第53章

Have you never seen a small man from college placed amongst great folk, and giving himself the airs of a man of fashion? He goes back to his common room with fond reminiscences of Ermine Castle or Strawberry Hall.He writes to the dear countess, to say that dear Lord Lollypop is getting on very well at St.Boniface, and that the accident which he met with in a scuffle with an inebriated bargeman only showed his spirit and honor, and will not permanently disfigure his lordship's nose.He gets his clothes from dear Lollypop's London tailor, and wears a mauve or magenta tie when he rides out to see the hounds.A love of fashionable people is a weakness, I do not say of all, but of some tutors.Witness that Eton tutor t'other day, who intimated that in Cornhill we could not understand the perfect purity, delicacy, and refinement of those genteel families who sent their sons to Eton.O usher, mon ami! Old Sam Johnson, who, too, had been an usher in his early life, kept a little of that weakness always.Suppose Goldsmith had knocked him up at three in the morning and proposed a boat to Greenwich, as Topham Beauclerc and his friend did, would he have said, "What, my boy, are you for a frolic? I'm with you!" and gone and put on his clothes? Rather he would have pitched poor Goldsmith down stairs.He would have liked to be port if he could.Of course WE wouldn't.Our opinion of the Portugal grape is known.It grows very high, and is very sour, and we don't go for that kind of grape at all.

"I was walking with Mr.Fox"--and sure this anecdote comes very pat after the grapes--"I was walking with Mr.Fox in the Louvre," says Benjamin West (apud some paper I have just been reading), "and Iremarked how many people turned round to look at ME.This shows the respect of the French for the fine arts." This is a curious instance of a very small claret indeed, which imagined itself to be port of the strongest body.There are not many instances of a faith so deep, so simple, so satisfactory as this.I have met many who would like to be port; but with few of the Gascon sort, who absolutely believed they WERE port.George III.believed in West's port and thought Reynolds's overrated stuff.When I saw West's pictures at Philadelphia, I looked at them with astonishment and awe.Hide, blushing glory, hide your head under your old nightcap.

O immortality! is this the end of you? Did any of you, my dear brethren, ever try and read "Blackmore's Poems," or the "Epics of Baour-Lormian," or the "Henriade," or--what shall we say?--Pollok's "Course of Time?" They were thought to be more lasting than brass by some people, and where are they now? And OUR masterpieces of literature--OUR poets--that, if not immortal, at any rate, are to last their fifty, their hundred years--oh, sirs, don't you think a very small cellar will hold them?