464 Familiarities - Quotations. [May, 



the eloquent arguments of old and beloved friende. Danger is, however, 

 sometimes mixed up with the delight. I remember having once half 

 mistaken a very specious doctrine for sound theology, simply because 

 the accomplished divine recited a passage in Milton, which I had made 

 as it were my own by frequent repetition. 



A notice of the authors most eligible for quotation must be reserved 

 for another opportunity. All writers are by no means alike in this re- 

 spect. Pope (it may be remarked by the vvay) abounds in quotable 

 things, chiefly from his habit of making every line rest on its own merits— 

 a circumstance that accounts, in its turn, for the strong resemblance his 

 couplets bear to each other. Of Shakspeare, not a line but has been 

 repeatedly, and will continue to be cited, as a commentary on the great 

 and various volume of human nature. In this spirit, the unannounced 

 author (not Sir Walter) of a fashionable, but acute and intellectual novel, 

 with an extensive and available reading, selects from this one grand 

 authority the mottoes for every chapter of his work. It is a compliment 

 to the divine poet, worthy of the writer in question. — And here I must 

 stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards 

 other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation : that we cannot, 

 for instance, quote a star that we have been watching ; or a hue of 

 sunset ; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said 

 heart) ; or a beautiful picture — a Claude or Titian, for example. 

 Hogarth must be singularly tempting : he is full of little bits that would 

 quote with a tickling effect. In music Ave are somewhat more fortunate, 

 when the ear and throat happen to go (if I may so say) hand in hand. 

 But let us be thankful that with books we can always make retirement, 

 and produce and replant in the world the golden fruit of adventure. 

 We can, besides^, introduce ourselves, material and immaterial, to an 

 imaginative reader, in a scrap of antique verse : it is the most philo- 

 sophic, as well as cheapest of portraitures — it saves one a fortune in 

 drawings from busts and engravings upon steel. Such is m)f regard for 

 these scraps (which are what the Biographer of Sheridan would desig- 

 nate as " fossils of thought"), that I had meditated an article of rather 

 than on quotations — one composed purely of isolated lines, wherein the 

 sound and sense should blend with each other as colours meet in a 

 rainbow. Something of the kind remains to be tried ; but the experi- 

 ment is a delicate one. It is to construct a cabinet of inlaid and curious 

 workmanship — the forming a multitude of precious links into one 

 matchless chain. Delight would, however, more than recompense the 

 labour ; we should gather the richest images from a hundi-ed different 

 points, and with conscious fingers, 



" Feel music's pulse in all her arteries." 

 At all events, the pleasure of simply quoting woidd be something, while 

 the beauty of the links themselves would atone for an occasional 

 deficiency of connexion. For, as I have remarked, the lustre of quo- 

 tations gives a clearness and a colour to the blankest page ; or to use a 

 figure of Cowley's — 



" So lilies in a glass inclose, 

 The glass will seem as white as those." 

 In a well-penned essay, they are as " sweets to the sweet" — to an 

 inelegant one they will lend a grace, though the)-^ cannot animate it into 

 beauty. They may, in this respect, be likened to the dolphins that are 

 said to have brought to shore the dead body of Hesiod : they saved from 

 tlie deep what, after all, was only lifeless clay. 



B. 



