A barber recommended him his aromatic essence for the improvement of his hair. "No, no; don't waste your fragrance on the desert hair."
A friend remarked of a gentleman with very large curly whiskers, that he said nothing. "Poor fellow; don't you see he's lock-jawed?"
"How well you put on your cravat," said a crony: "that tie's something new."—"Yes; it's a novel-tie."
He pacified a quarrelsome fellow one evening by observing, "I should not like to go up in a balloon with you, for fear of our falling out."
Seeing a porter bring in an edition of a new work of his from the press to his bookseller, "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "what a weight is off my mind."
"What a swell you are in your new frock coat," said a quiz to him one day. "Don't you like it?—I do: indeed I'm quite wrapped up in it."
The same person meeting him one day in the city, observing he had on a new waistcoat, asked if it was a city cut. "No," answered he, "it's a west-cut."
Dining at the Wrekin tavern, he asked for a wine glass: the waiter, in bringing it, inadvertently let it fall—"Zounds! I did not ask you for a tumbler!"
Sitting in company with one of those people who find fault with every thing, good, bad, or indifferent, he could not refrain from quizzing the old fellow. "True, true; we have nothing new or good now-a-days: Waterloo bridge is a catchpenny, Herschell's telescope all my eye, the steam engine a bottle of smoke, and the safety-coach a complete take in."
Bearcroft the classic observed to him, that learning was pabulum animi, food of the mind. "Yes," replied he, "and that's the reason, I suppose, the collegians wear trencher caps."