penury, misfortune, contumely, and other heart-trying torturers, have tried their worst at changing it; but none but the fine hand of its original moulder can unfashion it: "change cannot alter it, nor custom stale" it. Ye shall not, as I have afore said, know him when the moon of his mania doth change: the man is then on earth; but the mind is in the air, the sea, the fields, the valleys, and the mountains; and though he is" the observed of all observers," he observes nothing. In vain does the wallchalking doctor insinuate his waste-paper for unnecessary purposes at Temple-bar; he heeds him not: in vain do Mr. Elliston's puffs meet him, like so many small winds, at every corner of every street; they tempt him not: in vain does Mr. Tomkins invite him to a share in his pictorial lottery; he has no chance with him: in vain does the crippled sailor shew the want of his legs, which never failed him before, and "God-bless" his honour; his honour seems no more to him than it is to Lord A- -, or Lord B. You might offer him your shrewish wife; he would scarcely look thankful: you might proffer him your toothpick in Duke Humphrey's Walk; he would not look obliged: you might pay him the first instalment of a horsewhipping which he never deserved, and I doubt whether he would stop to give you a receipt, or be nice enough to count the change: you might invite him to half a gooseberry, and ask him to hold the iron-ladle while you pumped, and I fear he would not be anacreontic enough to toast "the founder of the feast:" or you might tread on his toes, and he would politely beg your pardon. Ask him where he goes, and he believes Thomson was very well; ask him where he has been, and he has not seen Brown for a month: his body is parading the streets of the town, but his mind is abroad on a venture, far as the Hesperides; or wandering in the golden vales of Arcady, or basking its whole length on sunny banks, by tinkling rills, With shepherds chatting in a rustic row. This high state of excitement is, however, usually spent with the three guineas that superinduced it, in three days, more or less, (to speak with the advisedness of Mr. Almanack Moore,) at a bookstall, or at the "Apocryphal Chapter*," gradually subsiding in a shower of sonnets and fragmental bits of projected epics, tragedies, comedies, and essays without end, though they are" to be concluded in our next," (so that you might be led to fear that mount Helicon had published a volcano in one volume, and intended to smother the public in general by private subscription with its long-gathering magazine of contributions): together with drawings of ground-plans of very capacious and desirable * A minor coffee-house, in the neighbourhood of the theatres, so called by him. air-built castles, done in smoke on the passing clouds which composed its ceiling, &c. &c. &c. He is now excellent company, if you gather him to your garner in due season, and save him from himself, and from the blight of self-disappointment and the mildew of despondency; for his high fantasies usually end, else, in the lowest grade of melancholy. Time the invitation well, and you may get him home with you to dinner, and chat; and considering he has been pampering his mind's appetite with the manna-bread of the Muses, he shews no daintiness of demand, or nicety of palate. Imagine not, however, he is to be had for a dinner; he would dine on an acorn under a hedge, and pick his teeth with a bramble first. He is no Major Dumpling, nor Commissariat Bibber; he will not play the part of clown to any entertainment, though he be allowed "to say more than is set down for him." Neither hope, if you are merely a man of the world, to have him at your board: I have heard him say he would as soon sit for a day and ogle a dead wall; or support the chair at an overseer's dinner, and eat up the bread of the poor, as contemplate the pound-shillings-and-pence-table face of a mere worldling, and meet his dull intellect half way across the board, with an intellect lowered down to the altitude of his comprehension. But if you have a literary taste, or a gusto for higher matters,-for the bettering of the condition of your fellow-men, or at least a sympathy with them and for them,— you may command him to a French roll and garlick. Or if you prefer cracking jokes to ditto walnuts, you shall find him the soundest nut in your dessert. His wit comes in with the salt, and does not go out with the table-cloth. Flash follows flash, sparkle follows sparkle, till all the board is in a blaze. If you have a quieter feeling for literary remark and fireside chattiness, he is the man for your conversazione, and the profoundest poker of a "sea-coal fire" between this and Newcastle. You will find him no dull commentator on the brilliancies of the mind and the imagination; but a critic as benevolent in opinion, and as cordial in praise, as he is kind in heart, and sincere in soul. : There is, however, a slight vein of whim running through that rich mine, his mind, which I merely point out honestly, (as Mr. Piazza Robins would do,) in going over this "estate of man.” He will not, for one thing, take snuff; nor does he much care to converse with any one who does it is the only thing in which he is intolerant. You may frank him the freedom of the gentleman* in a gold box, and he betrays no gratitude of nose; you may insinuate the blackguard* in indecent French papier machée, and you shall not mistake him for "the politest man of the age." He will perhaps say, half tetchily, "Sir, I am obliged, but I do not talk snuff" for he insists that there are a certain set of conver * Snuffs so named. sation common-places that he terms snuff-box ideas, which some men play regularly off, instead of "a Tuscan air," or Mozartian waltz, by a musical ditto; and he asserts, moreover, that generally the ideas of snuff-takers are the inverse of the snuff they take: the taker of the gentleman being usually the best talker of the blackguard; and vice versâ: the brown rappeeists are plain minds, but confused. Nor does he care, to the turning of more than three black hairs gray, to be held by the button by a dull chitchatter on indifferent subjects, while a house is on fire opposite, and a child may be "plucked like a brand from the burning," by stretching out his hand, or caught from a window by holding up his arms. Neither cares he much to talk on political subjects; he will perhaps say, if you push him to it, that he never plays politics, for he insists that it is but a card-like game, in which the very best players of it shuffle the usual number of fifty-two ideas instead of cards, and cut their nearest neighbours and dearest friends; and deal about the round-table of cavilry, (not chivalry,) kings that prefer being "hail-fellow-well-met," with their knaves, to being seen in the company of their queens; and play tricks, and for tricks, till the game is out, and then shuffle, cut, and deal again, the same unvarying round, only by different and perhaps less capable hands. He has left off politics, since he discovered that they heated his head, but cooled his heart. Therefore, unless you would pull his ears for wearing his wig on one side, ask him not the news of the day; he would rather tell you the closest secret of his breast, such as the amount of his last laundress's bill, or what is the sum-total of his shirts, and the state of their proximity to, or equi-distance between, the tinderbox and the rag-bag. But if you will put such a question, look for some such answer as he gave gratis, to a political quid nunc, who was empty of intelligence but full of inquiries after it ;Why, Sir," (said he, exchanging buttons with him, in his own manner,) it is reported on 'Change, that, in consequence of the repeated complaints of certain idle aristocratical, nothing-doing, but poor-compelling-to-hard-labour persons, against my Lady Lily-of-the-valley, that she neither sowed nor spun,' she has been induced to open a day-school for a limited number of pupils, where the young dandelions are taught decency, and the daisies, and other children of the sun, are educated to get up their own Vandyke frills: I have not a card of the terms, but a prospectus is coming out in the Spring." 66 His humour is high, relishing, and perfectly innocuous, though occasionally a little freakish, rampant, and irrestrainable. His laugh is long, cordial, and heart-quaking, though he has a tendency, in his weaker moments, to wire-draw a pretty broad laugh into a thin gradual titter: but he deserves pity, and not the unfeeling surprise of the vulgar, when he falls into this slight error; for I have reason to believe that his heart is then struggling with feelings which have nothing to do with the laughs or the smiles. A particular gentleman, who always looks as if he laughed by a stop-watch, thinks this small failing of his very monstrous : poor creature, he little knows how much sadness without tears, how many fears without hopes, go to the composition of this hysterical termination of a laugh that began in a mirth which is sometimes more like sorrow and madness than the gladness it appears to be. Humour is the light of his character; melancholy the shade of it. There is, however, a sudden light of humour involved even in the deepest gloom of his moodiest melancholy, which, however dense it may appear, only requires a kind look or a kindred one to come in collision with it, to break it into smiles; like the gloomy fogs of November, through which the sun bursts, making his brightness the more beautiful, warm, and welcome, by its contrast with the gloom which had so lately surrounded him. Leave him to himself, and these mental vapours will veil the brilliancy of his mind; but throw yourself like a true friend in his way, or prompt a dull waiter to say a witty thing, and you win him from himself to yourself, and to the world. He is, in his merry moments, the best maker of a bad pun between Dean Swift and Tom Dibdin, I have met with. Good and bad shower from him "thick as the leaves that strew the vale of Vallombrosa." He has christened a maiden lady's dog of his acquaintance, from the barking objection she displays to beaus, Fanny Beauharnois, (Beau-annoy.) An intimate of his, who sometimes sets himself against the diffusion of knowledge, among the poor, is called by him the modern Anti-nous. This is one of the puns which, he says, keep the word of promise to the eye, but break it to the ear;" for he insists that it looks like a pun, though it must not be pronounced, or the pun is lost. Benevolence in heart and act is, however, the best feature of his character,—that benevolence that made him once drop the arm of beauty to lead a blind beggar patiently and slowly over a wide and dirty road, and look as unconscious of the kindness of the act, as if he had but thought of doing it. I have come at the knowledge of fifty similar instances of his feeling: one which he told me himself, I cannot refrain from repeating. He was reading very intently in a summer evening, when a moth buzzed through the flame of his candle; in a moment the light was extinguished, and the infatuated moth spared. When he told me of this prompt piece of feeling, he lamented the frailty and inconsistency of human nature, "for," said he, "the very next evening, I was guilty of the greatest act of inhumanity in my life." I did not dare ask him the nature of this act, perhaps trivial to a less sensitive mind, but to him serious and painful enough for regret and shame. 6 His humanity shews itself in all things, and at all times. I dined with him at a chop-house one day, when a fiddler of the most scraping description indulged the company with his most capricious capriccios; one of the party, an amateur in music, as soon as he had played through a bar or two, commenced vituperating the poor fellow in a genteel blackguard way that would not have shocked the polite Lord Chesterfield himself: my humane friend, however, checked him, in due season, with a few words, which, I trust, he will not soon forget: "Sir," said he, "I would have you consider, in excuse for this man's playing, that it is his necessity, and not his taste or propensity, which urges him to this poor trial of his skill: give him the shilling he wants, and you will hear no more of him, I warrant me. I can sympathize with the fine sensibility of your ear so far, that I assure you, if it was an amateur who touched the brisk viol' thus vilely, I would be the first man to throw my wig at him; but as the stomach of this ill-fortuned fellow is the prime mover of his elbow, and not his taste, I can hear him with patience, and reward him with kindness. There is, I think, a point in bad playing where it ceases to be offensive even to a good ear; it is sometimes too bad to be disagreeable, and has a smack, a voice of humour in it, rather than of harshness: but even when it does not reach this, to the ear of a humane heart, it will produce a patient pity rather than an impatient reproach: to such a heart, it is no more disagreeable, than is the disgusting wound to the eye of the kind and self-forgetting surgeon." The polite amateur was satisfied, and changed his tone and half-crown at the same time, giving the ragged itinerant the better part of it as his share of the subscription. He has known and felt the severest miseries and worst wants of life; but these things, though they have, as he asserts, made his head and feet cold, have not quite chilled his heart. We met in the Park Mall, on one of the colder days in last week: I saluted him with the most approved salutations, and the usual weather-news, remarking, as I closed with him, on the fine clearness of the day:-" Yes, Sir, the day is fine enough; it is like the world, smiling, but cold." I saw in an instant, as I thought, the mood of the moment in this answer, and attempted to rally him out of it with pleasantry. "How now, my dear friend! what has your landlady, under pretence of giving you hot toast for breakfast, served you with cold cream? or-" He shook his head ruefully my rallying would not do: he had tried it himself.“Sir," said he, in a serious tone of voice, and more serious manner, "I have just been accosted here by a gentleman whom I have sometimes met in the pleasanter spots of life: I have talked |