Transcribed from the 1907 Hodder and Stoughton edition byDavid Price,
By
CLEMENT SHORTER
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON MCMVII
p. ivButler andTanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome,and London.
The following addresses were delivered at the request ofvarious literary societies and commemorative committees. They amused me to write, and they apparently interested theaudiences for which they were primarily intended. Perhapsthey do not bear an appearance in print. But they are notfor my brother-journalists to read nor for the judicious men ofletters. I prefer to think that they are intended solelyfor those whom Hazlitt styled “sensiblepeople.” Hazlitt said that “the most sensiblepeople to be met with in society are men of business and of theworld.” I am hoping that these will buy my book andthat some of them will like it.
It is recorded by Sir Henry Taylor of Samuel Rogers that whenhe wrote that very indifferent poem, Italy, he said,“I will make people buy. Turner shall illustrate myverse.” It is of no importance that the biographer ofRogers tells p. vius that the poet first made theartist known to the world by these illustrations. Taylor’s story is a good one, and the moral worth taking toheart. The late Lord Acton, most learned and mostaccomplished of men, wrote out a list of the hundred best booksas he considered them to be. They were printed in a popularmagazine. They naturally excited much interest. Ihave rescued them from the pages of the Pall MallMagazine. Those who will not buy my book for its sevenother essays may do so on account of Lord Acton’s list ofbooks being here first preserved “betweenboards.” I shall be equally well pleased.
CLEMENT SHORTER.
Great Missenden,
Bucks.
A toast proposed at the Johnson Birthday Celebration held atthe Three Crowns Inn, Lichfield, in September, 1906.
In rising to propose this toast I cannot ignore what must bein many of your minds, the recollection that last year it wassubmitted by a very dear friend of my own, who, alas! has nowgone to his rest, I mean Dr. Richard Garnett. [3] Many of you who heard him in thisplace will recall, with kindly memories, that venerablescholar. I am one of those who, in the interval have stoodp.4beside his open grave; and I know you will permit me totestify here to the fact that rarely has such brilliantscholarship been combined with so kindly a nature, and with somuch generosity to other workers in the literary field. Onemay sigh that it is not possible to perpetuate for all time forthe benefit of others the vast mass of learning which such men asDr. Garnett are able to accumulate. One may lament evenmore that one is not able to present in some concrete form, as anexample to those who follow, his fine qualities of heart andmind—his generous faculty for ‘helping lame dogs overstiles.’
Dr. Garnett had not only a splendid erudition that speciallyqualified him for proposing this toast, he had also what many ofyou may think an equally exceptional qualification—he was anative of Lichfield; he was born in this fine ci