Indeed, To Borrow The Well-Known
Words Applied To A Great Man Whom We All Love, 'He Tore His
Dinner
Like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling in his
forehead, and the perspiration running down his cheeks.' The
Trend of his thoughts, though he was eminently a man of
intellect, followed the dictates of his senses. Walk with
him in the fields and, from the full stores of a prodigious
memory, he would pour forth pages of the choicest poetry.
But if you paused to watch the lambs play, or disturbed a
young calf in your path, he would almost involuntarily
exclaim: 'How deliciously you smell of mint, my pet!' or
'Bless your innocent face! What sweetbreads you will
provide!'
James Wigan had kept a school once. The late Serjeant
Ballantine, who was one of his pupils, mentions him in his
autobiography. He was a good scholar, and when I first knew
him, used to teach elocution. Many actors went to him, and
not a few members of both Houses of Parliament. He could
recite nearly the whole of several of Shakespeare's plays;
and, with a dramatic art I have never known equalled by any
public reader.
His later years were passed at Sevenoaks, where he kept an
establishment for imbeciles, or weak-minded youths. I often
stayed with him (not as a patient), and a very comfortable
and pretty place it was. Now and then he would call on me in
London; and, with a face full of theatrical woe, tell me,
with elaborate circumlocution, how the Earl of This, or the
Marquis of That, had implored him to take charge of young
Lord So-and-So, his son; who, as all the world knew, had -
well, had 'no guts in his brains.' Was there ever such a
chance?
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