DEAR Manning,—You needed not imagine any apology necessary. Your fine hare and fine birds (which just now are dangling by our kitchen blaze) discourse most eloquent music in your justification. You just nicked my palate. For, with all due decorum and leave may it be spoken, my worship hath taken physic for his body to-day, and being low and puling, requireth to be pampered. Foh! how beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose! For you must know we extract a divine spirit of gravy from those materials which, duly compounded with a consistence of bread and cream (y’clept bread-sauce), each to each giving double grace, do mutually illustrate and set off (as skilful goldfoils to rare jewels) your partridge, pheasant, woodcock, snipe, teal, widgeon, and the other lesser daughters of the ark. My friendship, struggling with my carnal and fleshly prudence (which suggests that a bird a man is the proper allotment in such cases), yearneth sometimes to have thee here to pick a wing or so. I question if your Norfolk sauces match our London culinaric.
George Dyer has introduced me to the
table of an agreeable old gentleman, Dr.
Anderson, who gives hot legs of mutton and grape pies at his
sylvan lodge at Isleworth, where, in the middle of a street, he has shot up a
wall most preposterously before his small dwelling, which, with the
circumstance of his taking several panes of glass out of bedroom windows (for
air), causeth his neighbours to speculate strangely on the state of the good
man’s pericranicks. Plainly, he lives under the reputation of being
deranged. George does not mind this circumstance; he
rather likes him the better for it. The Doctor, in his pursuits, joins
agricultural to poetical science, and has set
George’s brains mad about the old Scotch
writers, Barbour, Douglas’s Æneid, Blind
Harry, &c. We returned home in a return postchaise (having
dined with the Doctor), and George kept wondering and
wondering, for eight or nine turnpike miles, what was the name, and striving to
recollect the name, of a poet anterior to Barbour. I
begged to know what was remaining of his works. “There is nothing extant of his works, Sir, but by all accounts he
seems to have been a fine genius!” This fine genius, without
anything to show for it or any title beyond George’s
courtesy, without even a name! and Barbour, and
Douglas, and Blind Harry, now are
the predominant sounds in George’s pia mater, and
their buzzings exclude politics, criticism, and algebra—the late lords of that
illustrious lumber-room. Mark, he has never read any of these bucks, but is
impatient till he reads them all at the Doctor’s
| 1800 | AMOS COTTLE’S DEATH | 189 |
Could I have my will of the heathen, I would lock him up from all access of new ideas; I would exclude all critics that would not swear me first (upon their Virgil) that they would feed him with nothing but the old, safe, familiar notions and sounds (the rightful aborigines of his brain)—Gray, Akenside and Mason. In these sounds, reiterated as often as possible, there could be nothing painful, nothing distracting.
God bless me, here are the birds, smoking hot!
All that is gross and unspiritual in me rises at the sight!
Avaunt friendship and all memory of absent friends!
