ir author mixes up probabilities and improbabilities
so that there is a perpetual jarring) is maintained throughout the
scenery and etceteras. The comfortable but modest accommodations of
Ambrose's hotels in Gabriel's Road and Picardy Place are turned into
abodes of not particularly tasteful luxury which put Lord Beaconsfield's
famous upholstery to shame, and remind one of what they probably
suggested, Edgar Poe's equally famous and much more terrible sketch of a
model drawing-room. All the plate is carefully described as "silver"; if
it had been gold there might have been some humour in it. The "wax"
candles and "silken" curtains (if they had been _Arabian Nights_ lamps
and oriental drapery the same might be said) are always insisted on. If
there is any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's
actual habits, which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a
gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement
when writing for _Blackwood_; his daughter's unvarnished account of the
same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so
forth, but substitutes water for the old hock and "Scots pint" (magnum)
of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of
the _Noctes_, and a single large tallow candle for Christopher's "floods
of light." He carried the whim so far as to construct for himself--his
_Noctes_ self--an imaginary hall-by-the-sea on the Firth of Forth, which
in the same way seems to have had an actual resemblance, half of
likeness, half of contrast, to the actual Elleray, and to enlarge his
own comfortable town house in Gloucester Place to a sort of fairy palace
in Moray Place. But that which has most puzzled and shocked readers are
the specially Gargantuan passages relating to eating and drinking. The
comments made on this seem (he was anything but patient of criticism) to
have annoyed Wilson very much; and in some of the later _Noctes_ he
drops hints that the whole is mere Barmecide business. Unfortunately the
same criticism applies to this as to the upholstery--the exaggeration is
"done too natural." The Shepherd's consumption of oysters not by dozens
but by fifties, the allowance of "six common kettles-full of water" for
the night's toddy ration of the three, North's above-mentioned bottle of
old hock at dinner and magnum of claret after, the dinners and suppers
and "whets" which appear so often;--all these stop short of the actually
incredi