middle age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a common stock.  Hence they formed a sort of Noah’s ark.  Odd fishes.  A lay-monastery.  Domestic retainers in a great house, kept more for show than use.  Yet pleasant fellows, full of chat—­and not a few among them had arrived at considerable proficiency on the German flute.

The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton.  He had something of the choleric complexion of his countrymen stamped on his visage, but was a worthy sensible man at bottom.  He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in my young days, Maccaronies.  He was the last of that race of beaux.  Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him, making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter; in his hypochondry ready to imagine himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of his becoming one:  his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Anderton’s at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a little before his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house, which he had frequented for the last five-and-twenty years), but not attaining the meridian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting.  The simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence.  Then was his forte, his glorified hour!  How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin!  How would he dilate into secret history!  His countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London—­the site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay—­where Rosamond’s pond stood—­the Mulberry-gardens—­and the Conduit in Cheap—­with many a pleasant anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon,—­the worthy descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country, from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hog-lane, and the vicinity of the Seven Dials!

Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame.  He had the air and stoop of a nobleman.  You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster-hall.  By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors.  While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy.  The conference over, you were at leisure to smile