Table-Talk, Essays on Men and Manners [125]
actual for our ideal identity; and to feel the pulse of our old transports revive very keenly, we must 'jump' all our present comforts and connections. Our romantic and itinerant character is not to be domesticated. Dr. Johnson remarked how little foreign travel added to the facilities of conversation in those who had been abroad. In fact, the time we have spent there is both delightful, and in one sense instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial, downright existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same, but another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings:
Out of my country and myself I go.
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!
NOTES to ESSAY III
[1] Near Nether-Stowey, Somersetshire, where the author of this Essay visited Coleridge in 1798. He was there again in 1803.
[2] Fletcher's 'Faithful Shepherdess,' i. 3 (Dyce's _Beaumont and Fletcher,_ ii. 38, 39).
ESSAY IV
ON COFFEE-HOUSE POLITICIANS
There is a set of people who fairly come under this denomination. They spend their time and their breath in coffee-houses and other places of public resort, hearing or repeating some new thing. They sit with a paper in their hands in the morning, and with a pipe in their mouths in the evening, discussing the contents of it. The _Times,_ the _Morning Chronicle,_ and the _Herald_ are necessary to their existence: in them 'they live and move and have their being.' The Evening Paper is impatiently expected and called for at a certain critical minute: the news of the morning becomes stale and vapid by the dinner-hour. A fresher interest is required, an appetite for the latest-stirring information is excited with the return of their meals; and a glass of old port or humming ale hardly relishes as it ought without the infusion of some lively topic that had its birth with the day, and perishes before night. 'Then come in the sweets of the evening':--the Queen, the coronation, the last new play, the next fight, the insurrection of the Greeks or Neapolitans, the price of stocks, or death of kings, keep them on the alert till bedtime. No question comes amiss to them that is quite new--none is ever heard of that is at all old.
That of an hour's age doth hiss the speaker.
The World before the Flood or the Intermediate State of the Soul are never once thought of--such is the quick succession of subjects, the suddenness and fugitiveness of the interest taken in them, that the _Twopenny Post Bag_ would be at present looked upon as an old-fashioned publication; and the Battle of Waterloo, like the proverb, is somewhat musty. It is strange that people should take so much interest at one time in what they so soon forget;--the truth is, they feel no interest in it at any time, but it does for something to talk about. Their ideas are served up to them, like their bill of fare, for the day; and the whole creation, history, war, politics, morals, poetry, metaphysics, is to them like a file of antedated newspapers, of no use, not even for reference, except the one which lies on the table! You cannot take any of these persons at a greater disadvantage than before they are provided with their cue for the day. They ask with a face of dreary vacuity, 'Have you anything new?'--and on receiving an answer in the negative, have nothing further to say. [They are like an oyster at the ebb of the tide, gaping for fresh _tidings._] Talk of the Westminster Election, the Bridge Street Association, or Mr. Cobbett's Letter to John Cropper of Liverpool, and they are alive again. Beyond the last twenty-four hours, or
Out of my country and myself I go.
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!
NOTES to ESSAY III
[1] Near Nether-Stowey, Somersetshire, where the author of this Essay visited Coleridge in 1798. He was there again in 1803.
[2] Fletcher's 'Faithful Shepherdess,' i. 3 (Dyce's _Beaumont and Fletcher,_ ii. 38, 39).
ESSAY IV
ON COFFEE-HOUSE POLITICIANS
There is a set of people who fairly come under this denomination. They spend their time and their breath in coffee-houses and other places of public resort, hearing or repeating some new thing. They sit with a paper in their hands in the morning, and with a pipe in their mouths in the evening, discussing the contents of it. The _Times,_ the _Morning Chronicle,_ and the _Herald_ are necessary to their existence: in them 'they live and move and have their being.' The Evening Paper is impatiently expected and called for at a certain critical minute: the news of the morning becomes stale and vapid by the dinner-hour. A fresher interest is required, an appetite for the latest-stirring information is excited with the return of their meals; and a glass of old port or humming ale hardly relishes as it ought without the infusion of some lively topic that had its birth with the day, and perishes before night. 'Then come in the sweets of the evening':--the Queen, the coronation, the last new play, the next fight, the insurrection of the Greeks or Neapolitans, the price of stocks, or death of kings, keep them on the alert till bedtime. No question comes amiss to them that is quite new--none is ever heard of that is at all old.
That of an hour's age doth hiss the speaker.
The World before the Flood or the Intermediate State of the Soul are never once thought of--such is the quick succession of subjects, the suddenness and fugitiveness of the interest taken in them, that the _Twopenny Post Bag_ would be at present looked upon as an old-fashioned publication; and the Battle of Waterloo, like the proverb, is somewhat musty. It is strange that people should take so much interest at one time in what they so soon forget;--the truth is, they feel no interest in it at any time, but it does for something to talk about. Their ideas are served up to them, like their bill of fare, for the day; and the whole creation, history, war, politics, morals, poetry, metaphysics, is to them like a file of antedated newspapers, of no use, not even for reference, except the one which lies on the table! You cannot take any of these persons at a greater disadvantage than before they are provided with their cue for the day. They ask with a face of dreary vacuity, 'Have you anything new?'--and on receiving an answer in the negative, have nothing further to say. [They are like an oyster at the ebb of the tide, gaping for fresh _tidings._] Talk of the Westminster Election, the Bridge Street Association, or Mr. Cobbett's Letter to John Cropper of Liverpool, and they are alive again. Beyond the last twenty-four hours, or