submit to a blacked face.  He rehearsed the part once.  During the rehearsal Quin entered, and, having listened for some time with attention, exclaimed, ‘Well done, David! but where’s the teakettle?’ alluding to the print of Hogarth, where a black boy follows his mistress with a teakettle in his hand....  In stature Garrick was short....  A fact which conveys a high notion of his powers is, that he was able to act out the absurd stage-costume of those days.  He represented Coriolanus in the attire of Cheapside.  I remember hearing from Sir G. Beaumont, that while he was venting, as Lear, the violent paroxysms of his rage in the awful tempest scene, his wig happened to fall off.  The accident did not produce the slightest effect on the gravity of the house, so strongly had he impregnated every breast with his own emotions.

Some of my friends (H.C. for instance) doubt whether poetry on contemporary persons and events can be good.  But I instance Spenser’s ‘Marriage,’ and Milton’s ‘Lycidas.’  True, the ‘Persae’ is one of the worst of Aeschylus’s plays; at least, in my opinion.

Milton is falsely represented by some as a democrat.  He was an aristocrat in the truest sense of the word.  See the quotation from him in my ’Convention of Cintra.’[259] Indeed, he spoke in very proud and contemptuous terms, of the populace.  ‘Comus’ is rich in beautiful and sweet flowers, and in exuberant leaves of genius; but the ripe and mellow fruit is in ‘Samson Agonistes.’  When he wrote that, his mind was Hebraized.  Indeed, his genius fed on the writings of the Hebrew prophets.  This arose, in some degree, from the temper of the times; the Puritan lived in the Old Testament, almost to the exclusion of the New.

The works of the old English dramatists are the gardens of our language.

One of the noblest things in Milton is the description of that sweet, quiet morning in the ‘Paradise Regained,’ after that terrible night of howling wind and storm.  The contrast is divine.[260]

[259] Page 174 (vol. i.), where Milton speaks of the evils suffered by a nation,’ unless men more than vulgar, bred up in the knowledge of ancient and illustrious deeds, conduct its affairs.’

[260] Paradise Regained, iv. 431.

What a virulent democrat ——­ is!  A man ill at ease with his own conscience is sure to quarrel with all government, order, and law.

The influence of Locke’s Essay was not due to its own merits, which are considerable; but to external circumstances.  It came forth at a happy opportunity, and coincided with the prevalent opinions of the time.  The Jesuit doctrines concerning the papal power in deposing kings, and absolving subjects from their allegiance, had driven some Protestant theologians to take refuge in the theory of the divine right of kings.  This theory was unpalatable to the world at large, and others invented the more popular doctrine of a social contract, in its place; a doctrine which history refutes.  But Locke did what he could to accommodate this principle to his own system.