We have a poetic friend.  The backs of his books are scrolled and transfigured.  A vase of japonicas, even in mid-winter, adorns his writing desk.  The hot-house is as important to him as the air.  There are soft engravings on the wall.  This study-chair was made out of the twisted roots of a banyan.  A dog, sleek-skinned, lies on the mat, and gets up as you come in.  There stand in vermilion all the poets from Homer to Tennyson.  Here and there are chamois heads and pressed seaweed.  He writes on gilt-edged paper with a gold pen and handle twisted with a serpent.  His inkstand is a mystery of beauty which unskilled hands dare not touch, lest the ink spring at him from some of the open mouths, or sprinkle on him from the bronze wings, or with some unexpected squirt dash into his eyes the blackness of darkness.

We have a very precise friend.  Everything is in severe order.  Finding his door-knob in the dark, you could reason out the position of stove, and chair, and table; and placing an arrow at the back of the book on one end of the shelf, it would fly to the other end, equally grazing all the bindings.  It is ten years since John Milton, or Robert Southey, or Sir William Hamilton have been out of their places, and that was when an ignoramus broke into the study.  The volumes of the encyclopedias never change places.  Manuscripts unblotted, and free from interlineation, and labeled.  The spittoon knows its place in the corner, as if treated by tobacco chewers with oft indignity.  You could go into that study with your eyes shut, turn around, and without feeling for the chair throw yourself back with perfect confidence that the furniture would catch you.  No better does a hat fit his head, or shoe his foot, or the glove his hand, than the study fits his whole nature.

We have a facetious friend.  You pick off the corner of his writing table “Noctes Ambrosianae” or the London “Punch.”  His chair is wide, so that he can easily roll off on the floor when he wants a good time at laughing.  His inkstand is a monkey, with the variations.  His study-cap would upset a judge’s risibilities.  Scrap books with droll caricatures and facetiae.  An odd stove, exciting your wonder as to where the coal is put in or the poker thrust for a shaking.  All the works of Douglass Jerrold, and Sydney Smith, and Sterne, the scalawag ecclesiastic.  India-rubber faces capable of being squashed into anything.  Puzzles that you cannot untangle.  The four walls covered with cuts and engravings sheared from weekly pictorials and recklessly taken from parlor table books.  Prints that put men and women into hopeless satire.

We have a friend of many peculiarities.  Entering his house, you find nothing in the place where you expected it.  “Don Quixote,” with, all its windmills mixed up with “Dr. Dick on the Sacraments,” Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog,” and “Charnock on the Attributes.”  Passing across the room, you stumble against the manuscript of his last lecture, or put your foot in a piece of