Books and Authors: Curious Facts and Characteristic SketchesAnonymous
General
Books and Authors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches
Anonymous
Authors; Literature -- Anecdotes
George Colman, the younger, notes:--"There is no Shakspeare or Roscius
upon record who, like Foote, supported a theatre for a series of years
by his own acting, in his own writings; and for ten years of the time,
upon a wooden leg! This prop to his person I once saw standing by his
bedside, ready dressed in a handsome silk stocking, with a polished
shoe and gold buckle, awaiting the owner's getting up: it had a kind of
tragic, comical appearance, and I leave to inveterate wags the ingenuity
of punning upon a Foote in bed, and a leg out of it. The proxy for a
limb thus decorated, though ludicrous, is too strong a reminder of
amputation to be very laughable. His undressed supporter was the
common wooden stick, which was not a little injurious to a well-kept
pleasure-ground. I remember following him after a shower of rain, upon
a nicely rolled terrace, in which he stumped a deep round hole at every
other step he took, till it appeared as if the gardener had been there
with his dibble, preparing, against all horticultural practice, to plant
a long row of cabbages in a gravel walk."
* * * * *
RIVAL REMEMBRANCE.
_Mr. Gifford to Mr. Hazlitt._
"What we read from your pen, we remember no
more."
_Mr. Hazlitt to Mr. Gifford._
"What we read from your pen, we remember before."
* * * * *
WHO WROTE "JUNIUS'S LETTERS"?
This question has not yet been satisfactorily answered. In 1812, Dr.
Mason Good, in an essay he wrote on the question, passed in review all
the persons who had then been suspected of writing these celebrated
letters. They are, Charles Lloyd and John Roberts, originally treasury
clerks; Samuel Dyer, a learned man, and a friend of Burke and Johnson;
William Gerard Hamilton, familiarly known as "Single-speech Hamilton;"
Mr. Burke; Dr. Butler, late Bishop of Hereford; the Rev. Philip
Rosenhagen; Major-General Lee, who went over to the Americans, and took
an active part in their contest with the mother-country; John Wilkes;
Hugh Macaulay Boyd; John Dunning, Lord Ashburton; Henry Flood; and Lord
George Sackville.
Since this date, in 1813, John Roche published an Inquiry, in which he
persuaded himself that Burke was the author. In the same year there
appeared three other publications on Junius: these were, the Attempt of
the Rev. J. B. Blakeway, to trace them to John Horne Tooke; next were
the "Facts" of Thomas Girdlestone, M.D., to prove that General Lee was
the author; and, thirdly, a work put forth by Mrs. Olivia Wilmot Serres,
in the following confident terms:--"Life of the Author of _Junius's
Letters_,--the Rev. J. Wilmot, D.D., Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford;"
and, like most bold attempts, this work attracted some notice and
discussion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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