December 30 1812: Dinner and Cards

After dinner a rubber at Lamb's; then went with Lamb and Burney to Rickman's. Hazlitt there. Cards, as usual, were our amusement. Lamb was in a pleasant mood. Rickman produced one of Chatterton's forgeries. In one manuscript there were seventeen different kinds of e's. "0," said Lamb, "that must have been written by one of the Mob of gentlemen who write with ease."

           — Henry Crabb Robinson writes in his diary for December 30th, 1812 

Or damn all Shakespeare, like th' affected fool
At court, who hates whate'er he read at school.

 But for the wits of either Charles's days,
The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease;
Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more,
(Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o'er)
One simile, that solitary shines
In the dry desert of a thousand lines,
Or lengthen'd thought that gleams through many a page,
Has sanctified whole poems for an age.

           —  Imitations of Horace by Alexander Pope,