Salt was his opposite in this, as in all—­never knew what he was worth in the world; and having but a competency for his rank, which his indolent habits were little calculated to improve, might have suffered severely if he had not had honest people about him.  Lovel took care of every thing.  He was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his “flapper,” his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer.  He did nothing without consulting Lovel, or failed in any thing without expecting and fearing his admonishing.  He put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world.  He resigned his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could ever have forgotten for a moment that he was a servant.

I knew this Lovel.  He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty.  A good fellow withal, and “would strike.”  In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents.  He once wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had drawn upon him; and pommelled him severely with the hilt of it.  The swordsman had offered insult to a female—­an occasion upon which no odds against him could have prevented the interference of Lovel.  He would stand next day bare-headed to the same person, modestly to excuse his interference—­for L. never forgot rank, where something better was not concerned.  L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick’s, whom he was said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry—­next to Swift and Prior—­moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage boards, and such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire.  He was a brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr. Isaac Walton would have chosen to go a fishing with.  I saw him in his old age and the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness—­“a remnant most forlorn of what he was,”—­yet even then his eye would light up upon the mention of his favourite Garrick.  He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes—­“was upon the stage nearly throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a bee.”  At intervals, too, he would speak of his former life, and how he came up a little boy from Lincoln to go to service, and how his mother cried at parting with him, and how he returned, after some few years’ absence, in his smart new livery to see her, and she blessed herself at the change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it was “her own bairn.”  And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, till I have wished that sad second-childhood might have a mother still to lay its head upon her lap.  But the common mother of us all in no long time after received him gently into hers.