ithout a rival (almost)
in private conversation, an expert public speaker, a keen politician, a
first-rate grammarian, and the finest gentleman (to say the least) of his
own party. He had no imagination (or he would not have scorned it!)--no
delicacy of taste, no rooted prejudices or strong attachments: his
intellect was like a bow of polished steel, from which he shot
sharp-pointed poisoned arrows at his friends in private, at his enemies in
public."

_hear a sound so fine_. J. S. Knowles's "Virginius," v, 2.

P. 310. _silenced a learned professor_. Cf. "Spirit of the Age": "He used
to plague Fuseli by asking him after the origin of the Teutonic dialects,
and Dr. Parr, by wishing to know the meaning of the common copulative,
_Is_."

_Curran_, John Philpot (1750-1817), member of Parliament from Ireland,
orator and wit.

P. 311. _Mrs. Inchbald_, Elizabeth (1753-1821), a well-known actress,
dramatist, and novelist. In literature she is associated with the group of
William Godwin, and her best-known works are "A Simple Story" and "Nature
and Art."

_from noon to dewy eve_. "Paradise Lost," I, 743.

_Mrs. M----_. Mrs. Montagu, wife of Basil Montagu. In the "Pleasure of
Hating" ("Plain Speaker") there is another allusion to Mrs. Montagu "whose
dark raven locks made a picturesque background to our discourse."

_H--t's_. Leigh Hunt's.

_N--'s_. Northcote's.

_H--yd--n's_. Haydon's.

_Doctor Tronchin_. Theodore Tronchin, a physician of Geneva, figures in
Rousseau's "Confessions."

P. 312. _Sir Fopling Flutter_, a character in George Etherege's comedy,
"The Man of Mode."

_For wit is like a rest_. "Master Francis Beaumont's Letter to Ben
Jonson." For _players_ read _gamesters_.

_came down into the country_. Charles and Mary Lamb with a few of their
friends paid a visit to Hazlitt at Winterslow in 1810.

_Like the most capricious poet_. "As You Like It," iii, 3, 8.

_walked gowned_. Lamb's "Sonnet Written at Cambridge, August 15, 1819."

P. 313. _the person I mean_. George Dyer (1755-1841), an amiable
hack-writer and a friend of Lamb. He figures prominently in two of the
Essays of Elia, "Oxford in the Vacation" and "Amicus Redivivus," and in
many of Lamb's letters. "To G. D. a poem is a poem. His own as good as any
bodie's, and god bless him, any bodie's as good as his own, for I do not
think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem being
better than another. The Gods by denying him the v