CHATTY MR. BRYANT AGAIN.
Jan. 8.—I met Mr. Bryant, who came, by appointment to give me that pleasure. He was in very high spirits, full Of anecdote and amusement. He has as much good-humoured chit-chat and entertaining gossiping as if he had given no time to the classics and his studies, instead of having nearly devoted his life to them. One or two of his little anecdotes I will try to recollect.
In the year thirty-three of this century, and in his own memory, there was a cause brought before a judge, between two highwaymen, who had quarrelled about the division of their booty; and these men had the effrontery to bring their dispute to trial. “In the petition of the plaintiff,” said Mr. Bryant, “he asserted that he had been extremely ill-used by the defendant: that they had carried on a very advantageous trade together, upon Black-heath, Hounslow-heath, Bagshot-heath, and other places; that their business chiefly consisted in watches, wearing apparel, and trinkets of all sorts, as well as large concerns between them in cash; that they had agreed to an equitable partition of all profits, and that this agreement had been violated. So impudent a thing, the judge said, was never before brought out in a court, and so he refused to pass sentence in favour of either of them, and dismissed them from the court.”
Then he told us a great number of comic slip-slops, of the first Lord Baltimore, who made a constant misuse of one word for another: for instance, “I have been,” says he, “upon a little excoriation to see a ship lanced; and there is not a finer going vessel upon the face of God’s earth: you’ve no idiom how well it sailed.”
Having given us this elegant specimen of the language of one lord, he proceeded to give us one equally forcible of the understanding of another. The late Lord Plymouth, meeting in a country town with a puppet-show, was induced to see it; and, from the high entertainment he received through Punch, he determined to buy him, and accordingly asked his price, and paid it, and carried the puppet to his country-house, that he might be diverted with him at any odd hour. Mr. Bryant protests he met the same troop Just as the purchase had been made, and went himself to the puppet-show, which was exhibited senza punch!
Next he spoke upon the Mysteries, or origin of our theatrical entertainments, and repeated the plan and conduct Of several Of these strange compositions, in particular one he remembered which was called “Noah’s Ark,” and in which that patriarch and his sons, just previous to the Deluge, made it all their delight to speed themselves into the ark without Mrs. Noah, whom they wished to escape; but she surprised them just as they had embarked, and made so prodigious a racket against the door that, after a long and violent contention, she forced them to open it, and gained admission, having first content, them by being kept out till she was thoroughly wet to the skin. These most eccentric and unaccountable dramas filled up the chief of our conversation.