The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart
Chapter 3: 1813-15
John Gibson Lockhart to Jonathan Christie, 3 January 1815
“January 3, 1815.
“My dear Christie,—I am very much
delighted by your letter, for it shows you to be somewhat in better humour with
yourself and this world than some of the last did. This I attribute partly to
your cold having subsided, but principally to the collision which you have
enjoyed with Williams. Not to mention
other good qualities, I think his sort of steady spirits render him a most
valuable companion. What other people effect by politeness ![]()
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and painstaking he does by nature in this matter. He
talks of composing Florilegiums, &c. I think it may be a good enough way of
making £50 or so—rather better than breaking iron-stone on a road in
July. I am grieved that W. takes offence at my tolerance
for some of the Wordsworth school: I am
not sure that I would say so much as I have said after reading the ‘Excursion,’ at least
the Jeffreys (sic) give one a bad
scent of it. But from their having omitted to quote any of several
divine passages which I have read I doubt not they are unfair. However, you in
one of your letters lately mention, among the absurdities of this age’s
producing, sentimental braziers and tender-hearted Jews. I daresay Coleridge has by this time added
philosophising pedlars to the list. Upon the whole, I doubt we have had bad
luck on the lakes this year on both sides the Atlantic.
“I have never been so solitary all my days as I am
now, and have been for some months. I feel no sympathy with the mercantile
souls here, and have really no companion whatever. I don’t know what I
would not have given to spend Christmas with the Welchman and you. I fancy Bristol may be cursedly like this
place, for you—tant pis.
“T’other day I went to a Glasgow ball, almost, I
may say, for the first time. On entering the room a buzz of
‘sugars,’ ‘cottons,’ ‘coffee,’
‘pullicates,’ assailed my ears from the four winds of heaven. Every
now and then the gemmen were deserting ![]()
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their partners, and
rushing into the caper course to talk over the samples of the morning. One
sedulous dog seemed to insist on another’s putting his finger into his
waistcoat pocket. The being did so, and forthwith put the tip to his lips, but
the countenance was so mealy that I could not tell whether it smacked of sugar
or Genseng.
“There is nobody affords me so much amusement here as
a dentist—a little, fat, coarse, bandy fellow, who commonly goes by the
name of Count Pulltuski. This man
carries personal vanity to the most daring height I ever witnessed. It becomes
quite magnanimous in him. He makes no bones of speaking it out, in a broad and
open way, that he considers himself as the greatest man now alive. I won his
heart one evening at a punch party. They were roasting him upon the narrow and
illiberal branch of the medical trade to which he confines himself. I took up
the cudgels for him, and maintained that I thought the circumstance of such a
man being a tooth doctor one of the best proofs of the advanced civilisation of
this age, and added that I hoped this country would soon learn, like ancient
Egypt, to have no physicians who undertake all manner of cures, but restrict
every practitioner to some lith or limb of his own.
“Pulltuski
sported me a royal dinner the day after. He had a set of rich, vulgar dogs
about him, who all pretend to the title of humorists, or, according to the
local phraseology, gaggers. ![]()
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N.B.—Gaggery, in the Glasgow idiom, means that
sort of fun which consists in saying things that stop one’s mouth; and
the coarser the gag, they seem to reckon the joke the more exquisite. There is
what they call a Gag club. I went to it one night as visitor. . . . They sang
‘The pigs they lie,’ in chorus,
&c. Says the President, ‘I was sent for t’other day to
Lord Douglass. I took particular care to
dress myself in silks, powdered highly, and arrived in my gig about seven in
the evening. I was shown into the dining-room—dinner just over. Sat next
my lady, a whisper through the room, “who’s
that?”—“’tis the great Scott—the
dentist—Pulltuski—a remarkably genteel-looking man. . .
.”’ This chiel is President also of the Newtonian Scientific
Society of Glasgow, &c, &c. But ’tis all nothing unless one could
write his face. I drew him in a box great-coat with nineteen necks and a
comforter round his neck. He has got this varnished and put in a two-guinea
frame over his mantelpiece. He sent round with his dessert, after dinner, the
jaw of a Roman soldier, and a set of teeth from Borodino, which last produced
twenty jokes on the high profits of his import trade, &c. He drank his wine
out of a glass about a foot high. . . . So much for him.
“Hamilton has
lately become a member of the Antiquarian Society of Edinburgh. Traill has passed his civil law trials, as I
am told, with éclat, which means without being plucked.
Hamilton
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lately made his first attempt at a speech, but immediately
lost every ray of recollection, and raved about like a madman for some minutes,
and then stuck dumb. What unfortunate nerves for a barrister. He has become a
great student of magic, and talks of publishing a history of Dæmonology,
but I see W. Scott announces a novel on Astrology, and I fancy
that will be enough of the black art for us all. Hannay, I hear, is a great dab at the bar for his time, and
brought off a sheepstealer at Kirkcudbright assizes.
“Will you be in Oxon Easter and Act? I think the essay
subjects are both d—— bad, but if I think of either it will be the
Latin. I read during summer some of the late German histories of philosophy,
and think I must make something of it.—Yours,
“J. G. L.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet and philosopher who projected
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
with William Wordsworth; author of
Biographia Literaria (1817),
On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other
works.
Robert Hannay (1789 c.-1868)
Son of James Hannay of Kirkcudbright; he was a classmate of John Gibson Lockhart's at
Balliol College, Oxford, afterwards a Scottish barrister.
Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850)
Scottish barrister, Whig MP, and co-founder and editor of the
Edinburgh
Review (1802-29). As a reviewer he was the implacable foe of the Lake School of
poetry.
James Scott [The Odontist] (1830 fl.)
The first dental specialist to practice in Glasgow, he was a member of the Royal
Philosophical Society of Glasgow (1803), afterward pilloried in
Blackwood's as “The Odontist.”. Blackwood's describes him as deceased in
1831.
James Traill (1794-1873)
Of Hobbister, Orkney; educated at Balliol College (Snell Exhibitioner) and the Middle
Temple, he was a police magistrate in London. Traill was John Christie's second in the duel
with John Scott.
John Williams (1792-1858)
Classical scholar educated at Balliol College, Oxford; he was a classmate of John Gibson
Lockhart and friend of Sir Walter Scott, whose son he tutored, and rector of the Edinburgh
Academy (1824-27, 1829-47).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
