1830.] George Colman's Random Records. 309 



preparing, against all horticultural rule, to plant a row of cabbages in a 

 gravel walk/' 



With Garrick, his acquaintance commenced in boyhood ; and his 

 sketches of that extraordinary performer on and off the stage, are graphic 

 and forcible. " The frequent letters passing between him, at Hampton- 

 court, and my father, at Richmond, were so many opportunities for me 

 to take airings on horseback, attended by the servant, who carried the 

 despatches. On these occasions, I always, on arriving at Garrick's, ran 

 about his gardens, where he taught me the game of trap-ball, which 

 superseded our former nine pins. He practised too a thousand monkey 

 tricks upon me. He was Punch, Harlequin, and a cat in a gutter ; then 

 King Lear, with a mad touch, at times, that almost terrified me, and he 

 had a peculiar mode of flashing the lightning of his eye, by darting it 

 into the astonished mind of a child, as a serpent is said to fascinate a 

 bird, which was an attribute belonging only to this theatrical Jupiter." 

 To Garrick, he gives the palm of all the actors whom he has ever seen. 

 " He has only to repeat what others have said a thousand times 



( Take him for all in all, 

 I ne'er shall look upon his like again/ " . 



The uncommon brilliancy of Garrick's eye was proverbial, and yet " he 

 had the art of completely quenching its fire, as in his acting Sir Anthony 

 Brainville, a personage who talks passionately, with the greatest sang 

 Jroid, and whose language opposing his temperament, breathes flame, 

 like Hecla in Iceland. In this part he made the twin stars look as 

 ' dull as two coddled gooseberries/ But his deaf man's eye evinced his 

 minuteness of observation and power of execution. There is an expres- 

 sion in the eye of deaf persons, I mean such as have not lost all percep- 

 tion of sound, which consists of a mixture of dulness and vivacity in 

 the organ of vision, indicating an anxiety to hear all, with a pretending 

 to hear more than is actually heard, and a disappointment in having 

 lost much ; an embarrassed look, between intelligence and stupidity 

 all this he conveyed admirably. On the whole, with all his superior art 

 in pourtraying Nature, it is to be lamented that he outraged her in one 

 character ; he over-acted the part of Garrick, he converted his compa- 

 nions into critics in the pit, practised clap-traps upon them, and had 

 the row of lamps in front of the proscenium eternally under his nose." 



Of Gibbon the historian's prejudices and powers, the world has known 

 a good deal already, but no man has left fewer records of his effect in 

 social intercourse. His long residence abroad alienated him from English 

 society, even when he occasionally returned home. Colman has laboured 

 a portrait of him with more than the usual felicity of labour. " Gibbon 

 was a curious counterbalance to Johnson. Their manners and tastes were 

 not more different than their habiliments. On the day I first sat dow r n 

 with Johnson in his rusty-brown coat and black worsted stockings, 

 Gibbon was placed opposite to me in a suit of flowerecj velvet, with a 

 bag and sword. Each had his measured phraseology ; and Johnson's 

 famous parallel of Dryden and Pope might be loosely parodied in refe- 

 rence to himself and Gibbon. Johnson's style was grand, and Gibbon's 

 elegant : the stateliness of the former was sometimes pedantic, and the 

 polish of the latter was occasionally finical. Johnson marched to kettle- 

 drums and trumpets. Gibbon moved to flutes and hautboys. Johnson 



