(Standing one day with him looking at two busts—one of Dante, the other of Goethe, in a London shop, I asked, “What is wanting to make Goethe’s as fine as the other’s?”)
“The Divine.” (“Edel sei der Mensch” was a poem in which he thought he found “The Divine.”—Ed.)
(Taking up and reading some number of Pendennis at my lodging.) “It’s delicious—it’s so mature.”
(Of Richardson’s Clarissa, etc.) “I love those great, still Books.”
“What is it in Dryden? I always feel that he is greater than his works.” (Though he thought much of “Theodore and Honoria,” and quoted emphatically:
More than a mile immerst within the wood.)
“Two of the finest similes in poetry are Milton’s—that of the Fleet hanging in the air (Paradise Lost), and the gunpowder-like ‘So started up in his foul shape the Fiend.’ (Which latter A. T. used to enact with grim humour, from the crouching of the Toad to the Explosion.) Say what you please, I feel certain that Milton after Death shot up into some grim Archangel.” N.B.—He used in earlier days to do the sun coming out from a cloud, and returning into one again, with a gradual opening and shutting of eyes and lips, etc. And, with a great fluffing up of his hair into full wig, and elevation of cravat and collar, George the Fourth in as comical and wonderful a way.
“I could not read through Palmerin of England, nor Amadis of Gaul, or any of those old romances—not even ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ though with so many fine things in it—But all strung together without Art.”
Old Hallam had been speaking of Shakespeare as the greatest of men, etc. A. T. “Well, he was the Man one would have wished to introduce to another Planet as a sample of our kind.”
Àpropos of physical stature, A. T. had been noticing how small Guizot looked beside old Hallam (when he went with Guizot, Hallam, and Macaulay over the Houses of Parliament.—Ed.).