They happened
to be men of the world, it is true; but how few men of very great
eminence in literature, how few intellectually Lord B.'s peers, have
'not' been men of the world? Does any one doubt that the topics he had
most pleasure in discussing with Scott or Moore were literary ones, or
had at least some relation to literature?
"As for the foreign 'literati', pray what 'literati' anything like his
own rank did he encounter abroad? I have no doubt he would have been
as much at home with an Alfieri, a Schiller, or a Goethe, or a
Voltaire, as he was with Scott or Moore, and yet two of these were
very little of men of the world in the sense in which he uses that
phrase.
"As to 'every-day men of letters,' pray who does like their company?
Would a clever man like a prosing 'captain, or colonel, or
knight-in-arms' the 'better' for happening to be himself the Duke of
Wellington?"]
[Footnote 3: George Granville Leveson Gower (1786-1861) succeeded his
father in 1833 as second Duke of Sutherland.]
[Footnote 4: George Lamb (1784-1834), the fourth son of the first Lord
Melbourne, married, in 1809, Caroline Rosalie St. Jules. As one of the
early contributors to the 'Edinburgh Review', he was attacked by Byron
in 'English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers', lines 57 and 516 (see 'Poems',
ed. 1898, vol. i. p. 301, 'note' I). A clever amateur actor, his comic
opera 'Whistle for It' was produced at Covent Garden, April 10, 1807,
and he was afterwards on the Drury Lane Committee of Management.
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