310 George Caiman* s Random Records* [MARCH, 



hewed passages through the Alps, while Gibbon levelled Walks through 

 parks and gardens. 



" Mauled as I had been by Johnson, Gibbon poured balm upon my 

 bruises by condescending once or twice in the course of the evening, to 

 talk with me. The great historian was light and playful, suiting his 

 matter to the capacity of the boy, but it was done more siu>, his manner- 

 ism prevailed; still he tapped his snuff-box, still he smirked and 

 smiled; and rounded his periods with the same air of good-breeding, as 

 if he were conversing with me. His mouth, mellifluous as Plato's, was 

 a round hole, in the centre of his visage." 



This last touch of description is not very complimentary to the histo- 

 rian of the Decline and Fall, but it is true ; and Colman, in giving it, 

 boldly shows, that he was superior to the mellifluous civility that flowed 

 from it on his young brow. Sheridan he met, of course, in all kinds of 

 life ; and he idly thinks it necessary to apologize for " thinking that 

 Sheridan did not excel in light conversation." The fact was notorious, 

 and easily accounted for. Sheridan was a wit perhaps the most acute 

 and finished writer of good things in the whole range of the English 

 language. He sometimes said excellent things too. But wit is at all 

 times an exercise of the understanding, and is often the gift of the 

 gravest temperament. Humour is of a totally different calibre ; it is 

 light, obtrusive, and gay. The wit often becomes a silent man, from 

 a jealousy of his own reputation. The humorist, seldom having any 

 reputation to lose, which may not be regained by the next trivial plea- 

 santry, strikes at every thing, and is the best companion in common 

 society, for there the secret of success is to keep up the ball. In She- 

 ridan's instance there was the additional obstruction, that he loved wine ; 

 and a lover of wine is., by habit, out of spirits until he is at least half 

 drunk. The first hour after dinner found Sheridan much more disposed 

 to sleep than to talk, or to growl at every thing round him than to make 

 the most of the passing pleasantry. His planet seldom rose until the 

 third bottle began its gyrations. He then felt the reviving lustre, and 

 shone, when three-fourths of his fellow sitters were saturated and 

 sleepy. Even his shining was but brief. Brandy gave the effulgence, 

 which was but thinly supplied by claret ; and the flow of soul, which 

 had so tardily superseded the feast of reason, suddenly terminated under 

 the table. 



" Many men of inferior powers were, in my humble conception, plea- 

 santer dinner companions his son Tom, for instance. I admit, that 

 nobody, sitting down with him for the first time, and even ignorant of 

 his abilities, could have mistaken him for a common-place character, nor 

 would the evening pass, without some thoughts or turns of expression 

 escaping him, indicative of genius ; but he wanted the flickering blaze 

 of social pleasantry, the playful lightning of familiar discourse : his style 

 appeared to me more an exercise than desultory table-talk. I have heard 

 him late in the evening recapitulate nearly all that had been said at 

 table ; and comment on it with much ingenuity, and satire. But, to say 

 nothing of people's disliking to find their careless chat thus remembered, 

 and summed up, this was rather speechifying than conversing, and less 

 fit for a dinner party than for a debating society." The narrator pushes 

 his illustration of this parliamentary propensity to an extreme in which 

 we suspect him of exercising his own pleasantry. "The habit of 



