INTRODUCTION

ΤΟ

ESMOND AND TO THE LECTURES

1851-1853

PART 1.

"My dear Smith," my father once wrote, "how would the lectures do with no end of illustrations?-T. O.-I was drawing these, and that made me write to you,-Yours,

"W. M. T."

Here are the sketches over the page in this book as they are in my father's letter-Captain Steele with his cane and periwig, Mr. Sterne in his bands and buckles, Dr. Johnson pacing the street with Boswell by his side.

As one reads the Lectures on the Humourists, one feels how much my father was at ease with all these people, whom he loved and admired. He trod in the actual footsteps of Johnson and Goldsmith, and Steele and Addison. He saw the things they had seen, heard the echoes to which they had listened, he walked up the very streets where they had walked. He was one of them, and happy in their good company. Sir Walter also wrote of these times, also admired and appreciated all these personalities, but he belonged to a different and more romantic world of chivalry and adventure. As for my father-so he says in one of his letters "the eighteenth century occupies him to the exclusion almost of the nineteenth," and he carried its traditions along with him.

The first lecture was given on the 21st of May 1851. Charlotte Brontë has described it, and Mrs. Kemble has described it and Willis's Rooms, the assembled company, the undoubted