Labours, Opinions, and Table-Talk, by three
of his intimate friends, who dined with him
every other Sunday throughout the whole of
his long and distinguished life. It is a very
pretty book in a great many volumes,
with pleasing anecdotes—not only of the
eminent man himself, but of all his family
connections as well. His shortest notes are
preserved, and the shortest notes of others to
him. "My dear Oily, how is your head-
ache? Yours, Boily?" "My dear Boily,
worse than ever. Yours, Oily?" And so
on. His great sayings are also recorded for
the first time with due regard to
chronological exactness. We know that it was
when he was actually living at Highgate, and
not when he was only on the point of leaving
Hampstead, that he made his famous speech
to his wife's sister, who was standing at the
bottom of his garden one day, looking at the
view. "My love," he said, "always sit down
to look at a view. The more completely you
set the body at rest, the more widely you
throw the mind open to the influences of
Nature."

At the time the thoughtless lady laughed,
and he remarked with his customary
gentleness:

"You will not laugh always, Poppet. Let
us go in to tea."

Years afterwards, when Oily was no more,
that same wife's sister (the Poppet of early
days) happened to be going out for a walk on
the Heath with the venerable Boily, then
peacefully approaching the end of his long
and useful career.

"My dear sir," she playfully said to him,
"do you mind exchanging your stick for a
camp-stool? We are going to see a view,
and I love to sit down when I look at a
view."

The venerable Boily, who had been present
when the remarkable words were spoken at
the end of the garden, instantly recalled them,
and, fixing his piercing eye on the speaker,
said:

"Our poor Oily! You remember?"

She looked at him in eloquent silence.
Who shall say what she remembered or
what she did not in that venerable presence
and at that affecting moment?

Anecdotes of this sort abound in the book,
so do portraits of Oily at various periods of
his existence,—so do fac-similes of his hand-
writing, showing the curious modifications
which it underwent when he occasionally
exchanged a quill for a steel-pen. But it
will be more to my present purpose to
announce for the benefit of unfortunate people who
have not yet read the Memoirs, that Oily
was, as a matter of course, a delightful and
incessant talker. He poured out words, and
his audience imbibed the same perpetually
three times a week from tea-time to past
midnight. Women especially revelled in his
conversation. They hung, so to speak,
palpitating on his lips. All this is told me in
the Memoirs at great length, and in several
places; but not a word occurs anywhere
tending to show that Oily ever met with the
slightest interruption on any one of the
thousand occasions when he held forth. In
relation to him, as in relation to the Great
Glib, I seem bound to infer that he was never
staggered by an unexpected question, never
affronted by a black sheep among the flock,
in the shape of an inattentive listener, never
silenced by some careless man capable of
unconsciously cutting him short and starting
another topic before he had half done with
his own particular subject. I am bound to
believe all this—and yet, when I look about
at society as it is constituted now, I could fill
a room, at a day's notice, with people who
would shut up the mouth of Oily before it
had been open five minutes, quite as a matter
of course, and without the remotest suspicion
that they were misbehaving themselves in
the slightest degree. What—I ask myself—
to take only one example, and that from the
fair sex—what would have become of Oily's
delightful and incessant talk, if he had known
my friend Mrs. Marblemug, and had taken
her down to dinner in his enviable capacity
of distinguished man?

Mrs. Marblemug has one subject of
conversation—her own vices. On all other
topics she is sarcastically indifferent and
scornfully mute. General conversation she
consequently never indulges in; but the
person who sits next to her is sure to be
interrupted as soon as he attracts her attention by
talking to her, by receiving a confession of
her vices—not made repentantly, or
confusedly, or jocularly—but slowly declaimed
with an ostentatious cynicism, with a hard
eye, a hard voice, a hard—no, an adamantine
—manner. In early youth, Mrs. Marblemug
discovered that her business in life was to be
eccentric and disagreeable, and she is one of
the women of England who fulfils her mission.

I fancy I see the ever-flowing Oily sitting next
to this lady at dinner, and innocently trying to
make her hang on his lips like the rest of his
tea-table harem. His conversation is reported
by his affectionate biographers, as having
been for the most part of the sweetly pastoral
sort. I find that he drove that much-enduring
subject, Nature, in his conversational car
of triumph, longer and harder than most men.
I see him, in my mind's eye, starting in his
insinuating way from some parsley garnish
round a dish of lobsters—confessing, in his rich,
full, and yet low voice (vide Memoirs) that
garnish delights him, because his favourite
colour is green—and so getting easily
on to the fields, the great subject from
which he always got his largest conversational
crop. I imagine his tongue to be, as it
were, cutting its first preliminary capers on
the grass for the benefit of Mrs. Marblemug;
and I hear that calmly-brazen lady throw
him flat on his back by the utterance of some
such words as these: