CHAPTER VIII
October 23. Numbered IX.
Captain Parry. Captain, afterwards Sir William Edward Parry (1790–1855), explorer of the North-West Passage.
[139]. Note. Painful scene in Evelina. Letter XXV.
[142]. Note. My old acquaintance (Dr. Stoddart). Sir John Stoddart (1773–1856), Hazlitt’s brother-in-law. He was knighted in 1826.
[144]. Mutually reflected charities. Burke, Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 40.
Note. In the manner of Swift. Add, from the newspaper:—‘So accomplished an equestrian (thought I) might ascend a throne with popularity and effect! It was not the first or the last time in my life I have been rebuked for glancing a sceptical eye at the same sort of grave masquerading.—Cucullus non facit Monachum. It was but the other day that I was called to account for having hinted that a subscriber to The Sentinel,[[60]] and a patron and prime mover in Blackwood, is not one of the best and greatest characters of the age; or that, if so, then a tool of power, a party-bigot, and a suborner of private slander, in support of public wrong, is one of the best and greatest characters of the age. Mr. Blackwood should take care how he implicates any really respectable character by defending it. The worst ever supposed of the author of Waverley was, that there was a clandestine understanding between him and Mr. Blackwood—through Sir Walter Scott! The Ned Christian[[61]] compliment turns upon this. Mr. Taylor of Fleet-street, need not have disavowed the paragraph; it might as well have been laid to the charge of Mr. Taylor of The Sun. The passage was not worth speaking of—but I have since done the same thing better, and the one passage is (cleverly enough) brought forward as a screen to the other.’
[145]. Thrust us from a level consideration. 2 King Henry IV., Act II. Sc. 1.
Garlanded with flowers.
Cf. ‘All garlanded with carven imag’ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass.’
Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes, XXIV.
The lean abhorred monster. Romeo and Juliet, Act V. Sc. 3.
No black and melancholic yew-trees. Webster’s The White Devil, Act IV. Sc. 2.
Pansies for thoughts. Hamlet, Act IV. Sc. 5.
[146]. The daughter of Madame d’Orbe. Sixième Partie, Lettre XI.
[146]. Ney. Michel Ney (1769–1815), Napoleon’s great general, ‘the bravest of the brave,’ who had five horses shot under him at Waterloo. He urged Napoleon to abdicate after the campaign of 1814, and on Napoleon’s return from Elba was sent to fight him. He went over to his old Emperor, however, and, after Waterloo, was arrested for high treason, condemned to death, and shot in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Massena. André Masséna (1756–1817), another of Napoleon’s generals, ‘the favoured child of victory.’
Kellerman. François Christophe de Kellermann (1735–1820), the successful general at Valmy (1792).
Fontaine. Jean de la Fontaine (1621–1695), the fabulist.
De Lille. Jacques Delille (1738–1813), French poet and translator of Paradise Lost.