Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/42

30 of his garments." To the same Eneyclopædia, Sir Thomas contributed the notices of the Lyric Poets of Greece, of Thucydides, sections of the history of Greece and of Rome, the Arts and Sciences of the Ancients, &c.

He stood well, too, on the once brilliant staff of the London Magazine, that bright-starred, thickly-starred, ill-starred rival of Old Ebony. Remembering how noble an army of coadjutors it once maintained, we may well concur in Hood's saying, that perhaps no ex-periodical might so appropriately be apostrophised with the Irish funeral question, "Arrah, honey, why did you die?" "Had you not," he continues (and as poor John Scott's successor he speaks feelingly), "an editor, and elegant prose writers, and beautiful poets, and broths of boys for criticism and classics, and wits and humorists,—Elia, Gary, Procter, Cunningham, Bowring, Barton, Hazlitt, Elton, Hartley Coleridge, Talfourd, Soane, Horace Smith, Reynolds, Poole, Clare, and Thomas Benyon, with a power besides? Hadn't you Lions' Heads with Traditional Tales? Hadn't you an Opium-eater, and a Dwarf, and a Giant, and a learned Lamb, and a Green Man? Arrah, why did you die?" To that longer-lived Magazine which the reader now holds in his hand, was Mr. Talfourd also a steady contributor; and he has amusingly recorded his sense of the utter unfitness of the then Editor (Campbell) for his office—alleging that he regarded a magazine as if it were a long affidavit, or a short answer in Chancery, in which the absolute truth of every sentiment and the propriety of every jest were verified by the editor's oath or solemn affirmation; that he stopped the press for a week at a comma, balanced contending epithets for a fortnight, and at last grew rash in his despair, and tossed the nearest, and often the worst article, "unwhipp'd of justice," to the impatient printer. Both the great Quarterlies, we believe, may also claim the name of Talfourd on their respective lists of critical allies.

But though periodical literature had provided his labours with a "local habitation," a "name" of prominent import and illuminated letters was first secured to him by the production of "Ion." The play was privately printed in 1834, and reviewed in the Quarterly; its performance at Covent Garden in 1836 was one of the memorabilia of the modern stage. Miss Mitford has told us of one brilliant gathering