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Updated: May 25, 2025
Success was not success so long as his daughter's physique, the rumour of her engagement, were not included in the "Jottings" with the certainty of being extensively copied.
The jottings in question were written for a friend who had undertaken to write the artist's biography. The Rabelais, Don Quixote, The Inferno, and several more of these sumptuous volumes were brought out in England. Forty years ago Dore's bold and richly imaginative work was in great favour here; indeed, throughout his life he was much more appreciated by ourselves than by his countrymen.
They are hardly literature in the formal meaning of the word; he has left his jottings for the most part as he made them; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a dying soldier, a business memorandum, the copy of a letter short, straightforward to the point, with none of the trappings of composition; but they breathe a profound sentiment, they give us a vivid look at one of the sides of life, and they make us acquainted with a man whom it is an honour to love.
Their blood was blue, their upbringing beyond suspicion; they simply erred through a too-generous supply of the above-mentioned philanthropic fluid. They had come home dead-beat the night before, but were first down to breakfast, as happy as could be at the thought of the strenuous day before them, and were ostentatiously comparing their books of notes or jottings when Damaris came in.
After dinner these jottings remained as a valuable memorial of his visit. Perhaps if they were all collected, these slight affairs might bring enough at auction to pay for all the dinners to which the prudent host had invited the artist. The world of subjects included in Meissonier's art was a very narrow one, and was not calculated to interest men and women in general.
Some have called him the father of English antiquaries, in virtue of one of his notebooks which has been preserved, and which contains jottings about his travels in England; it is a sort of rude elementary Leland's Itinerary. It is by no means the only book of his compiling, nor the only one owned by him that we have.
These however were the colourless jottings of mere annalists; it was in the Scriptorium of Canterbury, in Osbern's lives of the English saints or in Eadmer's record of the struggle of Anselm against the Red King and his successor, that we see the first indications of a distinctively English feeling telling on the new literature.
Of my life at Penrith I need add nothing to the jottings I have already placed before the reader on the occasion of my first visit to that place. My brother, already a very different man from what he had been in London, came from his Irish district to visit us there; and I returned with him to Ireland, to his head-quarters at Banagher on the Shannon. Neither of this journey need I say much.
Pliny's jottings on natural history very soon resolved themselves into the most ambitious plan, which up to that time had not been attempted by man he would write out and sum up all human knowledge. The next man to try the same thing was Alexander von Humboldt. We now have Pliny's "Natural History" in thirty-seven volumes. His other forty volumes are lost.
Alas! how many of us are so sodden how many have wander'd so far away, that return is almost impossible. But to my jottings, taking them as they come, from the heap, without particular selection. There is little consecutiveness in dates. They run any time within nearly five or six years. Each was carelessly pencilled in the open air, at the time and place.
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