The following extracts are taken from George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book
Zeuxis was said to have painted grapes on a boy’s head so well that the birds came and pecked them. Sir G. Kneller said that if the boy too had been well painted the birds wouldn’t have dared approach.
An accurate daguerrotype portrait of a commonplace face, a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.
C. Bront‘ (1848) on Pride and Prejudice
Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.
Henry James on Kipling (1892)
I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have given that up in proportion as he has come down steadily from the simple in subject to the more simple – from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws.
Id. (1897)
Though the tough cough and hiccough plough me through,
O’er life’s rough lough my thorough course I’ll hew.
‘Ough (?)
Yan tan tethera pethera pimp; Tethera lethera hovera bovera dik; Yan-a-dik tan-a-dik tethera-dik pethera-dik bumfit; Yan-a-bumfit tan-a-bumfit tethera-a-bumfit pethera-a-bumfit figgit.
Shepherds counting sheep (Cymric numerals)
Green Grow the Rushes
One: God.
Two: the Lillywhite boys were Christ and John the Baptist.
Three: the arrivals were the three wise men, not ‘the rivals’ as often sung.
Four: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Five: the symbols at your door, was the five-pointed pentacle on the door at the Passover, or symbols on the stone, i.e. crosses on the altar-stone, the five wounds of Christ.
Six: proud waters (not walkers), the six good water-pots at Cana.
Seven: stars, i.e. star-angels of seven churches of the Apocalypse.
Eight: bold rangers were the eight human beings saved in the Ark.
Nine: bright singers, not shiners, the nine choirs of angels.
Ten: Commandments.
Eleven: apostles without Judas.
Twelve: apostles with Judas.
Laconic: When Philip threatened that if he entered Laconia the inhabitants should be exterminated, their answer was ‘If’.
Next Thursday I shall be delivered to the World, for whose inconstant and malicious levity I am coolly but firmly prepared.
Gibbon to his stepmother just before the publication of Decline and Fall
Darwin found a rare beetle and picked it up – then saw a rarer and, hands being full, popped it in his mouth.
The simple bird that thinks two notes a song.
W. H. Davies on the cuckoo
Lockhart said Jane Eyre must be by a man or a ‘very coarse woman’. (Miss Rigby said a man, because Miss Ingram’s dress was said to be of ‘sky-blue crepe’.)
Augustine Birrell said he had once heard a man treat George Eliot rudely. ‘I sat down in a corner and prayed God to blast him. God did nothing and ever since I have been an agnostic.’
On Sunday he cries ‘Tripe!’ On Monday night
He skims the book to see if he was right.
L. E. Jones on reviewers
‘Have ye no tasted haggis?’ ‘No, but I once trod in some.’
Hengist was coarser than Horsa
And Horsa was awfully coarse;
Horsa drank whisky,
Told tales that were risquZ,
But Hengist was in a divorce.
Horsa grew coarser and coarser,
But Hengist was coarse all his life;
That reprobate Horsa
Drank tea from a saucer,
But Hengist ate peas with his knife.
Desmond Carter: ‘New Light on Ancient Heroes’
A cargozoon of strumpets; a skein of wildfowl; a ribboning of plover; a murder of crows; a rafter of turkeys; an unkindness of ravens; a pitying or dule of doves; a blow of tulips.
Nouns of Assembly
How long ago upon the fabulous shores
Of far Lumbago, all on a summer’s day,
He and the maid Neuralgia, they twain,
Lay in a flower-crowned mead,
and garlands wove
Of gout and yellow hydrocephaly,
Dim palsies, pyorrhoea and sweet
Myopia, bluer than the summer sky,
Agues both white and red, pied common cold,
Cirrhosis, and that wan faint flower of love
The shepherds called dyspepsia
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