The Plain Speaker; Opinions on Books, Men, and Things Volume 1 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Same Subject continued. This was the case formerly at Lamb's?where we used to have many lively skirmishes at their Thursday evening parties. I doubt whether the Small-coal man's musical parties could exceed them.i Oh! for the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a petit souvenir to their memory!? There was Lamb himself, the most delightful, the most provoking, the most witty and sensible of men. He always made the best pun, and the best remark in the course of the evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half a dozen half-sentences as he does. His jests scald like tears: and he probes a question with a play upon words. What a keen, laughing, hair-brained vein of home-felt truth! What choice venom! How often did we cut into" the haunch of letters, while we discussed the haunch of mntton on the table ! How we skimmed the cream of criticism ! How we got into the heart of controversy! How we picked out the marrow of authors ! " And, in our flowing cups, many a good name and true was freshly remembered." Eecollect (most sage and critical reader) that in all this I was but a guest! Need I go over the names ? They were but the old everlasting sot?Milton and Shakspeare, Pope and Dryden, Steele and Addison, Swift and Gay, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Eichardson, Hogarth's prints, Claude's landscapes, the cartoons at Hampton Court, and all those things that, having once been, must ever be. The Scotch novels had not then been heard of: so we said nothing about them. In general, we were hard upon the moderns. The author i Thomas Britton. He was a native of Wellingborough, county Xorthampton. See a g...