��Anecdotes by Hannah More.
��make one in the party. Dr. Adams, the master of Pembroke, had contrived a very pretty piece of gallantry. We spent the day and evening at his house. After dinner Johnson begged to conduct me to see the College, he would let no one show it me but himself, ' This was my room ; this Shenstone's x / Then after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who had been of his
��'that though Henderson had much quackery before ignorant people to astonish them with his eccentricities of erudition, which became so much a habit that he was generally quackish in the selection of his subjects, the manner was full of ability ; and that he Memoirs of F. Homer, i. 241.
Lamb wrote to Coleridge in June, 1796 : ' Of the Monody on Hender son I will here only notice these lines, as superlatively excellent. That energetic one, " Shall I not praise thee, scholar, Christian, friend," like to that beautiful climax of Shake speare's " King, Hamlet, Royal Dane, Father 1 ;" " yet memory turns from little men to thee," "And sported careless round their fellow child."' Ainger's Letters of Lamb, i. 14.
De Ouincey tells how ' when Hen derson was disputing at a dinner party, his opponent being pressed by some argument too strong for his logic or his temper, replied by throwing a glass of wine in his face ; upon which Henderson . . . coolly wiped it, and said, " This, Sir, is a digression ; now, if you please, for the argument."' De Quincey's Works, xii. 192.
The Monody was by Joseph Cottle.
Coleridge in his lines To the Aiithor of Poems, &c., says: 'But lo ! your Henderson awakes the Muse
��His Spirit beckoned from the
Mountain's height, You left the plain, and soared mid
richer views ! So Nature mourned, when sunk
the First Day's light, With stars, unseen before, spangling
her robes of night.' Coleridge's Poems, ed. 1859, p. 53. 1 Johnson's room over the gate way is in its fabrick much as it was when Hannah More saw it; Shen stone's is no longer known.
2 ' From school Shenstone was sent to Pembroke College in Oxford, a society which, for half a century, has been eminent for English poetry and elegant literature.' Works, viii. 408. For a list of the eminent men see Life, i. 75 ; where Boswell also re cords, that 'being himself a poet, Johnson was peculiarly happy in mentioning how many of the sons of Pembroke were poets ; adding, with a smile of sportive triumph, " Sir, we are a nest of singing-birds." '
The College has not been wanting in scholars in later years. Among my contemporaries were the late Dr. Edwin Hatch, the learned theo logian ; Dr. Edward Moore, the editor of Dante, and Canon Dixon, the author of The History of the Church of England, and of finer poems than were sung by most of last-century's nest of singing- birds.
��' I '11 call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane.' Act. i. Sc. 4.
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