To which the critic:
‘Your pardon, sir; I took you for a wit.’
To which Thackeray again:
‘Did you, indeed? Then, compliments to pass,
I took you just for what you are—an ass.’
But this, which one hesitates to pronounce Thackerayan, was surely even trite. However, these dialogues at least remind us of what English society was saying and doing in the year of grace 1868. Thus, Thackeray tells Shakespeare that his dramas are played but scarcely acted:
‘For I won’t deny
That people now are tickled through the eye.
No one to thought a deep attention lends,
And if a play’s successful it depends
Far less upon the language than the scene.’
Again, in another colloquy, Meyerbeer informs Mozart that
‘The “Traviata” and the “Trovatore”
Of “Il Barbiere” have eclipsed the glory.
As Margarita Patti fills the stage,
And Marta sung by Nilsson is the rage.’
He who dips into Colburn’s New Monthly for the year 1822 or thereabouts will be rewarded (or otherwise) by coming across a ‘Dialogue of the Dead’ in prose, and there may be other such fugitive lucubrations. But so far as the English literature of the past is concerned, ‘dialogues of the dead’ were written by only two persons worthy of celebration—Walter Savage Landor and George, Lord Lyttelton, the author of ‘Letters from a Persian in England to his friend in Ispahan.’ Landor’s ‘Imaginary Conversations’ are among those numerous works which everybody is supposed to have read, and, having read them, to admire. And unfortunate indeed would be he who could not recognise and appreciate the varied beauty and charm of these prose masterpieces. Here Menelaus and Helen, Æsop and Rhodope, Tiberius and Vipsania, Leofric and Godiva, Roger Ascham and Jane Grey, and a hundred other heroes and heroines of the past, converse not only with dramatic appropriateness, but with rhetorical force—with amplitude of thought and spontaneity of image. By the side of such a wonderful flower-show (as one of our poets said of a selection from a brother poet’s lyrics), Lyttelton’s trim parterre shows, no doubt, but dimly; nevertheless, to that accomplished nobleman there is due something more than the small credit of having been Landor’s predecessor in this form of English composition. Of that form Lyttelton says, in the preface to his ‘Dialogues,’ that
‘It sets before us the history of all times and all nations, presents to the choice of a writer all characters of remarkable persons which may be best opposed to, or compared with, each other; and is, perhaps, one of the most agreeable methods that can be employed of conveying to the mind any critical, moral, or political observations.’