ODOHERTY. Sir Jamie again. "Her eldest son (George,) afterwards second Lord Hervey." There was John, FIRST Lord Hervey, afterwards created Earl of Bristol. Carr, SECOND Lord Hervey, his eldest son. John, THIRD Lord Hervey, his second son; consequently Lady Hervey's son, George, was the FOURTH Lord Her vey. Well hit again, Tim. At it again, boys. Sir James! To which again Timotheus. These four Lords Hervey did really exist, and yet the editor of Lady Suffolk's Letters is right, and the critic egregiously wrong. John, first Lord Hervey, so created in 1703, was created Earl of Bristol in 1714. His eldest son, Carr, was only a commoner, called Lord Hervey by courtesy. So was his second son John for many years; but in 1733, the latter was created a peer, (see Coxe,) by the title of Lord Hervey, and on his death, (old Lord Bristol being still alive,) his son George became the second peer of the creation of 1733, and on Lord Bristol's death, he became also the second peer of the creation of 1703. So that the critic is doubly wrong; and without any excuse; for all these facts may be gathered from the editor's notes, as well as from the peerages. NORTH. ODOHERTY. "Leonel, seventh Earl, and first Duke of Dorset, died in 1765.”—For 1765, read 1763! Round fourth! Southside!!! The Duke of Dorset died 9th October, 1765. See London Magazine, p. 598, and Gentleman's Magazine, p. 491. ODOHERTY. Enough, enough, man; such errors and such corrections are in themselves wholly inconsiderable, and not worth the notice of a pipe-stapple. It was ridiculous enough to see a solemn jackass set about such amendments; but to find that his grave amendments are, in fact, flagrant blunders, is as comical as anything in Mathews's American judge. But we have other fish to try. Just put Timothy into my portfolio, and see what comes to hand next. ODOHERTY. "Remains of Robert Bloomfield." Ay, poor fellow! there was one genuine poet, though of the lowly breed. NORTH, He was so indeed, Odoherty. I thought that book would be found in the box; for I had a letter not long ago mentioning the thing from his family. They sent me, by the way, most of the proof-sheets of the book, and a specimen of his hand-writing. Should you like to see it? ODOHERTY. Not I; give it to D'Israeli. He, you recollect, is one, not of the Bumpologists, but of the Fistologists; he will take it quite as a compliment. NORTH. I dare say they have sent him another letter and specimen of the same cut already. You must table your coin on this occasion, ODoherty. Bloomfield, from no fault of his own, has died poor, and left a worthy and amiable family in rather a dependent condition. You must take a few copies of the Remains at all events. ODOHERTY. Why, as neither you nor I have any young ladies to put to school, I don't know in what other way we can do anything for Bloomfield's daughters. Well, put me down, editor. NORTH. I will, sir; but there is no school in the case. Miss Hannah Bloomfield, indeed, wishes to have a situation as a musical teacher in some respectable family, and as she is evidently, from what appears in these very volumes, possessed of very considerable musical taste and skill, I trust the worthy daughter of such a man will not be long in getting the establishment she wishes. The whole family have been brought up, I well know, in the most exemplary manner; as indeed what else could anybody expect from the paternal solicitude of a man whose native strength of mind kept him at all times superior to the manifold temptations with which his lot naturally surrounded him, and who, in every line he ever wrote, shewed himself the friend of virtue? Sir, we have had but few real poets from this class of people; and, alas! fewer still, who, like Bloomfield, adhered steadily to the virtuous feelings of their lowly youth, when circumstances had introduced him to the dazzle and bustle of the upper world. I honour the memory of Robert Bloomfield. ODOHERTY. Yes, he was always one of your favourites. I see they have printed here your pretty verses on his death-this is right, too-and some verses of Montgomery's also, which I now recollect to have seen somewhere before. NORTH. In the Sheffield Iris, probably-or Alaric Watts' Leeds Intelligencerwhich, by the way, is a paper of very high merit in a literary point of view; indeed the best of all the Literary Gazettes. ODOHERTY. Literary Gazettes!-What a rumpus all that fry have been keeping up about Miss Landon's poetry-the Improvisatrice, I mean. NORTH. Why, I always thought you had been one of her greatest admirers, Odoherty. Was it not you that told me she was so very handsome?—A perfect beauty, I think you said. ODOHERTY. And I said truly. She is one of the sweetest little girls in the world, and her book is one of the sweetest little books in the world; but Jerdan's extravagant trumpetting has quite sickened everybody; and our friend Alaric has been doing rather too much in the same fashion. This sort of stuff plays the devil with any book. Sappho! and Corinna, forsooth! Proper humbug! NORTH. I confess you are speaking pretty nearly my own sentiments. I ran over the book and I really could see nothing of the originality, vigour, and so forth, they all chatter about. Very elegant, flowing verses they are-but all made up of Moore and Byron. ODOHERTY. Nay, nay, when you look over the Improvisatrice again, I am sure you will retract this. You know very well that I am no great believer in female ge nius; but nevertheless, there is a certain feminine elegance about the voluptuousness of this book, which, to a certain extent, marks it with an individual character of its own. NORTH. I won't allow you to review this book, my dear Standard-bearer for I perceive you are half in love with the damsel concerned; and under such circumstances, a cool and dispassionate estimate is what nobody could be expected to give-least of all you, you red-hot monster of Munster. No abuse, my old Bully-rock. ODOHERTY. NORTH. Nay, 'tis you that must be called Bully-Rock, now-for I suppose you acknowledge the " Munster Farmer" now to be but another of your aliases-I knew you at the first page, man. No drawing of straws before so old a cat. ६ ODOHERTY. The book is mine, sir. I need keep no secrets from you. Gad-a-mercy! NORTH. I now for the first time begin to suspect that you had no thing at all to do with it. ODOHERTY. Even as you please, most worshipful. These trifles do not affect me or my equanimity. NORTH. Impenetrable, imperturbable brazen face!-But get on, man. ODOHERTY. My eye! here's Gillray Redivivus. Here's the first number of the reprint of his caricatures-you must put on your spectacles now, Mr Christopher. NORTH. Ah! and that I will, my hearty. Well, this was really well thought on. What a pity that these things should have been sinking into the great gulph! Ha! ha! the old paper-money concerns once more! Here's Sherry ipsissimus. "Don't take the notes, John Bull; nobody takes notes now-a-days; they won't even take mine!" How good this view of the fine old sinner's phiz is— and Charlie, too, with his cockade tricolor! Well, these days are over. ODOHERTY. What a capital Pitt!-The pen behind the ear, and all !-And John Bull, too-why, Liston never sported a better grin. Turn over-ay, ay, this will do. NORTH. "The Broad-bottomites getting into the grand costume !"-Long live the immortal memory of 1806. Glorious Charlie! in what a pother you are shaving!-Illustrious Lansdowne! in what majesty dost thou strut!-Profound Ego! what gravity is in thy self-adoration !-Oh dear! oh dear!-That face of Lord Henry Petty and that toe-they are enough to kill a horse! ODOHERTY. This grand one of old George, with Boney on his hand,-how vividly it recalls to my memory the laughter of the years that were! Hang it! if I were to live a hundred years, I should never see any new thing to affect me in the same manner. How intensely familiar we all were made with the honest, open, well-larded countenance, of Georgius Tertius! What a solemn, fatherly suavity, in his goggling eyes! How reverend his bob-major! how grand his blue ribbon! how ample his paunch! What a sweet in-falling of the chin, honest old Cock! NORTH. Excellent monarch! Pater patriæ truly, if ever there was one. Here, again, is a very worthy one; one of Gillray's very best things, Odoherty. Behold Nap, en gingerbread baker, thrusting a new batch of pie-crust kings into his oven. Ye glorious Josephs, Jeromes, Louises! where are ye all now ?-quite chopfallen!-Bavaria! Wirtemberg! Baden!-Ah! Morgan, what queer times these were, my man! ODOHERTY. Indeed they were, old Royster ; and may they that wish, for the like of them find the short cut to Gehenna, say I.-We have no political caricaturist now-a-days, North. NORTH. Why, George Cruikshank does many things better; and yet it is impossible to deny great merit to many of his things about the time of the Queen's row. Alderman Wood was quite a hero for the pencil, and her Majesty was such a heroine Of late he, or whoever feeds the shop-windows, has fallen off sadly. The whole batch of the Battier concerns was deplorably stupid, and as for the Windsor-Park sketches, saw ye ever such a leaden, laborious dulness of repetition? ODOHERTY. Pooh! they're very well fitted for the time. Party spirit is very cool at present, and you would not have the party caricatures to be very pointed when that is the case. No, no, the public are taken up with other things, North. NORTH. True, Morgan; and, moreover, the great circulation lately of exquisite engravings of scenery among us shews decidedly a new and more polished sort of taste spreading among the people. Why, you can't go into a print-shop nowa-days without seeing a whole swarm of new works coming out in numbers, any one leaf of which would have been looked on as a real wonder some dozen or ten years back. There's Hugh Williams's Greek engravings, now, havé you seen those? ODOHERTY. To be sure I have, and i'faith they are worthy of the drawings themselves, and that is compliment enough. Gad! what a fine thing we should have thought it, when we were young lads at our classics, to be able to get such divine views of all the scenes the old ones said and sung about, for such a mere trifle of money. The engraving of the Tombs of Platea! Well, I really had no notion that the effect of that most original and undescribable work of art could have been so nearly given in black and white, to say nothing of the great reduction of scale. NORTH. There are many others of the series not a whit less interesting. One, of the Temple of Jupiter Panthellenius in Egina, particularly struck me-and Thebes! faith, I believe, that is, after all, the very chef-d'œuvre. But, perhaps, you don't know, Odoherty, what is one of my chiefest delights when I look over this work; and that is neither more nor less than this, sir, that Williams has had all his engravings done by native artists, and young, very young ones mostly. Sir, these things may shew themselves by the side of the very best that London can produce. The fortunes of Horsburgh and Miller are made; for, as to James Stewart, he, you know, was up enough long before this job. His engraving of Allan's last picture is a grand thing. I never saw an artist who shewed greater tact in preserving the minutiæ of his painter's peculiar touches. ODOHERTY. Stewart is a fine handy lad, and a very modest one too. So good luck to him,—and here's a bumper to Williams. NORTH. Welchman though he be, he is an honour to Scotia-here he goes. His Views of Athens will live as long as her memory. "Shall I unmoved behold the hallow'd scene And glides with glassy foot o'er yon melodious wave !”— Byron !-hum! ODOHERTY. NORTH. Come, come, none of your sneers. Hugh Williams' prints are certainly the best illustrations any one can bind up with Byron's poems. Others give you views, caricatures, (call them as you will,) of his personages, more or less happy, but this is nothing. Williams has been, like the poet, inspired by the sky, the mountains, the ruins of Greece, and the kindred stamp of their inspiration looks you in the face whichever way you turn among their works. ODOHERTY. I was glad to see the prints were so small, for this was the purpose I at once thought of turning them to. NORTH. Upon the same principle I take Thomson of Duddingstone's Fast-Castle to be the finest and most satisfactory accompaniment for the Story of Lammermoor-and Nasmyth's Old Prison of Edinburgh stands ditto, ditto, for the Heart of Mid-Lothian. ODOHERTY. I wish Williams would give us a series of his Italian things too-and particularly his Sicilian ones-for Agrigentum and Syracuse are, after all, less known to most people than any other old places of anything like the same in teresting character. NORTH. People may rail about boyish tastes, and what not, as long as they have a mind. I confess I like a book all the better for its being illustrated. Perhaps 'tis my imagination cooling, Ensign; but there, for example, was Basil Hall's book about South America: I confess I would fain have had a few cuts of his San Martins, O'Higginses, and the rest of them. ODOHERTY. And I own I should have liked to see what sort of a figure old Cochrane cuts in his outlandish riggery. He was a rum one enough in that long blue tog, and low-browed, broad-brimmed castor, as we used to see him lounging about town. NORTH. By some accident I never saw Lord Cochrane in my life. He is a noble fellow-mad, of course-but that's what he can't help. ODOHERTY. Was it madness that dished him? NORTH. Certainly; the only thing that dished him was the denying of the hoax, in the way he did, in the House of Commons. Had he stood firm on his feet, and said what was God's truth, that he was a sailor, and not a moral philosopher; and that if he had acted wrong, his error consisted merely in doing cleverly and successfully what thousands both of the most holy saints, and the most honourable sinners in the land, were trying to do every day; if he had stood up with a bold face, and spoken plain common sense after this fashion, I should like to know who would seriously have thought a pin the worse of him, at least for more than a week or two. Not I, for one. But the truth is, that every one thing he ever did in this country after he began to think himself a politician, was a perfect proof of madness. ODOHERTY. Well, 'tis lucky he has got into a walk, where, what you are pleased to call madness, does better than all the wisdom in the world would do. Will he ever come home again, think ye? NORTH. I don't know. Many queer stories are going about. Some say he has done things about the English shipping that would land him inextricably in lawsuits if he shewed his nose here. Others, again, maintain that he has arranged all these concerns of late, and that it would be nothing strange if he should be seen parading Pall-Mall within this twelvemonth. For my part, I know nothing of the matter. Captain Hall could tell, no doubt. ODOHERTY. Aye, aye; but Hall was a great deal too knowing to tell half what he knew about some of those folks in his book. |