Friends on the Shelf by Bradford Torrey - HTML preview

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In this Old Colony town, though none of his English biographers appear to know it, the boy Hazlitt lived in the Old North Parsonage, in which had lived some time before a girl named Abigail Smith, afterward better known as Abigail Adams, wife of the second President of the United States, and mother of the sixth. For which fact, more interesting to him than to his readers, it is to be feared, the present writer is indebted to the researches of his old Weymouth schoolmate, now President of the Weymouth Historical Society, Mr. John J. Loud.

[2] As it was to Solomon and, by this time, to William Hazlitt.

[3] “Mr. Johnson, indeed, as he was a very talking man himself, had an idea that nothing promoted happiness so much as conversation.”—Mrs. Piozzi.

[4] Author of Two Suffolk Friends.

[5] In a letter to his friend Pollock he says: “To-morrow I am going to one of my great treats, namely, the Assizes at Ipswich: where I shall see little Voltaire Jervis, and old Parke, who I trust will have the gout, he bears it so Christianly.”

[6] In connection with which it is good to remember that when Thackeray, not long before he died, was asked by his daughter which of his old friends he had loved most, he replied, “Why, dear old Fitz, to be sure.” After FitzGerald’s death Tennyson wrote of him: “I had no truer friend: he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one of so fine and delicate a wit.”

[7] After he began writing, the question of an individual style took on, as was inevitable, a different complexion. In his early days he would not read Carlyle, and (more surprising) at forty or thereabout he discontinued the reading of Livy; dreading in both cases an injury to his own manner.

[8] How largely he profited by his study of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and other poets, especially in the enrichment of his vocabulary, is shown by Mr. E. de Sélincourt in the notes and appendices to his recent admirable edition of Keats’s Poems. The subject is interesting, and is treated in the most painstaking manner.

[9] At this very time, by-the-bye, Hazlitt was lecturing, and Keats, after hearing him, reports to his brother (February 14, 1818), “Hazlitt’s last lecture was on Thomson, Cowper, and Crabbe. He praised Thomson and Cowper, but he gave Crabbe an unmerciful licking.”

[10] We speak thus without forgetting that an American poet once wrote (what a reputable American periodical printed) a revised version of one of the odes, just to show how easily Keats could be improved upon. The good man might have been, though we believe he was not, brother to the one of whom we have all heard, who declared his opinion that there weren’t ten men in Boston who could have written Shakespeare’s plays.

[11] Is there a possible connection between this fact and the further one that really magical lines are seldom or never to be found in the work of the more distinctively musical poets,—say in Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne?

[12] According to an eminent French critic, M. de Wyzewa, the United States still has (since Whitman’s death, he means to say) two poets,—Mr. Merril and Mr. Griffin. “Only two” is the critic’s phrase, but the adverb need not disturb us. A busy people who have two poets at once may count themselves rich.