dition 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?"[1] 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 con-
- ↑ Hood's Own (1846). The pathetic Why in this inquest touching the "dear deceased" seems to find its answer in the mismanagement of new proprietors, and the falling off of old contributors. Thus we read in a letter of Lamb's to Wordsworth (1822): "Our chief reputed assistants have forsaken us. The Opium-eater crossed us once with a dazzling path, and hath as suddenly left us darkling:"—and again, to Bernard Barton (1823): "The London, I fear, falls off. I linger among its creaking rafters, like the last rat; it will topple down if they don't get some buttresses. They have pulled down three; Hazlitt, Procter, and their best stay, kind, light-hearted Wainright, their Janus." (Of the last mentioned [Janus Weathercock], Justice Talfourd disclosed a lamentable history in the Final Memorials.) Thomas Hood thus sketches the catastrophe of the declining Magazine: "Worst of all, a new editor tried to put the Belles Lettres in Utilitarian envelopes; whereupon the circulation of the Miscellany, like that of poor Le Fevre, got slower, slower, slower,—and slower still,—and then stopped for ever! It was a sorry scattering of those old Londoners! Some went out of the country; one (Clare) went into it. Lamb retreated to Colebrooke. Mr. Gary presented himself to the British Museum. Reynolds and Barry took to engrossing when they should pen a stanza; and Thomas Benyon gave up literature."
