Page:The Maclise Portrait-Gallery.djvu/84

 used rather blasphemously to call him a caricature of a crucifixion. Strange being! Yet under that odd and repulsive appearance he possessed wit unbounded, jocularity unceasing, deliberate courage, magnanimous philanthropy. Sage in council, jocose at table, valiant in action, luxurious in ease, he was the idol of London. Wherever he went, joy brightened every countenance, and the very phrase, ' It's a saying of Sam's,' became proverbial to express the highest degree of wit. In this particular, indeed, he was unequalled; none, in fact, approached him, except the illustrious Hallam,who, we are informed by some of the principal critical works of the age, wrote a jocular treatise on the Middle Ages which has not come down to posterity, but which, in his own generation, appears to have excited a universal laugh wherever it was mentioned."

Another novel, which had originally appeared in Ainsworth's Magazine, was reissued in separate form, after his death, and assumes an importance not its own from the designs of the inimitable George Cruikshank, by which it is illustrated; this is John Manesty, or the Liverpool Merchant, 1844, 2 vols. 8vo. The collector, too, may care to be reminded of that little pocket "La Rochefoucauld" of the diner-out and man-about-town, ''The Maxims of Sir Morgan O'Doherty. Bart.'' Blackwood, 1849.

I have alluded to Maginn's skill in Parody j in this branch of humorous literature he was truly facile princeps, the greatest of his time, if not of all time. His effusions in this way are scattered here and there, but the curious reader may find some specimens in W. Jerdan's Autobiography, vol. iii., p. 82. As a Song-writer he was not excelled even by Procter ("Barry Cornwall"); and as a Conversationist, his table-talk is represented by one who had enjoyed it, to be " an outpouring of the gorgeous stores wherewith his mind was laden, flowing on hke the storied Pactolus, all golden"— "Quidquid come loquens, atque omnia dulcia linquens," —and to be devoid alike of the turgid pomposity of Johnson, and of the often tedious monotony of Coleridge. The learned Heinsius was pronounced by our own S eld en "quam sever arum turn amsenarum literarum Sol"; and Buchanan, the Scottish poet, was characterized as "omni liberali eruditione non leviter tinctus, sed penitus imbutus." Such hyperbolic phrases of eulogy, which the scholars of old were wont to apply to each other, find a parallel in those by which the friends and immediate contemporaries of William Maginn have expressed their estimation of the genius and attainments of the departed scholar. Hear only one, capable of judging, and who knew him from the very commencement of his literary career to its mournful close,— the late William Jerdan—"There is scarcely any species of literature of which he has not left examples as masterly as any in the language. Romancist, Parodist, Politician, Satirist, Linguist, Poet, Critic, Scholar,—pre-eminent in all, and in the last all but universal,—the efflux of his genius inexhaustible."

But here I am warned to bring these notes to a conclusion, and hasten to the closing scene, over which I would fain draw the curtain. With the induration of intemperate habits, and the want of ordinary prudence,—his