on of dress they wore, if they liked any particular
dish for dinner, what kind of women they fell in love with, and whether
their domestic atmosphere was stormy or the reverse. Concerning such men
no bit of information is too trifling; everything helps to make out the
mental image we have dimly formed for ourselves. And this kind of
interest is heightened by the artistic way in which time occasionally
groups them. The race is gregarious, they are visible to us in clumps
like primroses, they are brought into neighbourhood and flash light on
each other like gems in a diadem. We think of the wild geniuses who came
up from the universities to London in the dawn of the English drama.
Greene, Nash, Marlowe--our first professional men of letters--how they
cracked their satirical whips, how they brawled in taverns, how pinched
they were at times, how, when they possessed money, they flung it from
them as if it were poison, with what fierce speed they wrote, how they
shook the stage. Then we think of the "Mermaid" in session, with
Shakspeare's bland, oval face, the light of a smile spread over it, and
Ben Jonson's truculent visage, and Beaumont and Fletcher sitting together
in their beautiful friendship, and fancy as best we can the drollery, the
repartee, the sage sentences, the lightning gleams of wit, the
thunder-peals of laughter.

"What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid? Heard words that hath been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole soul in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life."

Then there is the "Literary Club," with Johnson, and Garrick, and Burke,
and Reynolds, and Goldsmith sitting in perpetuity in Boswell. The Doctor
has been talking there for a hundred years, and there will he talk for
many a hundred more. And we of another generation, and with other things
to think about, can enter any night we please, and hear what is going on.
Then we have the swarthy ploughman from Ayrshire sitting at Lord
Monboddo's with Dr. Blair, Dugald Stewart, Henry Mackenzie, and the rest.
These went into the presence of the wonderful rustic thoughtlessly
enough, and now they cannot return even if they would. They are
defrauded of oblivion. Not yet have they tasted forgetfulness and the
grave. The day may come when Burns will be forgotten, but till that day
arrives--and the eastern sky as yet gives n