The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 19, No. 554, June 30, 1832

A certain learned theological bishop of that fraternity, a warm controversialist, long since dead, was of an amorous disposition. One day, being left alone with a pretty young lady, he began to be rude to her; she knocked off his prelated wig, and stamped it under her foot. At that time the footman entered, and all was confusion! The girl was in tears; the bishop's pate was bald. The footman was left to wonder! Some squibs appeared in the papers of the day, which few understood. I wrote a piquant epigram, which I will not revive. Old Thurlow, who was the prelate's friend and patron, laughed outright, and clapped me on the back when I dined with him a few days afterwards.

I have been more than once in company with Washington Irving, a most amiable man and great genius, but not lively in conversation. The engraved portraits I have seen of him are not very like him. He frequented the reading-room of Galignani at Paris, and seemed to have some literary connexions with him. There I saw Captain Medwin, the author of the book called Lord Byron's Conversations, which I believe to have been accurately reported. He was with his friend Grattan, the author of High-ways and Bye-ways. I was not personally acquainted with either of them. Grattan's flat nose is somewhat concealed in the print given of him in Colburn's Magazine, where this author, of course, makes a distinguished figure.

The late Professor Pictet, of Geneva, who had spent some of his early days in England, and was very fond of it, told me some curious anecdotes of his countryman De Lolme, whose book on the English constitution is much more commended than it deserves. He once endeavoured to set up a rival Journal to Old Swinton's Courrier de l'Europe, but his absurd denial of Rodney's victory ruined the project. De Vergennes, the French minister, patronized it. Brissot was connected with Swinton in the above-named Journal. One of Swinton's sons holds a high situation in the British Government in India:—another commanded a ship in the Company's service. Old Swinton was a Scotch jacobite, and forfeited.

Horace Walpole, who died Earl of Orford, was a little old man with small features—very lively and amusing,—who talked just as he wrote: but a little too fond of baubles and curiosities. He had a witty mind, but not a great one:—yet he was a man of genius. His family was ancient, but his vanity made him always endeavour to represent it of much more consequence than it was. They had a great deal of the Norfolk squierarchy about them. He could not bear his uncle Horace, the diplomatist, whose son, the grandfather of the present earl, with his little tie-wig, looked like an old-fashioned glover.

I have mentioned Mrs. Macauley, the historian. She had a dog latterly, of which she made a great pet, and on being asked why she bestowed so much care on it, she answered—"Why! are you aware whence it came? It is a true republican, and has been stroked by the hand of Washington!" The event of the French Revolution maddened her with joy; but when the news came of Louis the Sixteenth's escape, and before she heard he had been brought back, she took to her bed, wrote to her friends that she should die of the disappointment—and did die. She complained that Dr. Graham had given her a love-potion! Her young husband used her ill.

Tom Warton, the poet, was a good-natured man, but addicted to low company. He was fond of

"Smoking his pipe upon an alehouse bench;"

He was tutor to Colonel North, the son of the minister, who thought he neglected him. This connexion, perhaps, led him to write the Life of Sir Thomas Pope, or rather that this family were founders of Warton's college. He also wrote the life of the President Bathurst, who was elder brother of Sir Benjamin Bathurst, a commercial man, father to the first Lord Bathurst, the friend of Pope the poet, and who lived to the age of ninety, in possession of his faculties,—always calling his son, the Chancellor, "the old man!" He was one of Queen Anne's twelve peers—but so rapid has been the extinction and change, that the Bathursts are now considered old nobility. He sprung from one of the Grey Coat families in the weald of Kent, the clothiers.

Old Dr. Farmer, the head of Emanuel College, Cambridge, Prebendary of Canterbury, and afterwards of St. Paul's, or Westminster, used to frequent a club in London, to which I belonged. He was at first reserved and silent: but his forte was humour and drollery. At Cambridge he neglected forms and ceremonies in his college too much: and was in all his glory when in dishabille in his study, with his cat by his side, and his Shakspeare tracts about him. He found no literature at Canterbury, and was disgusted with his brother members of the cathedral: quaint Dean Horne, and chattering romancing Dr. Berkeley, and his rhodomontading wife, were not suited to him, and as little her son Monke Berkeley, of whom she gave such an absurd and mendacious memoir, and who had none of his celebrated grandfather Bishop Berkeley's genius. Farmer had some cleverness, but no leading talent. He collected an immense quantity of rare and forgotten old English books—especially poetry and the drama—at a trifling price. Todd, the learned editor of Milton, Spencer, &c., was then a member of that cathedral; but as his literary superiority was not pleasant to those above him in that establishment, he was got rid of by promotion, elsewhere, out of their patronage. He wrote the lives of the Deans of that Church, which does not rise to more than local interest. It is a dull book.

It has been my fate to be Acquainted with Irish Secretaries. I saw much of little Charles Abbot—afterwards Speaker—and at last Lord Colchester. He was a pompous dwarf; yet of an analytical head. Nothing could be more amusing than to see him strut up the House of Commons to take the chair; nor was the amusement less to listen to him, when he delivered his edicts, or the thanks of the House from the chair. His sonorous voice issuing from a diminutive person, and the epigrammatic points of empty sentences, formed with great artifice, were in very bad taste—though much admired by a House which consisted of so few men of a classical education. His rise was extraordinary, because his talents little exceeded mediocrity. But he was a courtier, and an intriguant. He was the son of a schoolmaster at Colchester.

Swift, though of English extraction, was born in Ireland. From some memoranda of my grandfather's, I learn, that he did not speak of his residence with Sir William Temple at Moore Park, in Surrey, without spleen. He seemed to retain a sort of unwilling awe of Sir William; but not to have loved him. Sir William was a ceremonious courtier: Swift's early habits were somewhat rude and slovenly. Swift had genius, as Gulliver's travels prove; but there is no genius in his poetry. He was both proud and vain. His ancestor was the rector of a small living in Kent; his father an attorney. When I was quartered at Canterbury, I saw the monument for one of his ancestors, preserved out of the old church at St. Andrew's and replaced in the new one. The arms sculptured on it are totally different from what Swift erroneously supposes the family to have borne: this ancestor was minister of that parish—not a prebendary, as Swift represents. Miss Vanhomrigg was cousin of my grandfather, who considered that Swift had used her very cruelly.

I often met the late Monsieur Etienne Dumont, of Geneva, the friend and commentator of old Jeremy Bentham, at Romilly's house in London, in 1789. He was a man of astonishing talents, sagacity, acuteness, and clearness of head. What part he had in the brilliant effusions of Mirabeau, and in the French Revolution, may be seen by his posthumous work, just published at Paris, entitled Souvenirs de Mirabeau. He was a short, thick man, of coarse features, blear eyed, and slovenly in his dress; but of mild manners, hospitable, an excellent story-teller, and much beloved. I think he had been at one time librarian to old Lord Lansdowne. He died at Milan, in 1829, aged about 70. The French cannot contain their rage at the exposure that he was the spirit who moved their brilliant Mirabeau.

I was once talking to Anna Maria Porter about him, when she expressed her astonishment at the admiration I bestowed on him! She said, "I thought you was a Whig, and an aristocrat! how can you commend a revolutionary radical?" I answered, "You mistake his character, he is not a radical in the sense you mean! he considers Tom Paine's Rights of Man to be mischievous nonsense!" I could not convince her: but I made my peace with her by praising, with the utmost sincerity, her beautiful novel, The Recluse of Norway. I found her full of good sense, and with much command of language. She will forgive me for saying she had not the personal beauty of her gentle sister Jane. She paid many compliments to the imaginative vivants of the green island; for she perceived by my tones that I was an Irishman, though I am not sure, that she knew even my name; for the company was numerous, and of all countries. It was an evening assembly, in which the rooms were so full, that one could hardly move. Tommy Moore was there, and though he is a very little man, he was the great lion of the evening: all the young ladies were dying to see the bard whose verses they had chanted so often with thrilling bosoms, and tears running down their cheeks. They were not quite satisfied when they saw a diminutive man, not reaching five feet, with a curly natural brown scratch, handing about an ugly old dowager or two, who fondly leaned upon his arms, even though they discovered them to be ladies of high titles.

Rogers came in late, and went away early, looking sallower and more indifferent than usual. He paid a few bows and compliments to two or three noble peeresses, and then retired.

The Rev. Thomas Frognel Dibdin was there. He was very facetious and quaint: when he found himself by my side, he instantly started off, crying to me; "Brobdignagian; We Lilliputians must not stand by you! You would make a soldier for the King of Prussia! Look at that tall lady there, that Miss de V–; why do you not take her for a wife?" E– G–n heard what he said, and looked fierce at us both! I expected another Bluviad! Perhaps the ingenious bibliographer does not recollect the conversation; but he may be assured it took place. And I entreat also Anna Maria Porter to tax her memory, and recall the very interesting and sensible conversation I had with her. I told her some anecdotes of her brother, Sir Robert, whom I met on our travels, which pleased her. Jane would not talk much that night; something heavy seemed to have seized her spirits. Let Jane recollect how she once related to me the curious history and character of Percival Stockdale! It happened at the house of a friend in London, whom I shall not point out with too much particularity. Dibdin endeavoured to excite the envy of some of us litterateurs, that we were not, like him, members of the Roxburgh, which had dukes, and earls, and chancellors of the exchequer, and judges, and the great Magician of the North into the bargain!—Metropolitan.

TO A CHILD IN PRAYER

Fold thy little hands in prayer,
Bow down at thy Maker's knee;
Now thy sunny face is fair,
Shining through thy golden hair,
Thine eyes are passion-free;
And pleasant thoughts like garlands bind thee
Unto thy home, yet Grief may find thee—
Then pray, Child, pray!

Now thy young heart like a bird
Singeth in its summer nest,
No evil thought, no unkind word.
No bitter, angry voice hath stirr'd
The beauty of its rest.
But winter cometh, and decay
Wasteth thy verdant home away—
Then pray, Child, pray!

Thy Spirit is a House of Glee,
And Gladness harpeth at the door,
While ever with a merry shout
Hope, the May-Queen, danceth out,
Her lips with music running o'er!
But Time those strings of Joy will sever.
And Hope will not dance on for ever;
Then pray, Child, pray!

Now thy Mother's Hymn abideth
Round they pillow in the night,
And gentle feet creep to thy bed,
And o'er thy quiet face is shed
The taper's darken'd light.
But that sweet Hymn shall pass away,
By thee no more those feet shall stay;
Then pray, Child, pray!

New Monthly Magazine.

SONG.

BY JAMES SHERIDAN KNOWLES

A Fair lady looks out from her lattice—but why
Do tears bedim that lady's eye?
Below stands the knight who her favour wears,
But be mounts not the turret to dry her tears;
He springs on his charger—"Farewell;—he is gone,
And the lady is left in her turret alone.
"Ply the distaff, my maids—ply the distaff—before
It is spun, he may happen to stand at the door."

There was never an eye than that lady's more bright,—
Why speeds then away her favour'd knight?
The couch which her white fingers broider'd so fair,
Were a far softer seat than the saddle of war;
What's more tempting than love? In the patriot's sight
The battle of freedom he hastens to fight;
"Ply the distaff, my maids—ply the distaff—before
It is spun, he may happen to stand at the door."

The fair lady looks out from her lattice, but now
Her eye is as bright as her fair shining brow:
And is sorrow so fleeting?—Love's tears—dry they fast?
The stronger is love, is't the less sure to last?
Whose arm sees her knight round her waist?—'Tis his own;
By the battle she wept for, her lover is won;
"Ply the distaff, my maids, ply the distaff no more;