Page:Table-Talk, vol. 2 (1822).djvu/305

 and feel an interest in you without your knowing it. This is a bolster to lean upon; a lining to your poor, shivering, threadbare opinion of yourself. You want some such cordial to exhausted spirits, and relief to the dreariness of abstract speculation. You are something; and, from occupying a place in the thoughts of others, think less contemptuously of yourself. You are the better able to run the gauntlet of prejudice and vulgar abuse. It is pleasant in this way to have your opinion quoted against yourself, and your own sayings repeated to you as good things. I was once talking to an intelligent man in the pit, and criticising Mr. Knight’s performance of Filch. “Ah!” he said, “little Simmons was the fellow to play that character.” He added, “There was a most excellent remark made upon his acting it in the (I think it was)—That he looked as if he had the gallows in one eye and a pretty girl in the other.” I said nothing, but was in remarkably good humour the rest of the evening. I have seldom been in a company where fives-playing has been talked of but some one has asked in the course of it, “Pray, did any one ever see an account of one Cavanagh that appeared some time back in most of the papers? Is it known who wrote it?” These are trying moments. I had a triumph over a