P. 145. Addison.—Hor. Ars Poet. 1. 319:—
When the sentiments and manners please,
And all the characters are wrought with ease,
Your tale, though void of beauty, force, and art,
More strongly shall delight and warm the heart;
Than where a lifeless pomp of verse appears,
And with sonorous trifles charms our ears.—Francis.
Butler, writing of 'A small poet' (Characters), says: 'There was one that lined a hat-case with a paper of Benlowe's poetry: Prynne bought it by chance, and put a new demicastor into it. The first time he wore it he felt a singing in his head, which within two days turned to a vertigo.' A 'demicastor' is a hat.
P. 147. Scott.—Mr. W. J. Courthope, in his Warton Lecture on English Poetry before the British Academy, read on October 25, 1911, observes that 'the best illustration of historic change in "romantic" temper is perhaps to be found in a comparison of Cervantes' account of the character of Don Quixote [see p. [155]] with Walter Scott's representation of the romanticism of the hero of Waverley. Don Quixote's "fancy", says Cervantes, "grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it." ... "My intention," says Scott, "is not to follow the steps of the inimitable Cervantes in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but the more common aberration from sound judgement, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic colouring."' Scott expatiates at length on Waverley's reading in the third chapter of his novel.
P. 148. Boswell.—Macaulay writes in his review of Southey's edition of The Pilgrim's Progress: 'Doctor Johnson, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favour of The Pilgrim's Progress. That work was one of the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common merit that the illiterate sectary extracted praise like this from the most pedantic of critics and the most bigoted of Tories.'
Boswell relates that Dr. Johnson 'had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end.'
P. 149. Chandos.—The authorship of Horae Subsecivae is not absolutely known, but it is attributed to James I's favourite courtier. It was published in 1620, the year before Chandos died.
P. 149. Waller.—'A library well chosen cannot be too extensive, but some there are who amass a great quantity of books, which they keep for show, and not for service. Of such persons, Louis XI of France aptly enough observed, that "they resembled hunch-backed people, who carried a great burden, which they never saw".'—W. Keddie. Cyclopaedia.
P. 153. Coleridge.—The most deadly thing that Coleridge wrote was when he classed the patrons of the circulating libraries as lower in the scale than that reading public nine-tenths of whose reading is confined to periodicals and 'Beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas [Anecdotes]'.
P. 153. Boswell.—Dr. Birkbeck Hill points out that Boswell alludes to this opinion in one of his letters, modestly adding: 'I am afraid I have not read books enough to be able to talk from them.' Johnson particularized Langton as talking from books, 'and Garrick would if he talked seriously.'