[7] A cottage of Ungentility, for it had neither double coach-house nor wings. Like its tenant, it stood alone. He said, glancing at the Paternoster one, that he did not like “the Row.” There was a bit of a garden, in which, being, as he professed, “more fond of Men Sects than of Insects,” he made probably his first and last observation in Entomology. He had been watching a spider on a gooseberry bush, entrapping a fly. “Good God,” he said, “I never saw such a thing! Directly he was caught, in her fatal spinning, she darted down upon him, and in a minute turned him out, completely lapped in a shroud! It reminded me of the Fatal Sisters in Gray.”
[8] A sort of rheumatic celerity, of which Sir W. Scott’s favourite dramatiser seemed to have a very accurate notion. Those who remember “poor Terry’s” deliberate delivery, will be able to account, for the shout of laughter which once rang throughout the Adelphi green-room, at his emphatic manner of giving, from a manuscript-play, the stage direction of “Enter——, with—a—lack—ri—ty!”
[9] As regards his Unitarianism, it strikes me as more probable that he was what the unco guid people call “Nothing at all.” which means that he was every thing but a Bigot. As he was in spirit an Old Author, so was he in faith an Ancient Christian, too ancient to belong to any of the modern sub-hubbub-divisions of—Ists,—Arians, and—Inians.
[10] Talking of Poetry, Lamb told me one day that he had just met with the most vigorous line he had ever read. “Where?” “Out of the Camden’s Head, all in one line—
“To One Hundred Pots of Porter £2 1 8”
[11] Somebody happened to say that the Peasant ought to figure in the Percy Anecdotes, as an example of uncultivated genius. “And where will they stick me?” asked Clare, “will they stick me in the instinct?”
[12] I once cut out from a country newspaper what seemed to me a very good old English poem. It proved to be a naturalization, by Cary, of a French Song to April, by Remy Belleau.
[13] The father expressing an uncertainty to what profession he should devote a younger Cary, Lamb said, “Make him an Apothe-Cary.”
[14] Unable to make any thing “like a likeness” of a sitter for the purpose, I have a sort of Irish faculty for taking faces behind their backs. But my pencil has not been guilty of half the personalities attributed to it; amongst others “a formidable likeness of a Lombard Street Banker.” Besides that one would rather draw on a Banker than at him, I have never seen the Gentleman alluded to, or even a portrait of him in my life.
[15] On a visit to Norfolk, I was much surprised to find that Opium, or Opie, as it was vulgarly called, was quite in common use in the form of pills amongst the lower classes, in the vicinity of the Fens. It is not probable that persons in such a rank of life had read the Confessions,—or, might not one suspect that as Dennis Brulgruddery was driven to drink by the stale, flat and unprofitable prospects of Muckslush Heath, so the Fen-People in the dreary foggy cloggy boggy wastes of Cambridge and Lincolnshire, had flown to the Drug for the sake of the magnificent scenery that filled the splendid visions of its Historian?