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Dr. Chalmers, at his last visit to London, within a week or two of his sudden death, records in his Diary the pleasant and unlike impression of Mr. Carlyle that personal contact gave him: "His talk not at all Carlylish, much rather the plain and manly conversation of good ordinary common sense, with a deal of hearty laughing on both sides."

According to Scott, no man was ever less known by his writings than Henry Mackenzie. You would suppose a retired, modest, somewhat affected man, with a white handkerchief, and a sigh ready for every sentiment. No such thing. "H. M. [at 83, too] is alert as a contracting tailor's needle in every sort of business-a politician and a sportsmanshoots and fishes in a sort even to this day—and is the life of a company with anecdotes and fun. Sometimes his daughter tells me he is in low spirits at home, but really I never see anything of it in society." Half a dozen years later, Sir Walter jots down the decease of the Man of Feeling: "I got notice of poor Henry Mackenzie's death... gayest of the gay, though most sensitive of the sentimental."

So again it has been remarked of Campbell by Leigh Hunt, that those who knew him only as the author of "Gertrude of Wyoming" and the "Pleasures of Hope," would not have suspected him to be a merry companion, overflowing with humour and anecdote, and anything but fastidious. "Very unlike a puritan he talked!" Mr. Hunt, in another place, expresses the astonishment he once felt, on

finding that "gentle Mr. Hayley," whom he had taken for

A puny insect, shivering at a breeze,

was a strong-built man, famous for walking in the snow before daylight, and possessed of an intrepidity as a horseman amounting to the reckless.* In his Feast of the Violets," again, Leontius commemorates the contrast between Mrs. Shelley's looks and her books:

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So sleek and so smiling she came, people stared

To think such fair clay should so darkly have dared.

Perthes spent two evenings with Jean Paul, who exerted himself (his visitor says) to appear in the best light. But Perthes, by his own account, did not hear him utter one significant word, one deep view, one result of great inner experience. “His conversation was throughout wearisome and obscure. For half an hour Jean Paul put us to sleep with receipts for sleeping. None of the lightning flashes and scintillations of fancy, the striking similes, or the glowing pictures with which his works abound, appeared in his conversation." And Perthes left him, convinced that the man who, as an author, belonged to the tenderest and richest minds of Germany, was not, therefore, necessarily tender and soft-hearted.

"It is not improbable that the feeble Hayley, during one of his equestrian passes, could have snatched up the 'vigorous' Gifford, and pitched him over the hedge into the next field.”— Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ch. xii.

It is the old story, as regards heart and feeling, of Richter's English model and prototype, Laurence Sterne. And it is the old story, as regards intellectual display, of Oliver Goldsmith and ever so many more. La Bruyère has commented on the practical paradox that you'll find "un homme paraitre grossier, lourd, stupide; il ne sait pas parler, ni raconter ce qu'il vient de voir"-all literally and specially applicable to Goldsmith, as Boswell and others picture him in company; but what La Bruyère then proceeds to say is equally so,—namely, that " s'il se met à écrire, c'est le modèle des bons contes; il fait parler les animaux, les arbres, les pierres, tout ce qui ne parle point: ce n'est que légéreté, qu' élégance, que beau natural, et que délicatesse dans ses ouvrages." "Good Heavens, Mr. Foote," exclaimed an actress at the Haymarket Theatre, "what a humdrum kind of man Dr. Goldsmith appears in our green-room, compared with the figure he makes in his poetry!" He was Garrick's butt, too, as one who

-wrote like an angel, and talked like Poor Poll.

We are told that Lord Dorset was so much struck by the extraordinary merit of "Hudibras," on its publication in 1663, that he must needs be introduced to the author. This was effected, accordingly, at a tavern, whither Mr. Fleetwood Shepherd brought his lordship as an untitled friend. With this result : that Mr. Butler, while the first bottle was drinking, appeared very flat and heavy; at the second bottle, brisk and lively, full of wit and learning, and a most

agreeable companion; but before the third bottle was finished, he "sunk again into such deep stupidity and dulness, that hardly anybody would have believed him to be the author of a book which abounded with so much wit, learning, and pleasantry." He had his lucid interval, however: which is more than we find allowed of some wits, at any stage whatever of the bottling process. Next morning, Mr. Shepherd asked Dorset his opinion of Butler, and his lordship ingeniously replied, that Samuel was like a ninepin, little at both ends, but great in the middle.

This golden mean redeemed Butler. He was not always little-not always "at both ends," semper in extremis. But poets and philosophers of almost equal renown have been denied, by associates and compotators, the redeeming point of any such middle passage.

When Leslie, the painter, was at Ayr, all enthusiasm about Burns, he came across an old man who said he had often had a gill of whisky with Rab. "What a delightful companion Burns must have been," exclaimed Mr. Leslie. "Oh, not at all," the old man replied; "he was a silly chiel; but his brother Gilbert was quite a gentleman." Before we make much of this auld body's testimonial, we should like to know (but indeed inferentially do know) what sort of chiel he was, his ain sel. Quite capable, no doubt, of tossing off glass for glass, or gill for gill, with Rab the poet; but less so, possibly, of taking his mental measure, with that poor metrical ell-wand of his own.

It is likely enough that there might be found, here and there, those of low estate, to whom Scott condescended, in that genial, uncondescending way of his, who would similarly disparage Sir Walter's colloquial claims. And what are we to say of him, in his real character, in this respect? Was Sir Walter the sort of man you might correctly predicate from your study of his books? Did the author personally answer to his books; or was he, like so many, of his craft, in sheer and startling contrast with them?

Suppose we take his own statement of the case, made early in life. Writing to Miss Seward, about the possible prospect of visiting her at Lichfield, the author of the Lay of the Last Minstrel says: "You would expect to see a person who had dedicated himself much to literary pursuits, and you would find me a rattle-sculled half-lawyer, half-sportsman, through whose head a regiment of horse has been exercising since he was five years old; half-educated -half crazy, as his friends sometimes tell him; halfeverything, but entirely Miss Seward's much obliged, affectionate, and faithful servant, Walter Scott." Altogether a man to endorse Mr. Emerson's charge against the "too great fineness, effeminacy, and melancholy" of modern literature, as attributable to the enervated and sickly habits of the literary class; and to agree with the rider to that proposition: Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the bookmaker abler and better, and not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all that he has written. Sir Walter used himself to say that, as for poets,

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