Table-Talk by William Hazlitt (best pdf reader for ebooks txt) 📕

delight! Lord, lord! and how does my knight? Touchstone

Fie, with more modesty.

Gertrude

Modesty! why, I am no citizen now. Modesty! am I not to be married? You’re best to keep me modest, now I am to be a lady.

Sir Petronel

Boldness is a good fashion and court-like.

Gertrude

Aye, in, a country lady I hope it is, as I shall be. And how chance ye came no sooner, knight?

Sir Petronel

Faith, I was so entertained in the progress with one Count Epernoun, a Welsh knight: we had a match at baloon too with my Lord Whackum for four crowns.

Gertrude

And when shall’s be married, my knight?

Sir Petronel

I am come now to consummate: and your father may call a poor knight son-in-law.

Mrs. Touchstone

Yes, that he is a knight: I know where he had money to pay the gentlemen ushers and heralds their fees. Aye, that he is a knight: and so might you have been too, if you had been aught else but an ass, as well as some of your neighbours. An I thought you would not ha’ been knighted, as I am an honest woman, I would ha’ dubbed you myself. I praise God, I have wherewithal. But as for you, daughter⁠—

Gertrude

Aye, mother, I must be a lady tomorrow; and by your leave, mother (I speak it not without my duty, but only in the right of my husband), I must take place of you, mother.

Mrs. Touchstone

That you shall, lady-daughter; and have a coach as well as I.

Gertrude

Yes, mother; but my coach-horses must take the wall of your coach-horses.

Touchstone

Come, come, the day grows low; ’tis supper time: and, sir, respect my daughter; she has refused for you wealthy and honest matches, known good men.

Gertrude

Body o’ truth, citizen, citizens! Sweet knight, as soon as ever we are married, take me to thy mercy, out of this miserable city. Presently: carry me out of the scent of Newcastle coal and the hearing of Bow-bell, I beseech thee; down with me, for God’s sake.

—⁠Act I, Scene 1

This dotage on sound and show seemed characteristic of that age (see New Way to Pay Old Debts, etc.)⁠—as if in the grossness of sense, and the absence of all intellectual and abstract topics of thought and discourse (the thin, circulating medium of the present day) the mind was attracted without the power of resistance to the tinkling sound of its own name with a title added to it, and the image of its own person tricked out in old-fashioned finery. The effect, no doubt, was also more marked and striking from the contrast between the ordinary penury and poverty of the age and the first and more extravagant demonstrations of luxury and artificial refinement. ↩

Gertrude

Good lord, that there are no fairies nowadays, Syn.

Syndefy

Why, Madam?

Gertrude

To do miracles, and bring ladies money. Sure, if we lay in a cleanly house, they would haunt it, Synne? I’ll sweep the chamber soon at night, and set a dish of water o’ the hearth. A fairy may come and bring a pearl or a diamond. We do not know, Synne: or there may be a pot of gold hid in the yard, if we had tools to dig for’t. Why may not we two rise early i’ the morning, Synne, afore anybody is up, and find a jewel i’ the streets worth a hundred pounds? May not some great court-lady, as she comes from revels at midnight, look out of her coach, as ’tis running, and lose such a jewel, and we find it? ha!

Syndefy

They are pretty waking dreams, these.

Gertrude

Or may not some old usurer be drunk overnight with a bag of money, and leave it behind him on a stall? For God’s sake, Syn, let’s rise tomorrow by break of day, and see. I protest, la, if I had as much money as an alderman, I would scatter some on’t i’ the streets for poor ladies to find when their knights were laid up. And now I remember my song of the Golden Shower, why may not I have such a fortune? I’ll sing it, and try what luck I shall have after it.

—⁠Act V, Scene 1

↩

Everything tends to show the manner in which a great artist is formed. If any person could claim an exemption from the careful imitation of individual objects, it was Nicolas Poussin. He studied the antique, but he also studied nature. “I have often admired,” says Vignuel do Marville, who knew him at a late period of his life, “the love he had for his art. Old as he was, I frequently saw him among the ruins of ancient Rome, out in the Campagna, or along the banks of the Tiber, sketching a scene that had pleased him; and I often met him with his handkerchief full of stones, moss, or flowers, which he carried home, that he might copy them exactly from nature. One day I asked him how he had attained to such a degree of perfection as to have gained so high a rank among the great painters of Italy? He answered, ‘I have neglected nothing.’ ”⁠—See his Life lately published. It appears from this account that he had not fallen into a recent error, that Nature puts the man of genius out. As a contrast to the foregoing description, I might mention, that I remember an old gentleman once asking Mr. West in the British Gallery if he had ever been at Athens? To which the President made answer, No; nor did he feel any great desire to go; for that he thought he had as good an idea of the place from the Catalogue as he could get by living there for any number of years. What would he have said, if anyone had told him he could get as good an idea of the subject of one of his great works from reading the Catalogue of it, as