When Brummell was obliged by want of money, and debt, and all that, to retire to France, he knew no French; and having obtained a grammar for the purpose of study, his friend Scrope Davies was asked what progress Brummell had made in French. He responded, that Brummell had been stopped, like Buonaparte in Russia, by the Elements.
"I have put this pun into Beppo, (says Lord Byron), which is a fair exchange and no robbery, for Scrope made his fortune at several dinners, (as he owned himself,) by repeating occasionally, as his own, some of the buffooneries with which I had encountered him in the morning."
JOHNSON'S CLUB-ROOM.
In a paper in the Edinburgh Review, we find this cabinet picture:—The club-room is before us, and the table, on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke, and the tall thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerc, and the beaming smile of Garrick; Gibbon tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up—the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease; the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig, with the scorched foretop; the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and nose moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!"
DR. CHALMERS'S INDUSTRY.
In October, 1841, Dr. Chalmers commenced two series of biblical compositions, which he continued with unbroken regularity till the day of his decease, May 31, 1847. Go where he might, however he might be engaged, each week-day had its few verses read, thought over, written upon—forming what he denominated "Horæ Biblicæ Quotidianæ:" each Sabbath-day had its two chapters, one in the Old and the other in the New Testament, with the two trains of meditative devotion recorded to which the reading of them respectively gave birth—forming what he denominated "Horæ Biblicæ Sabbaticæ." When absent from home, or when the manuscript books in which they were ordinarily inserted were not beside him, he wrote in short-hand, carefully entering what was thus written in the larger volumes afterwards. Not a trace of haste nor of the extreme pressure from without, to which he was so often subjected, is exhibited in the handwriting of these volumes. There are but few words omitted—scarcely any erased. This singular correctness was a general characteristic of his compositions. His lectures on the Epistle to the Romans were written currente calamo, in Glasgow, during the most hurried and overburthened period of his life. And when, many years afterwards, they were given out to be copied for the press, scarcely a blot, or an erasure, or a correction, was to be found in them, and they were printed off exactly as they had originally been written.
In preparing the "Horæ Biblicæ Quotidianæ," Chalmers had by his side, for use and reference, the "Concordance," the "Pictorial Bible," "Poole's Synopsis," "Henry's Commentary," and "Robinson's Researches in Palestine." These constituted what he called his "Biblical Library." "There," said he to a friend, pointing, as he spoke, to the above-named volumes, as they lay together on his library-table, with a volume of the "Quotidianæ," in which he had just been writing, lying open beside them,—"There are the books I use—all that is Biblical is there. I have to do with nothing besides in my Biblical study." To the consultation of these few volumes he throughout restricted himself.
The whole of the MSS. were purchased, after Dr. Chalmers's death, for a large sum of money, by Mr. Thomas Constable, of Edinburgh, her Majesty's printer; and were in due time given to, and most favourably received by, the public.