LION. Well, let me but sup, Just to send me to sleep, On that plump-visaged dangler Who looks like a sheep. He's fat, full, and fifty, He'll never be miss'd; Besides, he'll disburden The Queen's civil list. LIONESS. Oh Africa! land of my heart, And suppers was thieved; Where I lived on the choicest Of fat and of lean; Now swallow'd a bullock, Now bolted a queen. LION. Or see that thin marquis Who talks nonsense for bread; With his purse like his heart, And his heart like his head. LIONESS. I'll pluck in with my paw Will wish to bring back, From the pit of my stomach, My little Lord Jack. LION. Yes, my dear, I'm quite wrong, And you're always quite right, Yet those girls are so rosy, Their shoulders so white, That I feel my heart meltingNow, don't pull my ears— I've seen no such skins Since I lunch'd in Algiers. LIONESS. Why, you villain! What! flirting? Pray look at these claws : Lie down in your den, Or I'll soon give you cause. Have done with your nonsense; Grand Chorus of Lions, Tigers, and And now, please your Majesty, Such feats as throw all. Or the Premier himself; A meal that might almost The Bar's always a bore. And our talons-and then You'll have only to whistle us Back to our den. ARETINO. THE LATE JAMES SMITH. SOCIAL qualities must be dear to mankind from the general regret which is felt when any one distinguished for them leaves the world. We can part with nine-tenths of what are called public men, with a very moderate sense of their loss to the community. If the whole Treasury Bench were decimated to-morrow, we question if a tear the more would be shed in the circuit of the globe. We equally question whether a very considerable mortality at the bar would occasion a national mourning; and we are fully convinced that many individuals who, from bustling and brawling in "the service of the public and themselves," have acquired a habit of thinking that the world could by no means go on without them, would, in twenty-four hours, be nowhere found recorded but in the parish register. But this was not the case with him whose name heads these pages. There were few men mixing in general society by whom he was not known, and fewer still by whom his easy pleasantry, his gentlemanly manners, and his unwearied good-humour, were not noticed as they deserved. James Smith was a wit; yet we never remember to have heard of his falling into the grand error of wits-sarcasm. Obviously awake to the follies round him, he was never severe; nor did he ever attempt to reinforce his merriment by offences to propriety in any form. He never urged conversation, and never declined it. He was always ready with his remark or his repartee; but the remark was never invidious, and the repartee never carried any personal sting. To those who have had many opportunities of meeting professed wits, and who have found them often the most uncertain, captious, and peevish of mankind, the pleasantry of James Smith always formed a happy exception. He was among the best, because the safest and easiest, conversationist whom we ever remember to have seen. The talent of conversation is not quite so simple a thing as it is generally conceived. Even in the extensive and varied circle of London society, there have not been half-adozen in the last half-century, who had established any kind of name in this rather private path to renown. A man may have considerable knowledge, may have seen a great deal of the world, and may, besides, know well the ambition of figuring in the conversational world, without the talents of a good conversationist. The late Sir James Mackintosh had all thesehe had fluency of speech, and now and then brilliancy of conception. But he was given to talking over much-he often prosed alarmingly; his anecdotes were from hacks, his sentences had the formality, with but seldom the point of Johnson, and his recitations of verse, which were frequent and generally of merciless length, showed that he had taken the trouble of preparing his memory for the occasion, and that he was determined not to have his trouble thrown away. "Conversation Sharpe," as he was called, was amusing and clever. But he repeated himself. Novelty is essential, and his was soon exhausted. The third time of meeting him was fatal to his charms. Rogers, the poet of Memory, has abundance of anecdote: but it lies chiefly among the dead and gone. The mention of Sheridan acts upon him with the effect of a match put to a firework. The composition goes off in a long succession of explosions, all of the bluest kind, until every ear is tired, and then the feu d'artifice, in every sense, drops dead to the ground, and every one flies from the racket case. Yet he has mixed a good deal in society; not the best, however; for it has been chiefly with the set gathered round the table of Holland House, where people are assembled for the declared purpose of talk, a process which makes every thing as formal as a parade in St James's Park, as sets men minuet-dancing in odes, epodes, and " the last new tragedy," and of course reduces all conversation to the dregs of an article in the Edinburgh Review. What must be, for instance, the dying state of a conversation where the noble host has called on every body round the table to pull pencil and paper from his pocket, and write down on the spot the names of the ten most amusing books that he had ever read! And all those grown children have done the deed accordingly. A game at forfeits would have been rational, and a game at blind man's buff profitable, to those sexagenarian diversions. Jekyll was a good converser, for he had wit; though, as no man is perfect, his wit was often pun, and there are some specimens of it on record which are not to be mentioned to "ears polite." But the bar had made him too professional. He talked too much of old judges and their senili ties; and though always diverting, grew more barristerial, until he grew little more than a relic of himself, and disappeared into his nightgown and slippers, and was no more for this world. Canning was lively; but he had not a fund of talk for all days. He had high spirits, but was uncertain; and there were times when, like Hamlet, he seemed to think the earth flat, stale, and unprofitable," and the sky a collection of pestilent vapours. The fluctuations of his public career might have, in some degree, accounted for this; for admirable as his House of Commons talents were, he never felt himself recognised as one of the natural possessors of power. His obscure origin and narrow income, al ways placed him in the light of an adventurer before the very courteous, but very arrogant, aristocracy of England. If he got high office, it was always regarded by them as a piece of luck, pretty much like the luck of an adventurer who goes into a gaminghouse with a shilling in his pocket, and comes out with a thousand pounds. It was all accounted for by the turn of the die. No man in public life was so often thrown off and thrown on. Even his final possession of the highest office, produced only a gaze of astonishment from his own party, an instant secession of every man of rank among them, and that explosion of aristocratic scorn, which blew him over, singed and crippled as be was, into the ranks of the Whigs, who nursed his bruises until they smothered him. Want of birth may be compensated by great fortune, want of fortune by high birth; but want of both is fatal to ministerial eminence in England. But even in the midst of society, Canning was often silent, sometimes singularly so; melancholy, distract, and embarrassed; though, at other times, lively, innocent, and entertaining. Low spirits killed him at last, and robbed the country of an elegant, cultivated, and not ill-disposed public mind. Burke's reputation belongs to the last century. Johnson said of him that he was always ready for talk, that he was never humdrum, that he spoke from the fulness of his mind." All excellent preparations, but still wanting the finish of conversation. His fault was, that he "declaimed " in society; he was rapid, abrupt, and altogether too "political" for a master of conversation; he frequently threw out fine ideas, but he was seldom happy in their expression. His excellence was with the pen in his hand. He then had time to contrast, arrange, and polish the beauty of his powerful conceptions. Of all the thinkers of England, living or dead, he was the most vivid, various, and imaginative. But this was the product of his desk; there he carried his diamonds in the rough, and shaped and set them, until he offered them to the world flashing and sparkling, as no dealer in intellectual brilliants had ever exhibited them before. But Burke has left few conversational remembrances distinguished for either happiness or pungency, for easy elegance or pointed splendour. Curran, the Irish barrister, had perhaps the highest conversational ability of any man of his day. He certainly had astonishing wit. There are more showy conceptions of Curran on record, than of any other man of his time or ours, and the period was remarkable for the animation and cultivated elegance of its society. Devonshire House and the Prince's table were the centres round which perpetual pleasantry gathered; where a perpetual rivalry of wit was sustained; and where political disappointments forced the associates to look for their resources in sportive contempt and showy ridicule. As men are forced by the gloom and tempest without, to shut their doors, light candles, and forget the inclemency of the night in double comfort and gaiety within-in those assemblages, all men learned to adopt the tone, if they could not seize the spirit, of the hour. Charles Fox became a wit for the time, and wrote epigrams; Fitzpatrick turned poet, and wrote sentimental songs; Hare, Harding, Courtenay, and a crowd of those inferior names which float on the surface of gay society, and sink after the agitation of the day has passed those motes in the sunshine, of whose existence no one would have dreamed but for the casual entrance of the beam, were all busy with their little lively contributions ; and the showy and good-natured Duchess, and the not less showy and good-natured Prince, received all like divinities, equally welcoming the incense streaming from golden wine, and the fragrance of the flower. Among orators, the professions, and public men in a body, there are now no conversationists of any repute. We live in degenerate days; and for our consolation, must only believe that we have found some other and better gifts in place of the old, or revert in our despair to the blue stocking of Lydia White, and those vigorous tea-givers, the Misses Berry. Lady Cork, too, rests at last. She gathers the flies of fashionable talk round her creamjug no more; she no longer lights her wax chandelier to bring fluttering round it all the bookworms, transformed into moths. She has given, for the last time in a hundred successive years, the funeral baked-meats of " dear Dr Goldsmith, and gay Mr Garrick, whose performance in a tiewig, and the full uniform of a colonel of the guards, scarlet faced with blue, she always thought the most elegant thing in the world." The oldest Sappho on earth, or under it, her ladyship gives neither dinner nor supper more; and men of wit and many idle hours walk about town, not knowing where to deposit either the one or the other-peace be to her teakettle, her album, and her tongue! The poets have not succeeded much as conversationists. They are generally heavy, decorous, and silent men, not often thinking in company, yet not the more lively for their want of thought. In general, the only way to rouse a coterie of poets, is to start the topic of some furious Quarterly or Scotch review of somebody or other. The effect is sometimes like dropping a shell, with the fusee burning, into a group of sleeping soldiers -every man who has any legs to take care of, is on them at the instant; but the effect sometimes, too, goes the same length in both instances, and the parties run away. The late William Sotheby was a favourite every where. He was a man of fortune, without any of the airs belonging to the "landed interest"a man of general literature, without pedantry-and a poet, too, without pressing his poetry on any one, unless after a considerable term of acquaintance. This rendered his old friendship somewhat formidable; but it was seldom inflicted under an intercourse of four or five years; and by that time his bosom friends were sufficiently on their guard to escape, by very weak eyes, an habitual headache, an immediate engagement out of town, or some other ingenious expedient found effectual in previous cases of difficulty. Their escapes were, now and then, narrow enough. "Take that tragedy home with you, and let me know your opinion of it as an old friend and an excellent critic, as I know you to be," said an author to his visiter. The friend put it in his pocket. On their next meet ing, "Have you read my tragedy? and what do you think of it? I ask your candid opinion," said the author. "The fact is, I have not read it yet, but intend to take the first opportunity," said the old friend. "Then lose no time, I beg; for if you think that it will answer for either the press or the stage, I have five more ready, of which you shall have the first reading, in preference to any man in England," said the author. The old friend next day discovered that he had particular business at Paris or the Antipodes, and set off by the mail, returning the tragedy with a thousand regrets for its non-perusal. We shall not say to whom all this happened; but from the moment that the story got wind, the word tragedy was enough to put all the old friends of the prolific author to flight, and he was forced to wait for the readers of another generation. Scott was a pleasant converser ; easy, affable, and well furnished. In Scotland he must have been peculiarly pleasing, from his nationality of topic. But England is not national; its taste abjures locality; and the moment that an Irishman begins to tell Irish stories, or a Scotchman talks of either Highlands or Lowlands, they listen to him only as they would listen to a Welshman talking of Mertin or Owen Glendower. But Scott was always a favourite, from his natural civility and unwearied good humour. The late Lord Dudley was made to be a memorable man; but he was spoiled at nurse. From boyhood, he was what the provincials call cracked. He was not altogether mad, at least in the beginning of his career; but there were crevices in his cerebellum, through which external things streamed, like the street lamps through the cracks in shutters, strongly confusing the lights within. He had mingled in all the odd society of all the countries of Europe-a sort of voluntary exile in all the period of his youth, and picking up all odd kinds of knowledge, of which he never made the least use; something in the style of those geologist ladies and gentlemen who ramble about Derbyshire, hammer in hand, filling their reticules and pockets with fragments of mica and lime, and learning just enough to chatter of primary and secondary formations, till all the world runs away from them and the topic together. He lived upon a guinea aday, or perhaps a shilling; and after this preparation for the life of an English legislator, returned to take upon himself the duties of a peerage, a great English landlord, and an estate of £75,000 a-year. To accumulate evil on evil, his friend Canning induced him to load his brain with the burden of office; and this crazy and curious hypochondriac came forth to mankind as secretary for foreign affairs. But the farce was too soon a tragedy. Poor Dudley grew wild, talked, did, and dreamed all kinds of eccentricities; threw up office-threw up the world after it; and, after holding imaginary conversation, often of the cleverest order, with Julius Cæsar and Jack the painter, with Cleopatra and Madame de Staël, with Semiramis and Lady Holland, he suddenly died, leaving a million of pounds sterling and lands unlimited to a cousin, and nothing to mankind. Vathek Beckford was a clever converser; but this was fifty years ago. He was then clever in every thing. The finest musician, the most general linguist, the most scientific connoisseur, and the most brilliant romance-writer of his day. He has since disappeared, abandoning the faculty of speech: he shut himself up for twenty years in the midst of a desert in Wiltshire, which he converted into a park and a palace. He has since abandoned the solitude, and gone to Bath, to prove that he despises mankind as much in the city as in the wilderness. He towers over the city of vapour-baths and scandal, exchanges civilities with nothing but his King Charles's spaniels, and wholly exercises the finest understanding of man in preventing the most acute senses in Europe from being annoyed by the sight of human beings, or the smell of dinners. For the latter purpose, he has his meals dressed in an opposite mansion; and for the latter he has built on his hill battlements lofty enough to defy any thing but an invasion of Titans. Coleridge was not a converser: he was a lecturer. His sentences were dissertations; his very metaphors had beginning, middle, and end; his divisions were as numerous, parenthetical, and positive as those of a preacher of the Moravian connexion; and in the briskest conversation he seemed never able to disengage himself from the idea, that it was his duty at once to enlighten and astound the whole living race of mankind, besides leaving a handsome legacy for all generations to come. He was an honest man, and without a stain on his reputation except the praises of the small gang of literaturists who constantly followed him as flies wing and cling round a corpulent alderman. He wrote good poetry in his youth; but muddled his Helicon with metaphysics as he fell into years. It is remarkable that his politics purified as his poetry grew thick. Beginning with proposals for throwing off the incumbrances of coat and pantaloons, and founding an original commonwealth in the western wilderness, he ended with Christian habiliments, a cottage at Highgate, and in honest devotion to Conservatism. But he was no conversationist. He declaimed; he harangued; he talked long and loftily; his reveries were of the pagan muthoi, of Mesmerism, of the Samothracian impostures, and the profundities of science lost to mankind in the burning of the Alexandrian library. His mind was like one of the obelisks of his favourite land-wild, odd, antique, |