I must not omit the name, in these brief memorials, of my cultured friend, George Hall, a physician and still more than that, a gentleman. As travelling Redcliffe Fellow, he spent ten years in visiting Greek and Italian and Turkish cities, and the chief courts of Europe. He was too refined for a Brighton physician; few of his patients were to his taste. When summoned to those who suited him best, he passed hours with them instead of sharing his time fairly among all. He had some noble blood in him, according to rumour; but it was of a sinister strain. This held possession of him secretly, and influenced his life; but he found consolation in marrying Lady Hood, a peeress of very considerable fortune, and in retiring from the vulgarity of physic.
The pun sacrifices the sense and purport to the playful analogy. In the practice of this Horace Smith expended the conversational portions of his life. I told him, at one of Mrs. Smith’s evening receptions, that a man known to us had injured a limb while travelling in Norway. His reply was, “I suppose a bear came and Gnaw’wayed his arm.” His daughter, Miss Smith then, and I believe so for life, was a quick and clever match for her father in drawing him out. She had an open, good-tempered face, with the eyes well apart, to which her nose, following suit, owed a flatness. Most auditors must have observed that all whom Nature has favoured with a lying-down nose were let fall by their nurse when babies in arms. Thackeray was one of these. One would have thought they would have fallen on their backs; but no, they all fall on their noses.
The only authority for punning that I know of is Aristotle; he recommends it to a pleader. Horace Smith’s puns are yet remembered; the one on elder-flower water was his best.
The evening receptions at Brighton were pleasant pastimes, especially those of Lady Carhampton and the Hon. Mrs. Mostyn, daughter of Mr. Thrale, of Johnsonian memory. This lady, in Sillwood or Oriental Place, near the Horace Smiths, had a suite of receiving-rooms winding all round the mansion, hung with pictures. In one room was a couch enclosed by a silken canopy within a recess, above which was gilded in large letters, “Mon Repos.”
XXXV.
Any one who has enjoyed the help of an acute mind in life must have concluded that the human creature was not designed to be very intellectual. It has great faculties, but these can do little more than provide munificently for its wants. It solves with facility all the problems of luxury and amusement, but can for the most part no further go. Nevertheless, there are a few of an intellectual caste, living apart from the vulgar and ostentatious; these force their thoughts on unwilling recipients, and in what they produce give intimations of a higher race than that of man being still possible, though scarcely to be expected to spring from the few, since the grovellers have so immense a majority.
The clergy of Brighton were adapted more to the wants of the congregations than to those of religion. One likes the clergy. They have a good education up to the age of one or two and twenty, and their profession is gentlemanly. If they renewed their knowledge of science from time to time, they would not interpolate nature with dogma, the effect of which is more damaging than they can conceive. To the eye clarified by impartial thought, it is like a pimple on the face of a pretty girl; but it will run its little course.