He said that formerly men concealed their vices; but now, in the change of manners and the laxity of theories, they boasted of those they had not.

He sometimes told a story well, though but rarely. He used to speak with some drollery and unction of his meeting in his tour in Germany with a Lutheran clergyman, who expressed a great curiosity about the fate of Dr. Dodd in a Latin gibberish which he could not at first understand. ‘Doctorem Tott, Doctorem Tott! Infelix homo, collo suspensus!‘—he called out in an agony of suspense, fitting the action to the word, and the idea of the reverend divine just then occurring to Mr. Coleridge’s imagination. The Germans have a strange superstition that Dr. Dodd is still wandering in disguise in the Hartz forest in Germany; and his Prison Thoughts are a favourite book with the initiated.

If these remarkable sayings are fewer than the reader might expect, they are all we remember; and we might avail ourselves of the answer which Quevedo puts into the mouth of the door-keeper of Hell, when the poet is surprised to find so few kings in his custody—‘There are all that ever existed!’

PETER PINDAR

The Atlas.] [April 5, 1829.

This celebrated wit and character lived to a great age, and retained his spirit and faculties to the last. In person he did not at all answer to Mr. Cobbett’s description of authors, as a lean, starveling, puny race—‘men made after supper of a cheese-paring’—he was large, robust, portly, and florid; or in Chaucer’s phrase,

‘A manly man to ben an abbot able.’

In his latter years he was blind, and had his head close shaved; and as he sat bare-headed, presented the appearance of a fine old monk—a Luther or a Friar John, with the gravity of the one and the wit and fiery turbulence of the other. Peter had something clerical in his aspect: he looked like a venerable father of poetry, or an unworthy son of the church, equally fitted to indict a homily and preach a crusade, or to point an epigram, and was evidently one of those children of Momus in whom the good things of the body had laid the foundation of and given birth to the good things of the mind. He was one of the few authors who did not disappoint the expectations raised of them on a nearer acquaintance; and the reason probably was what has been above hinted at, namely, that he did not take to this calling from nervous despondency and constitutional poverty of spirit, but from the fulness and exuberance of his intellectual resources and animal spirits. Our satirist was not a mere wit, but a man of strong sense and observation, critical, argumentative, a good declaimer, and with a number of acquirements of various kinds. His poetry, instead of having absorbed all the little wit he had (which is so often the case), was but ‘the sweepings of his mind.’ He said just as good things every hour in the day. He was the life and soul of the company where he was—told a story admirably, gave his opinion freely, spoke equally well, and with thorough knowledge of poetry, painting, or music, could ‘haloo an anthem’ with stentorian lungs in imitation of the whole chorus of children at St. Paul’s, or bring the black population of the West Indies before you like a swarm of flies in a sugar-basin, by his manner of describing their antics and odd noises. Dr. Wolcot’s conversation was rich and powerful (not to say overpowering)—there was an extreme unction about it, but a certain tincture of grossness. His criticism was his best. We remember in particular his making an excellent analysis of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast in a controversy on its merits with Mr. Curran; and as a specimen of his parallelisms between the sister-arts, he used to say of Viotti (the celebrated violin-player), that ‘he was the Michael Angelo of the fiddle.’ He had a heresy in painting, which was, that Claude Lorraine was inferior to Wilson; but the orthodox believers were obliged to be silent before him. A short time before his death he had a private lodging at Somers’ Town, where he received a few friends. He sat and talked familiarly and cheerfully, asking you whether you thought his head would not make a fine bust? He had a decanter of rum placed on the table before him, from which he poured out a glass-full as he wanted it and drank it pure, taking no other beverage, but not exceeding in this. His infirmities had made no alteration in his conversation, except perhaps a little more timidity and hesitation; for blindness is the lameness of the mind. He could not see the effect of what he said lighting up the countenances of others; and in this case, the tongue may run on the faster, but hardly so well. After coffee, which he accompanied with the due quantity of merum sal, he would ask to be led down into a little parlour below, which was hung round with some early efforts of his own in landscape-painting, and with some of Wilson’s unfinished sketches. Though he could see them no longer, otherwise than in his mind’s eye, he was evidently pleased to be in the room with them, as they brought back former associations. Youth and age seem glad to meet as it were on the last hill-top of life, to shake hands once more and part for ever! He spoke slightingly of his own performances (though they were by no means contemptible), but launched out with great fervour in praise of his favourite Wilson, and in disparagement of Claude, enlarging on the fine broad manner and bold effects of the one, and on the finical littleness of the other, and ‘making the worse appear the better reason.’ It was here we last parted with this fine old man, and it is with mixed pleasure and regret we turn to the subject. Peter Pindar, besides his vein of comic humour, excelled when he chose in the serious and pathetic; and his ‘Lines to a Fly drowned in Treacle,’ and ‘To an Expiring Taper,’ are among his best pieces.

LOGIC

The Atlas.] [April 12, 1829.