Atlantic Monthly | Page 5

perpetual text, in preference to all other pulpit-topics, the remarkable resistance recorded in the 89th of Exodus [Genesis?],--dwelling, moreover, and dilating upon it,--then Parson W---- might be reasonably suspected of hypocrisy. But Parson W---- rarely diverteth into such line of argument, or toucheth it briefly. His ordinary topics are fetched from 'obedience to the powers that are,'--'submission to the civil magistrate in all commands that are not absolutely unlawful'; on which he can delight to expatiate with equal fervor and sincerity.
"Again. To despise a person is properly to look down upon him with none or the least possible emotion. But when Clementina, who has lately lost her lover, with bosom heaving, eyes flashing, and her whole frame in agitation, pronounces with a peculiar emphasis that she 'despises the fellow,' depend upon it that he is not quite so despicable in her eyes as she would have us imagine.
"One more instance. If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, _a truism_, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism; as to say, A good name is a proof of a man's estimation in the world. We seem to be saying something, when we say nothing. I was describing to F---- some knavish tricks of a mutual friend of ours. 'If he did so and so,' was the reply, 'he cannot be an honest man.' Here was a genuine truism, truth upon truth, inference and proposition identical,--or rather, a dictionary definition usurping the place of an inference."
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"We are ashamed at sight of a monkey,--somehow as we are shy of poor relations."
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"C---- imagined a Caledonian compartment in Hades, where there should be fire without sulphur."
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"Absurd images are sometimes irresistible. I will mention two. An elephant in a coach-office gravely coming to have his trunk booked;--a mermaid over a fish-kettle cooking her own tail."
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"It is the praise of Shakspeare, with reference to the playwriters, his contemporaries, that he has so few revolting characters. Yet be has one that is singularly mean and disagreeable,--the King in 'Hamlet.' Neither has he characters of insignificance, unless the phantom that stalks over the stage as Julius Caesar, in the play of that name, may be accounted one. Neither has he envious characters, excepting the short part of Don John, in 'Much Ado about Nothing.' Neither has he unentertaining characters, if we except Parolles, and the little that there is of the Clown, in 'All's Well that Ends Well.'"
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"It would settle the dispute as to whether Shakspeare intended Othello for a jealous character, to consider how differently we are affected towards him, and for Leontes in the 'Winter's Tale.' Leontes is that character. Othello's fault was simply credulity."
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"Is it possible that Shakspeare should never have read Homer, in Chapman's version at least? If he had read it, could he mean to travesty it in the parts of those big boobies, Ajax and Achilles? Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon are true to their parts in the 'Iliad '; they are gentlemen at least. Thersites, though unamusing, is fairly deducible from it. Troilus and Cressida are a fine graft upon it. But those two big bulks"--
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Disraeli wrote a book on the Quarrels of Authors. Somebody should write one on the Friendships of Literary Men. If such a work is ever written, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be honorably mentioned therein. For among all the friendships celebrated in tale or history there is none more admirable than that which existed between these two eminent men. The "golden thread that tied their hearts together" was never broken. Their friendship was never "chipt or diminished"; but the longer they lived, the stronger it grew. Death could not destroy it.
Lamb, after Coleridge's death, as if weary of "this green earth," as if not caring if "sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself," went out with life, willingly sought "Lavinian shores."
"Lamb," as Mr. John Foster says, in his beautiful tribute to his memory, "never fairly recovered the death of Coleridge. He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of