“What things have we seen
  Done at the Mermaid?  Heard words that hath been
  So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
  As if that every one from whence they came
  Had meant to put his whole soul in a jest,
  And had resolved to live a fool the rest
  Of his dull life.”

Then there is the “Literary Club,” with Johnson, and Garrick, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Goldsmith sitting in perpetuity in Boswell.  The Doctor has been talking there for a hundred years, and there will he talk for many a hundred more.  And we of another generation, and with other things to think about, can enter any night we please, and hear what is going on.  Then we have the swarthy ploughman from Ayrshire sitting at Lord Monboddo’s with Dr. Blair, Dugald Stewart, Henry Mackenzie, and the rest.  These went into the presence of the wonderful rustic thoughtlessly enough, and now they cannot return even if they would.  They are defrauded of oblivion.  Not yet have they tasted forgetfulness and the grave.  The day may come when Burns will be forgotten, but till that day arrives—­and the eastern sky as yet gives no token of its approach—­him they must attend as satellites the sun, as courtiers their king.  Then there are the Lakers,—­Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey burdened with his tremendous dream, Wilson in his splendid youth.  What talk, what argument, what readings of lyrical and other ballads, what contempt of critics, what a hail of fine things!  Then there is Charles Lamb’s room in Inner Temple Lane, the hush of a whist table in one corner, the host stuttering puns as he deals the cards; and sitting round about.  Hunt, whose every sentence is flavoured with the hawthorn and the primrose, and Hazlitt maddened by Waterloo and St. Helena, and Godwin with his wild theories, and Kemble with his Roman look.  And before the morning comes, and Lamb stutters yet more thickly—­for there is a slight flavour of punch in the apartment—­what talk there has been of Hogarth’s prints, of Izaak Walton, of the old dramatists, of Sir Thomas Browne’s “Urn Burial,” with Elia’s quaint humour breaking through every interstice, and flowering in every fissure and cranny of the conversation!  One likes to think of these social gatherings of wit and geniuses; they are more interesting than conclaves of kings or convocations of bishops.  One would like to have been the waiter at the “Mermaid,” and to have stood behind Shakspeare’s chair.  What was that functionary’s opinion of his guests?  Did he listen and become witty by infection? or did he, when his task was over, retire unconcernedly to chalk up the tavern score?  One envies somewhat the damsel who brought Lamb the spirit-case and the hot water.  I think of these meetings, and, in lack of companionship, frame for myself imaginary conversations—­not so brilliant, of course, as Mr. Landor’s, but yet sufficient to make pleasant for me the twilight hour while the lamp is yet unlit, and my solitary room is filled with ruddy lights and shadows of the fire.