"
To those acquainted with his admired prototypes, these Essays of the
ingenious and highly gifted author have the same sort of charm and relish
that Erasmus's "Colloquies," or a fine piece of modern Latin, have to the
classical scholar.--"_On Familiar Style_."
[_Hazlitt's "Plain Speaker,"_ Vol. I. p. 62.]
At Lamb's we used to have lively skirmishes at their Thursday evening
parties. I doubt whether the Small Coal-man's musical parties could exceed
them. O for the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a _petit souvenir_ to
their memory! There was Lamb himself, the most delightful, the most
provoking, the most witty and sensible of men. He always made the best pun
and the best remark in the course of the evening. His serious
conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever stammered
out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things, in half a dozen sentences,
as he does. His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a
play upon words. What a keen, laughing, hair-brained vein of homefelt
truth! What choice venom! How often did we cut into the haunch of letters!
How we skimmed the cream of criticism! How we picked out the marrow of
authors! Need I go over the names? They were but the old, everlasting set
--Milton and Shakespeare, Pope and Dryden, Steele and Addison, Swift and
Gay, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, Hogarth's prints, Claude's
landscapes, the Cartoons at Hampton Court, and all those things that,
having once been, must ever be.
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