For wit is like a rest. “Master Francis Beaumont’s Letter to Ben Jonson.” For players read gamesters.
came down into the country. Charles and Mary Lamb with a few of their friends paid a visit to Hazlitt at Winterslow in 1810.
Like the most capricious poet. “As You Like It,” iii, 3, 8.
walked gowned. Lamb’s “Sonnet Written at Cambridge, August 15, 1819.”
[P. 313.] the person I mean. George Dyer (1755-1841), an amiable hack-writer and a friend of Lamb. He figures prominently in two of the Essays of Elia, “Oxford in the Vacation” and “Amicus Redivivus,” and in many of Lamb’s letters. “To G. D. a poem is a poem. His own as good as any bodie’s, and god bless him, any bodie’s as good as his own, for I do not think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem being better than another. The Gods by denying him the very faculty itself of discrimination have effectually cut off every seed of envy in his bosom.” Letter to Wordsworth (Lamb’s Works, ed. Lucas, VI, 519).
OF PERSONS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE SEEN
This, like the preceding essay, is a record of one of Lamb’s Wednesday evenings. It was originally published in the New Monthly Magazine for January, 1826, from which the present text is reproduced. It was republished by Hazlitt’s son in “Literary Remains” (1836) and “Winterslow” (1850).
[P. 315.] Come like shadows. “Macbeth,” iv, 1, 111.
B——. Lamb. The name is supplied in “Literary Remains.”
defence of Guy Faux. See p. [224] and n.