A writer in the Law Quarterly Magazine says:--To the best of our information, James's coup d'essai in literature was a hoax in the shape of a series of letters to the editor of the...
Alfieri, the greatest poet modern Italy produced, delighted in eccentricities, not always of the most amiable kind. One evening, at the house of the Princess Carignan, he was leani...
Sir Richard Lovelace, who in 1649 published the elegant collection of amorous and other poems entitled Lucasta, was an amiable and accomplished gentleman: by the men of his time (t...
Stammering, (says Coleridge,) is sometimes the cause of a pun. Some one was mentioning in Lamb's presence the cold-heartedness of the Duke of Cumberland, in restraining the duchess...
Mr. Gifford to Mr. Hazlitt. "What we read from your pen, we remember no more." Mr. Hazlitt to Mr. Gifford. "What we read from your pen, we remember before." * * * * *
One of the most stinging reproofs of perverted literary taste, evidently aimed at Newgate Calendar literature, appeared in the form of a valentine, in No. 31 of Punch, in 1842. The...
Milton was born at the Spread Eagle, Bread-street, Cheapside, December 9, 1608; and was buried, November, 1674, in St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate, without even a stone, in the fir...
When the late Sir Richard Phillips took his "Morning's Walk from London to Kew," in 1816, he found that a portion of the family mansion in which Lord Bolingbroke was born had been...
Campbell relates:--"Turner, the painter, is a ready wit. Once at a dinner where several artists, amateurs, and literary men were convened, a poet, by way of being facetious, propos...
When Brummell was obliged by want of money, and debt, and all that, to retire to France, he knew no French; and having obtained a grammar for the purpose of study, his friend Scrop...
Sir James Mackintosh had a great deal of humour; and, among many other examples of it, he kept a dinner-party at his own house for two or three hours in a roar of laughter, playing...
Bunyan had some providential escapes during his early life. Once, he fell into a creek of the sea, once out of a boat into the river Ouse, near Bedford, and each time he was narrow...
The transcript of Magna Charta, now in the British Museum, was discovered by Sir Robert Cotton in the possession of his tailor, who was just about to cut the precious document out...
Smollett, perhaps one of the most popular authors by profession that ever wrote, furnishes a sad instance of the insufficiency of even the greatest literary favour, in the times in...
Other writers, of the same age with Lope de Vega, obtained a wider celebrity. Don Quixote, during the life of its ill-requited author, was naturalized in countries where the name o...
Day, the author of Sandford and Merton, was an eccentric but amiable man; he retired into the country "to exclude himself," as he said, "from the vanity, vice, and deceptive charac...
In 1841, the author of Pelham lived in Charles-street, Berkeley-square, in a small house, which he fitted up after his own taste; and an odd melee of the classic and the baronial c...
The MS. Diary, or "Kalendarium," of the celebrated John Evelyn lay among the family papers at Wotton, in Surrey, from the period of his death, in 1706, until their rare interest an...
At a club of which Jerrold was a member, a fierce Jacobite, and a friend, as fierce, of the Orange cause, were arguing noisily, and disturbing less excitable conversationalists. At...
John Dennis, the dramatist, had a most extravagant and enthusiastic opinion of his tragedy of Liberty Asserted. He imagined that there were in it some strokes on the French nation...
Flatman's beautiful lines to Walton, (says Mr. Jesse) commencing-- "Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows Except himself," have always struck us as conveying a true picture...
Jasper Mayne says of Master Cartwright, the author of tolerable comedies and poems, printed in 1651:-- "Yes, thou to Nature hadst joined art and skill; In thee, Ben Jonson still he...
Professor Porson, the great Graecist, when a boy at Eton, displayed the most astonishing powers of memory. In going up to a lesson one day, he was accosted by a boy in the same for...
Goldsmith, during the first performance of this comedy, walked all the time in St. James' Park in great uneasiness. Finally, when he thought that it must be over, hastening to the...
The first of these ladies, whom Swift romantically christened Varina, was a Miss Jane Waryng, to whom he wrote passionate letters, and whom, when he had succeeded in gaining her af...
The number of Lope de Vega's works has been strangely exaggerated by some, but by others reduced to about one-sixth of the usual statement. Upon this computation it will be found t...
In a paper in the Edinburgh Review, we find this cabinet picture:--The club-room is before us, and the table, on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. The...
Hoole was born in a hackney-coach, which was conveying his mother to Drury-lane Theatre, to witness the performance of the tragedy of Timanthes, which had been written by her husba...
When Lord Byron was in Parliament, a petition setting forth, and calling for redress for, the wretched state of the Irish peasantry, was one evening presented to the House of Lords...
Although Dr. Johnson had (or professed to have) a profound and unjustified contempt for actors, he succeeded in comporting himself towards Mrs. Siddons with great politeness; and o...