and get so much death and disease, by pursuing false means of obtaining our good opinion, would, in a wiser state of society, be led as vehemently to adopt the true. Instead of going about half- stifled with bad vitals and ready-made coroner's inquests, the poor creatures would then be anxious to show us that they were natural healthy females, fit to be wives and mothers. At present, if they can be mothers at all, it is frightful to think what miseries they may in- flict on their offspring. TABLE-TALK. 69 GRAYITY AND INDUSTRY OE DANCERS. One of Addison's happy papers in the Spec- tator (and how numerous they are ! ) con- tains an account of a mysterious personage, who, lodo'ino^ at the same house as his ob- server and making a great noise one day over his head, was watched by some of his fellow-lodgers through the key-hole. They observed him look gravely on a book, and then twirl round upon one leg. He looked gravely again, and put forth his leg in a different manner. A third time he fell to studying profoundly, and then, darting off with vivacity, took a career round the room. The conclusion was, if I remember, that he was some mad gentleman. The peepers, however, ventured in, and upon inquiry found that he was a dancing-master. The Spectator, who had joined them, concluded by requesting, that the gentleman would be pleased in future to addict himself with less vehemence to his studies, since they had cost him that morning the loss of several trains of thought, besides breaking a couple of tobacco-pipes. They who have seen the grave faces and lively legs of some of the opera-dancers, can 70 TABLE-TALK. easily understand the profundities of this master of their art ; nor will they fall into the mistake of younci; people in supposing that a dancer has nothing to do but to be lively and enjoy himself. M. Blasis, the author of a work on the art, says that the dancer must be always practising, otherwise he is in danger of losing what he has acquired. Some muscle will get out of practice, some shiver of the left-leg be short of perfection. Furthermore, he must follow neither " simple unpractised theorists," nor the " imaginary schemes of innovating speculators." He must also be temperate and sober; nay, must "partially renounce every pleasure but that which Terpsichore affords ;" must not think of horsemanship, fencing, or running; must study the antique, drawing, and music, but particularly his own limbs ; and if he aspire to the composition of ballets, must have a profound knowledge of the drama and of human nature. See now, you who reflect but little, how much it takes to bring a man to a right state of pirouette ; what a world of accomplishment there is in that little toe, which seems pointed at nothing ; and what a right the possessor of it has to the grave face which has so often puzzled conjecture. He TABLE-TALK. 71 seems to be merely holding the tip of a lady's finger : but who is to know what is passing throiioh his mind ? " Use your endeavours," saith Blasis, " to twirl deUcately round on the points of your toes." Here we feel in a state of anxiety, with a world of labour before us. In another sentence, one hardly knows in w^hat sense we are to take his words, w^hether as an encourage- ment to tranquilhty of mind, or an injunction to acquire lissomness in the body. " Make yourself easy," quoth he, " about your hips." ADVERTISEMENTS. Advertisements are sometimes very amusing. They give insights into the manners of the times no less interesting than authentic. Sup- pose the ancients had possessed a press, and that a volume of a Roman Post or Chronicle had been dug up at Herculaneum, w4th what curiosity should we not contemplate the milli- nery of the Roman ladies, or, "Wanted a Gladiator to fight the last new lion ;" or, " Xext Ides of November will be published the new poem of ' Quintus Horatius Flaccus' " or a long account of a court-day of Nero or Antoninus ! 72 TABLE-TALK. The best editions of the Tatler and Spectator have very properly retained a selection of the Advertisements. SPORTSMEN AND CUSTOM. There are nn question abl}- many amiable men among sportsmen, who, as the phrase is, would not " hurt a fly," — that is to say, on a window. At the end of a string, the case is altered. So marvellous are the effects of custom and educa- tion. Consoling thought, nevertheless ! for if custom and education have been so marvellous in reconciling intelligent men to absurdities, and humane men to cruelty, what will they not effect, when they shall be on the side of justice ? when reason, humanity, and enjoyment, shall become the three new graces of the civilized world? It has been said that absurdities are necessary to man; but nobody thinks so who is not their victim. With occupation, leisure, and healthy amusement, all the world would be satisfied. TABLE-TALK. 73 BEAES AND THEIR HUXTEES. It is natural in bear hunters, -svlio have wit- nessed the creature's ravages, and felt the peril of his approach, to call him a ferocious animal, and gift him at times with other epithets of objection : but we who sit in our closets, far removed from the danger, may be allowed to vindicate the character of the bear, and to think that Bruin, who is only labouring in his voca- tion, and is not more ferocious than hunger and necessity make him, might, with at least equal reason, have advanced some objections against his invader. He might have said, if he pos- sessed a little -<5^sopean knowledge of mankind, "^ Here, now, is a fellow coming to kill me for getting my dinner, who eats slaughtered sheep and lobsters boiled alive ; who, with the w^ord ' ferocity' in his mouth, puts a ball into my poor head, just as the highwayman vindicates him- self by abusing the man he shoots ; and who then writes an account of his humane achieve- ment with a quill plucked from the body of a bleeding and screaming goose." Or, knowing nothing of mankind, he might say, " Here comes that horrid strange animal to murder us, who sometimes has one sort of 74 TABLE-TALK. head and sometimes another (hat and cap), and who carries another terrible animal in his paw — a kind of stiff snake — which sends out thun- der and lightning ; and so he points his snake at us, and in an instant we are filled with burn- ing wounds, and die in agonies of horror and desperation." There is much resemblance to humanity in the bear. I would not make invidious compari- sons ; but travellers as well as poets have given us beautiful accounts of the maternal affections of the bear; and furthermore, the animal re- sembles many respectable gentlemen whom we could name. When he wishes to attack any- body he rises on his hind legs, as men do in the House of Commons. He dances, as aldermen do, with great solemnity and weight ; and his general appearance, when you see him walking about the streets with his keeper, is surely like that of many a gentleman in a great-coat, whose enormity of appetite, and the recklessness with which he indulges it, entitle him to have a keeper also. TABLE-TALK. 75 SELF-STULTIFICATION. The highest, most deliberate, peremptory, and solemn instance perhaps on record, of this species of absurdity, is the dismissal of his court- fool, Archibald Amstrong, by Charles the First in council. Archy, as he was called, had given mortal offence to Laud, by ridiculing his at- tempts at church-domination. It is related of him that he once said, by way of grace before dinner, " Great praise to the King, and Little Laud to the devil." But the last feather that broke the back of the Archbishop's patience was Archibald saying to him, on the failure of his liturgy in Scotland, "Who's fool now?" Laud complained to Charles ; Charles sum- moned his council to take cognizance of the dreadful matter ; and accordingly, at " AYhite- hall, on the eleventh of March, one thousand six hundred and thirty-seven, present the King's Most Excellent Majesty, the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Keeper, Lord Trea- surer, Lord Privy Seal," and fourteen other great personages, Archibald Armstrong, "the Kino^'s fool," for certain scandalous words, of a " high nature," and " proved to be uttered by hun by two witnesses," was sentenced to have 76 TABLE-TALK. his coat pulled over his ears," and discharged from his Majesty's service. What was this but saying, that the fool was a fool no longer ? " Write me down an ass/' says Dogberry in the comedy. Write down, that Archy is no fool, says King Charles in coimcil — he has called the Archbishop one ; and therefore we are all agreed, the Archbishop included, that the man has proved himself to be entitled no longer to the appellation. COWSLIPS. A country girl, the other day, expressed her astonishment that ladies could see anything to admire in " cowslips." Now, here was an in- stance of the familiarity that breeds contempt. Cowslips are among the most elegant of the spring flowers. They look, with those pretty sleeves of theirs, like ladies themselves in their morning dresses. But the country girl had been accustomed to see whole fields of them, and to associate them with wet and mire, and Farmer Higgins. Shakspeare mentions cowslips seven times, primroses just as often, and violets fourteen. He says nothing of anemones or hyacinths. I TABLE-TALK. 77 gather this from Mrs. Clarke's " Concordance ;" which, besides being admirably what it pro- fesses to be, suggests curious speculations as to the greater or less likings of Shakspeare, his habitual associations of ideas, &c. ; — and it might be made subservient to interestins" in- quiries on those subjects. APRIL FOOLS. An anniversary of this kind, in which stulti- fication is the order of the day, appears to take place, about the same time of the year, all over the civilized world. Yet it would look more like a custom originating in some one particular country, than most of those which are thought to have had such commencements ; for it is as difficult not to imagine ordinary holidays and superstitions the natural growth of every human community, as it would be to suppose that all the world, at one particular season, agreed to make fools of one another w^ithout knowinor it. There are solemn people whose dignity can- not bear to be disturbed, let the season be never so full of gaiety. It is such a fragile and empty pretension, they are afraid that the least touch will knock it to pieces. Xot so with the wiser. 78 TABLE-TALK. They rejoice in every good which Nature has bestowed on them, mirth included ; and are only baulked by the presence of the incom- petent. The celebrated Dr. Clarke was once amusing himself at some merry pastime with some youths of his college, when he suddenly left off at the sight of one of the fellows. " Hush, boys," said he, " we must be quiet. Here 's a fool coming." I must tell you a story of a friend of mine, which I take to be crowning specimen of April Fool makino;. Down comes this father of a family one April Day to breakfast, with a face looking at once amused and confounded, as if something had happened to him both pleasant and mor- tifying. The mother of the family asks the reason, and all his children's eyes are turned on him. He looked, at first, as if he did not like to speak ; but on being pressed, assumed an aspect of bold acknowledgment, and said, " Well, my dear, you know I am not particular on April Days, but, certainly, I did not think that Harriet (one of the servants) would have gone so far as this." "What is it?" " Why, she has made an April Fool of me! ! TABLE-TALK. 79 I was coming down the stairs, when she re- quested me to have a care of a broom that was lying at the bottom of it. There was no broom^ and she ran away laughing." "Well/' cries the ladv, "of all the bold o-irls I ever met in my life, that Harriet has the greatest effrontery." The children all joined in the astonishment. They never heard of such a thing. It was wonderful, shameful, &c., but they could not help laughing, and the roar became universal. " My dear," said Harry, gravely, " and you, all of you merry young ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure of informing you, all round, and at one fell swoop, that you are a parcel of April Fools." PRIVATE WAE. In the times when duels were foug-ht with swords, the Dutch had a pretty custom (per- haps have it still in sequestered places, where virtue survives) in which two rustical parties, whenever they happened to have an argument over their beer, and couldn't otherwise settle it, took out the knives with which they had been cutting their bread and cheese, and went to it 80 TABLE-TALK. like gentlemen. It was called snick-and-snee^ which is understood to mean catch and cut, the parties catching hold of one another by the collar or waistcoat, and thus conveniently snee- hig or cutting away, as butchers might do at a carcase. A similar custom is related of the Highlanders, who, whenever they sat down together to dinner, were so prepared for it, that in case of accidents, that is to say of argu- ments, they stuck their dirks into the board beside their trenchers, so as to have tlieir rea- sons ready at hand. If a man said, " You grow hot and ridiculous," out came the cold steel to disprove his words ; and the question was settled upon the most logical military principles. Now, if private and public virtue are iden- tical, as moralists insist they are, in contradic- tion to the casuists of expediency, there is no reason why the disputes of individuals should not be settled like those of nations, in the good old Dutch and Highland manner. But, at the same time, as moralists and casuists alike agree in thinking that the more the system of war can be humanized the better, I can't but think that an obvious mode presents itself of showing the resort to bloodshed in its best and most reasonable colours — a light at once conclusive TABLE-TALK. 81 and considerate, humane yet valiant, elegant in the accessories, yet as no-nonsense and Jolui Bull^ like as the perfection of reason can desire. War, observe, is a very filthy as well as melan- choly thing. There can be no doubt of that. And, therefore, on the no-nonsense principle, the fact is not to be disguised. People, it is true, do disguise it ; writers of despatches disguise it ; even Wellington says little or nothing about it, which I have always thought the only blot on the character and candour of that o;reat man. But I am sure that, on reflection, and consider- ing how un-Enylish-like such insincerity is, the Duke would give up the concealment after his usual manly fashion. My plan is this : — that whenever two gentle- men, alive to the merits and necessities of war, should happen to have a dispute over their wine, they should immediately put on two laced hats, call in a band of music from the streets, and after hearing a little of it, and marching up and down the room with an air of dignified pro- priety, fall to it with their fists, and see which can give the other the most bloody nose. The sight of blood adding to the valour of the combatants, the noses of course would get worse and worse, and the blows heavier and G 82 TABLE-TALK. lieavier, till both of the warriors reasonably became " sights," and one of the two at last fell insensible — that being an evil necessary to the termination of the argument. Meantime, they would groan considerably, and complain in a very touching manner of the kicks and cuffs they received on the tenderest parts of their bodies (to show that there was " no non- sense"); a great dust would be struck up from the carpet ; pools of blood would properly over- flow it (always to show that there was " no nonsense"); and then, when the fight was over, and the band of music had played again, and the shrieks in the drawino'-room and kitchen had subsided into those tears and sobs which are the final evidences of a state of logical con- viction, the conqueror (if he was able), or his friends at all events, would clear their throats in the most dignified manner, strike up a hymn, and thank the author of their respective vitali- ties that the defeated party had been beaten to a jelly, to the special satisfaction of the beater, and the eternal honour and glory of the Author of the Universe. N.B. — You must be cautious how you doubt whether the Author of the Universe takes any particular notice of the bloody noses, or whether TABLE-TALK. 83 he does not rather leave them to work out some different tMrd purpose bj themselves ; because, in that case, you might be charged with wanting a due sense of his dignity. On the other hand, you must not at all imagine that he approves the bloody noses in the ab- stract as well as concrete ; because, in that case, you would be charged with doubting his virtue. And, again, you are not to fancy that Heaven wishes to put an end to the bloody noses alto- gether ; for that would be quite opposed to the principle of ''no nonsense." Your business is to preach love to your nei^'hbour, to kick him to bits, and to thank God for the contradiction. BEAUMARCHAIS. Beaumarchais, author of the celebrated co- medy of " Figaro," an abridgment of which has been rendered more celebrated by the music of Mozart, made a large fortune by supplying the American republicans with arms and ammuni- tion, and lost it by speculations in salt and printing. His comedy is one of those produc- tions which are accounted dangerous, from de- veloping the spirit of intrigue and gallantry g2 84 TABLE-TALK. with more gaiety than objection ; and they would be more undeniably so, if the good- humour and self-examination to which they excite did not suggest a spirit of charity and inquiry beyond themselves. MOZAKT. IMozart is wonderful for the endless variety and undeviatino; 2:race of his invention. Yet his wife said of him, that he was a still better dancer than musician ! In a soul so full of harmony, kindness towards others was to be looked for ; and it was found. When a child, he would go about asking people " w^hether they loved him." When he was a great musi- cian, a man in distress accosted him one day in the street, and as the composer had no money to give him, he bade him wait a little, while he w^ent into a coffee-house, where he wrote a beautiful minuet extempore, and, sending the poor man with it to the music-seller's, made him a present of the proceeds. This is the way that great musicians are made. Their sensibility is their genius. TABLE-TALK. 85 \T:0LET— WITH A DIFFEHEXCE. " V^iolet" is thought a suitable name for the sweetest heroines of romancej on account of its association with the flower; vet add but a letter to it, and that not a harsh one, and it becomes the most unfeminine of characteristics — Violent. VERBAL MISTAKES OE FOREIGNERS. The Abbe Georgel, having to send a dinner- invitation to Hume from Prince Louis de Rohan, took the opportunity of impressing the historian with his knowledge of the English lano;uao:e in the followinsc terms : — " M. L'Abbi, Georgel fait un million de com- plimens a 31. Hume. He makes great account of his vorks, admires her wit, and loves her person.^ If ever Hume shook his fat sides with lauo-hter, it must have been at the English of M. I'Abbe Georgel. There is an old joke on the coast of France about an English lady, who, in putting up at an inn, raised a great confusion in the minds of the attendants by showing herself very particular about her two " sailors'' {mate- 86 TABLE-TALK. lots) ; when all that she meant to unpress was her nicety respecting two "mattresses" {matelas). The Italians have similar jokes about English- men declining to have any more at dinner, because they have eaten " ships" (the term for which, hastbneiito, they mistake for ahastanza, enough) ; upon which another declines too, on the ground that he had eaten the "anchor" (pronouncing ancora instead of ancora, also). I remember an English lady in Italy, who became accomplished in the language ; but at the out- set of her studies, it was said of her that she one day begged a coachman not to drive so fast, by the title of '^ spoon" : — " Spoon, spoon, pray not so fast": usinsf the word cucchiaio Instead of cocchiere. The effect of this kind of mistake being in proportion to the gravity of the intention, I know of none better than tliat of an honest German (the late Mr. Stumpff, the harp-maker), who beino; diso;usted at some trait of world- liness which he heard related, and wishing to say that rather than be guilty of such mean- ness he would quit society for a hermitage, and live upon acorns, exclaimed with great animation, " Oh — I shall go into de vilderness, and live upon unicorns" TABLE-TALK. 87 HUME AXD THE THREE LITTLE KIXGS. ^Vhen Hume was in Paris, receiving the homage of the philosophers for his scepticism, and of the courtiers for his advocacy of Charles the First, three little boys were brought before him to make him speeches. They compli- mented him after the fashion of grown persons, said how impatiently they had expected his arrival, and expressed their admiration of his beautiful history. Alas I a history too much like that of the Stuarts, was in preparation for them. These children were afterwards the un- fortunate Louis the Sixteenth, and his brother Louis the Eio^hteenth, and Charles the Tenth. " Heaven from all creatures hides the Book of Eate, All but the page prescribed — their present state." If the poor little boys could have read in that tremendous volume, their compliments might have been turned in somethino; of this fashion: — Little Charles the Tenth. — Accept the com- pliments, Mr. Jacobite, of a Prince whom you will help to send into exile. Little Louis the Eighteenth. — And of one whom you will help to bring from it, only to let him die of fat. 88 TABLE-TALK. Little Louis the Sixteenth. — And of another, whose head your beautiful history will help to cut off. A CHARMING CREATURE. Shakspeare, in the compass of a line, has described a thoroughly charming girl : — *' Pretty, and witty ; wild, and yet, too, gentle." BACON. If I were asked to describe Bacon as briefly as I could, I should say that he was the liberator of the hands of knowledo;e. SUICIDES OF BUTLERS. Tragedy will break in upon one's dinner- table in spite of us. Mr. Wakley tells us that suicide is rife among butlers! The news is startling to people at dinner. How many faces must have been turned on butlers, the day on which the coroner made the remark ; and how uncomfortable some of them must have felt ! The teetotallers will not overlook it; for the cause appears obvious enough. The butler is TABLE-TALK. 89 always sipping. He is also the most sedentary of domestics, the house-keeper excepted ; and wine-merchants accuse him of having a bad conscience. So he grows burly and uneasy ; thinks he shall never retire into an inn or a public office ; loses bits of his i^roperty in spe- culation ; and when the antibilious pill fails him, there is an inquest. The poor butler should take to his legs, in- stead of his arm-chair. He should make him- self easier in his mind, considering his tempta- tions ; and cultivate an interest in everything out of doors, except shares in railroads. DUELS. The only conjecture to be made as to the pos- sible utihty of duels (on the assumption that the retention of any prevailing custom must have some foundation in reason) seems to be, that they serve to counteract the effeminate ten- dencies of sedentary states of society, and admonish us of the healthiness and necessity of courage. For as to suffering insolence and outrage, the most polished nations of antiquity had no 90 TABLE-TALK. duels, and yet never appear to have felt the want of them. But the Greeks and Romans, by their wrestling-grounds, and military training, and the very nakedness and beauty of their sculp- ture, maintained a sense of the desirableness of bodily vigour. The diffusion of knowledge, however, seems to be conspiring with the increased activity and practical good sense of the age to discountenance duelling, and render it ridiculous ; and as the occasions of it are in general really so, while the consequences are tragical to the persons concerned, it is to be hoped that every brave and considerate man will do what he can to assist in proving it superfluous. Did anybody ever write a serious pane- gyric on a duel ? It has received hundreds of banters, and (consequences apart) has a natural tendency to the burlesque. Nay, even those have given rise to it in some pensive minds. About thirty years ago, there was a famous duel about a couple of dogs between a Colonel Montgomery and a Captain JMacnamara, in which the former was killed. The colonel or the captain would not " call his dog off," and TABLE-TALK. 91 the captain or colonel would not hinder his dog from going on ; and so, " Straight they call'd for swords and pistols," and made a few women and children miserable. This catastrophe occasioned a printed elegiac poem, the author of which, who was quite serious, concluded it with a burst of regret in the following extraordinary triplet : — " If two fine dogs had quarrelled not !— Oh ! if Kot iell Montgomery through false honour's tiff, Ivor Chalk-Earm witness'd of two heroes' miffl " LISTOIS. Talking of paralysis reminds one of the death of Liston. Poor fellow ! he had long outlived the active portion of his faculties, and used to stand at his window by Hyde-park-corner, sadly gazing at the tide of human existence which was going by, and which he had once helped to enliven. Liston's " face was his fortune." He was an actor, though truly comic and original, yet of no great variety ; and often got credit given him for more humour than he intended, by reason of that irresistible compound of plainness and pretension, of chubbiness and challenge, of born. d-2 TABLE-TALK. baggy, desponding heaviness, and the most in- effable airs and graces, which seemed at once to sport with and be superior to the permission which it gave itself to be laughed at. When Liston expressed a peremptory opinion, it was the most incredible thing in the world, it was so refuted by some accompanying glance, gesture, or posture of incompetency. When he smiled, his face simmered all over with a fondness of self-complacency amounting to dotao;e. Never had there been the ownino; of such a soft impeachment. Liston was aware of his plainness, and allowed himself to turn it to account; but not, I sus- pect, without a supposed understanding between him and the audience as to the superiority of his intellectual pretensions ; for, like many comedians, he was a grave man underneath his mirth, thought himself qualified to be a trage- dian, and did, in fact, now and then act in tragedy for his benefit, with a lamentable sort of respectability that disappointed the laughers. I have seen him act in this way in Octavian, in the Mountaineers, TABLE-TALK. 93 STEEPLE-CHASIXG. Steeple-chasing is to proper bold riding what fool-hardiness is to courage. It proves nothing except that the chaser is in want of a sensa- tion, and that he has brains not so much worth taking care of as those of other men. A. But is it not better than sta2:-huntino- ? -S. For the stag, certainly. A. There can be no such piteous sight at a steeple-chase as may be seen at other kinds of hunting. B. How can you be sure of that ? I am afraid you are severer upon the chasers than I am. A. Suppose, as the poet says — " A stag comes weeping to a pool." B. Good ; but suppose "A wife comes weeping to a fool." Suppose Xumskull brought home on a shutter. Dano;er for dangler's sake is senseless. Be- sides, the horse is worth somethinor. One has no right to crash and mash it in a pit on the other side of a wall, even with the chance of being retributively kicked to death in its company. Did you ever hear this patient and 94 TABLE-TALK. noble creature, the horse, scream for anguish ? It is one of the ghastliest and most terrific of sounds ; one of the most tremendous even on a field of battle ; and depend upon it, you will catch no old soldier riskins; the chance of hear- ing it. If you do, he will be no Uncle Toby, nor Major Bath, nor the "Iron Duke" himself; but some brazen-faced simpleton, with no more brains in his head than his helmet. TURKEYS. It is amusing to see the turkey strutting and ofobblino: about the homestead. He looks like a burlesque on the peacock. Good old Admiral S. ! How sorry he was to hear the simile ; and what good things he had to say on the worth of turkeys in general, and of a foreign species of the race in particular. But is it not true? Look at the animal's attempt to get up a sensation with his " tail," or what is called such. Look at the short- coming size of it, the uncouth heaviness of his body, the sombre tawdriness of his colours, and, above all, that ineffable drawing back of the head and throat into an intensity of the arrogant and self-satisfied ! He looks like TABLE-TALK. 95 a corpulent fop in a paroxysm of conceit. John Reeve was not greater in the character of Marmaduke Magog the beadle, when he stamped the ground in a rapture of pomp and vanity. Bubb Doddington might have looked so, when he first put on his peer's robes, and practised dignity before a looking-glass. The name of Bubb is very turkey-like. The bird's familiar name in Scotland, admirably expres- sive of its appearance, is Bubbly Jock. Goethe says that Xature has a lurking sense of comedy in her, and sometimes intends to be jocose; and it is not difficult to imagine it when one considers that she includes art, and comedy itself, and is the inventress of turkeys. The turkey is a native of America, and Franklin recommended it for the national symbol ! BAGPIPES. An air played on the bagpipes, with that detestable, monstrous drone of theirs for the bass, is like a tune tied to a post. 98 TABLE-TALK. CiESAR AND BONAPARTE. To-morrow (Sunday, the 15tliof the month) is the famous Ides of March, the day of the death of Csesar. Durhig a conversation which Napoleon had with the German poet Wieland, he expressed his surprise at the "great blun- der" of which Ciesar was guilty ; and on the poet intimating by his look a desire to know what the blunder was, his Majesty said, it was trusting people with his life whose designs against it he was aware of. Wieland thought within him- self, as he contemplated the imperial counte- nance, " That is a mistake that will never be committed by you.'* But see how dangerous it is for a living man to pronounce judgment on a dead one. If Napoleon would never have committed the mistake of C^sar, the accom- plished Roman would not have fallen, as the other did, for want of knowing the character of the nations Avith whom he fouglit, and the chances of a climate. Now it is better to perish in consequence of having a generous faith than a self-satisfied ignorance. TABLE-TALK. 97 PSEUDO CHRISTIANITY. Some religious persons the other day, with a view to the promotion of " Christian union," had a meeting in Birmingham, at which they are said to have come to these two resokitions: —First, that it is " everyhody s right and duty to exercise private judgment in the interpre- tation of the Scriptures ;" and second, that " Uiihody is to belong to their society who does not hold the doctrine of the divine institution of the Christian ministry, and the authority and perpetuity of Baptism and the Lord's Supper." This is the way Christianity has been spoilt ever since dogma interfered with it; — ever since something was put upon it that had nothing to do with it, in order that people mio-ht dictate to their neio;hbours instead of loving them, and indulge their pragmatical egotism at the very moment when they pre- tend to leave judgment free and to promote universal brotherhood. It is just as if some devil had said, '^Christianity shall not succeed — people shaU not be of one accord, and find out what's best for 'em; — Til invent dogma; I'll invent faith versus reason ; I'll invent the H 98 TABLE-TALK. Emperor Constantlne ; I'll invent councils, popes, polemics, Calvins and Bonners, inquisi- tions, auto-da-fes, massacres ; and should Chris- tianity survive and outgrow these, I'll invent frights about them, and whispers in their favour, and little private popes of all sorts, all infal- lible, all fighting with one another, all armed with their sine qua nons, for the purpose of beating down the olive-branch, and preventing their pretended object from superseding my real one." I do not believe, mind, that any such thing was said, or that this chaos of contradiction has been aught else but a fermentation of good and ill, out of which good is to come trium- phant, perhaps the better for the trial ; for evil itself is but a form of the desire of good, some- times a necessity for its attainment. But the seeming needlessness of so much evil, or for so long a period, is provoking to one's uncer- tainty ; and the sight of such a heap of folly is a trial of the patience. Our patience we must not lose, for then we shall fall into the error we deprecate ; but let us keep reason and honest ridicule for ever on the watch. A' But they say that ridicule is unfair. B. Yes ; and make use of it whenever they TABLE-TALK. 99 can. In like manner they deprecate reason, and then reason in favour of the deprecation. DYED HAIR. There Is a sly rogue of a fellow advertising in the Dublin papers, who is very eloquent and dehortatory on the subject of grey hair. He says, that people when they begin to have it, decline ^'in respect and esteem" as "com- panionable beings," particularly with the fair sex ; nay, in their own eyes ; and tlierefore he advises them to lose no time in availing themselves of an immense discovery which he has made, in the shape of a certain " colouring material," which turns the hair instantly to a " luxuriant dark." He tells them, that it is as easy in the operation as combing, preserves and invigorates as well as beautifies, wiU not stain the most delicate linen, is useless for any other purpose, and in fine will not cost them a farthing. All they have to pay is "two pounds" for the secret. He does not quit his theme without repeating his caution as to the dreadful consequences that will ensue from neglecting his advice, — that "decided change," as he calls it, " which a grey or a bald head is H 2 100 TABLE-TALK. sure to produce in public, private, and self- esteem." Every gentleman, not quite perfect in the colour of his hair, must start at this advertise- ment, " like a guilty thing surprised." He must think of all the friends, particularly fe- male ones, in whose eyes he might or ought to have noticed a manifest decrease of his ac- ceptability ; must begin to reflect how painful it is to lose caste as a " companionable being" ; and what steps he ought to take, in order to recover his threatened standing in public and private estimation. " Good Heaven ! " he will exclaim, looking in the glass, "and is it come to this ? I see it ; I feel it. Yes, there is a ' decided change ;' — virtue is gone out of me ; Miss Dickenson looks odd ; Lady Charlotte is dignified; nobody will hold me in any fur- ther regard; — perhaps I shall lose my office, my estate, my universe ; — I'm a lost, middle- tinted man." So saying, he disburses his two pounds in a frenzy ; realizes the wonderful dark hair im- mediately ; and in the course of two days, what is the consequence ? I remember an elderly gentleman whose sister persuaded him to adopt one of these two-pound secrets that cost nothing. TABLE-TALK. 101 All he had to do was to make use of a comb dipped in the preparation, and the fine dark colour undoubtedly resulted. In the course of a few hours it changed to a beautiful blue ; and he had the greatest difficulty, for days after, to o-et rid of it. EATING. Talk of indulgence in eating as you may, and avoid excess of it as we must, it is not a little wonderful to consider what respect nature en- tertains for the process, and how doubly strange and monstrous the consideration renders tlie wants of the half-starved. It throws us back upon thoughts more amazing still. We observe that the vital principle in the universe, instead of, or perhaps in addition to, its embodying itielf in the shapes of created multitudes throughout the apparently uninhabited portions of space, tends to concentrate its phenomena into distinct dwelling-places, or planets, m which they are so crowded together (though even then with large seeming intervals) that they are compelled to keep down the popula- tions of one another by mutual devourment. Fortunately (so to speak,— without meaning 102 TABLE-TA.LK. at all to assume that fortune settles the matter), this cruel-looking tendency is accompanied by nature's usual beneficent tendency to pro- duce a greater amount of pleasure than pain ; for the duration of the act of dying, or of being killed, is in no instance comparable with that of the state of being alive ; and life, upon the whole, is far more pleasurable than painful (otherwise we should not feel pain so im^oa- tiently when it comes). The swallow snaps up the fly ; the fly has had its healthy pleasures ; and one dish entertains at a time many human feasters. Now think of the enor- mous multitude of those dishes — of the endless varieties oi food which nature seems to have taken a delight in providing, and of the no less diversity of tastes and relishes w^ith Nvhich she has recommended them to our palates. Take the list of eatables for mankind alone (if any cook could make one out), and think of its endless variety of fish, flesh, and fowl, of fruits, and vegetables, and minerals; how many domestic animals it includes ; how many wild ones ; how many creatures out of the sea ; how many trees and shrubs ; how many plants and herbs ; how many lands, oceans, airs, climates, countries, besides the combinations producible out of all TABLE-TALK. ^^^ these results by the art of cookery (for art is also nature's doing) ; modifications of roast and boiled and broiled, of pastries, jellies, creams confections, essences, preserves. One would fancy that she intended us to do nothmg but eat ; and, indeed, a late philosopher said, that her great law was, " Eat, or be eaten." The philosopher obeyed it pretty stoutly hmiself (it was Darwin), and he inculcated it (one would think with no great necessity) on his patients; some of whose bihary vessels must^ have con- tributed to pay him well for the advice. For here is the puzzle. A man stands equally astonished at the multitude of his temptations to eat, at the penalty of the mdul- o-ence, and at the starvations of the poor. I am not o-oing to enter into the question, or to en- deavour to show how it may be reconciled with the beneficence of nature in a large and final point of view, the only point in which her great operations can be regarded. What I meant to show was her respect for this eating law of hers, and the astonishing spirit of profusion m which she has poured forth materials for its exercise. Why we are not aU individually rich or healthy enouo-h to do it justice is another question, which cannot, indeed, but suggest itself during 104, TABLE-TALK. the consideration. INIr. Maltlius (as if that mended the matter) said there was not room enough to squeeze in at the table between him- self and his bishop ! Let us comfort ourselves (till the question be settled) by reflecting that the mortal portion of Mr. Malthus, and of the bishop too, have gone to nourish the earth which is to support the coming generations. " Fat be the gander" (as the poet says) " that feeds on their grave." If you are ever at a loss to support a flagging conversation, introduce the subject of eating. Sir Robert Walpole's secret for unfailing and harmonious table-talk was gallantry ; but this will not always do, especially as handled by tlie jovial minister. Even scandal vvill not be wel- come to everybody. But who doesn't eat ? And who cannot speak of eating? The sub- ject brightens the eyes, and awakens the tender recollections, of everybody at table, — from the little boy with his beatific vision of dumpling, up to the most venerable person present, who mumbles his grous. " He that will not mind his dinner," said Johnson, " will mind nothing" (he put it stronger ; but honest words become vulgarised; and the respectable term "stomach'' won't fit). Ask a lady if she is attached to the TABLE-TALK. 105 worthiest gentleman in the room, and she will reasonably think you insult her : but ask if she is ^'Jnnd of veal" and she either enthusiasti- cally assents, or expresses a sweet and timid doubt on the subject — an apologetical inability to accord with those who are. She " cartt say she is." "Love" was formerly the phrase; perhaps is still. "Do you love pig?" "Xo, I can't say I do; but I dote upon eels." Questioner, looking enchanted. " Really ! Well, so do I." Dishes are bonds, not only of present, but of absent unanimity. I remember an uxorious old gentleman, who had a pretty wife that he was recommending one day to the good graces of a lady at the head of a table. His wife was not present; but he had been expatiating on her merits, and saying how Mrs. Scrivelsby did this thing, and did that, and what a charming, eleo-ant woman she was, when the conversation became diverted to other topics, and the lady's accomplishments lost sight of. The gentleman's hostess happening to speak of some fish at table, he asked if she "loved the roe"; and upon her owning that " soft impeachment," and 106 TABLE-TALK. being helped to some, he exclaimed, in the fondest tones, with a face full of final bliss, and radiant with the thoughts of the two sympa- thizing women, the absent and the present — " Do you, indeed ? — Well, now ; — Mrs. Scrivelsby loves the roe." N.B. — If anybody sees " nothing" in this story, he is hereby informed that he has made a discoyery unawares ; for that is precisely the value of it. POLAND AND KOSCIUSKO. The claims of Poland may be imperfect : she w^as once badly governed ; there is no doubt of that ; but so are many nations who, neverthe- less, very properly decline to be governed by others ; and, besides, she has had bitter teach- ing, and professes to have learned by it. Her leaders are not so confined, as they are supposed to be, to the aristocracy. Kosciusko himself was no aristocrat, hardly, indeed, a Pole proper. He was a small gentleman of Lithuania; but he loved his half-countrymen, the Poles; and he thought, with Blake, that they ought not to be " fooled by foreigners." TABLE-TALK. 107 One of the most afFectins; of national anec- dotes is related of this great man, during the first occupation of France by the allies. He was then livino; there, but sidins; neither with the allies nor with Bonaparte. He never did side with either. He knew both the parties too well. A Polish troop in the allied service came foraging in his neighbourhood, and they took liberties with his humble garden. The owner came out of the house, and remonstrated with them in their own lano;uaore. " Who are you," said they, exasperated, "that are not on our side, and yet dare to speak to us in this manner ?" " My name is Kosciusko." They fell at his feet, and worshipped him. EXGLAXD a:;D the pope (GREGORy). The Pope, instead of attending to the welfare of the unfortunate people whom he governs, and saving his country from the reproach of being the worst-governed state in Europe, is putting up prayers to Heaven for the conver- sion of Eno-land ! He mio;ht as well come to London, and try to convert Mr. Cobden to the 108 TABLE-TALK. corn-laws, or the railway companies to the old roads. About eighty years ago, a Scotsman went to Rome for the purpose of converting the Pope. The Scotsman was not content with praying. He boldly entered St. Peter's at high mass, and addressed his holiness, in a loud voice, by the title of a certain lady who lives not a hun- dred miles from Babylon. The Pope, who at that time, luckily for the Scotsman, happened to be a kind and sensible man (Ganganelli), was advised to send him to the galleys; but he answered, that the galleys were but a sorry place to teach people "good breeding"; so he put the honest fanatic into a ship, and sent him home again to Scotland. We, in England here, should be equally civil to the Pope, if he would do us the honour of a visit ; and he might take Dr. Pusey away with him, if he pleased, together with a score or two of ladies and gentlemen who constitute con- verted England. It is a little too late in the day to expect Englishmen to pant after purgatory and con- fession ; to rejoice in the damnation of their fathers and mothers and little children ; or even to wish for the celibacy of their clergy. Their TABLE-TALK. 109 clergy are accused of being lively enouo-h already towards the ladies. What would they be if they had no wives ? " Gracious heavens !" Why, in the course of six months the bench of Bisliops would be as bad as Cardinals. TRE DUKE or WELLINGTOT^'S COXCEKT. The Duke of Wellino;ton has been directino- a concert of Ancient Music. It is curious to see the music he selected; what a mixture it is of devotion, fighting, and gallantry; how he abides by the favourites of his youth; and how pleasantly, and Hke a good son, he includes the compositions of his father. Lord Mornino-- ton. Conquerors deal in such tremendous (and disputable) wares, that it is not easy to deter- mine the amount of their genius ; — to distin- guish it from chances and consequences, or to sav how much of it is not owino- to neo-ative as well as positive qualities. The world are hardly in a condition to judge a man who plays at chess with armies; — who blows us up ; takes us by storm and massacre ; and alters the face of nations. He may or may not be as great as we suppose; though his want of civil talents is generally against him. 110 TABLE-TALK. and he often perishes out of mipriidence. But there can be no doubt that a great soldier is a very striking and important person of some kind ; and to catch him at these soft, har- monious, and filial amusements is interesting. The Duke's concert the other day was in good old taste, not omitting some of the later great masters. There was plenty of Handel in it ; some Gluck and Paesiello, Beethoven and Mozart ; Avison's " Sound the loud timbrel ;" a glee of Webbe's ; another by his Grace's father, aforesaid ; and the fine old French air, " Charmante Gabrielle," which, an arch rogue of a critic says, was sung in a " chaste manner" by Madame Caradori. Not that the chastity is to be doubted, or that the air was not one of recognised propriety ; but it is worth consi- dering how " Nice customs curtsey to great kings ;" what storms of honour and glory, and royal and national trumpets, have been allowed to smuggle into good society the "charming Gabrielle," mistress of Henri Quatre ; and how the fair singer would have been scared at being requested to do as much for the charming Jane Shore, or giddy Mrs. Eleanor Gwynn. TABLE-TALK. m The Duke of Wellington's was a right sol- dier's concert, a little overdone perhaps in the church-going quarter — a little too much on the oratorio side ; but that might have been looked for at an " Ancient Concert/' famous for mem- ories of George the Third. The rest was given to love and fighting, — to " Gird on thy sword," and " Giving them Hailstones," and " charming Gabrielle," and the ladies' duett in Mozart, " Prendero quel brunettino" (I'll take that little brown fellow), which may have been con- nected with some pleasing reminiscences of country-quarters, or the jungles of Hyderabad. But the paternal glee, after all, was the thing ; the filial reminiscence ; the determina- nation of the great " iron" Duke to stand by his little, gentle, accomplished father, the ama- teur composer ; and a very pretty composer too. All soldiers can go to church and admire charming Gabrielles ; but it is not for every great fame thus to stand by a minor one, and take a pride in showing off the father on whose knee it sat in its infancy. The Duke is a good fellow, depend upon it, me j)atrejudice. He may give odd answers to deputations, and be "curst and brief to auto- graph seekers, and not know how to talk in 113 TABLE-TALK. their own lan2;uaixe to his warm-hearted Irish countrymen. 1 wish he did. But he sticks to his father. He will have due honour paid to the paternal crotchets. WAE, DINNER, AND THANKSGIVING. It is not creditable to a " thinking people"' that the two things they most thank God for should be eating and fighting. We say grace when we are going to cut up lamb and chicken, and when we have stuffed ourselves with both to an extent that an ourang-outang would be ashamed of ; and we offer up our best praises to the Creator for having blown and sabred his "images," our fellow-creatures, to atoms, and drenched them in blood and dirt. This is odd. Strange that we should keep our most pious transports for the lowest of our appetites and the most melancholy of our necessities ! that we should never be wrought up into paroxysms of holy gratitude but for bubble and squeak, or a good-sized massacre ! that we should think it ridiculous to be asked to say grace for a concert or a flower-show, or the sight of a gallery of pictures, or any other of the divinest gifts of Heaven, yet hold it to TABLE-TALK. 113 be the most natural and exalted of impulses to fall on our knees for having kicked, beaten, torn, shattered, drowned, stifled, exenterated, mashed, and abolished thousands of our neigh- bours," whom we are directed to '' love as our- selves ! " A correspondent of the Times, who had of course been doing his duty in this respect, and thanking Heaven the first thing every morning for the carnage in the Punjaub, wished the other day to know " what amount of victory was considered, by the Church or State, to call forth a public expression of thank- fulness to Almighty God." He was angry that the Bishops had not been up and stirring at the slaughter ; that Sir Robert Peel was not as anxious to sing hymns for it, as to feed the poor ; that Lord John Pussell, with all his piety, was slower to call for rejoicings over the Sikh widows, than attention to hapless Ireland. The pause did Government honour. The omission of the ceremony, if they had had courage enough to pass it by altogether, would have done them more. Not because God is not to be reverenced in storm as in sunshine, but because it does not become any section of his creatures to translate these puzzles of I 114 TABLE-TALK. the mystery of evil in their own favour ; and, with the presumptuous vanity called humility, thank him, like the pharisee, for not beins: conquered like *' those" Indians. Our med- dling with the Punjaub at all is connected with some awkward questions. So is our whole Indian history. I believe it to have been the inevitable, and therefore, in a large and final point of view, the justifiable and desirable consequence of that part of the "right of might" which constitutes the only final secret of the phrase, and which arises from superior knowledge and the healthy power of advancement. But in the humility becomino; such doubtful thino;s as human con- elusions, it behoves us not to play the fop at every step ; not to think it necessary to God's glory or satisfaction to give Him our " sweet voices," even though we do it in their most sneakino- tones ; nor to thank the o;ood Fatlier for havino; been chosen to be the scouro-ers of CD O our weaker brethren. " Go," we might imagine him saying ; " go, and hold your tongues, and be modest. Don't afilict me during the necessity with your stupid egotism. Perhaps I chose you for the task, only because you had the less sensibility." TABLE-TALK. 115 FIRES AND MAETYRDOM. Fires are still happening every day, not- withstandinsT the tremendous lessons which they give to the incautious. People are shocked at the moment, and say that some- thing must be done ; but in the course of four- a nd-twenty hours they forget the shrieking females at the windows, and the children re- duced to ashes ; and the calamities are risked as before. It is really a pity that Parliament does not interfere. Officious legislation is bad : but if the public are children in this respect, and don't know how to take care of themselves, grown understandings ought to help them. Parliament can ordain matters about lamps and pavements; why not about balconies for great houses, and corridors at the back of smaller ones ? Are health and con- venience of more importance than being saved from the crudest of deaths ? Meantime, what an opportunity presents it- self to Puseyites and others for a little indis- putable Christianity — a good practical resti- tution of their favourite days of martyrdom and self-sacrifice. It is said that no calamitous chance of things is ever done away with in I 2 118 TABLE-TALK. this country, unless some great man happens to be the victim. Now the Puseyites are accused of being Christian only in disputation, with great dislikes of foregoing their comforts and snug corners. Here is an occasion for them to prove their brotherly love — to show how their gold can be tried in the fire. Why can- not Dr. Pusey, or Mr. Newman, or Mr. Wells (who admires the tapers and other splendid shows of Popery) be a shining light himself, of the most unquestionable order? Why not take some house about to be pulled down in a great thoroughfare, assemble a crowd at night-time, set fire to the goods and chattels round about him like an Indian widow, step forth into the balcony to show us how easy it was for him to escape, and then, in spite of our cries, tears, agonies, and imploring remonstrances (the more, the memorabler), offer himself up, like a second Poly carp, on the altar of human good? Invidious people say, that it is no very difficult thing for a man to be a shining light in a good comfortable pulpit, between breakfast and dinner, with DO greater heat on him than that of his self- complacency ; but the Ridleys and Bradfords found a different business of it at the stake ; TABLE-TALK. 117 and here is an opportunity for such as sneer at those Protestant martyrs, to show how they can be martyrs themselves of a nobler sort, and of the most undoubted utility. For who could forget the circumstance ? what bal- conies and corridors would not start forth to their honour and glorilBcation all over the metropolis ? But perhaps the Bishop of London, who is jealous of his prerogative, might choose to avail himself of the opportunity. Or suppose Bishop Philpotts requested it of him as a favour. What a truly reviving spectacle, in these days of Christian declension, to see the two bishops, at the last moment, affectionately contesting with one another the honour of the sacrifice, and try- ing to thrust his brother off the devoted premises. EESPECTABILITY. " When the question was put to one of the witnesses on the trial of Thurtell, ' What sort of a person was Mr. Weare?' the answer was, ' Mr. Weare was respectable.'' On being pressed by the examining counsel as to what he meant by respectability, the definition of the witness was, that ' he kept a gig .-'' " 118 TABLE-TALK. " A person," sajs the York Courant, on this incident, " was annoying a whole company in a public room, and one of them reproving him sharply for his indecorum, an apologist whis- pered, ^ Pray, do not offend the gentleman ; I assure you he is a respectable man. He is worth two hundred a year independent property y^ There is no getting at the root of these matters, unless we come to etymology. People mean something when they say a man is respectable — they mean something different from despicable or intolerable. What is it they do mean? Why, they mean that the gentle- man is worth tivice looking at — he is respectable, re-spectuhilis ; that is to say, literally, one who is to be looked at again; you must not pass him as though he were a common man ; you must turn round and observe him well ; a second look is necessary if you have the least respect for him : if you have more, you look at him again and again ; and if he is very respectable indeed, and you have the soul of a footman, you look at him till he is out o-f sight, and turn away with an air as if you could black his shoes for him. But what is "respectable"? What is the virtue that makes a man worth twice looking at ? We have intimated it in what has been said. TABLE-TALK. 119 The York Courant has told us — he keeps a gig. Gig is virtue. A buggy announces moral worth. Curriculus evehit ad deos. Bat you must be sure that he does keep it. He may come in a gig, and yet the gig not be his own; in which case it behoves you to be cautious. You must not be taken in by ap- pearances. He may look like a gentleman ; he may be decently dressed ; you may have seen him perform a charitable action ; he may be a soldier covered with scars, a patriot, a poet, a great philosopher ; but for all this, beware how you are in too much haste to look twice at him — the gig may have been borrowed. On the other hand, appearances must not condemn a man. A fellow (as you may feel inclined to call him) drives up to the door of an inn ; his face (to your thinking) is equally des- titute of sense and goodness ; he is dressed in a slang manner, calls for his twentieth glass of gin, has flogged his horse till it is raw, and condi^mns, with energetic impartiality, the eyes of all present, his horse's, the bye-standers', and his own. Now, before you pronounce this man a blackguard, or think him rather to be turned away from with loathing, than looked at twice out of respect, behave you as impartially as he : 120 TABLE-TALK. take the ostler aside, or the red-faced fellow whom he has brought in the gig with him, and ask, "Is the gig his own?" The man, for aught you know, may reply, " His own ! Lord love you, he has a mint of money. He could ride in his coach if he pleased. He has kept a gig and Moll Fist these two years." Thus you see, without knowing it, you might have loathed a respectable man. " He keeps his gig." But this respectable gentleman not only keeps his gig — he might keep his coach. He is respectable in esse ; in posse he is as respect- able as a sheriff — you may look twice at him; nay, many times. Let us see. We have here a clue to the degrees of a man's respectability. To keep a gig is to be simply respectable ; you may look twice at the gig-man. A curricle, having two horses, and costing more, is, of course, more respectable. You may look at the possessor of a curricle at least twice and a half. A chariot renders him fit to be regarded over and over again : a whole carriage demands that you should many times turn your neck to look at him ; if you learn that he drives a coach and four, the neck may go backwards and for- wards for three minutes ; and if the gentleman abounds in coaches, his own carriage for him- TABLE-TALK. ]21 self, and another for his wife, together with gigj buggy, and dog-cart, you are bound to stand watching him all the way up Pail-Mall, your head going like a fellow's jaws over a pan- pipe, and your neck becoming stiff with admira- tion. The story of the " two hundred a year inde- pendent property " is a good appendage to that of the gig-keeping worthy. The possessor of this virtue was annoying a whole company in a public room, and one of them reproving him for his indecorum, somebody whispered, " Do not offend the gentleman ; he is a respectable man, I assure you. He is worth two hundred a year independent property." The meaning of this is, " I am a slave, and believe you to be a slave : think what strutting fellows we should be if we possessed two hundred a year; and let us re- spect ourselves in the person of this bully." If people of this description could translate the feelings they have towards the rich, such is the language their version would present to them, and it might teach them something which they are ignorant of at present. The pretence of some of them is, that money is a great means of good as well as evil, and that of course they should secure the good and avoid the evil. But 122 TABLE-TALK. this is not the real orround of their zeal ; other- wise they would be zealous in behalf of health, temperance, and honesty, good-humour, fair dealing, generosity, sincerity, public virtue, and everything else that advances the good of man- kind. No ; it is the pure, blind love of power, and the craving of weakness to be filled with it. Allowance should be made for much of it, as it is the natural abuse in a country where the most obvious power is commercial ; and the blindest love of power, after all (let them be told this secret for the comfort of human na- ture), is an instinct of sympathy — is founded on what others will think of us, and what means we shall find in our hands for adding to our importance. It is this value for one another's opinion which keeps abuses so long in exis- tence ; but it is in the same corner of the human heart, now that reform has begun, that the salvation of the world will be found. USE OF THE WORD "ANGEL," &c. IN LOVE- MAKING. Lady Suffolk, when bantering Lord Peter- borouo;h on his fondness for the fine terms used in love-making, said that all she argued for was, TABLE-TALK. 123 that as these expressions had been in all ages the favourite words of fine gentlemen, who would persuade themselves and others that they are in love, — those who really are in love should dis- card them, the better to distinguish themselves from impostors. But, with submission to her ladyship, a real lover may take them up again, as they were first taken up, because with him the language is still natural. ELOQUENCE OF OMISSION. A late gallant Irishman, who sometimes amused the House of Commons, and alarmed the ]\Iinisters, with his brusquerle (Mr. Mon- tague Mathew, I believe), set an ingenious example to those who are at once forbidden to speak, and yet resolved to express their thoughts. There was a debate upon the treat- ment of Ireland, and the General having been called to order for taking unseasonable notice of the enormities attributed to Government, spoke to the following effect : — "^ Oh, very well ; I shall sav nothino^ then about the mur- ders — (Order, order!) — I shall make no men- tion of the massacres — {^Hear, hear ! Order !) — 124 TABLE-TALK. Oh, well; I shall sink all allusion to the in- famous half-hangings." — {Order ^ order! Chair!) This Montairue Mathew was the man who, beino: confounded on some occasion with Mr. Mathew Montague (a much softer-spoken gen- tleman), said with great felicity, that people niifT-ht as well confound " a chestnut horse with a horse chestnut." GODS OE HOMER AND LUCRETIUS. Sir William Temple says that he " does not know why the account given by Lucretius of the Gods should be thought more impious than that given by Homer, who makes them not only subject to all the weakest passions, but perpetually busy in all the worst or meanest actions of men." — Perhaps the reason is, that in Homer they retain something of sympathy with others, however misdirected or perturbed ; whereas the gods of Lucretius are a set of selfish bon-vivants, living by themselves and caring for nobody. TABLE-TALE. 125 AN INVISIBLE RELIC. Bruges is the place where the Catholics pro- fessed to have in their keeping the famous liau de Sabit Joseph ; that is to say, one of the ho f's which St. Joseph used to utter, when in the act of cleaving wood as a carpenter. The reader may think this a Protestant invention; but the story is true. Bayle mentions the ho in his Dictionary. A NATURAL MISTAKE. A little girl seeing it written over inn doors " Good stabling and an ordinary on Sundays," thought that the stabling was good on week- days, but only ordinary on the Sabbath. MORTAL GOOD EFFECTS OF MATRIMONY. A lady meeting a girl who had lately left her service, inquired, " Well, Mary ! where do you live now?" — "Please, ma'am," answered the girl, "' I don't live now — I'm married." 126 TABLE-TALK. UMBRELLAS. From passages in the celebrated verses of Swift on a Shower, which appeared in 1770, and in Gay's poem of Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets, which was written a year or two afterwards, it would seem that the use of umbrellas at that time was confined to females, and those too of the poorer classes. The ladies either rode in their carriages through the rain, or were obliged to fly from it into shops. "Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, Threatening with deluge this devoted town. To shops in crowds the draggled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy. The Templar spruce, while every spout's abroach. Stays till ''tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. The tuck'd-up sempstress walks with hasty strides. While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides." There is no mention of an umbrella for men. The men got under a shed, like the Templar ; — into a coach, or into a sedan. " Here various kinds, by various fortunes led. Commence acquaintance underneath a shed ; Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs. TABLE-TALK. 127 Box'd in a chair, the beau impatient sits, AYhile spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits ; And ever and anon, with frightful din. The leather sounds : he trembles from within. So when Troy-chairmen bore the wooden steed. Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed (Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do. Instead of paying chairmen, run them through), Laocoon struck the outside with his spear, And each imprison'd hero quak'd for fear." In Gay's poem, the men are advised. In case the weather threatens rain, to put on their surtouts and worst wigs. The footman, he says, lets down the flat of his hat. Even amono; the females, the use of the umbrella appears to have been confined to winter time. " Good housewives all the winter's rage despise, Defended by the riding-hood's disguise ; Or, underneath the umbrella's oily shed. Safe through the wet, on chinking pattens tread. Let Persian dames th' umbrella's ribs display. To guard their beauties from the sunny ray ; Or sweating slaves support the shady load, When Eastern Monarchs show their state abroad : Britain in winter only knows its aid, To guard from chilly show'rs the walking maid." ^Tien Jonas Hanway made his appearance with an umbrella, the vulgar hooted him for his effeminacy. 128 TABLE-TALK. Umbrellas, it is observable, are always men- tioned as beino^ oiled. I think I remember the introduction of silken ones. BOOKSELLERS' DEVICES. Mr. Pickering, with no unpleasing pedantry, gives his edition of the Poets the epithet of " Aldine." Aldus w^as the great elegant pub- lisher of his day, and Mr. Pickering is ambi- tious of being thought his follower. He adopts his device in the title-page, with a motto cal- culated to mystify the unlearned, — Aldi Dis- cipulus Anglus ; to-wit, Aldus's English Dis- ciple. This is good, because anything is good that has faith in books, or elegance of choice ; but, inasmuch as originality is a good addition to it, a device of Mr. Pickering's own would have been better. Aldus's dolphin is very well done, but it is somewhat heavy. Mr. Taylor, the printer, a man of liberal knowledge, has a device of his own — a hand pouring oil into the midnight lamp ; and the late Mr. Valpy had another, not so good, a digamma (the Greek F), which looked like an improvement upon a gallows. It seemed as TABLE-TALK. 129 if it was intended to hang two commentators instead of one; or the parson, with his clerk underneath him. WOMEN ON THE RIGHT SIDE. Dr. A. Hunter said, that women who love their husbands creneraUy lie on their ris^ht side. What did he mean by "generally?" Women who loye their husbands always lie on the right side, for an obyious reason — to-wit, that they cannot lie on the wrong one. SHENSTONE MISTAKEN. It is strange that Shenstone should haye thought his name liable to no pun. A man might haye conyinced him to the contrary, after the fashion in which Johnson proposed to help foro^etfulness. " Sir," said the doctor to some- body who was complaining of short memory, "let me give you a kick on the shin, and I'U be bound you'll never forget it." So a man mio-ht have thrown a stone at Shenstone s leg, and said, "There, Mr. Shin-stone:" — for, as to the i and the e, no punster stands upon ceremony with a vowel. K 130 TABLE-TALK. THE MARSEILLES HYMN. The Marseilles Hymn, though not in the very highest class of art, in which pure feeling supersedes the necessity of all literal expres- sion, is nevertheless one of those genuine com- positions, warm from the heart of a man of genius, which are qualified to please the highest of the scientific, and those who know nothino; of music but by the effect it has upon them. The rise upon the word Patrie (or as the Eng- lish translator has very well made it fall, upon the word Glory) is a most elevating note of preparation ; this no sooner rouses us to war, than we are reminded of the affecting necessity for it, in the threats of the tyrants, followed by that touching passage respecting the tears and cries of our kindred ; and then comes another exalting note — the call to arms. The beating of the drum succeeds. We fancy the hurried muster of the patriots ; their arms are lifted, their swords unsheathed; and then comes the march — a truly grand movement — which even on the pianoforte suggests the fulness of a band. In the pathetic part, the E flat on the word j^Z^, and the whole strain on that passage, are par- TABLE-TALK. 131 ticularly affecting. The tears seem to come into the eyes of the heroes, as no doubt they have into thousands of them, and into thou- sands of those that have heard the song. But it must be played well ; and not be judged of by the performance of a new or a feeble hand. I know not who the author of the translation or rather imitation is, but he has done it very well. NON-SEaUITUR. There is a punning epigram by Dr. Donne which is false in its conclusion : — " I am unable," yonder beggar cries, " To stand or go." If be says true, he lies. No ; because he may lean, or be held up. NON-RHYMES. It is curious that in so correct a writer as Pope, and in so complete a poem as the Rape of the Lock, there should be two instances of rhyme, which are none at all : — k2 133 TABLE-TALK. " But this bold Lord, with manly strength endued, She with one jBnger and a thumb suhdued.'^ " The doubtful beam long nods from side to side ; At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside." They are both in the fifth Canto. There is another in the Essay on Criticism. " Unfinished things one knows not what to call, Their generation's so equivoc«/." STOTHARD. The death of Stothard grieved all the lovers of art, though it had been long expected. They regretted to think that they could have no *^ more last words" from his genius — no more of those sweet and graceful creations of youth, beauty, and womanhood, which never ceased to flow from his pencil, and which made his kindly nature the abode of a youthful spirit to the last. An ano;el dwelt in that totterinof house, amidst the wintery bowers of white locks, warming it to the last with summer fancies. Stothard had the soul in him of a genuine painter. He was a designer, a colourist, a grouper; and, above all, he had expression. All that he wanted was a better education. TABLE-TALK. 133 for he was never quite sure of his drawing. The want was a great one ; but if those who most loudly objected to it, had had a tenth part of his command over the human figure, even of his knowledge of it (for the purposes of expression), they would have had ten times the right to venture upon criticising him ; and having that, they would have spoken of him with reverence. His class was not of the highest order, and yet it bordered upon the gentler portion of it, and partook of that por- tion ; for since the days of the great Italian painters, no man felt or expressed the graces of innocence and womanhood as he did. And his colouring (which was little known) had the true rehsh, such as it was. He loved it, and did not colour for effect only. He had a bit of Eubens in him, and a bit of Raphael — and both of them genuine; not because he purposely imitated them, but because the seeds of gor- sreousness and of grace were in his own mind. The glowing and sweet painter was made out of the loving and good-natured man. This is the only process. The artist, let him be of what sort he may, is only the man reflected on canvass. The good qualities and defects of his nature are there ; and there they will be, let 134. TABLE-TALK. him deny or disguise them as he can. In youth, Stothard was probably too full of enjoyment, and had too little energy to study properly. In the greater masters, enjoyment and energy, sensibility and strength of purpose, went to- gether. Inferiority was the consequence ; but inferiority only to them. The genius was in- destructible. Stothard, for many years, was lost sight of by the public, owing to the more conventional elegances of some clever, but inferior men, and the dulness of public taste ; but it was curious to see how he was welcomed back as the taste grew better, and people began to see with the eyes of his early patrons. The variety, as well as grace, of his productions soon put him at the head of designers for books, and there he re- mained. What he did for the poems of Mr. Rogers is well known, and his picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims still better, though it was not one of his best. Many of- his early designs for Rohinson Crusoe and other works, espe- cially those in the old Novelists Magazine, far surpass it ; and so do others in BelVs British Poets. There is a female fiojure bendins: to- wards an angel, in one of the volumes of Chaucer in that edition, which Raphael him- TABLE-TALK. 135 self might have put in his portfolio ; and the same may be said of larger designs for editions of Milton and Shakspeare. See, in particular, those from Comiis, and for the Tico Gentle- men of Verona, where there is a girl in boy's clothes. Nothing can be more true or exqui- site than the little doubtful gesture of fear and modesty in the latter figure, blushing at the chance of detection. Stothard excelled in catching these fugitive expressions of feeling — one of the rarest of all beauties. But he has left hundi'eds, perhaps thousands, of designs — rich treasures for the collector and the student. He is one of the few English artists esteemed on the Continent, where his productions are bought up like those of his friend Flaxman, who may be reckoned among his imitators ; for Stothard's genius was richer than his, and included it. THE COUNTENANCE AETER DEATH. A corpse seems as if it suddenly knew every- thing, and was profoundly at peace in conse- quence. 136 TABLE-TALK. HUME. Hume, the most unphilosophic (in some respects) of all philosophic historians, and a bigoted enemy of bigotry (that is to say, un- able to give candid accounts of those whom he differed with on certain points), was a good- natured, easy man in personal intercourse, dis- passionate, not ungenerous, and could do people kind and considerate services. Out of the pale of sentiment, and of what may be called the providential and possible, he was an unanswer- able, or at least an unanswered dialectician ; but there was a whole world in that region into which he had no insight; and for want of it he was^ not qualified to pronounce finally on matters of faith and religion. GIBBON. Gibbon was a sceptic, in some respects, of a similar kind with Hume, and more immersed in the senses. I say " more," because both these anti- spiritual philosophers were fat, double- chinned men. Perhaps Gibbon's life was alto- gether a little too selfish, and lapped up in cotton. He lumbered from his bed to his board, and back again, with his books in the TABLE-TALK. 137 intervals^ or rather divided his time between the three, in a sort of swinishness of scholarship. Martyrdom and he were at a pretty distance I He was not a man to die of public spirit, or to comprehend very well those who did. But his scepticism tended to promote toleration. He was an admirable Latin scholar, a punctilious historian, an interesting writer in spite of a bad style ; and his faults, of every kind, appear to have been owing to temperament and disease, and to his having^ been an indulored infant, and heir to an easy fortune. Let us be thankful we got so much out of him, and that so dis- eased a body got so much out of life. A writer's infirmities are sometimes a reader's gain. If Gibbon had not disliked so much to go out of doors, we might not have had the Decline and Fall. AXGELS AND FLOTVERS. It might be fancied that the younger portion of angels — the childhood of heaven — had had a part assigned them in the creation of the world, and that they made the flowers. LinnaBus, however, would have differed on this point. 138 TABLE-TALK. AN ENVIABLE DISTRESS. Mr. Rogers, according to the newspapers, has been robbed of plate by his footman, to the amount of two thousand pounds. What a beautiful calamity for a poet ! to be able to lose two thousand pounds ! SIR THOMAS DYOT. The street lately called Dyot-street, in St. Giles, is now christened (in defiance, we believe, of a legal proviso to the contrary) George- street. It is understood that Sir Thomas Dyot, an admirable good feUow in the reign of the Stuarts, left his property in this street, for the use and resort of the houseless poor who " had not where to lay their heads," upon condition of its retaining his name; and how the parish authorities came to have a right to alter the name, his admirers would like to knoio. It is a singular instance of the effect of cir- cumstances in human affairs, that a name so excellent, and worthy to be had in remem- brance, should become infamous in connexion with this very street ; and perhaps the autho- rities might undertake to vindicate themselves TABLE-TALK. 139 on that score, and ask whether Sir Thomas could have calculated upon such a vicissitude ? But I say he could, and very likely did ; for he knew of what sort of people the houseless poor were likely to be composed; and he was pre- pared, like a thorough- going friend, to take all chances with them, and trust to more reflecting times to do justice both to him and to them. Or if he did not think of all this, his instinct did ; or, at all events, it did not care for any- thing but playing the kind and manly part, and letting a wise Providence do the rest. Sir Thomas was a right hearty good fellow, whoever he was ; for nothing else, I believe, is known of him ; — a little wild, perhaps, in his youth ; otherwise he might not have become acquainted with the wants of such people; but ever, be sure, honest to the backbone, and a right gentleman, — fit companion for the Dorsets and Cowleys in their old age, not for the Charles the Seconds. Here 's a libation to him in this dip of ink, — in default of a bumper of Burgundy. 14-0 TABLE-TALK. ANCIENT AND MODERN EXAMPLE. One has little sympathy after all with the virtues or failings of illustrious Greeks and Romans. One fancies that it was their busi- ness to be heroical, and to furnish examples for school themes, — owing, perhaps, to the forma- lity and tiresomeness of those themes. We leave then the practice and glory of their virtues as things ancient and foreign to us, like their garments, or fit only to be immor- talised in stone, — petrifactions of ambitious ethics; — not flesh and blood, or next-door neighbours ; — stars for the sky, not things of household warmth and comfort; — not feasible virtues; — or if feasible, rendered alien some- how by distance and strangeness, and perhaps accompanied by vices which we are hardly sorry to meet with, and which our envy (and something better) converts into reconcilements of their virtue ; — as when we hear, for example, that old Cato drank, or that Phocion said an arrogant thing on the "hustings," or that Numa (as a Frenchman would say), visited a pretty girl " of afternoons," — Ma'amselle Egerie, — who, he pretended, was a goddess and an oracle, and gave him thoughts on legislation- TABLE-TALK. Ul So, of the professed men of pleasure in the ancient world, — or indeed of professed men of pleasure at any time (for their science makes them remote and pecuhar, a sort of body apart, excessively Free Masons) one doesn't think one- self bound to resemble them. Their example is not pernicious, much less of any use for the attainment of actual pleasure. Who thinks of imitating the vices of Caesar or Alexander, out of an ambition of universality? (what a pre- posterous fop would he be !) or stopping to drink and carouse when he ouoht to be moviuo- onward, because Hannibal did it ? or of beino; a rake because Alcibiades had a reputation of that sort (unless, perhaps, it be some one of our lively ultra-classical neighbours, whose father has indiscreetly christened him Alcibiade, and who studies Greek beauty in a ballet) ? We do not think of imitating men in Greek helmets or the Roman toga. Their example is only for school exercises, or to be brought forward in the speech of some virgin orator. We must have heroism in a hat and boots, and good fel- lowship at a modern table. It is our every- day names, Smith, Jones, and Robinson, that must be instanced for an example which we can thoroughly feel. Has Thomson done a 142 TABLE-TALK. handsome action ? Everybody cries, " What a good fellow is Thomson." Is a living man of wit effeminate and a luxurious liver ? The example becomes perilous. It is no remote infection, no " Plao-ue of Athens." The disease is next door, — a pestilence that loungeth at noon, — a dandy cholera. Nobody cares much for Poetus and Arria, and the fine example they set. Those Romans seem bound to have set them, for the benefit of the '' Selectte e Profanis," and the publica- tions of Mr. Valpy. Lucretia sits " alone in her glory," a kind of suicide-statue, — too hard of example to be followed. We cannot think, somehow, that she felt much, except as a per- sonage who should one day be in the classical dictionaries.' And Portia's appears an odd and unfeeling taste, who swallowed " burning coals," instead of having a proper womanly faint, and taking: a o^lass of water. But tell us of " Mrs. Corbet" (celebrated by Pope), who heroically endured the cancer that killed her, and we understand the thing. Re- count us a common surgical case of a man who has his leg cut off without wincing ; and as we are no farther off than St. Bartholomew's Hos- pital, it comes home to us. Tell us what a TABLE-TALK. 143 good fellow Thomson the poet was, or how Quln took him out of a spimglng-house with a hundred pounds, or how Johnson "loved to dine," or Cowper solaced his grief with flowers and verses, and we all comprehend the matter perfectly, and are incited to do likewise. MILTON AND HIS PORTRAITS. There can be little doubt, that Milton, how- ever estimable and noble at heart, was far from beino- perfect in his notions of household govern- ment. He exacted too much submission to be loved as he wished. His wife (which was a singular proceeding in the bride of a young poet) absented herself from him in less than a month after their marriage ; that is to say, dur- ing the very honeymoon ; and she stayed away the whole summer with her relations. He made his daughters read to him in languages which they did not understand ; and in one part of his works he piques himself, like Johnson, on beino; a good hater. Now, " good haters," as they call themselves, are sometimes very good men, and hate out of zeal for something they love; neither would we undervalue the services which such haters may have done man- 144 TABLE-TALK. kind. They may have been necessary ; though a true christian philosophy proposes to supersede them, and certainly does not recommend them. But as all men have their faults, so these men are not apt to have the faults that are least disagreeable, even to one another ; for it is ob- servable that good haters are far from loving their brethren, the good haters on the other side ; and their tempers are apt to be infirm and overbearing. In the most authentic portraits of Milton, venerate them as one must, it is diffi- cult not to discern a certain uneasy austerity — a peevishness — a blight of something not sound in opinion and feeling. WILLIAM HAY. Hay, the author of an Essay on Deformity, was a member of Parliament, and an adherent, but not a servile one, to the government of Sir Robert Walpole. He was author of several publications on moral and political subjects, in- teresting in their day, and not unworthy of being looked at by posterity. He was a very amiable and benevolent man, of which his essays afford abundant evidence ; and his name is to be added to the list of those delightful TABLE-TALK. ]i5 individuals, not so rare as might be imagined, who surmount the disadvantages of personal exterior on the wings of beauty of spirit. It is observable, however, of these men, that they have generally fine eyes. BISHOP CORBET. It is related of this facetious prelate, who flourished in the time of Charles the First, and whose poems have survived in the collections, that, having been tumbled into the mud with a fat friend of his by the fall of a coach, he said that '• Stubbins was up to the elbows in mud, and he was up to the elbows in Stubbins." During a confirmation, he said to the country people who were pressing too closely upon the ceremony, " Bear ofi* there, or I'll confirm you with my staff." And another time, on a like occasion, having to lay his hand on the head of a very bald man, he turned to his chaplain, and said, " Some dust, Lushington," to keep his hand from slipping. Corbet's constitutional vivacity was so strong, as hardly to have been compatible with episco- pal decorum. But times and manners must be taken into consideration ; and, though a bishop L 146 TABLE-TALK. of this turn of mind would have been forced, had he lived now, to be more considerate in regard to times and places, there is no reason to doubt that he took himself for as good a churchman as he was an honest man. And liberties are sometimes taken by such men with serious objects of regard, not so much out of a lio'ht consideration, as from the confidence of love. Had Corbet lived in later times, he would, perhaps, have furnished as high an example of elegant episcopacy as any of the Rundles or Shipleys. As it was, he was a sort of manly college-boy, who never grew old. HOADLY. Hoadly, the son of the bishop, and author of the Suspicious Husband, was a physician, and a good-natured, benevolent man. His play has been thought as profligate as those of Con- greve; but there is an animal spirit in it, and a native under-current of good feeling, very diffe- rent from the sophistication of Congreve's fine ladies and gentlemen. Cono-reve writes like a rake upon system ; Hoadly like a wild-hearted youth from school. TABLE-TALK. 1±7 YOLTAIRE. Perhaps Voltaire may be briefly, and not un- justly, characterized as the only man who ever obtained a place in the list of the greatest names of the earth, by an aggregation of secondary abilities. He was the god of cleverness. To be sure, he was a very great wit. H A X D E L. Handel was the Jupiter of music ; nor is the title the less warranted from his includins^ in his genius the most affecting tenderness as well as the most overpowering grandeur: for the father of gods and men was not only a thunderer, but a love-maker. Handel was the son of a physi- cian; and, like Mozart, began composing for the public in his childhood. He was the grand- est composer that is known to have existed, wielding, as it were, the choirs of heaven and earth together. Mozart said of him, that he " struck you, whenever he pleased, with a thun- derbolt."" His hallelujahs open the heavens. He utters the word " Wonderful," as if all their trumpets spoke together. And then, when he L 2 148 TABLE-TALK. comes to earth, to make love amidst nymphs and shepherds (for the beauties of all religions found room in his breast), his strains drop milk and honey, and his love is the youthfulness of the Golden Age. We see his Acis and Gala- tea, in their very songs, looking one another in the face in all the truth and mutual homage of the tenderest passion ; and poor jealous Poly- phemus stands in the background, blackening the scene with his gigantic despair. Christian meekness and suffering attain their last degree of pathos in "He shall feed his flock," and "He was despised and rejected." We see the blush on the smitten cheek, mingling with the hair. Handel had a large, heavy person, and was occasionally vehement in his manners. He ate and drank too much (probably out of a false notion of supporting his excitement), and thus occasionally did harm to mind as well as body. But he was pious, generous, and independent, and, like all great geniuses, a most thorough lover of his art, making no compromises with its demands and its dignity for the sake of petty conveniences. There is often to be found a quaintness and stiffness in his style, owing to the fashion of the day ; and he had TABLE-TALK. 149 not at his command the instrumentation of the present times, which no man would have turned to more overwhehning account; but what is sweet in his compositions is surpassed in sweet- ness by no other ; and what is great, is greater than in any. MOXTAIGNE. Montaigne's father, to create in him an equable turn of mind, used to have him waked during his infancy with a flute. ]Montaigne was a philosopher of the material order, and as far sighted perhaps that way as any man that ever lived, having that tempe- rament, between jovial and melancholy, which is so favourable for seeing fair play to human nature ; and his good-heartedness rendered him an enthusiastic friend, and a believer in the goodness of others, notwithstanding his insight into their follies and a o;ood stock of his own ; for he lived in a coarse and licentious age, of the freedoms of which he partook. But for want of somethinoj more imao;inative and spiritual in his genius, his perceptions stopped short of the very finest points, critical and philo- sophical. He knew little of the capabilities of 150 TABLE-TALK. the mind, out of the pale of its more manifest influences from the body; his taste in poetry was logical, not poetical ; and he ventured upon openly despising romances (*^ Amadis de Gaul," &c.) ; which was hardly in keeping with the modesty of his motto, Que sqais-je? (What do I know ?) Montaigne, who loved his father's memory, rode out in a cloak which had belonged to him; and would say of it, that he seemed to feel " lorapped up in his father" {il me semble rrienve- lopper de lui). Some writers have sneered at this saying, and at the conclusions drawn from it respecting the amount of his filial affection ; but it does him as much honour as anything he ever uttered. There is as much depth of feel- ing in it, as vivacity of expression. WALLER. Pope said of Waller, that he would have been a better poet had he entertained less admiration of people in power. But surely it was the excess of that propensity which inspired him. He was naturally timid and servile ; and poetry is the flower of a man's real nature, whatever it be, provided there be intellect and TABLE-TALK. 151 music enougli to bring it to bear. Waller's very best pieces are those in praise of sovereign authority and of a disdainful mistress. He would not have sung Sacharissa so well, had she favoured him. T ^Y A Y. Otway is the poet of sensual pathos: for, affecting as he sometimes is, he knows no way to the heart but through the senses. His very friendship), though enthusiastic, is violent, and has a smack of bullying. He was a man of generous temperament, spoilt by a profligate age. He seems to dress up a beauty in tears, only for the purpose of stimulating her wrongers. RAPHAEL AND :MICHAEL ANGELO. The lovers of energy in its visible aspect think ^Michael Angelo the greatest artist that ever lived. Ariosto (in not one of his happiest compliments) punning upon his name, calls him — " :Micliel, piu che mortal, Angiol divino." Michael, the more than man, Angel divine. Pursuing the allusion, it may be said that 153 TABLE-TALK. there is much of the same difference between him and Raphael, as there is between their namesakes, the warhke archangel Michael in Paradise Lost, and Raphael "the affable arch- angel." But surely Raphael, by a little exag- geration, could have done all that Michael Angelo did ; whereas Michael Angelo could not have composed himself into the tranquil perfection of Raphael. Raphael's Gods and Sybils are as truly grand as those of Buonar- roti ; while the latter, out of an instinct of infe- riority in intellectual and moral grandeur, could not help ekeing out the power of his with some- thing of a convulsive strength, — an ostentation of muscle and attitude. His Jupiter was a Mars intellectualized. Raphael's was always Jupiter himself, needing nothing more, and including the strength of beauty in that of majesty ; as true moral grandeur does in nature.* WAX AND HONEY. Wax-lights, though we are accustomed to overlook the fact, and rank them with ordi- * Siuce raalving these remarks, I have seen the bust of a Susannah, which if truly attributed to Michael Angelo, proves him to have been the master of a sweetness of expression inferior to no man. It is in- deed the perfection of loveliness. TABLE-TALK. 153 nary commonplaces, are true fairy tapers, — a white metamorphosis from the flowers, crowned with the most intangible of all visible mysteries — fire. Then there is honey, which a Greek poet would have called the sister of wax, — a thins as beautiful to eat as the other is to look upon ; and beautiful to look upon too. What two ex- traordinary substances to be made, by little winged creatures, out of roses and lilies I T\"hat a singular and lovely energy in nature to im])el those little creatures thus to fetch out the sweet and elegant properties of the coloured fragrances of the gardens, and serve them up to ns for food and light I — honey to eat, and waxen tapers to eat it by ! AYhat more graceful repast could be imagined on one of the fairy tables made by Yulcan, which moved of their own accord, and came gliding, when he wanted a luncheon, to the side of Apollo ! — the honey golden as his lyre, and the wax fair as his shoulders. Depend upon it, he has eaten of it many a time, chatting with Hebe before some Olympian concert ; and as he talked in an under-tone, fervid as the bees, the bass- strings of his lyre murmured an accompani- ment. 154 TABLE-TALK. ASSOCIATIONS WITH SHAKSPEARE. How naturally the idea of Sliakspeare can be made to associate itself with anything which is worth mention ! Take Christmas for in- stance ; " Shakspeare and Christmas ; " the two ideas fall as happily together as " wine and walnuts," or heart and soul. So you may put together " Shakspeare and May," or " Shak- speare and June," and twenty passages start into your memory about spring and violets. Or you may say " Shakspeare and Love," and you are in the midst of a bevy of bright damsels, as sweet as rosebuds ; or " Shakspeare and death," and all graves, and thoughts of graves, are before you ; or '^ Shakspeare and Life," and you have the whole world of youth, and spirit, and Hotspur, and life itself; or you may say even, " Shakspeare and Hate," and he will say all that can be said for hate, as well as against it, till you shall take Shylock himself into your Christian arms, and tears shall make you of one faith. TABLE-TALK. 155 BAD GREAT MEN. There have, undoubtedly, been bad great men; but, inasmuch as they were bad, they were not o-reat. Their o-reatness was not en- th'e. There was a great piece of it omitted. They had heads, legs, and arms, but they wanted hearts ; and thus were not whole men. CICERO. This great Roman special pleader — tlie law- yer of antiquity — the child of the old age of Roman virtue, when words began to be taken for things — was the only man ever made great by vanity. ELOWERS IX VriXTER. It is a charmino; sio-ht to see China roses coverincr the front of a cottasce in winter-time. It looks as if we need have no winter, as far as flowers are concerned ; and, in fact, it is possible to have both a beautiful and a fragrant garden in January. There is a story in Boccaccio, of a magician who conjured up a garden in winter- time. His mao-ic consisted in his havino; a 156 TABLE-TALK. knowledge beyond his time ; and magic plea- sures, so to speak, await on all who choose to exercise knowledjre after his fashion and to realize what the progress of information and good taste may suggest. Even a garden six feet wide is better than none. Now the possessor of such a garden might show his " magic" by making the most of it, and filling it with colour. CHARLES LAMB. Lamb was a humanist, in the most universal sense of the term. His imagination was not great, and he also wanted sufficient heat and music to render his poetry as good as his prose; but as a prose w^riter, and within the wide circuit of humanity, no man ever took a more complete range than he. He had felt, thought, and suffered so much, that he literally had intolerance for nothing ; and he never seemed to have it, but when he supposed the sympathies of men, who might have known better, to be imperfect. He was a wit and an observer of the first order, as far as the world around him was concerned, and society in its existing state ; for as to anything theoretical or transcendental. TABLE-TALK. 157 no man ever had less care for it, or less power. To take him out of habit and convention, how- ever tolerant he was to those who could specu- late beyond them, was to put him into an exhausted receiver, or to send him naked, shivering, and driven to shatters, through the regions of space and time. He was only at his ease in the old arms of humanity ; and humanity loved and comforted him like one of its wisest, though weakest children. His life had ex- perienced great and peculiar sorrows ; but he kept up a balance between those and his con- solations, by the goodness of his heart, and the ever-willino^ socialitv of his humour ; thoug-h, now and then, as if he would cram into one moment the spleen of years, he would throw out a startling and morbid subject for reflection, perhaps in no better shape than a pun ; for he was a great punster. It was a levity that re- lieved the gravity of his thoughts, and kept them from falling too heavily earthwards. Lamb was under the middle size, and of fragile make ; but with a head as fine as if it had been carved on purpose. He had a very weak stomach. Three glasses of wine would put him in as lively a condition as can only be wrought in some men by as many bottles ; 158 TABLE-TALK. which subjected him to mistakes on the part of the inconsiderate. Lamb's essays, especially those collected under the signature of Elia, will take their place among the daintiest productions of Eng- lish wit-melancholy, — an amiable melancholy being the ground-work of them, and serving to throw out their delicate flowers of wit and cha- racter w^ith the greater nicety. Nor will they be liked the less for a sprinkle of old language, which was natural in him by reason of his great love of the old English writers. Shakspeare himself might have read them, and Hamlet have quoted them. SPORTING. The second of September is terrible in the annals of the French Kevolution, for a mas- sacre, the perpetrators of which were called Septembrizers. If the birds had the settlement of almanacks, new and startling would be the list of Septembrizers and their fusillades, — amazing the multitude of good-humoured and respectable faces that would have to look in the glass of a compulsory self-knowledge, and re- cognise themselves for slaughterers by whole- TABLE-TALK. 159 sale, — or worse, — distributors of broken bones and festerino; dislocations. " And what" (a reader may ask) " would be the good of that, if these gentlemen are not aware of their enormities ? Would it be doing anything but substituting one pain for an- other, and setting men's minds upon needless considerations of the pain which exists in the universe ? " Yes; — for these gentlemen are perhaps not quite so innocent and unconscious, as in the gratuitousness of your philosophy you are will- ing to suppose them. Besides, should they cease to give pain, they would cease to feel it in its relation to themselves : and as to the pain existing in the universe, people in general are not likely to feel it too much, especially the healthy ; nor ought anybody to do so, in a feeble sense, as long as he does what he can to diminish it, and trusts the rest to Providence and futurity. What we are incited by our own thoughts or those of others, to amend, it becomes us to consider to that end : what we cannot contribute any amendment to, we must think as well of as we can contrive. Sportsmen for the most part are not a very thoughtful ge- neration. Xo harm would be done them by put- 160 TABLE-TALK. tln TABLE-TALK. another, as hard as they could drive, to the admiration of the beliolders, who were never tired of hstcning. They must have carried away a world of thoughts. For my part, my deafness came upon me. I never so much lamented it. Tliere was a long story told by a hautboy, wdiich was considered so admirable, that the whole band fell into a transport of scratching and tootling. I observed the flute's mouth water, probably at some remarks on green peas, wdiich had just come in season. It might have been guessed, by the gravity of the hearers, that the conversation chiefly ran upon the new king and queen; but I believe it Avas upon periwigs ; for turning to that puppy Kawlinson, and asking wdiat he concluded from all that, he had the face to tell me, that it gave him a "heavenly satisfaction." We laughed heartily at this sally against music. — Dr. Swift was very learned on the dessert. He said he owed his fructification to Sir William Temple. I observed that it was delif^htful to see so great a man as Sir William Temple so happy as he appears to have been. The otium cum dignitate is surely nowhere to be found, if not as he has painted it in his works. Dr. Swift. — The otium cum digging potatoes SWIFT AND POPE. 245 is better. I could show you a dozen Irishmen (which is a great many for thriving ones) who have the advantage of him. Sir William was a great, but not a happy man. He had an ill stomach. What is worse, he gave me one. He taught me to eat platefuls of cherries and peaches, when I took no exercise. A. H. — What can one trust to, if the air of tranquillity in his writings is not to be depended on? Mr. Pope, — I believe he talks too much of his ease, to be considered very easy. It is an ill head that takes so much concern about its pillow. Dr. Savift. — Sir William Temple was a martyr to the "good sense" that came up in those days. He had sick blood, that required stirring; but because it was a high strain of good sense to agree with Epicurus and be of no religion, it was thought the highest possible strain, in any body who should not go so far, to live in a garden as Epicurus did, and lie quiet, and be a philosopher. So Epicurus got a great stone in his kidneys ; and Sir William used to be out of temper, if his oranges got smutted. I thought there was a little spleen in this 2tG TABLE-TALK. account of Temple, wlilcli surprised me, con- sidering old times. But if it be true that the giddiness, and even deafness, to which the Dean is subject, is owing to the philosopher's bad example, one can hardly wonder at its making him melancholy. He sat amidst a heap of fruit without touching it. Mr. PorE. — Sir William, in his Essay on Gardening^ says, he does not know how it is that Lucretius's account of the gods is thought more impious than Homer's, who makes them as full of bustle and bad passions as the meanest of us. Now it is very clear : for the reason is, that Homer's gods have something in common with us, and are subject to our troubles and concerns ; whereas Lucretius's live like a parcel of hon-vivants by themselves, and care for no- body. The Dean. — There are two admirable good things in that essay. One is an old usurer's, who said, " that no man could have peace of conscience, that run out of his estate." The other is a Spanish proverb ; that " a fool knows more in his own house, than a wise man in another's." The conversation turning upon our discussion last time respecting anglers, the Dean said he V SWIFT AND POPE. 24-7 once asked a scrub who was fishing, if he ever caught the fish called the Scream. The man protested he had never heard of such a fish. " What ! " says the Doctor, " you an angler, and never heard of the fish that gives a shriek when coming out of the water ! It is true it is not often found in these parts ; but ask any Crim Tartar, and he will tell you of it. 'Tis the only fish that has a voice ; and a sad dismal sound it is." The man asked, w^ho could be so barbarous as to angle for a creature that shrieked ? — " That," says the Doctor, " is an- other matter : but what do you think of fellows that I have seen, whose only reason for hooking and tearing all the fish they can get at, is that they do not scream ? " I shouted this not in his ear, and he almost shuffled himself into the river. Mr. Walscott. — Surely, Mr. Dean, this argument would strike tbe dullest. Dr. Swift. — Yes, if you could turn it into a box on the ear. Not else. They would fain give you one meantime, if they had the courage ; for men have such a perverse dread of the very notion of doing wrong, that they would rather do it, than be told of it. You know Mr. TVilcox of Hertfordshire (to Mr. Pope). 248 TABLE-TALK. I once convinced him he did an inhuman thing, in angling ; at least, I must have gone very near to convince him ; for he cut short the dispute, by referrino; me to his friends for a o;ood character. It gives one the spleen to see an honest man make such an owl of liimself. Mr. Pope. — And all anglers, perhaps, as he was ? Dr. Swift. — Very likely, 'faith. A parcel of sneaking, scoundrelly understandings get some honest man to do as they do, and then, forsooth, must dishonour him with the testi- mony of their good opinion. Ko; it requires a very rare benevolence, or as great an under- standing, to see beyond even such a paltry thing as this angling, in angling times ; about as much as it would take a good honest-hearted cannibal to see further than man-eating, or a goldsmith beyond his money. What ! isn't Tow-wow a good husband and jaw-breaker; and must he not stand upon reputation ? Mr. Walscott. — It is common to hear people among the lower orders talk of "the poor dumb animal," when they desire to rescue a cat or dog from ill-treatment. The Dean. — Yes ; and the cat is not dumb ; nor the dog either. A horse is dumb ; a fish SWIFT AND POPE. 249 is clumber; and I suppose this is the reason why the horse is the worst used of any crea- ture, except trout and grayling. Come: this is melancholy talk. Mrs. Patty, why didn't you smoke the bull? Mrs. Blount. — Smoke the bull, sir? Dr. Swift. — Yes ; I have just made a bull. I said horses were dumb, and fish dumber. Mrs. Pope. — Pray, Mr. Dean, why do they call those kind of mistakes hulls ? Dr. Swift.— Why, madam, I cannot tell; but I can tell you the prettiest bull that ever was made. An Irishman laid a Avaofcr with another, a bricklayer, that he could not carry him to the top of a building, in his hod. The fellow took him up, and, at the risk of both their necks, landed him safely. " Well," cried the other, " you have done it ; there's no denying that; but at the fourth story I had hopes." Mr. Pope. — Doctor, I believe you take the word smoke to be a modern cant phrase. I found it, when I was translating Homer, in old Chapman. He says, that Juno "smoked" Ulysses through his disguise. Mention was made of the strange version of Hobbes. — Mr. Pope. — You recollect, Mr. 250 TABLE-TALK. Honeycomb, the passage in the first book of Homer, where Apollo comes down to destroy the Greeks, and how his quiver sounded as he came? "Yes, sir," said I, "very well;" and I quoted from his translation : — " Eierce as he moved, the silver shafts resoimd." Mr. Pope. — I was speaking of the original ; but tliat line will do very well to contrast with Hobbes. What think you of " His arrows chink as often as he jogs ! " Mr. Pope mentioned another passage just as ridiculous. I forget something of the first line, and a word in the second. Speaking of Jupiter, he says, — " With that his great black brow he nodded Wherewith (astonish' d) were the powers divine : Olympus shook at shaking of his God-head, And Thetis from it jump'd into the brine." Mr. Pope. — Dryden good-naturedly says of Hobbes, that he took to poetry when he was too old. Dean Swift (with an arch look). — Perhaps had he begun at forty, as Dryden did, he w^ould have been as great as my young master. SWIFT AND POPE. 251 Mr. Walscott could not help laughing to hear Dryden, and at forty, called "my young master." However, he was going to say some- thing, but desisted. I wish I could recollect many more things that were said, so as to do them justice. Altogether, the day was not quite so pleasant as the former one. With Mr. Pope, one is both tranquil and delighted. Dr. Swift somehow makes me restless. I could hear him talk all day long, but should like to be walking half the time, instead of sitting. Besides, he did not appear quite easy himself, notwithstanding what the boatman said ; and he looked ill. I am told he is very anxious about the health of a friend in Ireland. THE END. Printed by Sie^vakt & MuRaAY, Old Biiiley. NEW WEEKLY PERIODICAL, Edited by Mr. LEIGH HUNT. LEIGH HUNT'S JOURNAL; TOR THE CULTIVATION OF THE MEMORABLE, THE PEOGEESSIVE, AND THE BEAUTIEUL. The First Number appeared on Saturday, December 7, Price Three Half -pence. fg? December 1850. CATALOGUE OF BOOKS IN VARIOUS BRANCHES OF LITERATURE, PUBLISHED AND PREPARING FOR PUBLICATION BY SMITH, ELDEE AND CO., 65, CORNHILL, LONDON. CONTENTS. PAGE PAGE New Publications . 1 Illustrated Scientific W ORKS 9 Works of Mr. Ruskin . 3 Oriental and Colonial . . 11 ,, Currer Bell . 4 Educational . 13 ,, Leigh Hunt 5 Religious . 14 General Literature . 6 Books for the Blind . 16 Works of Practical Inform ation 7 ^eto CftrfetmasJ asoofes; Mr. THACKERAY'S NEW CHRISTMAS BOOK. THE KICKLEBUEYS ON THE RHINE. A new Picture Book, Dra^YIl and Written by Mr. M. A. TITMARSH. Price 5^. plain. Is. 6d. coloured. {Just ready^ A NEW FAIRY TALE. THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER; OR, THE BLACK BROTHERS. With IDustrations by Richard Doyle. {Jvst ready.) TABLE TALK. 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