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GOLDSMITH'S "SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER."

Goldsmith, during the first performance of this comedy, walked all the time in St. James' Park in great uneasiness. Finally, when he thought that it must be over, hastening to the theatre, hisses assailed his ears as he entered the green-room. Asking in eager alarm of Colman the cause--"Pshaw, pshaw!" said Colman, "don't be afraid of squibs, when we have been sitting on a barrel of gunpowder for two hours." The comedy had completely triumphed--the audience were only hissing the after farce. Goldsmith had some difficulty in getting the piece on the stage, as appears from the following letter to Colman:--"I entreat you'll relieve me from that state of suspense in which I have been kept for a long time. Whatever objections you have made, or shall make, to my play, I will endeavour to remove, and not argue about them. To bring in any new judges either of its merits or faults, I can never submit to. Upon a former occasion, when my other play was before Mr. Garrick, he offered to bring me before Mr. Whitehead's tribunal, but I refused the proposal with indignation. I hope I shall not experience as hard treatment from you, as from him. I have, as you know, a large sum of money to make up shortly; by accepting my play, I can readily satisfy my creditor that way; at any rate, I must look about to some certainty to be prepared. For God's sake take the play, and let us make the best of it; and let me have the same measure at least which you have given as bad plays as mine."

SILENCE NOT ALWAYS WISDOM.

Coleridge once dined in company with a person who listened to him, and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and Coleridge thought him intelligent. At length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and the listener had no sooner seen them than he burst forth, "Them's the jockeys for me!" Coleridge adds: "I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head."

Coleridge was very luminous in conversation, and invariably commanded listeners; yet the old lady rated his talent very lowly, when she declared she had no patience with a man who would have all the talk to himself.

DR. CHALMERS IN LONDON.

ROMILLY AND BROUGHAM.

PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS.

DEATH OF SIR CHARLES BELL.

This distinguished surgeon died suddenly on April 29, 1842, at Hallow Park, near Worcester, while on his way to Malvern. He was out sketching on the 28th, being particularly pleased with the village church, and some fine trees which are beside it; observing that he should like to repose there when he was gone. Just four days after this sentiment had been expressed, his mortal remains were accordingly deposited beside the rustic graves which had attracted his notice, and so recently occupied his pencil. There is a painful admonition in this fulfilment.

CLASSIC PUN.

POETRY OF THE SEA.

Campbell was a great lover of submarine prospects. "Often in my boyhood," says the poet, "when the day has been bright and the sea transparent, I have sat by the hour on a Highland rock admiring the golden sands, the emerald weeds, and the silver shells at the bottom of the bay beneath, till, dreaming about the grottoes of the Nereids, I would not have exchanged my pleasure for that of a connoisseur poring over a landscape by Claude or Poussin. Enchanting nature! thy beauty is not only in heaven and earth, but in the waters under our feet. How magnificent a medium of vision is the pellucid sea! Is it not like poetry, that embellishes every object that we contemplate?"

"FELON LITERATURE."

The valentine itself reminds one of Churchill's muse; and it needs no finger to tell where its withering satire is pointed:--

"THE LITERARY GENTLEMAN.

"MY VALENTINE."

DEATH BED REVELATIONS.

Men before they die see and comprehend enigmas hidden from them before. The greatest poet, and one of the noblest thinkers of the last age, said on his death-bed:--"Many things obscure to me before, now clear up and become visible."

STAMMERING WIT.

ORIGIN OF BOTTLED ALE.

Alexander Newell, Dean of St. Paul's, and Master of Westminster School, in the reign of Queen Mary, was an excellent angler. But Fuller says, while Newell was catching of fishes, Bishop Bonner was catching of Newell, and would certainly have sent him to the shambles, had not a good London merchant conveyed him away upon the seas. Newell was fishing upon the banks of the Thames when he received the first intimation of his danger, which was so pressing, that he dared not go back to his own house to make any preparation for his flight. Like an honest angler, he had taken with him provisions for the day; and when, in the first year of England's deliverance, he returned to his country, and to his own haunts, he remembered that on the day of his flight he had left a bottle of beer in a safe place on the bank: there he looked for it, and "found it no bottle, but a gun--such the sound at the opening thereof; and this is believed to be the original of bottled ale in England."

BAD'S THE BEST.

LUDICROUS ESTIMATE OF MR. CANNING.

The Rev. Sydney Smith compares Mr. Canning in office to a fly in amber: "nobody cares about the fly: the only question is, how the devil did it get there?" "Nor do I," continues Smith, "attack him for the love of glory, but from the love of utility, as a burgomaster hunts a rat in a Dutch dyke, for fear it should flood a province. When he is jocular, he is strong; when he is serious, he is like Samson in a wig. Call him a legislator, a reasoner, and the conductor of the affairs of a great nation, and it seems to me as absurd as if a butterfly were to teach bees to make honey. That he was an extraordinary writer of small poetry, and a diner-out of the highest lustre, I do most readily admit. After George Selwyn, and perhaps Tickell, there has been no such man for the last half-century."

Mrs. Murray Keith, a venerable Scotch lady, from whom Sir Walter Scott derived many of the traditionary stories and anecdotes wrought up in his novels, taxed him one day with the authorship, which he, as usual, stoutly denied. "What!" exclaimed the old lady, "d'ye think I dinna ken my ain groats among other folk's kail?"

QUID PRO QUO.

HOPE'S "ANASTASIUS."

SMART REPARTEE.

COLTON'S "LACON."

This remarkable book was written upon covers of letters and scraps of paper of such description as was nearest at hand; the greater part at a house in Princes-street, Soho. Colton's lodging was a penuriously-furnished second-floor, and upon a rough deal table, with a stumpy pen, our author wrote.

BUNYAN'S COPY OF "THE BOOK OF MARTYRS."

Here is one of the Tinker's tetrasticks, penned in the margin, beside the account of Gardiner's death:--

"The blood, the blood that he did shed Is falling one his one head; And dredfull it is for to see The beginers of his misere."

One of the signatures bears the date of 1662; but the verses must undoubtedly have been some years earlier, before the publication of his first tract. These curious inscriptions must have been Bunyan's first attempts in verse: he had, no doubt, found difficulty enough in tinkering them to make him proud of his work when it was done; otherwise, he would not have written them in a book which was the most valuable of all his goods and chattels. In later days, he seems to have taken this book for his art of poetry. His verses are something below the pitch of Sternhold and Hopkins. But if he learnt there to make bad verses, he entered fully into the spirit of its better parts, and received that spirit into as resolute a heart as ever beat in a martyr's bosom.

Southey's Life of John Bunyan.

LITERARY LOCALITIES.

Leigh Hunt pleasantly says:--"I can no more pass through Westminster, without thinking of Milton; or the Borough, without thinking of Chaucer and Shakspeare; or Gray's Inn, without calling Bacon to mind; or Bloomsbury-square, without Steele and Akenside; than I can prefer brick and mortar to wit and poetry, or not see a beauty upon it beyond architecture in the splendour of the recollection. I once had duties to perform which kept me out late at night, and severely taxed my health and spirits. My path lay through a neighbourhood in which Dryden lived, and though nothing could be more common-place, and I used to be tired to the heart and soul of me, I never hesitated to go a little out of the way, purely that I might pass through Gerard-street, and so give myself the shadow of a pleasant thought."

CREED OF LORD BOLINGBROKE.

Lord Brougham says:--"The dreadful malady under which Bolingbroke long lingered, and at length sunk--a cancer in the face--he bore with exemplary fortitude, a fortitude drawn from the natural resources of his vigorous mind, and unhappily not aided by the consolations of any religion; for, having early cast off the belief in revelation, he had substituted in its stead a dark and gloomy naturalism, which even rejected those glimmerings of hope as to futurity not untasted by the wiser of the heathens."

Lord Chesterfield, in one of his letters, which has been published by Earl Stanhope, says that Bolingbroke only doubted, and by no means rejected, a future state.

BUNYAN'S PREACHING.

HONE'S "EVERY-DAY BOOK."

This popular work was commenced by its author after he had renounced political satire for the more peaceful study of the antiquities of our country. The publication was issued in weekly sheets, and extended through two years, 1824 and 1825. It was very successful, the weekly sale being from 20,000 to 30,000 copies.

BUNYAN'S ESCAPES.

DROLLERY SPONTANEOUS.

ORIGIN OF COWPER'S "JOHN GILPIN."

It happened one afternoon, in those years when Cowper's accomplished friend, Lady Austen, made a part of his little evening circle, that she observed him sinking into increased dejection; it was her custom, on these occasions, to try all the resources of her sprightly powers for his immediate relief. She told him the story of John Gilpin, , to dissipate the gloom of the passing hour. Its effects on the fancy of Cowper had the air of enchantment. He informed her the next morning that convulsions of laughter, brought on by his recollection of her story, had kept him waking during the greatest part of the night! and that he had turned it into a ballad. So arose the pleasant poem of John Gilpin. To Lady Austen's suggestion, also, we are indebted for the poem of "the Task."

Sir E. B. Lytton, in the memoir which he prefixed to the collected works of Laman Blanchard, draws the following affecting picture of that author's position, after he had parted from an engagement upon a popular newspaper:--

"For the author there is nothing but his pen, till that and life are worn to the stump: and then, with good fortune, perhaps on his death-bed he receives a pension--and equals, it may be, for a few months, the income of a retired butler! And, so on the sudden loss of the situation in which he had frittered away his higher and more delicate genius, in all the drudgery that a party exacts from its defender of the press, Laman Blanchard was thrown again upon the world, to shift as he might and subsist as he could. His practice in periodical writing was now considerable; his versatility was extreme. He was marked by publishers and editors as a useful contributor, and so his livelihood was secure. From a variety of sources thus he contrived, by constant waste of intellect and strength, to eke out his income, and insinuate rather than force his place among his contemporary penmen. And uncomplainingly, and with patient industry, he toiled on, seeming farther and farther off from the happy leisure, in which 'the something to verify promise was to be completed.' No time had he for profound reading, for lengthened works, for the mature development of the conceptions of a charming fancy. He had given hostages to fortune. He had a wife and four children, and no income but that which he made from week to week. The grist must be ground, and the wheel revolve. All the struggle, all the toils, all the weariness of brain, nerve, and head, which a man undergoes in his career, are imperceptible even to his friends--almost to himself; he has no time to be ill, to be fatigued; his spirit has no holiday; it is all school-work. And thus, generally, we find in such men that the break up of the constitution seems sudden and unlooked-for. The causes of disease and decay have been long laid; but they are smothered beneath the lively appearances of constrained industry and forced excitement."

"Or hail at once the patron and the pile Of vice and folly, Greville and Argyle."

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