“At Ambrose’s.”
“But is there such a tavern, really?”
“Oh, certainly. Anybody will show it to you. It is a small house, kept in an out-of-the-way corner of the town, by Ambrose, who is an excellent fellow in his way, and had a great influx of custom in consequence of his celebrity in the Noctes. We were there one night very late, and had all been remarkably gay and agreeable. ‘What a pity,’ said Lockhart, ‘that some short hand writer had not been here to take down the good things that have been said at this supper.’ The next day he produced a paper called ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ and that was the first. I continued them afterward.”
“Have you no idea of publishing them separately? I think a volume or two should be made of the more poetical and and critical parts, certainly. Leaving out the politics and the merely local topics of the day, no book could be more agreeable.”
“It was one of the things pending when poor Blackwood was taken ill. But will you have some breakfast?”
The breakfast had been cooling for an hour, and I most willingly acceded to his proposition. Without rising, he leaned back, with his chair still toward the fire, and seizing the tea-pot as if it were a sledge-hammer, he poured from one cup to the other without interrupting the stream, overrunning both cup and saucer, and partly overflooding the tea-tray. He then set the cream toward me with a carelessness which nearly overset it, and in trying to reach an egg from the centre of the table, broke two. He took no notice of his own awkwardness, but drank his cup of tea at a single draught, ate his egg in the same expeditious manner, and went on talking of the Noctes and Lockhart and Blackwood, as if eating his breakfast were rather a troublesome parenthesis in his conversation. After a while he digressed to Wordsworth and Southey, and asked me if I was going to return by the Lakes. I proposed doing so.
“I will give you letters to both, if you haven’t them. I lived a long time in that neighborhood, and know Wordsworth perhaps as well as any one. Many a day I have walked over the hills with him, and listened to his repetition of his own poetry, which of course filled my mind completely at the time, and perhaps started the poetical vein in me, though I cannot agree with the critics that my poetry is an imitation of Wordsworth’s.”
“Did Wordsworth repeat any other poetry than his own?”
“Never in a single instance, to my knowledge. He is remarkable for the manner in which he is wrapped up in his own poetical life. He thinks of nothing else. Everything is done with reference to it. He is all and only a poet.”
“Was the story true that was told in the papers of his seeing, for the first time, in a large company some new novel of Scott’s, in which there was a motto taken from his works; and that he went immediately to the shelf and took down one of his own volumes and read the whole poem to the party, who were waiting for a reading of the new book?”