The humour of Professor Porson lay in parodies, imitations, and hoaxes, ready wit and repartee; in his oddities of dress and demeanour; and his disregard for certain decencies of society is very deplorable, though at the same time mirthful in its very extravagances. Porson left Cambridge to become the scholar about town; to quench his thirst for Florentine MSS. in the tankards of the "Cider Cellar;" and to exchange the respectability and stateliness of the Trinity common room for the savage liberty of Temple chambers. He had for some time become notorious at Cambridge. His passion for smoking, which was then going out among the younger generation, his large and indiscriminate potations, and his occasional use of the poker with a very refractory controversialist, had caused his company to be shunned by all except the few to whom his wit and scholarship were irresistible. When the evening began to grow late, the Fellows of Trinity used to walk out of the common room, and leave Porson to himself, who was sometimes found smoking by the servants next morning, without having apparently moved from the spot where he had been left over-night.
Porson's imitations of Horace, which appeared in the Morning Chronicle, have really no merit at all, nor have any of the hundred and one epigrams which he is said to have written in one night upon the drunkenness of Mr. Pitt. But two other papers, one called The Swinish Multitude, and the other The Saltbox, display certainly both wit and humour. One is a satire upon the famous expression of Burke, in his Letters on a Regicide Peace; the other, a parody of the Oxford style of examination in Logic and Metaphysics.
Of the hundred and one epigrams, the story goes—that when Pitt and Dundas appeared before the House, Pitt tried to speak, but showing himself unable, was kindly pulled down into his seat by those about him; Dundas who was equally unfitted for eloquence, had sense enough to sit silent. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, witnessed the scene, and on his return from the House, gave a description of it to Porson, who, being vastly amused, called for pen and ink, and musing over his pipe and tankard, produced the one hundred and one pieces of verse before the day dawned. The point of most of them lies in puns. The first epigram is:
"That Ça Ira in England will prevail,
All sober men deny with heart and hand;
To talk of going sure's a pretty tale,
When e'en our rulers can't as much as stand."
The following are better:—
"Your gentle brains with full libations drench,
You've then Pitt's title to the Treasury Bench.
Your foe in war to overrate
A maxim is of ancient date;
Then sure 'twas right, in time of trouble,
That our good rulers should see double.
The mob are beasts! exclaims the King of Daggers;
What creature's he that's troubled with the staggers?"
"When Billy found he scarce could stand,
'Help! help!' he cried, and stretched his hand
To faithful Harry calling,
Quoth Hal, 'My friend, I'm sorry for't;
'Tis not my practice to support
A minister that's falling.'"
"'Who's up?' inquired Burke of a friend at the door;
'Oh! no one,' says Paddy, 'though Pitt's on the floor.'"
Porson was not imposed upon for a moment by the Ireland forgeries of Shakspeare, and when asked to set his name to a declaration of belief in their genuineness, replied, with a smile, that he was "slow to subscribe articles of faith." Scholars, however, owe a debt of gratitude to Ireland, of which, perhaps, they are seldom conscious; for it was the alleged discovery of Shakspearian plays that drew from Porson one of the cleverest specimens of his peculiar powers that remain to us. We mean the translation of "Three Children sliding on the Ice," which he sent to the Morning Chronicle, as a fragment of Sophocles, recently discovered by a friend of his at the bottom of an old trunk.
Porson had high animal spirits; and he is said once, for a wager, to have carried a young lady round the room in his teeth. His conversation, however, after a certain period of the evening, was not always fit for ladies. Rogers once took him to a party, where several women of fashion were present, who were anxious to hear him talk. The Professor, who hated being made a lion, selected for his theme the soup of Vauxhall, and at last, we are told, talked so oddly, that all the women retreated except the famous Lady Crewe, who was not to be frightened by any man. "After this," says Rogers, "I brought him home as far as Piccadilly, where I am sorry to say I left him sick in the middle of the street."