Waller wrote a fine panegyric on Cromwell, when he assumed the Protectorship. Upon the restoration of Charles, Waller wrote another in praise of him, and presented it to the King i...
During his stay in England, Haydn was honoured by the diploma of Doctor of Music from the University of Oxford--a distinction not obtained even by Handel, and it is said, only conf...
This popular work was commenced by its author after he had renounced political satire for the more peaceful study of the antiquities of our country. The publication was issued in w...
The Gentleman's Magazine unaccountably passes for the earliest periodical of that description; while, in fact, it was preceded nearly forty years by the Gentleman's Journal of Mott...
When the immortal composer Haydn was on his visit to England, in 1794, his chamber-door was opened one morning by the captain of an East Indiaman, who said, "You are Mr. Haydn?" "Y...
Hawkesworth and Stillingfleet died of criticism; Tasso was driven mad by it; Newton, the calm Newton, kept hold of life only by the sufferance of a friend who withheld a criticism...
When Miss Mitford left her rustic cottage at Three Mile Cross, and removed to Reading, (the Belford Regis of her novel), she penned the following beautiful picture of its homely jo...
The celebrated club at the "Mermaid," as has been well observed by Gifford, "combined more talent and genius, perhaps, than ever met together before or since." The institution orig...
Sir E. B. (now Lord) Lytton, in the memoir which he prefixed to the collected works of Laman Blanchard, draws the following affecting picture of that author's position, after he ha...
At the close of the first canto of Don Juan, its noble author, by way of propitiating the reader for the morality of his poem, says:-- "The public approbation I expect, And beg the...
The author of the Seasons and the Castle of Indolence, paid homage in the latter admirable poem to the master-passion or habit of his own easy nature. Thomson was so excessively la...
Lully, the composer, being once thought mortally ill, his friends called a confessor, who, finding the patient's state critical, and his mind very ill at ease, told him that he cou...
"One of the Authors of the Rejected Addresses" thus writes to a friend:-- "Let me enlighten you as to the general disposal of my time. I breakfast at nine, with a mind undisturbed...
It happened one afternoon, in those years when Cowper's accomplished friend, Lady Austen, made a part of his little evening circle, that she observed him sinking into increased dej...
Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a legislator. He never examined foundations where a point was already ruled. His whole code of criticism rested on pure a...
Sterne's sermons are, in general, very short, which circumstance gave rise to the following joke at Bull's Library, at Bath:--A footman had been sent by his lady to purchase one of...
During his residence at Nether Stoney, Coleridge officiated as Unitarian preacher at Taunton, and afterwards at Shrewsbury. Mr. Hazlitt has described his walking ten miles on a win...
Lord North had little reason to congratulate himself when he ventured on an interruption with Burke. In a debate on some economical question, Burke was guilty of a false quantity--...
The portal of the Boar's Head was originally decorated with carved oak figures of Falstaff and Prince Henry; and in 1834, the former figure was in the possession of a brazier, of G...
Samuel Rogers was requested by Lady Holland to ask Sir Philip Francis whether he was the author of Junius' Letters. The poet, meeting Sir Philip, approached the ticklish subject th...
Wycherley being at Tunbridge for the benefit of his health, after his return from the Continental trip the cost of which the king had defrayed, was walking one day with his friend,...
It was Swift that first suggested to Gay the idea of the Beggar's Opera, by remarking, what an odd, pretty sort of a thing a Newgate pastoral might make! "Gay," says Pope, "was inc...
"I remember when I was a little boy, (writes Swift in a letter to Bolingbroke,) I felt a great fish at the end of my line, which I drew up almost on the ground, but it dropt in, an...
Douglas Jerrold and some friends were dining once at a tavern, and had a private room; but after dinner the landlord, on the plea that the house was partly under repair, requested...
Nathaniel Bowditch, the translator of Laplace's Mecanique Celeste, displayed in very early life a taste for mathematical studies. In the year 1788, when he was only fifteen years o...
It is remarkable, (says Bulwer, in his Zanoni,) that most of the principal actors of the French Revolution were singularly hideous in appearance--from the colossal ugliness of Mira...
Coleridge once dined in company with a person who listened to him, and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and Coleridge thought him intelligent. At length, towar...
When Mr. Fox's furniture was sold by auction, after his decease in 1806, amongst his books there was the first volume of his friend Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: b...
This man of genius among trading authors, before he began his History of England, wrote to the Earl of Shelburne, then in the Whig Administration, offering, if the Earl would procu...
Mr. Davy, who accompanied Colonel Cheney up the Euphrates, was for a time in the service of Mehemet Ali Pacha. "Pickwick" happening to reach Davy while he was at Damascus, he read...