Rogers
himself, with all his feeling of our injustice, found it impossible
not to join us; and we were, at last, all three in such a state of
inextinguishable laughter, that, had the author himself been of our
party, I question much whether he could have resisted the infection.'
The final fall and dissolution of Rogers, Rogers behaving as badly as
either of them, is all that was needed to give perfection to this
heart-warming scene. I like to think that on a certain night in
spring, year after year, three ghosts revisit that old room and
(without, I hope, inconvenience to Lord Northcliffe, who may happen to
be there) sit rocking and writhing in the grip of that old shared
rapture. Uncanny? Well, not more so than would have seemed to Byron
and Moore and Rogers the notion that more than a hundred years away
from them was some one joining in their laughter--as I do.
Alas, I cannot join in it more than gently. To imagine a scene,
however vividly, does not give us the sense of being, or even of
having been, present at it. Indeed, the greater the glow of the scene
reflected, the sharper is the pang of our realisation that we were not
there, and of our annoyance that we weren't. Such a pang comes to me
with special force whenever my fancy posts itself outside the Temple's
gate in Fleet Street, and there, at a late hour of the night of May
10th, 1773, observes a gigantic old man laughing wildly, but having no
one with him to share and aggrandise his emotion.
Pages:
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269