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A Little English Gallery

Chapter 15: FOOTNOTES:
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About This Book

A series of compact biographical studies sketches a handful of literary and historical figures, blending archival detail, anecdote, and critical observation to reconstruct personality and milieu. Each essay foregrounds relationships, social or intellectual networks, and the private habits that shaped public reputations, while noting stylistic or spiritual influences on the subjects’ work. The writer balances affectionate portraiture with documentary rigor, moving from familial scenes to broader cultural and clerical contexts. Taken together, the pieces aim to revive neglected particulars of individual lives and to suggest how temperament and circumstance informed creative and civic achievement.

—“Our day is gone:
Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done.”

There are gods as good for the after-years; but Odin is down, and his pair of unreturning birds have flown west and east.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] A popular eighteenth-century beverage, composed of wine, orange, and sugar.

[46] Although Langton is recorded on his college books as having given the usual £10 for plate, and also as having paid his caution money in 1757, his name is not down upon the matriculation lists, possibly because he failed to appear at the moment the entries were being made. In what must have been his destined space upon one of the pages, Dr. Ingram made this note: “Q. Num Bennet Langton hic inserendus?”

[47] A boyish fashion of self-entertainment afterwards in great favor with Shelley.

[48] It is a pleasant thing to remember that it was Langton, always an appreciator of Goldsmith’s lovable genius, who suggested “Auburn” as the name for his Deserted Village. There is a hamlet called Auborne in Lincolnshire.

[49] Langton’s sisters are generally spoken of as three in number. But Burke’s History of the Landed Gentry mentions but two, Diana and Juliet. There was a younger brother, Ferne, who died in boyhood, and the floral name, not unlike a girl’s, may have been responsible for the confusion.

[50] The fruiterer.

[51] The bookseller’s.

[52] Rochester, in his immortal epigram, had said the same of King Charles II.

[53] This neat descriptive stroke has been attributed also to Richard Paget.

[54] The register of St. George’s betrays a little eager blunder of Lady Di’s which is amusing. When the officiating curate asked her to sign, she wrote “Diana Beauclerk,” and was obliged to cross out the signature—one knows with what a smile and a flush!—and substitute the “Diana Spencer” which stands beside it.

[55] Miss Hawkins says “ten,” and may have had the extra adopted child in mind.

[56] It is a pity he did not live to read the jolly American Ballad of Bon Gaultier, which seems to have a sort of muddled clairvoyant knowledge of this transaction:

“Every day the huge Cawana
Lifted up its monstrous jaws;
And it swallowed Langton Bennet,(!)
And digested Rufus Dawes.
“Riled, I ween, was Philip Slingsby
Their untimely deaths to hear;
For one author owed him money,(!)
And the other loved him dear.”

[57] The church has since been “restored,” and the fine epitaph is now (1890) “skyed” on the south wall of the nave.