[30] Levy. An insolvent Israelite who threw himself from the top of the Monument a short time before. An inhabitant of Monument Yard informed the writer, that he happened to be standing at his door talking to a neighbour; and looking up at the top of the pillar, exclaimed, 'Why, here's the flag coming down.' 'Flag!' answered the other, 'it's a man.' The words were hardly uttered when the suicide fell within ten feet of the speakers.
[31] The Authors, as in gallantry bound, wish this lady to continue anonymous.
[32] Walter Scott.
[33] Sir Walter Scott informed the annotator, that at one time he intended to print his collected works, and had pitched upon this identical quotation as a motto;—a proof that sometimes great wits jump with little ones.
[34] Alluding to the then great distance between the picture-frame, in which the green curtain was set, and the band. For a justification of this see below—Dr. Johnson.
[35] Old Bedlam at that time stood 'close by London Wall.' It was built after the model of the Tuileries, which is said to have given the French king great offence. In front of it Moorfields extended, with broad gravel walks crossing each other at right angles. These the writer well recollects; and Rivaz, an underwriter at Lloyd's, has told him, that he remembered when the merchants of London would parade these walks on a summer evening with their wives and daughters. But now, as a punning brother bard sings,
'Moorfields are fields no more.'
[36] Whitbread's shears. An economical experiment of that gentleman. The present portico, towards Brydges Street, was afterwards erected under the lesseeship of Elliston, whose portrait in the Exhibition was thus noticed in the Examiner: 'Portrait of the great lessee, in his favourite character of Mr. Elliston.'
[37] 'Samuel Johnson is not so good: the measure and solemnity of his sentences, in all the limited variety of their structure, are indeed imitated with singular skill; but the diction is caricatured in a vulgar and unpleasing degree. To make Johnson call a door "a ligneous barricado," and its knocker and bell its "frappant and tintinnabulant appendages," is neither just nor humorous; and we are surprised that a writer who has given such extraordinary proofs of his talent for finer ridicule and fairer imitation, should have stooped to a vein of pleasantry so low, and so long ago exhausted; especially as, in other passages of the same piece, he has shewn how well qualified he was both to catch and to render the true characteristics of his original. The beginning, for example, we think excellent.'—Edinburgh Review.
[38] The celebrated Lord Chesterfield, whose Letters to his Son, according to Dr. Johnson, inculcate 'the manners of a dancing-master and the morals of——,' &c.