wever, seconded the proposition. "Richardson?"--"By
all means, but only to look at him through the glass-door of his
back-shop, hard at work upon one of his novels (the most extraordinary
contrast that ever was presented between an author and his works), but not
to let him come behind his counter lest he should want you to turn
customer, nor to go upstairs with him, lest he should offer to read the
first manuscript of Sir Charles Grandison, which was originally written in
eight and twenty volumes octavo, or get out the letters of his female
correspondents, to prove that Joseph Andrews was low."

There was but one statesman in the whole of English history that any one
expressed the least desire to see--Oliver Cromwell, with his fine, frank,
rough, pimply face, and wily policy; and one enthusiast, John Bunyan, the
immortal author of the Pilgrim's Progress. It seemed that if he came into
the room, dreams would follow him, and that each person would nod under
his golden cloud, "nigh-sphered in Heaven," a canopy as strange and
stately as any in Homer.

Of all persons near our own time, Garrick's name was received with the
greatest enthusiasm, who was proposed by J. F----. He presently superseded
both Hogarth and Handel, who had been talked of, but then it was on
condition that he should act in tragedy and comedy, in the play and the
farce, Lear and Wildair and Abel Drugger. What a _sight for sore eyes_
that would be! Who would not part with a year's income at least, almost
with a year of his natural life, to be present at it? Besides, as he could
not act alone, and recitations are unsatisfactory things, what a troop he
must bring with him--the silver-tongued Barry, and Quin, and Shuter and
Weston, and Mrs. Clive and Mrs. Pritchard, of whom I have heard my father
speak as so great a favourite when he was young! This would indeed be a
revival of the dead, the restoring of art; and so much the more desirable,
as such is the lurking scepticism mingled with our overstrained admiration
of past excellence, that though we have the speeches of Burke, the
portraits of Reynolds, the writings of Goldsmith, and the conversation of
Johnson, to show what people could do at that period, and to confirm the
universal testimony to the merits of Garrick; yet, as it was before our
time, we have our misgivings, as if he was probably after all little
better than a Bartlemy-fair actor, dressed out to play Macbeth in a
scarlet coat and laced cocked-