“Quite an Opera pit,” he said to me, as he was courteously conducting me over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and recess, of his every-day waning grandeur.

Those who knew Elliston, will know the manner in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record.  One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a preliminary haddock.  After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner.  “I too never eat but one thing at dinner”—­was his reply—­then after a pause—­“reckoning fish as nothing.”  The manner was all.  It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savory esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom.  This was greatness, tempered with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming entertainer.

Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston! and not lessened in thy death, if report speak truly, which says that thou didst direct that thy mortal remains should repose under no inscription but one of pure Latinity.  Classical was thy bringing up! and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting the man with the boy, took thee back in thy latest exercise of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, under the roofs builded by the munificent and pious Colet.  For thee the Pauline Muses weep.  In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise.

DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING

To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one’s self with the forced product of another man’s brain.  Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.

    Lord Foppington in the Relapse.

An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.  At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people’s thoughts.  I dream away my life in others’ speculations.  I love to lose myself in other men’s minds.  When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think.  Books think for me.

I have no repugnances.  Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low.  I can read any thing which I call a book.  There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.