“I never knew a passion for politics exist for a long time without swallowing up, absolutely excluding, a passion for Religion,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 5/16/1797 letter to J.P. Estlin.
A few months later, to his clergyman brother, Coleridge said he had withdrawn himself from consideration of “immediate causes,” i.e., current political arguments.
Samuel Johnson’s aunt, a gossip, was “willing to find something to censure in the absent,” said SJ. It’s in Kingsmill, editor, Johnson Without Boswell, 1941.
Prime Min. Gladstone’s falling into the Thames would be a misfortune, his being pulled out a calamity, said witty man quoted in 1/19/07 Times Lit Supplement.
A “gentle dimming of the libido” is a benefit of growing old. “It’s like being unshackled from a lunatic,” said a contributor to Late Youth: an anthology celebrating the joys of being over fifty (S. Johnson ed., Arcadia), reviewed in TLS “In Brief,” 3/9/07.
It’s “a fat book covering just two years, with gruel-thin contents,” said Jan Marsh of The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (ed. Wm. E. Friedman, Brewer), vol. 6: Last Decade, 1873-84, Kelmscott to Birchington I: 1873-74.
“I always have to be the bad guy. Let’s both be good guys,” said Johnny, 4, to Madeline, 6, in playground in Intercourse, PA.
AUTHOR: Hugh Kingsmill, mentioned here earlier as declaring Victorian sentimentality the product of “an unnatural union of poetry and Puritanism,” has two books on Samuel Johnson, one, Samuel Johnson, is a bio. The other, Johnson Without Boswell, consists of passages from others who knew him besides his famous chronicler.
ANOTHER: Coleridge’s writing his Biographia Literaria is a case of long-delayed production, short-term hard work on a publisher’s advance. It distilled and summed up his life’s work as poet, essayist, and philosopher, combining autobiography, criticism, and philosophy in a manner best suited to his talents as he had come to understand them. This is from the 1955 intro by Geo. Watson to the Everyman’s Edition of BL.
MOVIE, MOVIE: “Touchez pas au grisbi” (Do not touch the loot) is a 1954 film with Jean Gabin and several gorgeous women, none of whom in vulgar fashion remove their clothes or leer into the camera. He’s a criminal who protects swag from a huge bullion robbery. It ends in a gunfight on a country road which I’d say the Cohen brothers drew on for their small-city film of Prohibition times, “Miller’s Crossing.”
This “Do not touch” is deliciously tense from the start and blessedly refrains from being cute or maudlin. No faux O. Henry ending here. The film puts pleasurable tension even into a man brushing his teeth. It’s part of the Criterion Collection, which the OP library stocks to our continuing benefit.
Blithe Spirit 