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no doubt the dinner was a powerful instrument in facilitating the conviction of country gentlemen." To this effect runs a couplet of Dr. Wolcot's:

For meat is apt opinion to improve,

And stomachs form a turnpike gate to love.

Scarcely any Bishop, Sidney Smith once remarked, is sufficiently a man of the world to deal with fanatics. "The way is not to reason with them, but to ask them to dinner."

Lord Lytton's Parson Dale preferred the evening service for "sermons that preach at you," not only because the congregation was more numerous, but also because, being a shrewd man in his innocent way, he knew that people bear better to be preached at after dinner than before; that you arrive more

means the business goes forward with success.-Citizen of the World, Let. cxii.

The late Mr. Walker, in his Original essays, again and again laid stress on the importance of the dinner-table as a bond of union and harmony, and a school for improvement of manners and civilisation—in fact, he appears to have accounted it the great emollient of mores, which nec sinit esse feros. He testifies that the only election he ever assisted at, that was throughout effectively managed, owed its effect to a judicious tickling of the palates of the committee. "I consider good cheer," he solemnly avows, 66 as the very cement of good government. It prevents ill blood," &c., &c. "The doctrine I always hold to the parishes with which I have anything to do is, that they must either eat together or quarrel together, that they must either have tavern bills or attorneys' bills.-Cf. The Original, Nos. 7, 25, &c.

insinuatingly at the heart when the stomach is at peace. And Lord Lytton himself, for his part, or at least on Pisistratus Caxton's, honestly declares, that there are hours in the twenty-four-such, for instance, as that just before breakfast, or that succeeding a page of unsuccessful composition, when any one in want of five shillings would find the author's value of that sum put it quite out of his reach; while at other times-"just after dinner, for instance "the value of those five shillings is so much depreciated that he might be almost tempted to give them away for nothing.

ABOUT INFERRING THE MAN FROM THE

BOOK.

A Case of Non Sequitur.

ONE of those essays which the author of "The Caxtons" collected into a volume, a quarter of a century at least before he devoted his practised pen to the everyway riper series entitled "Caxtoniana," takes for its theme the difference between Authors and the impression conveyed of them by their works.

Lord Lytton, in that essay, expresses his belief that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; and that it is usually in the "physical appearance" of the writer-his manners, his mien, his exterior, that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him-rarely in his mind. The feeling of disappointment is accordingly treated as usually a sign of the weak mind of him who experiences it," a foolish, apprentice-sort of disposition, that judges of everything great by the criterion of a puppet-show, and expects as much out of the common way in a celebrated author as in the lord mayor's coach."

That shrewd and sensible people are apt, neverthe

less, to utterly miscalculate the man in the author, is an every-day truism in practical life. "Had any one formerly brought me to Erasmus," writes Montaigne, "I should hardly have believed but that all was adage and apophthegm he spoke to his man or his hostess." Whereas Erasmus, depend upon it, cast no such pearls as epigram or rhetorical flourish before any such swine as the body-man that ran his errands, or the crone that did his chares. But Montaigne's impression was one common in all ages, and to, and about, all sorts of men.

Izaak Walton tells us that many and many turned out of their road purposely to see Richard Hooker, in his parsonage at Borne, whose life and learning were so much admired. But what went they out for to see? a man clothed in purple and fine linen? a man of stately presence and enthralling gifts of speech? No, indeed; but an obscure harmless man; a man in poor clothes, his loins usually girt in a coarse gown or canonical coat; of a mean stature, and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thoughts of his soul; . . . of so mild and humble a nature, that his poor Parish-clerk and he did never talk but with both their hats on, or both off, at the same time." Pilgrims had to pause and take breath before they could identify that threadbare, blushing parson with him that penned Ecclesiastical Polity.

Kant's style of conversation was so popular and unscholastic, that any stranger acquainted with his works, would have found it difficult to believe that

in this delightful and genial companion he saw the profound master of Transcendental Philosophy.

Almost all the tragic and gloomy writers, it has been remarked, have been, in social life, mirthful persons. The author of the Night Thoughts, says Moore, was a fellow of infinite jest; and of the pathetic Rowe, Pope says, "He! why, he would laugh all day long-he would do nothing else but laugh." Of La Fontaine, the larmoyant German novelist, over whose rose-coloured moral-sublime, as Mr. Carlyle has it, what fair eye has not wept? we are told that Varnhagen von Ense found him a man jovial as Boniface, swollen out on booksellers' profits, church preferments and fat things, " to the size of a hogshead ;" and not allowing his pretty niece to read a word of his romance-stuff, but "keeping it locked from her like poison."-As Mr. Thackeray says of the tragical paintings of Alexander M'Collop, "No one would suppose, from the gloomy character of his works, that Sandy M'Collop is one of the most jovial souls alive." And among the variety of painters whom Clive Newcome associated with at Rome, there were some, we read, with the strongest natural taste for low humour, comic singing, and Cyder-Cellar jollification, who would imitate nothing but Michael Angelo, and whose canvases teemed with tremendous allegories of fates, furies, genii of death and battle.

Describing his first introduction, by Wordsworth in 1808, to "Mr. Wilson of Elleray," De Quincey says that, “(as usually happens in such cases,) I felt

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