Chapter XXIII: Front Matter (23)

Northcote shewed me a poem with engravings of Dartmoor, which were too fine by half. I said I supposed Dartmoor would look more gay and smiling after having been thus illustrated, like a dull author who has been praised by a Reviewer. I had once been nearly benighted there and was delighted to get to the inn at Ashburton. ‘That,’ said N—, ‘is the only good of such places that you are glad to escape from them, and look back to them with a pleasing horror ever after. Commend me to the Valdarno or Vallambrosa, where you are never weary of new charms, and which you quit with a sigh of regret. I have, however, told my young friend who sent me the poem, that he has shown his genius in creating beauties where there were none, and extracting enthusiasm from rocks and quagmires. After that, he may write a very interesting poem on Kamschatka!’ He then spoke of the Panorama of the North Pole which had been lately exhibited, of the ice-bergs, the seals lying asleep on the shore, and the strange twilight as well worth seeing. He said, it would be curious to know the effect, if they could get to the Pole itself, though it must be impossible: the veins, he should suppose, would burst, and the vessel itself go to pieces from the extreme cold. I asked if he had ever read an account of twelve men who had been left all the winter in Greenland, and of the dreadful shifts to which they were reduced? He said, he had not.—They were obliged to build two booths of wood one within the other; and if they had to go into the outer one during the severity of the weather, unless they used great precaution, their hands were blistered by whatever they took hold of as if it had been red-hot iron. The most interesting part was the account of their waiting for the return of light at the approach of spring, and the delight with which they first saw the sun shining on the tops of the frozen mountains. N— said, ‘This is the great advantage of descriptions of extraordinary situations by uninformed men: Nature as it were holds the pen for them; they give you what is most striking in the circumstances, and there is nothing to draw off the attention from the strong and actual impression, so that it is the next thing to the reality. G— was here the other day, and I showed him the note from my bookseller about the _Fables_, with which you were so much pleased, but he saw nothing in it. I then said G— is not one of those who look attentively at nature or draw much from that source. Yet the rest is but like building castles in the air, if it is not founded in observation and experience. Or it is like the enchanted money in the _Arabian Nights_, which turned to dry leaves when you came to make use of it. It is ingenious and amusing, and so far it is well to be amused when you can; but you learn nothing from the fine hypothesis you have been reading, which is only a better sort of dream, bright and vague and utterly inapplicable to the purposes of common life. G— does not appeal to nature, but to art and execution. There is another thing (which it seems harsh and presumptuous to say, but) he appears to me not always to perceive the difference between right and wrong. There are many others in the same predicament, though not such splendid examples of it. He is satisfied to make out a plausible case, to give the _pros_ and _cons_ like a lawyer; but he has no instinctive bias or feeling one way or other, except as he can give a studied reason for it. Common sense is out of the question: such people despise common sense, and the quarrel between them is a mutual one. Caleb Williams, notwithstanding, is a decidedly original work: the rest are the sweepings of his study. That is but one thing, to be sure; but no one does more than one thing. Northcote said that Sir Joshua used to say that no one produced more than six original things. I always said it was wrong to fix upon this number—five out of the six would be found upon examination to be repetitions of the first. A man can no more produce six original works than he can be six individuals at once. Whatever is the strong and prevailing bent of his genius, he will stamp upon some master-work; and what he does else, will be only the same thing over again, a little better or a little worse; or if he goes out of his way in search of variety and to avoid himself, he will merely become a common-place man or an imitator of others. You see this plainly enough in Cervantes—that he has exhausted himself in the Don Quixote. He has put his whole strength into it: his other works are no better than what other people could write. If there is any exception, it is Shakspeare: he seems to have had the faculty of dividing himself into a number of persons. His writings stand out from every thing else, and from one another. Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff are striking and original characters; but they die a natural death at the end of the fifth act, and no more come to life again than the people themselves would. He is not reduced to repeat himself or revive former inventions under feigned names. This is peculiar to him; still it is to be considered that plays are short works and only allow room for the expression of a part. But in a work of the extent of Don Quixote, the writer had scope to bring in all he wanted; and indeed there is no point of excellence which he has not touched from the highest courtly grace and most romantic enthusiasm down to the lowest ribaldry and rustic ignorance, yet carried off with such an air that you wish nothing away, and do not see what can be added to it. Every bit is perfect; and the author has evidently given his whole mind to it. That is why I believe that the _Scotch Novels_ are the production of several hands. Some parts are careless, others straggling: it is only where there is an opening for effect that the master-hand comes in, and in general he leaves his work for others to get on with it. But in Don Quixote there is not a single line that you may not swear belongs to Cervantes.’—I inquired if he had read WOODSTOCK? He answered, No, he had not been able to get it. I said, I had been obliged to pay five shillings for the loan of it at a regular bookseller’s shop (I could not procure it at the circulating libraries), and that from the understood feeling about Sir Walter no objection was made to this proposal, which would in ordinary cases have been construed into an affront. I had well nigh repented my bargain, but there were one or two scenes that repaid me (though none equal to his best,) and in general it was very indifferent. The plot turned chiefly on English Ghost-scenes, a very mechanical sort of phantoms who dealt in practical jokes and personal annoyances, turning beds upside down and sousing you all over with water, instead of supernatural and visionary horrors. It was very bad indeed, but might be intended to contrast the literal, matter-of-fact imagination of the _Southron_ with the loftier impulses of Highland superstition. Charles II. was not spared, and was brought in admirably (when in disguise) as a raw, awkward Scotch lad, Master Kerneguy. Cromwell was made a fine, bluff, overbearing blackguard, who exercised a personal superiority wherever he came, but was put in situations which I thought wholly out of character, and for which I apprehended there was no warrant in the history of the times. They were therefore so far improper. A romance-writer might take an incident and work it out according to his fancy or might build an imaginary superstructure on the ground of history, but he had no right to transpose the facts. For instance, he had made Cromwell act as his own tip-staff and go to Woodstock to take Charles II. in person. To be sure, he had made him display considerable firmness and courage in the execution of this errand (as Lavender might in being the first to enter a window to secure a desperate robber)—but the plan itself, to say nothing of the immediate danger, was contrary to Cromwell’s dignity as well as policy. Instead of wishing to seize Charles with his own hand, he would naturally keep as far aloof from such a scene as he could, and be desirous to have it understood that he was anxious to shed as little more blood as possible. Besides, he had higher objects in view, and would, I should think, care not much more about Charles than about Master Kerneguy. He would be glad to let him get away. In another place, he had made Cromwell start back in the utmost terror at seeing a picture of Charles I. and act all the phrenzy of Macbeth over again at the sight of Banquo’s ghost. This I should also suppose to be quite out of character in a person of Cromwell’s prosaic, determined habits _to fear a painted devil_. ‘No,’ said N—, ‘that is not the way he would look at it; it is seeing only a part: but Cromwell was a greater philosopher than to act so. The other story is more probable of his visiting the dead body of Charles in a mask, and exclaiming in great agitation as he left the room, _Cruel necessity_! Yet even this is not sufficiently authenticated. No; he knew that it was come to this, that it was gone too far for either party to turn back, and that it must be final with one of them. The only question was whether he should give himself up as the victim, and so render all that had been done useless, or exact the penalty from what he thought the offending party. It was like a battle which must end fatally either way, and no one thought of lamenting, because he was not on the losing side. In a great public quarrel there was no room for these domestic and personal regards: all you had to do was to consider well the justice of the cause, before you appealed to the sword. Would Charles I. if he had been victorious, have started at the sight of a picture of Cromwell? Yet Cromwell was as much of a man as he, and as firm as the other was obstinate.’ Northcote said, he wished he could remember the subject of a dispute he had with G— to see if I did not think he had the best of it. I replied, I should be more curious to hear something in which G— was right, for he generally made it a rule to be in the wrong when speaking of any thing. I mentioned having once had a very smart debate with him about a young lady, of whom I had been speaking as very much like her aunt, a celebrated authoress, and as what the latter, I conceived, might have been at her time of life. G— said, when Miss — did any thing like Evelina or Cecilia, he should then believe she was as clever as Madame d’Arblay. I asked him whether he did not think Miss Burney was as clever before she wrote those novels as she was after; or whether in general an author wrote a successful work for being clever, or was clever because he had written a successful work! Northcote laughed and said, ‘That was so like G—.’ I observed that it arose out of his bigoted admiration of literature, so that he could see no merit in any thing else; nor trust to any evidence of talent but what was printed. It was much the same fallacy that had sometimes struck me in the divines, who deduced original sin from Adam’s eating the apple, and not his eating the apple from original sin or a previous inclination to do something, that he should not. Northcote remarked, that speaking of Evelina put him in mind of what Opie had once told him, that when Dr. Johnson sat to him for his picture, on his first coming to town, he asked him if it was true that he had sat up all night to read Miss Burney’s new novel, as it had been reported? And he made answer, ‘I never read it through at all, though I don’t wish this to be known.’ Sir Joshua also pretended to have read it through at a sitting, though it appeared to him (Northcote) affectation in them both, who were thorough-paced men of the world, and hackneyed in literature, to pretend to be so delighted with the performance of a girl, in which they could find neither instruction nor any great amusement, except from the partiality of friendship. So Johnson cried up Savage, because they had slept on bulks when they were young; and lest he should be degraded into a vagabond by the association, had elevated the other into a genius. Such prevarication or tampering with his own convictions was not consistent with the strict and formal tone of morality which he assumed on other and sometimes very trifling occasions, such as correcting Mrs. Thrale for saying that a bird flew in at the door, instead of the window. I said, Savage, in my mind, was one of those writers (like Chatterton) whose vices and misfortunes the world made a _set-off_ to their genius, because glad to connect these ideas together. They were only severe upon those who attacked their prejudices or their consequence. Northcote replied, ‘Savage the architect was here the other day, and asked me why I had abused his name-sake, and called him an impostor. I answered, I had heard that character of him from a person in an obscure rank of life, who had known him a little before his death.’ Northcote proceeded: ‘People in that class are better judges than poets and moralists, who explain away every thing by fine words and doubtful theories. The mob are generally right in their summary judgments upon offenders. A man is seldom ducked or pumped upon or roughly handled by them, unless he has deserved it. You see that in the galleries at the play-house. They never let any thing pass that is immoral; and they are even fastidious judges of wit. I remember there was some gross expression in Goldsmith’s comedy the first night it came out; and there was a great uproar in the gallery, and it was obliged to be suppressed. Though rude and vulgar themselves, they do not like vulgarity on the stage; they come there to be taught manners.’ I said, they paid more attention than any body else; and after the curtain drew up (though somewhat noisy before) were the best-behaved part of the audience, unless something went wrong. As the common people sought for refinement as a _treat_, people in high life were fond of grossness and ribaldry as a relief to their overstrained affectation of gentility. I could account in no other way for their being amused with the wretched _slang_ in certain magazines and newspapers. I asked Northcote if he had seen the third series of —? He had not. I said they were like the composition of a footman, and I believed greatly admired in the upper circles, who were glad to see an author arrange a side-board for them over again with servile alacrity. He said, ‘They delight in low, coarse buffoonery, because it sets off their own superiority: whereas the rabble resent it when obtruded upon them, because they think it is meant against themselves. They require the utmost elegance and propriety for their money: as the showman says in Goldsmith’s comedy—“My bear dances to none but the genteelest of tunes, _Water parted from the Sea_, or the minuet in _Ariadne_!”’

Northcote then alluded to a new novel he had been reading. He said he never read a book so full of words; which seemed ridiculous enough to say, for a book was necessarily composed of words, but here there was nothing else but words, to a degree that was surprising. Yet he believed it was sought after, and indeed he could not get it at the common library. ‘You are to consider, there must be books for all tastes and all ages. You may despise it, but the world do not. There are books for children till the time they are six years of age, such as Jack-the-Giant-Killer, the Seven Champions of Christendom, Guy of Warwick and others.[96] From that to twelve they like to read the Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and then Fielding’s Novels and Don Quixote: from twenty to thirty books of poetry, Milton, Pope, Shakspeare: and from thirty history and philosophy—what suits us then will serve us for the rest of our lives. For boarding-school girls _Thomson’s Seasons_ has an immense attraction, though I never could read it. Some people cannot get beyond a newspaper or a geographical dictionary. What I mean to infer is that we ought not to condemn too hastily, for a work may be approved by the public, though it does not exactly hit our taste; nay, those may seem beauties to others which seem faults to us. Why else do we pride ourselves on the superiority of our judgment, if we are not more advanced in this respect than the majority of readers? But our very fastidiousness should teach us toleration. You have said very well of this novel, that it is a mixture of genteel and romantic affectation. One objection to the excessive rhodomontade which abounds in it is that you can learn nothing from such extravagant fictions:—they are like nothing in the known world. I remember once speaking to Richardson (Sheridan’s friend) about Shakspeare’s want of morality, and he replied—“What! Shakspeare not moral? He is the most moral of all writers, because he is the most natural!” And in this he was right: for though Shakspeare did not intend to be moral, yet he could not be otherwise as long as he adhered to the path of nature. Morality only teaches us our duty by showing us the natural consequences of our actions; and the poet does the same while he continues to give us faithful and affecting pictures of human life—rewarding the good and punishing the bad. So far truth and virtue are one. But that kind of poetry which has not its foundation in nature, and is only calculated to shock and surprise, tends to unhinge our notions of morality and of every thing else in the ordinary course of Providence.’

Something being said of an artist who had attempted to revive the great style in our times, and the question being put, whether Michael Angelo and Raphael, had they lived now, would not have accommodated themselves to the modern practice, I said, it appeared to me that (whether this was the case or not) they could not have done what they did without the aid of circumstances; that for an artist to raise himself above all surrounding opinions, customs, and institutions by a mere effort of the will, was affectation and folly, like attempting to fly in the air; and that, though great genius might exist without the opportunities favourable to its development, yet it must draw its nourishment from circumstances, and suck in inspiration from its native air. There was Hogarth—he was surely a genius; still the manners of his age were necessary to him: teeming as his works were with life, character, and spirit, they would have been poor and vapid without the night-cellars of St. Giles’s, the drawing-rooms of St. James’s! Would he in any circumstances have been a Raphael or a Phidias? I think not. But had he been twenty times a Raphael or a Phidias, I am quite sure it would never have appeared in the circumstances in which he was placed. Two things are necessary to all great works and great excellence, the mind of the individual and the mind of the age or country co-operating with his own genius. The last brings out the first, but the first does not imply or supersede the last. Pictures for Protestant churches are a contradiction in terms, where they are not objects of worship but of idle curiosity:—where there is not the adoration, the enthusiasm in the spectator, how can it exist in the artist? The spark of genius is only kindled into a flame by sympathy.—Northcote spoke highly of Vanbrugh and of the calm superiority with which he bore the attacks of Swift, Pope, and that set who made a point of decrying all who did not belong to their party. He said Burke and Sir Joshua thought his architecture far from contemptible; and his comedies were certainly first-rate. Richards (the scene-painter) had told him, the players thought the Provoked Husband the best acting play on the stage; and Godwin said the City-Wives’ Confederacy (taken from an indifferent French play) was the best written one. I ventured to add, that the Trip to Scarborough (altered but not improved by Sheridan) was not inferior to either of the others. I should doubt whether the direction given at Sir Tunbelly’s castle on the arrival of Young Fashion—‘Let loose the grey-hound, and lock up Miss Hoyden!’—would be in Sheridan’s version, who, like most of his countrymen, had a prodigious ambition of elegance. Northcote observed, that talking of this put him in mind of a droll speech that was made when the officers got up a play on board the vessel that went lately to find out the North-West passage:—one of the sailors, who was admiring the performance, and saying how clever it was, was interrupted by the boatswain, who exclaimed—‘Clever! did you say? I call it _philosophy_, by G—d!’ He asked, if he had ever mentioned to me that anecdote of Lord Mansfield, who, when an old woman was brought before him as a witch, and was charged, among other improbable things, with walking through the air, attended coolly to the evidence, and then dismissed the complaint by saying, ‘My opinion is that this good woman be suffered to return home, and whether she shall do this, walking on the ground or riding through the air, must be left entirely to her own pleasure, for there is nothing contrary to the laws of England in either!’ I mentioned a very fine dancer at the Opera (Mademoiselle Brocard) with whom I was much delighted; and Northcote observed that where there was grace and beauty accompanying the bodily movements, it was very hard to deny the mental refinement or the merit of this art. He could not see why that which was so difficult to do, and which gave so much pleasure to others, was to be despised. He remembered seeing some young people at Parma (though merely in a country-dance) exhibit a degree of perfection in their movements that seemed to be inspired by the very genius of grace and gaiety. Miss Reynolds used to say that perfection was much the same in everything—nobody could assign the limits. I said authors alone were privileged to suppose that all excellence was confined to words. Till I was twenty I thought there was nothing in the world but books: when I began to paint I found there were two things, both difficult to do and worth doing; and I concluded from that time there might be fifty. At least I was willing to allow every one his own choice. I recollect a certain poet saying ‘he should like to _ham-string_ those fellows at the Opera’—I suppose because the Great would rather see them dance than read _Kehama_. Whatever can be done in such a manner that you can fancy a God to do it, must have something in its nature divine. The ancients had assigned Gods to dancing as well as to music and poetry, to the different attributes and perfections both of body and mind; and perhaps the plurality of the heathen deities was favourable to a liberality of taste and opinion. NORTHCOTE: ‘The most wretched scribbler looks down upon the greatest painter as a mere mechanic: but who would compare Lord Byron with Titian?’

CONVERSATION THE FIFTEENTH

I went to Northcote in the evening to consult about his _Fables_. He was downstairs in the parlour, and talked much as usual: but the difference of the accompaniments, the sitting down, the preparations for tea, the carpet and furniture, and a little fat lap-dog interfered with old associations and took something from the charm of his conversation. He spoke of a Mr. Laird who had been employed to see his _Life of Sir Joshua_ through the press, and whom he went to call upon in an upper story in Peterborough-Court, Fleet-street, where he was surrounded by his books, his implements of writing, a hand-organ, and his coffee-pots; and he said he envied him this retreat more than any palace he had ever happened to enter. Northcote was not very well, and repeated his complaints. I said I thought the air (now summer was coming on) would do him more good than physic. His apothecary had been describing the dissection of the elephant, which had just been killed at Exeter ‘Change. It appeared that instead of the oil which usually is found in the joints of animals, the interstices were in this case filled up with a substance resembling a kind of white paint. This Northcote considered as a curious instance of the wise contrivance of nature in the adaptation of means to ends; for even in pieces of artificial mechanism, though they use oil to lubricate the springs and wheels of clocks and other common-sized instruments, yet in very large and heavy ones, such as steam-engines, &c. they are obliged to use grease, pitch, and other more solid substances, to prevent the friction. If they could dissect a flea, what a fine, evanescent fluid would be found to lubricate its slender joints and assist its light movements! Northcote said the bookseller wished to keep the original copy of the _Fables_ to bind up as a literary curiosity. I objected to this proceeding as unfair. There were several slips of the pen and slovenlinesses of style (for which I did not think him at all accountable, since an artist wrote with his left hand, and painted with his right) and I did not see why these accidental inadvertences, arising from diffidence and want of practice, should be as it were enshrined and brought against him. He said, ‘Mr. P— H— tasked me the hardest in what I wrote in the _Artist_. He pointed out where I was wrong, and sent it back to me to correct it. After all, what I did there was thought the best!’ I said Mr. H— was too fastidious, and spoiled what he did from a wish to have it perfect. He dreaded that a shadow of objection should be brought against any thing he advanced, so that his opinions at last amounted to a kind of genteel truisms. One must risk something in order to do any thing. I observed that this was remarkable in so clever a man; but it seemed as if there were some fatality by which the most lively and whimsical writers, if they went out of their own eccentric path and attempted to be serious, became exceedingly grave and even insipid. His farces were certainly very spirited and original: NO SONG NO SUPPER was the first play I had ever seen, and I felt grateful to him for this. Northcote agreed that it was very delightful; and said there was a volume of it when he first read it to them one night at Mrs. Rundle’s, and that the players cut it down a good deal and supplied a number of things. There was a great piece of work to alter the songs for Madame Storace, who played in it and who could not pronounce half the English terminations. MY GRANDMOTHER, too, was a laughable idea, very ingeniously executed; and some of the songs in this had an equal portion of elegance and drollery, such as that in particular—

For alas! long before I was born,
My fair one had died of old age!

Still some of his warmest admirers were hurt at their being farces—if they had been comedies, they would have been satisfied, for nothing could be greater than their success. They were the next to O’Keefe’s, who in that line was the English Moliere.

Northcote asked if I remembered the bringing out of any of O’Keefe’s? I answered, No. He said ‘It had the oddest effect imaginable—at one moment they seemed on the point of being damned, and the next moment you were convulsed with laughter. Edwin was inimitable in some of them. He was one of those actors, it is true, who carried a great deal off the stage with him, that he would willingly have left behind, and so far could not help himself. But his awkward, shambling figure in Bowkitt the dancing-master, was enough to make one die with laughing. He was also unrivalled in _Lingo_, where he was admirably supported by Mrs. Wells in Cowslip, when she prefers “a roast duck” to all the birds in the Heathen Mythology—and in _Peeping Tom_, where he merely puts his head out, the faces that he made threw the audience into a roar.’ I said, I remembered no further back than B—, who used to delight me excessively in _Lenitive_ in the Prize, when I was a boy. Northcote said, he was an imitator of Edwin, but at a considerable distance. He was a good-natured, agreeable man; and the audience were delighted with him, because he was evidently delighted with them. In some respects he was a caricaturist: for instance, in Lenitive he stuck his pigtail on end, which he had no right to do, for no one had ever done it but himself. I said Liston appeared to me to have more comic humour than any one in my time, though he was not properly an actor. Northcote asked if he was not low-spirited; and told the story (I suspect an old one) of his consulting a physician on the state of his health, who recommended him to go and see Liston. I said he was grave and prosing, but I did not know there was any thing the matter with him, though I had seen him walking along the street the other day with his face as fixed as if had a lock-jaw, a book in his hand, looking neither to the right nor the left, and very much like his own Lord Duberly. I did not see why he and Matthews should both of them be so _hipped_, except from their having _the player’s melancholy_, arising from their not seeing six hundred faces on the broad grin before them at all other times as well as when they were acting. He was, however, exceedingly unaffected, and remarkably candid in judging of other actors. He always spoke in the highest terms of Munden, whom I considered as overdoing his parts.[97] Northcote said, ‘Munden was excellent but an artificial actor. You should have seen Weston,’ he continued. ‘It was impossible, from looking at him, for any one to say that he was acting. You would suppose they had gone out and found the actual character they wanted, and brought him upon the stage without his knowing it. Even when they interrupted him with peals of laughter and applause, he looked about him as if he was not at all conscious of having any thing to do with it, and then went on as before. In Scrub, Dr. Last, and other parts of that kind, he was perfection itself. Garrick would never attempt Abel Drugger after him. There was something peculiar in his face; for I knew an old school-fellow of his who told me he used to produce the same effect when a boy, and when the master asked what was the matter, his companions would make answer—‘Weston looked _at me_, Sir!’ Yet he came out in tragedy, as indeed they all did! Northcote inquired if I had seen Garrick? I answered, ‘No—I could not very well, as he died the same year I was born!’ I mentioned having lately met with a striking instance of genealogical taste in a family, the grandfather of which thought nothing of Garrick, the father thought nothing of Mrs. Siddons, and the daughter could make nothing of the Scotch Novels, but admired Mr. Theodore Hook’s ‘SAYINGS AND DOINGS!’

Northcote then returned to the subject of his book and said, ‘Sir Richard Phillips once wished me to do a very magnificent work indeed on the subject of art. He was like Curil, who had a number of fine title-pages, if any one could have written books to answer them. He came here once with Godwin to shew me a picture which they had just discovered of Chaucer, and which was to embellish Godwin’s _Life_ of him. I told them it was certainly no picture of Chaucer, nor was any such picture painted at that time.’ I said, Godwin had got a portrait about a year ago which he wished me to suppose was a likeness of President Bradshaw: I saw no reason for his thinking so, but that in that case it would be worth a hundred pounds to him! Northcote expressed a curiosity to have seen it, as he knew the descendants of the family at Plymouth. He remembered one of them, an old lady of the name of Wilcox, who used to walk about in Gibson’s-Field near the town, so prim and starched, holding up her fan spread out like a peacock’s tail with such an air, on account of her supposed relationship to one of the Regicides! They paid, however (in the vulgar opinion) for this distinction; for others of them bled to death at the nose, or died of the bursting of a blood-vessel, which their wise neighbours did not fail to consider as a judgment upon them.

Speaking of Dr. M—, he said, he had such a feeling of beauty in his heart, that it made angels of every one around him. To check a person who was running on against another, he once said, ‘You should not speak in that manner, for you lead me to suppose you have the bad qualities you are so prone to dwell upon in others.’—A transition was here made to Lord Byron, who used to tell a story of a little red-haired girl, who, when countesses and ladies of fashion were leaving the room where he was in crowds (to _cut_ him after his quarrel with his wife) stopped short near a table against which he was leaning, gave him a familiar nod, and said, ‘You should have married me, and then this would not have happened to you!’ A question being started whether Dr. M— was handsome, Northcote answered, ‘I could see no beauty in him as to his outward person, but there was an angelic sweetness of disposition that spread its influence over his whole conversation and manner. He had not wit, but a fine romantic enthusiasm which deceived himself and enchanted others. I remember once his describing a picture by Rosa de Tivoli (at Saltram) of _Two Bulls fighting_, and he gave such an account of their rage and manner of tearing up the ground that I could not rest till we went over to see it—when we came there, it was nothing but a coarse daub like what might be expected from the painter: but he had made the rest out of a vivid imagination. So my father told him a story of a bull-bait he had seen in which the bull had run so furiously at the dog that he broke the chain and pitched upon his head and was killed. Soon after, he came and told us the same story as an incident he himself had witnessed. He did not mean to deceive, but the image had made such an impression on his fancy, that he believed it to be one that he had himself been an eye-witness of.’ I was much amused with this account and I offered to get him a copy of a whimsical production, of which a new edition had been printed. I also recommended to him the _Spanish Rogue_, as a fine mixture of drollery and grave moralizing. He spoke of _Lazarillo de Tormes_ and of the _Cheats of Scapin_, the last of which he rated rather low. The work was written by Scarron, whose widow, the famous Madame de Maintenon, afterwards became mistress to Louis XIV.