"Who is yon spark in blue and silver? He beats Joe Addison himself, in
drinking, and pious Joe is the greatest toper in the three kingdoms,"
Dick Steele said, good-naturedly.
"His paper in the Spectator beats thy best, Dick, thou sluggard," the
Right Honorable Mr. Addison exclaimed. "He is the author of that famous
No. 996, for which you have all been giving me the credit."
"The rascal foiled me at capping verses," Dean Swift said, "and won a
tenpenny piece of me, plague take him!"
"He has suggested an emendation in my 'Homer,' which proves him a
delicate scholar," Mr. Pope exclaimed.
"He knows more of the French king than any man I have met with; and we
must have an eye upon him," said Lord Bolingbroke, then Secretary of
State for Foreign Affairs, and beckoning a suspicious-looking person who
was drinking at a side-table, whispered to him something.
Meantime who was he? where was he, this youth who had struck all the
wits of London with admiration? His galloping charger had returned to
the City; his splendid court-suit was doffed for the citizen's gabardine
and grocer's humble apron.
George de Barnwell was in Chepe--in Chepe, at the feet of Martha
Millwood.
VOL III.
THE CONDEMNED CELL.
"Quid me mollibus implicas lacertis, my Elinor? Nay," George added, a
faint smile illumining his wan but noble features, "why speak to thee in
the accents of the Roman poet, which thou comprehendest not? Bright One,
there be other things in Life, in Nature, in this Inscrutable Labyrinth,
this Heart on which thou leanest, which are equally unintelligible to
thee! Yes, my pretty one, what is the Unintelligible but the Ideal? what
is the Ideal but the Beautiful? what the Beautiful but the Eternal? And
the Spirit of Man that would commune with these is like Him who wanders
by the thina poluphloisboio thalasses, and shrinks awe-struck before
that Azure Mystery.
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