454 
mate companion qualified to make such 
record. The dull self-sufficiency of Bos- 
well, indeed, could make an amusive 
and interesting book of the sayings of Dr. 
Johnson; and perhaps that very dulness 
and self-sufficiency were among the causes 
why it was made so well: for Johnson 
was a pregnant, but deliberate sentence- 
maker; a man of pith and phrase, not of 
rambling and loquacious vivacity. He was 
always on his. tripos, delivering oracles ; 
and what he spoke always appeared, at 
jeast, to be the result of settled thought, 
10t of the ephemeral humour of the moment. 
tt had generally passion and prejudice 
mough ; but the passion was phlegmatic, 
1ot volatile, and the prejudice was syste- 
matic and coherent. His opinions were 
not, here and there and eyery where, fixed to 
no object, and of no certain colour; nor, 
egotist as he was in the appreciation of his 
own dogmas, were himself and his writings 
his own eternal theme. He spoke in print, 
in sentences already revised; and his con- 
versations, if such they may be called, 
needed neither selection nor arrangement ; 
all that was requisite was a sort of short- 
hand writer at his elbow, with a pencil and 
note-book in his pocket ; and volumes were 
soon collected, with which, however falla- 
cious in axiom, and illiberal in sentiment, 
moral decency was never in danger of 
being shocked, or the imagination conta- 
minated by libertine confessions and_ licen- 
tious anecdote. But it is not every man, 
even, of equal or superior genius, who talks 
like Dr. Johnson ; and the picture of whose 
mind could, therefore, be preserved in the 
fac-similies of a Boswell. What of the 
character or opinions, for example, could 
thus haye been known of such a man 
as Joln Horne Tooke ?—whose habit 
it was frequently to talk, not to reveal, but 
to hide his opinions ; to effect by loquacity, 
what others endeavour to obtain by silence, 
and to conceal his sentiments in such a 
throng of opposite paradoxes, that it was im- 
possible for the listener to separate the real 
from the assumed. But others there are, 
and not a few (and we suspect Lord Byron 
to have been occasionally of the number), 
who converse, neither for the purpose of re- 
vealingnor disguising their opinions; neither 
for the purpose of information nor of delu- 
sion; but for the sake of the recreation of 
conversing,—to give wings to the hour, 
and conviviality to the board, and to say 
whatever may be uppermost or amusing. 
Conversations like these are often the most 
pleasurable for the time; but they, most 
assuredly, are neither the most profitable, 
nor the most interesting to posterity. 
Habits of this deseription haye an in- 
evitable tendeney to render us but little 
attentive to fidelity of statement, even in 
anecdote and narration. Imagination (or 
the fancy rather and humour of the moment, ) 
mingles with every idea that suggests itself, 
and every incident that recurs ; till the mind 
Literary and Critical Proémium. 
[Bec. I, 
itself, looking to no results; pereeiyes not 
how much, that is passing across it, ismatter 
ofmemory, and what of mere suggestion and 
embellishment ; while not unfrequently the 
mere occurrence of a rhetorical figure, a 
well-turned sentence, a striking antithesis, 
or an epigrammatic point, supersedes at 
once all attention to veracity, and all 
consciousness of deviation. Such, we sus- 
pect, at best, are many of the conversations 
before us. Supposing, even, that Cap- 
tain Medwin had the rare accuracy of me~ 
mory, by which, without the assistance of 
the short-hand writer, such conversations 
as those of Lord Byron could be faith- 
fully recorded ;—supposing even that he 
had himself no portion of that habitude, 
from which few are entirely exempt, of 
listening at the same time to his own ima- 
ginations and the conversation which 
others are addressing to him, and being 
afterwards incapable of separating the ,one 
from the other ;*—certain, at any rate, it 
appears to be, whether the deviations.be in 
the record, or in the conyersations them- 
selves, that all, that is here set down, is not 
true in fact, any more than all, that is 
opinion, is worthy to be inserted among the 
canons of criticism. Many of the circum- 
stances relative to the conduct of Mr. Mur- 
ray, for example, have been clearly refuted 
by the deliberate evidence of Lord Byron’s 
own letters, in a little pamphlet (Notes on 
Captain Medwin’s Conversations of Lord 
Byron) which has been widely circulated ; 
and our veneration for Shakespeare and 
Milton will not be much shaken by eyen 
Lord Byron’s adjudication, whether after his 
first, second, third, or fourth bottle (for, he is 
made to tell us he was a four-bottle man), 
or after his pint of gin (which, he is also made 
to tell us, is the genuine draught of inspira- 
tion), that the former, as “‘ an actor, knew 
all the tricks of the trade, yet had but little fame 
in his day ;"’ that ‘“* few of what are called 
Shakespeare’s plays are exclusively so!”’ that 
*‘at this distance of time, so many works 
of that period being lost, we cannot sepa- 
rate what really is, from what is not, his 
own ;”’+ that ‘* many of his Comedies are 
insufferable to read, much more to see ;’’ 
that “one can hardly find ten lines toge- 
ther without some gross violation of taste, 
decency,” &e. or by his speaking with little 
more respect of the Paradise Lost, of the 
other, and yet afterwards feeling himself 
“too happy in being coupled in any way 
; with 
* The proportion is not small of those who never 
listen to any thing else but their own imagina- 
lions; who hear, while others are conversing to 
them, only the suggestions of their own. prepos- 
sessions, and yet repeat them afterwards with the 
same undoubting confidence, és if they had been 
really the faets and sentiments that had been de- 
livered to them. So much for the general confi- 
dence that is to be given to recorded conversa- 
tions! 
+ Wermight ask (as a sufficient answer to this), 
how much we can find in the works of others that 
are not lost, that could be suspected #f being Shakes 
speare’s ? - } ? 
