The life of humour, and the soul of whim.”
The lustre of his bright eye was gone—his eloquent face was passive and looked thrown out of work—and his frame was bowed down by no feigned decrepitude. His melancholy errand to me related to a Farewell Address, which at the invitation of his staunch friend Miss Kelly—for it did not require a request—I had undertaken to indite. He pleaded earnestly that it might be brief, being, he said, “a bad study,” as well as distrustful of his bodily strength. Of his sufferings he spoke with a sad but resigned tone, expressed deep regret at quitting a profession he delighted in, and partly attributed the sudden breaking down of his health to the superior size of one particular stage, which required of him a jump extra in getting off. That additional bound, like the bittock at the end of a Scotch mile, had, he thought, overtasked his strength. His whole deportment and conversation impressed me with the opinion that he was a simple, sensible, warm-hearted being, such indeed as he appears in his Memoirs—a Joseph after Parson Adams’s own heart. We shook hands heartily, parted, and I never saw him again. He was a rare practical humorist, and I never look into Rabelais, with its huge-mouthed Gargantua and his enormous appetite for “plenty of links, chitterlings, and puddings,” in their season, without thinking that in Grimaldi and his pantomime I have lost my best set of illustrations of that literary extravaganza.
EPICUREAN REMINISCENCES OF A SENTIMENTALIST.
“My Tables! Meat it is, I set it down!”—HAMLET
I THINK it was Spring but—not certain I am—
When my passion began first to work;
But I know we were certainly looking for lamb,
And the season was over for pork.