Chapter XX: Book VIII: , lines 568-571 (2)

[26] Apollo. A gigantic wooden figure of this deity was erected on the roof. The writer (_horrescit referens!_) is old enough to recollect the time when it was first placed there. Old Bishop, then one of the masters of Merchant Tailors' School, wrote an epigram upon the occasion, which, referring to the aforesaid figure, concluded thus:

'Above he fills up Shakespeare's place,
And Shakespeare fills up his below'--

Very antithetical: but quære as to the meaning? The writer, like Pluto, 'long puzzled his brain' to find it out, till he was immersed 'in a lower deep' by hearing Madame de Staël say, at the table of the late Lord Dillon, 'Buonaparte is not a man, but a system.' Inquiry was made in the course of the evening of Sir James Mackintosh as to what the lady meant. He answered, 'Mass! I cannot tell.' Madame de Staël repeats this apophthegm in her work on Germany. It is probably understood _there_.

[27] O. P. This personage, who is alleged to have growled like a bull-dog, requires rather a lengthened note, for the edification of the rising generation. The 'horns, rattles, drums,' with which he is accompanied, are no inventions of the poet. The new Covent Garden Theatre opened on the 18th Sept., 1809, when a cry of 'Old Prices' (afterwards diminished to O. P.) burst out from every part of the house. This continued and increased in violence till the 23rd, when rattles, drums, whistles, and cat-calls, having completely drowned the voices of the actors, Mr. Kemble, the stage-manager, came forward and said, that a committee of gentlemen had undertaken to examine the finances of the concern, and that until they were prepared with their report the theatre would continue closed. 'Name them!' was shouted from all sides. The names were declared, viz. Sir Charles Price, the Solicitor-General, the Recorder of London, the Governor of the Bank, and Mr. Angersteen. 'All shareholders!' bawled a wag from the gallery. In a few days the theatre re-opened: the public paid no attention to the report of the referees, and the tumult was renewed for several weeks with even increased violence. The proprietors now sent in hired bruisers, to _mill_ the refractory into subjection. This irritated most of their former friends, and, amongst the rest, the annotator, who accordingly wrote the song of 'Heigh-ho, says Kemble,' which was caught up by the ballad-singers, and sung under Mr. Kemble's house-windows in Great Russell Street. A dinner was given at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, to celebrate the victory obtained by W. Clifford in his action against Brandon the box-keeper, for assaulting him for wearing the letters O. P. in his hat. At this dinner Mr. Kemble attended, and matters were compromised by allowing the advanced price (seven shillings) to the boxes. The writer remembers a former riot of a similar sort at the same theatre (in the year 1792), when the price to the boxes was raised from five shillings to six. That tumult, however, only lasted three nights.

[28] 'From the knobb'd bludgeon to the taper switch.' This image is not the creation of the poets: it sprang from reality. The Authors happened to be at the Royal Circus when 'God save the King' was called for, accompanied by a cry of 'Stand up!' and 'Hats off!' An inebriated naval lieutenant perceiving a gentleman in an adjoining box slow to obey the call, struck his hat off with his stick, exclaiming, 'Take off your hat, sir!' The other thus assaulted proved to be, unluckily for the lieutenant, Lord Camelford, the celebrated bruiser and duellist. A set-to in the lobby was the consequence, where his lordship quickly proved victorious. 'The devil is not so black as he is painted,' said one of the Authors to the other; 'let us call upon Lord Camelford, and tell him that we were witnesses of his being first assaulted.' The visit was paid on the ensuing morning at Lord Camelford's lodging, in Bond Street. Over the fire-place in the drawing-room were ornaments strongly expressive of the pugnacity of the peer. A long thick bludgeon lay horizontally supported by two brass hooks. Above this was placed parallel one of lesser dimensions, until a pyramid of weapons gradually arose, tapering to a horsewhip:

'Thus all below was strength, and all above was grace.'

Lord Camelford received his visitants with great civility, and thanked them warmly for the call; adding, that their evidence would be material, it being his intention to indict the lieutenant for an assault. 'All I can say in return is this,' exclaimed the peer with great cordiality, 'if ever I see you engaged in a row, upon my soul, I'll stand by you.' The Authors expressed themselves thankful for so potent an ally, and departed. In about a fortnight afterwards Lord Camelford was shot in a duel with Mr. Best.

[29] Veeshnoo. The late Mr. Whitbread.

[30] Levy. An insolvent Israelite who threw himself from the top of the Monument a short time before. An inhabitant of Monument Yard informed the writer, that he happened to be standing at his door talking to a neighbour; and looking up at the top of the pillar, exclaimed, 'Why, here's the flag coming down.' 'Flag!' answered the other, 'it's a man.' The words were hardly uttered when the suicide fell within ten feet of the speakers.

[31] The Authors, as in gallantry bound, wish this lady to continue anonymous.

[32] WALTER SCOTT.

[33] Sir Walter Scott informed the annotator, that at one time he intended to print his collected works, and had pitched upon this identical quotation as a motto;--a proof that sometimes great wits jump with little ones.

[34] Alluding to the then great distance between the picture-frame, in which the green curtain was set, and the band. For a justification of this see below--DR. JOHNSON.

[35] Old Bedlam at that time stood 'close by London Wall.' It was built after the model of the Tuileries, which is said to have given the French king great offence. In front of it Moorfields extended, with broad gravel walks crossing each other at right angles. These the writer well recollects; and Rivaz, an underwriter at Lloyd's, has told him, that he remembered when the merchants of London would parade these walks on a summer evening with their wives and daughters. But now, as a punning brother bard sings,

'Moorfields are fields no more.'

[36] Whitbread's shears. An economical experiment of that gentleman. The present portico, towards Brydges Street, was afterwards erected under the lesseeship of Elliston, whose portrait in the Exhibition was thus noticed in the _Examiner_: 'Portrait of the great lessee, in his favourite character of Mr. Elliston.'

[37] 'Samuel Johnson is not so good: the measure and solemnity of his sentences, in all the limited variety of their structure, are indeed imitated with singular skill; but the diction is caricatured in a vulgar and unpleasing degree. To make Johnson call a door "a ligneous barricado," and its knocker and bell its "frappant and tintinnabulant appendages," is neither just nor humorous; and we are surprised that a writer who has given such extraordinary proofs of his talent for finer ridicule and fairer imitation, should have stooped to a vein of pleasantry so low, and so long ago exhausted; especially as, in other passages of the same piece, he has shewn how well qualified he was both to catch and to render the true characteristics of his original. The beginning, for example, we think excellent.'--_Edinburgh Review._

[38] The celebrated Lord Chesterfield, whose Letters to his Son, according to Dr. Johnson, inculcate 'the manners of a dancing-master and the morals of----,' &c.

[39] Lord Mayor of the theatric sky. This alludes to Leigh Hunt, who, in _The Examiner_, at this time kept the actors in hot water. Dr. Johnson's argument is, like many of his other arguments, specious, but untenable; that which it defends has since been abandoned as impracticable. Mr. Whitbread contended that the actor was like a portrait in a picture, and accordingly placed the green curtain in a gilded frame remote from the foot-lights; alleging that no performer should mar the illusion by stepping out of the frame. Dowton was the first actor who, like Manfred's ancestor in the _Castle of Otranto_, took the liberty of abandoning the canon. 'Don't tell me of frames and pictures,' ejaculated the testy comedian; 'if I can't be heard by the audience in the frame, I'll walk out of it!' The proscenium has since been new-modelled, and the actors thereby brought nearer to the audience.

[40] WILLIAM SPENCER.

[41] Sobriety, &c. The good-humour of the poet upon occasion of this parody has been noticed in the Preface. 'It's all very well for once,' said he afterwards, in comic confidence, at his villa at Petersham, 'but don't do it again. I had been almost forgotten when you revived me; and now all the newspapers and reviews ring with, "this fashionable, trashy author."' The sand and 'filings of glass,' mentioned in the last stanza, are referable to the well-known verses of the poet apologising to a lady for having paid an unconscionably long morning visit; and where, alluding to Time, he says,

'All his sands are diamond sparks,
That glitter as they pass.'

Few men in society have more 'gladdened life' than this poet. He now resides in Paris, and may thence make the grand tour without an interpreter--speaking, as he does, French, Italian, and German, as fluently as English.

[42] Congreve's plug. The late Sir William Congreve had made a model of Drury Lane Theatre, to which was affixed an engine that, in the event of fire, was made to play from the stage into every box in the house. The writer, accompanied by Theodore Hook, went to see the model at Sir William's house in Cecil Street. 'Now I'll duck Whitbread!' said Hook, seizing the water-pipe whilst he spoke, and sending a torrent of water into the brewer's box.

[43] See Byron, _afterwards_, in _Don Juan_:--

'For flesh is grass, which Time mows down to hay.'

But, as Johnson says of Dryden, 'His known wealth was so great, he might borrow without any impeachment of his credit.'

[44] MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS, commonly called Monk Lewis, from his once popular romance of that name. He was a good-hearted man, and, like too many of that fraternity, a disagreeable one--verbose, disputatious, and paradoxical. His _Monk_ and _Castle Spectre_ elevated him into fame; and he continued to write ghost-stories till, following as he did in the wake of Mrs. Radcliffe, he quite overstocked the market. Lewis visited his estates in Jamaica, and came back perfectly negro-bitten. He promulgated a new code of laws in the island, for the government of his sable subjects: one may serve for a specimen: 'Any slave who commits murder shall have his head shaved, and be confined three days and nights in a dark room.' Upon occasion of printing these parodies, Monk Lewis said to Lady H., 'Many of them are very fair, but mine is not at all like; they have made me write burlesque, which I never do.' 'You don't know your own talent,' answered the lady.

Lewis aptly described himself, as to externals, in the verses affixed to his _Monk_, as having

'A graceless form and dwarfish stature.'

He had, moreover, large grey eyes, thick features, and an inexpressive countenance. In talking, he had a disagreeable habit of drawing the fore-finger of his right hand across his right eyelid. He affected, in conversation, a sort of dandified, drawling tone; young Harlowe, the artist, did the same. A foreigner who had but a slight knowledge of the English language might have concluded, from their cadences, that they were little better than fools--'just a born goose,' as Terry the actor used to say. Lewis died on his passage homeward from Jamaica, owing to a dose of James's powders injudiciously administered by 'his own mere motion.' He wrote various plays, with various success: he had an admirable notion of dramatic construction, but the goodness of his scenes and incidents was marred by the badness of his dialogue.

[45] SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

[46] 'He of Blackfriars' Road,' viz. the late Rev. Rowland Hill, who is said to have preached a sermon congratulating his congregation on the catastrophe.

[47] 'Oh, Mr. Whitbread!' Sir William Grant, then Master of the Rolls, repeated this passage aloud at a Lord Mayor's dinner, to the no small astonishment of the writer, who happened to sit within ear-shot.

[48] 'Padmanaba,' viz. in a pantomime called _Harlequin in Padmanaba_. This elephant, some years afterwards, was exhibited over Exeter 'Change, where, the reader will remember, it was found necessary to destroy the poor animal by discharges of musketry. When he made his entrance in the pantomime above mentioned, Johnson, the machinist of the rival house, exclaimed, 'I should be very sorry if I could not make a better elephant than that!' Johnson was right: we go to the theatre to be pleased with the skill of the imitator, and not to look at the reality.

[49] DR. BUSBY. This gentleman gave living recitations of his translation of _Lucretius_, with tea and bread-and-butter. He sent in a real Address to the Drury Lane Committee, which was really rejected. The present imitation professes to be recited by the translator's son. The poet here, again, was a prophet. A few evenings after the opening of the theatre, Dr. Busby sat with his son in one of the stage-boxes. The latter, to the astonishment of the audience, at the end of the play, stepped from the box upon the stage, his father's real rejected address in his hand, and began to recite it as follows:-

'When energising objects men pursue,
What are the miracles they cannot do?'

Raymond, the stage-manager, accompanied by a constable, at this moment walked upon the stage, and handed away the juvenile _dilettante_ performer.

The doctor's classical translation was thus noticed in one of the newspapers of the day, in the column of births:--'Yesterday, at his house in Queen Anne Street, Dr. Busby of a still-born _Lucretius_.'

[50] 'Winsor's patent gas'--at that time in its infancy. The first place illumined by it was the Carlton House side of Pall Mall; the second, Bishopsgate Street. The writer attended a lecture given by the inventor: the charge of admittance was three shillings, but, as the inventor was about to apply to parliament, members of both houses were admitted gratis. The writer and a fellow-jester assumed the parts of senators at a short notice. 'Members of parliament!' was their important ejaculation at the door of entrance. 'What places, gentlemen?' 'Old Sarum and Bridgewater.' 'Walk in, gentlemen.' Luckily, the real Simon Pures did not attend. This Pall Mall illumination was further noticed in _Horace in London_:--

'And Winsor lights, with flame of gas,
Home, to king's place, his mother.'

[51] 'Ticket-nights.' This phrase is probably unintelligible to the untheatrical portion of the community, which may now be said to be all the world except the actors. Ticket-nights are those whereon the inferior actors club for a benefit: each distributes as many tickets of admission as he is able among his friends. A motley assemblage is the consequence; and as each actor is encouraged by his own set, who are not in general play-going people, the applause comes (as Chesterfield says of Pope's attempts at wit) 'generally unseasonably and too often unsuccessfully.'

[52] _Morning Post._

[53] The REV. GEORGE CRABBE. The writer's first interview with this poet, who may be designated Pope in worsted stockings, took place at William Spencer's villa at Petersham, close to what that gentleman called his gold-fish pond, though it was scarcely three feet in diameter, throwing up a _jet d'eau_ like a thread. The venerable bard, seizing both the hands of his satirist, exclaimed, with a good-humoured laugh: 'Ah! my old enemy, how do you do?' In the course of conversation, he expressed great astonishment at his popularity in London; adding, 'In my own village they think nothing of me.' The subject happening to be the inroads of Time upon Beauty, the writer quoted the following lines:--

'Six years had pass'd, and forty ere the six,
When Time began to play his usual tricks:
My locks, once comely in a virgin's sight,
Locks of pure brown, now felt th' encroaching white;
Gradual each day I liked my horses less,
My dinner more--I learnt to play at chess.'

'That's very good!' cried the bard;--'whose is it?' 'Your own.' 'Indeed! hah! well, I had quite forgotten it.' Was this affectation, or was it not? In sooth, he seemed to push simplicity to puerility. This imitation contained in manuscript the following lines, after describing certain Sunday-newspaper critics who were supposed to be present at a new play, and who were rather heated in their politics:--

'Hard is his task who edits--thankless job!
A Sunday journal for the factious mob:
With bitter paragraph and caustic jest,
He gives to turbulence the day of rest;
Condemn'd, this week, rash rancour to instil,
Or thrown aside, the next, for one who will:
Alike undone or if he praise or rail
(For this affects his safety, that his sale),
He sinks at last, in luckless limbo set,
If loud for libel, and if dumb for debt.'

They were, however, never printed; being, on reflection, considered too serious for the occasion.

It is not a little extraordinary that Crabbe, who could write with such vigour, should descend to such lines as the following:--

'Something had happen'd wrong about a bill
Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill;
So, to amend it, I was told to go
And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co.'

Surely 'Emanuel Jennings,' compared with the above, rises to sublimity.

[54] 'We come next to three ludicrous parodies--of the story of _The Stranger_, of _George Barnwell_, and of the dagger-scene in _Macbeth_, under the signature of Momus Medlar. They are as good, we think, as that sort of thing can be, and remind us of the happier efforts of Colman, whose less successful fooleries are professedly copied in the last piece in the volume.'--_Edinburgh Review._

[55] THEODORE HOOK, at that time a very young man, and the companion of the annotator in many wild frolics. The cleverness of his subsequent prose compositions has cast his early stage songs into oblivion. This parody was, in the second edition, transferred from Colman to Hook.

[56] Then Director of the Opera House.

[57] At that time the chief dancer at this establishment.

[58] Vauxhall Bridge then, like the Thames Tunnel at present, stood suspended in the middle of that river.

[59] The Critical Reviewers. The others are the _London_ and _Monthly_.

[60] _Vide_ Admiral Tyrrel's monument in Westminster Abbey.

[61] My worthy friend, the Bellman, had promised to supply an additional stanza, but the business of assisting the lamplighter, chimney-sweeper, etc., with complimentary verses for their worthy masters and mistresses, pressing on him at this season, he was obliged to decline it.

[62] Imitated from the introductory couplet to the 'Economy of Vegetation:'

'Stay your rude steps, whose throbbing breasts unfold
The legion friends of glory and of gold.'

This sentiment is here expanded into four lines.

[63] For the _os-culation_, or kissing of circles and other curves, see _Huygens_, who has veiled this delicate and inflammatory subject in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

[64] A curve supposed to resemble the sprig of ivy, from which it has its name, and therefore peculiarly adapted to poetry.

[65] Water has been supposed, by several of our philosophers, to be capable of the passion of love. Some later experiments appear to favour this idea. Water, when pressed by a moderate degree of heat, has been observed to _simper_, or _simmer_ (as it is more usually called). The same does not hold true of any other element.

[66] _Vide_ modern prints of nymphs and shepherds dancing to nothing at all.

[67] Imitated from the following genteel and sprightly lines in the first canto of the 'Loves of the Plants':

'So bright its folding canopy withdrawn,
Glides the gilt landau o'er the velvet lawn,
Of beaux and belles displays the glittering throng,
And soft airs fan them as they glide along.'

[68] The Nymph of the Wheel, supposed to be in love with SMOKE-JACK.

[69] 'A figure which has one angle, _or more_, of ninety degrees.'--_Johnson's Dictionary._ It here means a RIGHT-ANGLED TRIANGLE, which is therefore incapable of having more than one angle of ninety degrees, but which may, according to our author's _Prosopopœia_, be supposed to be in love with THREE or any greater number of NYMPHS.

[70] Supposed to be the same with SATAN.

[71] The Eastern name for GENII.--_Vide_ TALES OF DITTO.

[72] A submarine palace near Tunis, where ZATANAI usually held his Court.

[73] The Indian _Caucasus_.

[74] MR. HIGGINS does not mean to deny that SOLOMON was really King of JUDÆA. The epithet _fabled_ applies to that empire over the Genii, which the retrospective generosity of the Arabian fabulists has bestowed upon this monarch.

[75] It was under this shape that _Venus_ was worshipped in _Phœnicia_. MR. HIGGINS thinks it was the _Venus Urania_, or Celestial Venus; in allusion to which, he supposes that the _Phœnician_ grocers first introduced the practice of preserving sugar-loaves in blue or sky-coloured paper. He also believes that the _conical_ form of the original grenadiers' caps was typical of the loves of MARS and VENUS.

[76] The doctrine of mathematics. Pope calls her _mad Mathesis_.--_Vide Johnson's Dictionary._

[77] The harmony and imagery of these lines are imperfectly imitated from the following exquisite passage in the _Economy of Vegetation_:

'Gnomes, as you now dissect, with hammers fine,
The granite rock, the noduled flint calcine;
Grind with strong arm the circling Chertz betwixt,
Your pure ka--o--lins and Pe--tunt--ses mixt.'