George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[The afterpiece was reduced to pantomime by tumult and orange-peels], and at midnight we still left the audience shouting, quarrelling, and tearing up the benches, all which, the newspapers the following day informed us, was continued some time, and was finally broken up by throwing pails of water from the gallery into the pit. . . . .

As we had passed so much of the evening with the mob, we thought we would finish the remainder of it with them, and went from the theatre to the Lord Mayor's ball. There were, I suppose, about three or four thousand people there; but, excepting Mr. Irving, with whom I went to see the show, and my bookseller, there was not a face I had ever seen before. The whole was a complete justification of all the satires and caricatures we have ever had upon city finery and vulgarity. At the head of one of the great halls, on a platform raised a couple of feet above the rest of the room, sat the Lord Mayor, dressed in full gala, and the Lady Mayoress, dressed in a hooped petticoat, a high headdress, long waist, and a profusion of jewelry. They were surrounded by what, under other circumstances, might have seemed a court, but now looked more like the candle-snuffers and scene-shifters on the stage. . . . They were fenced off from the rabble, and sat there merely for exhibition. And, in truth, the spectators were worthy of the show they came to witness. They were but a mob of well-dressed people, collected in fine rooms, crowding for places to dance,. . . . and gazing on the furniture in a manner that showed they had rarely or never seen such before, and almost fighting for the poor refreshments, as if they were half starved; and yet with that genuine air of city complacency which felt assured there was nothing in the world, either so elegant as the apartments, or so great as the Lord Mayor, or so well-bred as themselves. . . . .

I found Hazlitt living in Milton's house, the very one where he dictated his ‘Paradise Lost,’ and occupying the room where, tradition says, he kept the organ on which he loved to play. I should rather say Hazlitt sat in it, for, excepting his table, three chairs, and an old picture, this enormous room was empty and unoccupied. It was whitewashed, and all over the walls he had written in pencil short scraps of brilliant thoughts and phrases, half-lines of poetry, references, etc., in the nature of a commonplace-book. His conversation was much of the same kind, generally in short sentences, quick and pointed, dealing much in allusions, and relying a good deal on them for success; as, when he said, with apparent satisfaction, that Curran was