ON THE CONVERSATION OF AUTHORS
This is the title of Essays III and IV of the “Plain Speaker.” Our selection begins with the last paragraph of the first, which forms a fitting introduction to the account of one of Lamb’s celebrated Wednesday evenings. Lamb tells us that his sister was accustomed to read this essay with unmixed delight.
[P. 301.] When Greek meets Greek. Nathaniel Lee’s “Alexander the Great,” iv, 2.
C——. Coleridge.
[P. 302.] small-coal man. Thomas Britton (1654?-1714), a dealer in small coal, who on the floor of his hut above the coal-shop held weekly concerts of vocal and instrumental music, at which the greatest performers of the day, even Handel, were to be heard.
And, in our flowing cups. Cf. “Henry V,” iv, 3, 51:
“then shall our names
Familiar in his mouth as household words ...
Be in their flowing cups freely remember’d.”
[P. 303.] the cartoons. See Hazlitt’s account of Raphael’s cartoons in “The Pictures at Hampton Court” (Works, IX, 43).
Donne, John (1573-1631), poet and divine. Hazlitt in the “Lectures on the English Poets” confesses that he knows nothing of him save “some beautiful verses to his wife, dissuading her from accompanying him on his travels abroad (see p. [318]), and some quaint riddles in verse, which the Sphinx could not unravel.” V, 83.
[P. 304.] Ned P——. Edward Phillips. Lamb speaks of him as “that poor card-playing Phillips, that has felt himself for so many years the outcast of Fortune.” (Works, ed. Lucas, VII, 972.)
Captain ——. Rear-Admiral James Burney (1750-1821), brother of Fanny Burney the novelist, author of a “Chronological History of the Voyages and Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean” in five volumes (1803-1817). “The captain was himself a character, a fine, noble creature—gentle, with a rough exterior, as became the associate of Captain Cook in his voyages round the world, and the literary historian of all these acts of circumnavigation.” Crabb-Robinson’s Diary, 1810.
Jem White. James White (1775-1820), of whom Lamb has left us a sketch in the essay “On the Praise of Chimney-Sweepers”: “He carried away half the fun of the world when he died.” He wrote, it is supposed with some cooperation from Lamb, the “Original Letters, etc., of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends” (1796), which were described by Lamb as “without exception the best imitations I ever saw.” (Works, ed. Lucas, VI, 2.) A review of this book by Lamb, consisting chiefly of specimens, appeared in the Examiner in 1819 (Works, ed. Lucas, I, 191 ff).
turning like the latter end. This phrase occurs in one of the extracts in Lamb’s review of Falstaff’s Letters just mentioned (p. 194).
A——. William Aryton (1777-1858), a musical critic and director of the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. In the letter of Elia to Robert Southey (Lamb’s Works, I, 230) he is spoken of as “the last and steadiest left me of that little knot of whist-players, that used to assemble weekly, for so many years, at the Queen’s Gate.”
Mrs. R——-. Mrs. Reynolds, who had been Lamb’s schoolmistress.
M. B. Martin Charles Burney, son of Admiral Burney. “Martin Burney is as odd as ever.... He came down here, and insisted on reading Virgil’s ‘Æneid’ all through with me (which he did,) because a Counsel must know Latin. Another time he read out all the Gospel of St. John, because Biblical quotations are very emphatic in a Court of Justice. A third time, he would carve a fowl, which he did very ill-favoredly, because ‘we did not know how indispensable it was for a Barrister to do all those sort of things well. Those little things were of more consequence than we supposed.’ So he goes on, harassing about the way to prosperity, and losing it. With a long head, but somewhat wrong one—harum-scarum. Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one—: may be, he has tired him out.” Lamb’s Works, VII, 855.
Author of the Road to Ruin. Thomas Holcroft.
[P. 305.] Critique of Pure Reason, by Kant.
Biographia Literaria. Coleridge’s account of his literary life, published in 1817.
Those days are over! The event here referred to may be Waterloo. Mr. Lucas thinks that Hazlitt’s share in Lamb’s gatherings “ceased after an unfortunate discussion of Fanny Burney’s Wanderer, which Hazlitt condemned in terms that her brother, the Admiral, could not forgive.” (Lamb’s Works, I, 482.) It is likely that Mr. Lucas has been led astray by the statement in Crabb-Robinson’s Diary to the effect that Hazlitt used to attend Captain Burney’s whist-parties “till he affronted the Captain by severe criticisms on the works of his sister,” presumably by his article in the Edinburgh Review in 1814. Hazlitt commemorates Lamb’s evenings in the “Pleasure of Hating” (“Plain Speaker”): “What is become of ‘that set of whist players,’ celebrated by Elia in his notable Epistle to Robert Southey, Esq. ... ‘that for so many years called Admiral Burney friend?’ They are scattered, like last year’s snow. Some of them are dead—or gone to live at a distance—or pass one another in the street like strangers; or if they stop to speak, do it as coolly and try to cut one another as soon as possible. Some of us have grown rich—others poor. Some have got places under Government—others a niche in the Quarterly Review. Some of us have dearly earned a name in the world; whilst others remain in their original privacy. We despise the one, and envy and are glad to mortify the other.”
Like angels’ visits. Cf. Blair’s “The Grave,” 582: “Like those of angels, short and far between.” Hazlitt was fond of pointing out this source for Campbell’s famous line “Like angels’ visits few and far between,” and of insisting that the alteration spoiled the sense. Thereby he is said to have incurred Campbell’s bitter hostility.
[P. 306.] Mr. Douce, Francis (1757-1834), Shakespearian scholar and keeper of the manuscripts in the British Museum.
L. H——. Leigh Hunt. There is a sketch of him in the “Spirit of the Age.”
aliquando sufflaminandus erat. “He sometimes had to be checked.” This is a quotation from Seneca which Ben Jonson in “Timber” (ed. Schelling, p. 23) had applied to Shakespeare.
[P. 307.] The Indicator. Leigh Hunt’s most successful series of essays, which began their run in 1819.
Mr. Northcote, James (1746-1831), the painter of whose talk Hazlitt has left an entertaining record in the “Conversations of James Northcote” (1830), a book which inspired Crabb-Robinson to say, “I do not believe that Boswell gives so much good talk in an equal quantity of his life of Johnson.”
[P. 308.] Sir Joshua’s. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the famous English painter.
[P. 309.] Horne Tooke (1736-1812), politician and author of a celebrated philological volume, “The Diversions of Purley” (1786, 1805). His portrait is included in the “Spirit of the Age”: “He was without a rival (almost) in private conversation, an expert public speaker, a keen politician, a first-rate grammarian, and the finest gentleman (to say the least) of his own party. He had no imagination (or he would not have scorned it!)—no delicacy of taste, no rooted prejudices or strong attachments: his intellect was like a bow of polished steel, from which he shot sharp-pointed poisoned arrows at his friends in private, at his enemies in public.”
hear a sound so fine. J. S. Knowles’s “Virginius,” v, 2.
[P. 310.] silenced a learned professor. Cf. “Spirit of the Age”: “He used to plague Fuseli by asking him after the origin of the Teutonic dialects, and Dr. Parr, by wishing to know the meaning of the common copulative, Is.”
Curran, John Philpot (1750-1817), member of Parliament from Ireland, orator and wit.
[P. 311.] Mrs. Inchbald, Elizabeth (1753-1821), a well-known actress, dramatist, and novelist. In literature she is associated with the group of William Godwin, and her best-known works are “A Simple Story” and “Nature and Art.”
from noon to dewy eve. “Paradise Lost,” I, 743.
Mrs. M——. Mrs. Montagu, wife of Basil Montagu. In the “Pleasure of Hating” (“Plain Speaker”) there is another allusion to Mrs. Montagu “whose dark raven locks made a picturesque background to our discourse.”
H—t’s. Leigh Hunt’s.
N—’s. Northcote’s.
H—yd—n’s. Haydon’s.
Doctor Tronchin. Theodore Tronchin, a physician of Geneva, figures in Rousseau’s “Confessions.”
[P. 312.] Sir Fopling Flutter, a character in George Etherege’s comedy, “The Man of Mode.”
For wit is like a rest. “Master Francis Beaumont’s Letter to Ben Jonson.” For players read gamesters.
came down into the country. Charles and Mary Lamb with a few of their friends paid a visit to Hazlitt at Winterslow in 1810.
Like the most capricious poet. “As You Like It,” iii, 3, 8.
walked gowned. Lamb’s “Sonnet Written at Cambridge, August 15, 1819.”
[P. 313.] the person I mean. George Dyer (1755-1841), an amiable hack-writer and a friend of Lamb. He figures prominently in two of the Essays of Elia, “Oxford in the Vacation” and “Amicus Redivivus,” and in many of Lamb’s letters. “To G. D. a poem is a poem. His own as good as any bodie’s, and god bless him, any bodie’s as good as his own, for I do not think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem being better than another. The Gods by denying him the very faculty itself of discrimination have effectually cut off every seed of envy in his bosom.” Letter to Wordsworth (Lamb’s Works, ed. Lucas, VI, 519).