as any which that
gentleman can be supposed to have turned out, but still the eagle's
impertinence was greater.[2] That would have been your excuse. AEschylus,
or my friend the casuist, is not to be listened to in his very learned
arguments _contra_.

Short of these cases, nothing can justify an interruption; and such
cases surely cannot be common, since how often can we suppose it to
happen that an eagle has a lobster to break just at the moment when a
tragic poet is walking abroad without his hat? What the reader's
experience may have been, of course, is unknown to me; but, for my own
part, I hardly meet with such a case twice in ten years, though I know
an extensive circle of tragic poets, and a reasonable number of bald
heads; eagles certainly not so many--they are but few on my visiting
list; and indeed, if that's their way of going on--cracking literary
skulls without leave asked or warning given--the fewer one knows the
better. If, then, a long life hardly breeds a case in which it is
strictly lawful to interrupt a co-dialogist, what are we to think of
those who move in conversation by the very principle of interruption?
And a variety of the nuisance there is, which I consider equally bad.
Men, that do not absolutely interrupt you, are yet continually _on the
fret_ to do so, and undisguisedly on the fret all the time you are
speaking. To invent a Latin word which ought to have been invented
before my time, 'non interrumpunt at _interrupturiunt_.' You can't talk
in peace for such people; and as to prosing, which I suppose you've a
right to do by _Magna Charta_, it is quite out of the question when a
man is looking in your face all the time with a cruel expression in his
eye amounting to 'Surely, that's enough!' or a pathetic expression which
says, '_Have_ you done?' throwing a dreadful reproach into the _Have_.
In Cumberland, at a farmhouse where I once had lodgings for a week or
two, a huge dog as high as the dining-table used to plant himself in a
position to watch all my motions at dinner. Being alone, and either
reading or thinking, at first I did not observe him; but as soon as I
did, and noticed that he pursued each rising and descent of my fork as
the poet 'with wistful eyes pursues the setting sun,' that unconsciously
he mimicked and rehearsed all the notes and _appoggiaturas_ that make up
the successive bars in the music of eating one's dinner, I was compelled
to rise, and say, 'My good fellow, I can't st