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Matilda recited some lines from Pope in my ear. Fanny challenged Burton to a rowing match. Sparks listened to all around him, and Mrs. Dalrymple mixed a very little weak punch, which Dr. Lucas had recommended to her to take the last thing at night, Noctes coenoeque etc. Say what you will, these were very jovial little réunions. The girls were decidedly very pretty.
Even after connecting himself with the magazine and becoming the symposiarch of the "Noctes," and perhaps the greatest Tory in all broad Scotland, he did not renounce his home among the lakes. He was a lover of scenery, and an enthusiast and master in manly sports. He is said to have fished in every trout-brook north of the Clyde, and he wandered every season over the Highlands.
Humor and wit, in anecdotes and repartee, beguiled the hours; and the few old taverns time has spared, could they speak, might narrate more good things their walls have heard, than have ever found record in the Noctes Ambrosianæ of the wits of Scrogie.
Jeffrey himself was ill and unable to take the chair, but Wilson, the leonine "Christopher North," editor of Blackwood, and author of those "Noctes Ambrosianæ" which were read so eagerly as they came out, and which some of us find so difficult to read now Wilson presided most worthily. Of speechifying there was of course much, and compliments abounded.
There were law students who read "Noctes Ambrosianae," the 'Age of Reason', and Bailey's "Festus," as well as Blackstone's 'Commentaries; and there was a public library in that village of six hundred people, small but very well selected, which was kept in one of the lawyers' offices, and was free to all.
Symonds as "Opalstein." He had great pleasure in the talk of the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin, which was both various and copious. But in these noctes coenaeque deum I was never a partaker. In many topics, such as angling, golf, cricket, whereon I am willingly diffuse, Mr. Stevenson took no interest.
Noctes Ambrosianae, April, 1829. The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. We must not underrate him who uses wit for subsistence, and flies from the ingratitude of the age even to a bookseller for redress. The critical faculty is a rara avis; almost as rare, indeed, as the phoenix, which appears only once in five hundred years.
Again, imagine some young lady of old captivated by the sentimental title of 'The Pomegranate with its Flower, and opening on a Treatise on the Jewish Ceremonials! Let us turn to the Romans. Aulus Gellius commences his pleasant gossipping 'Noctes' with a list of the titles in fashion in his day.
For the next three weeks we were as idle as a desert, and as vast as an antre, and thus on we go, alternately laboring like an ant, and relaxing in the sunny air like a dragon-fly, enamored of extremes." Of all his contributions, we think the "Noctes Ambrosianae" give by far the best idea of their author. They are perfectly characteristic throughout, though singularly various.
Although robustious, our fribbles were harmless enough ebullitions of animal spirit, sometimes perhaps of gaiety unguarded though each shade, treading the Celestian way, as most of them do, and recurring to those Noctes Ambrosianæ, might e'en repeat to the other the words on a memorable occasion addressed by Curran to Lord Avonmore: "We spent them not in toys or lust or wine; But search of deep philosophy, Wit, eloquence and poesy Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine."
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