classical scholar.--"_On Familiar Style_."

[_Hazlitt's "Plain Speaker,"_ Vol. I. p. 62.]

At Lamb's we used to have lively skirmishes at their Thursday evening
parties. I doubt whether the Small Coal-man's musical parties could exceed
them. O for the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a _petit souvenir_ to
their memory! There was Lamb himself, the most delightful, the most
provoking, the most witty and sensible of men. He always made the best pun
and the best remark in the course of the evening. His serious
conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever stammered
out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things, in half a dozen sentences,
as he does. His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a
play upon words. What a keen, laughing, hair-brained vein of homefelt
truth! What choice venom! How often did we cut into the haunch of letters!
How we skimmed the cream of criticism! How we picked out the marrow of
authors! Need I go over the names? They were but the old, everlasting set
--Milton and Shakespeare, Pope and Dryden, Steele and Addison, Swift and
Gay, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, Hogarth's prints, Claude's
landscapes, the Cartoons at Hampton Court, and all those things that,
having once been, must ever be. The Scotch Novels had not then been heard
of: so we said nothing about them. In general we were hard upon the
moderns. The author of the "Rambler" was only tolerated in Boswell's Life
of him; and it was as much as any one could do to edge in a word for
Junius. Lamb could not bear _Gil Blas_: this was a fault. I remember the
greatest triumph I ever had was in persuading him, after some years'
difficulty, that Fielding was better than Smollett. On one occasion he was
for making out a list of persons famous in history that one would wish to
see again, at the head of whom were Pontius Pilate, Sir Thomas Browne, and
Dr. Faustus; but we black-balled most of his list! But with what a gusto