FOOTNOTES
[2] To me there is something candid, naïve, and often something noble in this personal consciousness and confidence, this moderate self-trumpeting. “Questi sono miri!” cried Napoleon, when, at the sack of Milan, the MS. treatises of Leonardo da Vinci were discovered; and he bore them in triumph to his hotel, suffering no meaner hand to touch them. He knew—the Conquering Thinker—that he alone was worthy to possess those priceless papers. So too, Honoré de Balzac calmly remarking that there were only three men in France who could speak French correctly: himself, Victor Hugo, and “Théophile” (T. Gautier). So, too, Elliston, when the little ballet-girl complained of having been hissed: “They have hissed me,” said the awful manager, and the dancing girl was dumb. Who can forget the words that Milton wrote concerning things of his “that posteritie would not willingly let die?” and that Bacon left, commending his fame to “foreign nations and to the next age?” And Turner, simply directing in his will that he should be buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral? That sepulchre, the painter knew, was his of right. And innocent Gainsborough, dying: “We are all going to heaven, and Vandyke is of the company.” And Fontenelle, calmly expiring at a hundred years of age: “Je n’ai jamais dit la moindre chose centre la plus petite vertu.” ’Tis true, that my specious little argument falls dolefully to the ground when I remember that which the wisest man who ever lived said concerning a child gathering shells and pebbles on the sea-shore, when the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him.
[3] The bezant (from Byzantium) was a round knob on the scutcheon, blazoned yellow. “Golp” was purple, the colour of an old black eye, so defined by the heralds. “Sanguine” or “guzes” were to be congested red, like bloodshot eyes; “torteaux” were of another kind of red, like “Simnel cakes.” “Pomeis” were to be green like apples. “Tawny” was orange. There were also “hurts” to be blazoned blue, as bruises are.—New View of London, 1712.
[4] I believe Pope’s sneer against poor Elkanah Settle (who died very comfortably in the Charterhouse, 1724, ætat. 76: he was alive in 1720, and succeeded Rowe as laureate), that he was reduced in his latter days to compass a motion of St. George and the Dragon at Bartholomew fair, and himself enacted the dragon in a peculiar suit of green leather, his own invention, to have been a purely malicious and mendacious bit of spite. Moreover, Settle died years after Pope assumed him to have expired.
[5] 1720. The horrible room in Newgate Prison where in cauldrons of boiling pitch the hangman seethed the dissevered limbs of those executed for high treason, and whose quarters were to be exposed, was called “Jack Ketch’s kitchen.”
[6] Compare these voluntary torments with the description of the Dosèh, or horse-trampling ceremonial of the Sheik El Bekree, over the bodies of the faithful, in Lane’s Modern Egyptians.
[7] Daniel Button’s well-known coffee-house was on the south side of Russell Street, Covent Garden, nearly opposite Tom’s. Button had been a servant of the Countess of Warwick, and so was patronized by her spouse, the Right Hon. Joseph Addison. Sir Robert Walpole’s creature, Giles Earl, a trading justice of the peace (compare Fielding and “300l. a year of the dirtiest money in the world”) used to examine criminals, for the amusement of the company, in the public room at Button’s. Here, too, was a lion’s head letter-box, into which communications for the Guardian were dropped. At Button’s, Pope is reported to have said of Patrick, the lexicographer, who made pretensions to criticism, that “a dictionary-maker might know the meaning of one word, but not of two put together.”
[8] Not, however, to forget that another Duchess, Marlborough’s daughter, who loved Congreve so, had after his death a waxen image made in his effigy, and used to weep over it, and anoint the gouty feet.
[9] “They said he could not colour,” said old Mrs. Hogarth one day to John Thomas Smith, showing him a sketch of a girl’s head. “It’s a lie; look there: there’s flesh and blood for you, my man.”