when South Sea hopes were young—­(he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most flourishing company in these or those days):—­but to a genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is as nothing.  The fractional farthing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which stand before it.  He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity.  With Tipp form was every thing.  His life was formal.  His actions seemed ruled with a ruler.  His pen was not less erring than his heart.  He made the best executor in the world:  he was plagued with incessant executorships accordingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios.  He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand, that commended their interests to his protection.  With all this there was about him a sort of timidity—­(his few enemies used to give it a worse name)—­a something which, in reverence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic.  Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of self-preservation.  There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements; it betrays itself, not you:  it is mere temperament; the absence of the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, “greatly find quarrel in a straw,” when some supposed honour is at stake.  Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun; or went upon a water-party; or would willingly let you go if he could have helped it:  neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle.

Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common qualities become uncommon?  Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author, of the South-Sea House? who never enteredst thy office in a morning, or quittedst it in mid-day—­(what didst thou in an office?)—­without some quirk that left a sting!  Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive.  Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days—­thy topics are staled by the “new-born gauds” of the time:—­but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and Clinton, and the war which ended in the tearing from Great Britain her rebellious colonies,—­and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond,—­and such small politics.—­