"He always made the
best pun and the best remark in the course of the evening." Lamb was
undoubtedly "matchless as a fireside companion," inimitable as a
table-talker, "great at the midnight hour." The "wit-combats" at his
Wednesday-evening parties were waged with scarcely inferior skill and
ability to those fought at the old Mermaid tavern between Shakspeare
and Ben Jonson. Hazlitt, in his delightful essay intituled "Persons One
would Wish to have Seen," gives a masterly report of the sayings and
doings at one of these parties. It is to be regretted that he did not
report the conversation at all of these weekly assemblages of wits,
humorists, and good-fellows. He made a capital book out of the
conversation of James Northcote: he could have made a better one out of
the conversation of Charles Lamb. Indeed, Elia himself seems to have
been conscious that many of his deepest, wisest, best thoughts and
ideas, as well as wildest, wittiest, airiest fancies and conceits, were
vented in conversation; and a few months before his death he noted down
for the entertainment of the readers of the London "Athenaeum," a few
specimens of his table-talk. Although these paragraphs of table-talk are
not transcripts of their author's actual conversation, they doubtless
contain the pith and substance of what he had really said in some of his
familiar discourses with friends and acquaintances.
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