[245] Games at cards. Pope wrote a poem called "The Basset Table."
[246] Four o'clock was soon the fashionable hour. Mr. Dobson quotes from Swift's "Journal of a Modern Lady" (1728):--
"This business of importance o'er, And madam almost dressed by four, The footman, in his usual phrase, Comes up with 'Madam, dinner stays.'"
[247] See Lucian's "Judicium Vocalium." Such words as σήμερον and σὺκον afterwards came to be spelled τήμερον and τὺκον.
[248] Coal carried by sea from the colliery, as was then the case with all the coal used in London. In the country wood was burned; and Will Honeycomb, after his marriage to a farmer's daughter, said that had his steward not run away, he would still have been "immersed in sin and sea-coal" in London, with its smoke and gallantries (_Spectator_, No. 530).
From _Thursday, Dec. 14_, to _Saturday Dec. 16, 1710_.
Boccalini[251] in his "Parnassus," indicts a laconic writer for speaking that in three words which he might have said in two, and sentences him for his punishment to read over all the works of Guicciardin.[252] This Guicciardin is so very prolix and circumstantial in his writings, that I remember our countryman Dr. Donne, speaking of that majestic and concise manner in which Moses has described the creation of the world, adds that "if such an author as Guicciardin were to have written on such a subject, the world itself would not have been able to have contained the books that gave the history of its creation."[253]
I look upon a tedious talker, or what is generally known by the name of a story-teller, to be much more insufferable than even a prolix writer. An author may be tossed out of your hand and thrown aside when he grows dull and tiresome; but such liberties are so far from being allowed towards your orators in common conversation, that I have known a challenge sent a person for going out of the room abruptly, and leaving a man of honour in the midst of a dissertation. This evil is at present so very common and epidemical, that there is scarce a coffee-house in town that has not some speakers belonging to it, who utter their political essays, and draw parallels out of Baker's "Chronicle"[254] to almost every part of her Majesty's reign. It was said of two ancient authors who had very different beauties in their style, that if you took a word from one of them, you only spoiled his eloquence; but if you took a word from the other, you spoiled his sense. I have often applied the first part of this criticism to several of these coffee-house speakers whom I have at present in my thoughts, though the character that is given to the last of those authors is what I would recommend to the imitation of my loving countrymen: but it is not only public places of resort, but private clubs and conversations over a bottle, that are infested with this loquacious kind of animal, especially with that species which I comprehend under the name of a story-teller. I would earnestly desire these gentlemen to consider, that no point of wit or mirth at the end of a story can atone for the half-hour that has been lost before they come at it. I would likewise lay it home to their serious consideration, whether they think that every man in the company has not a right to speak as well as themselves? and whether they do not think they are invading another man's property, when they engross the time which should be divided equally amongst the company to their own private use?