He sat in his usual attitude, with his elbow rested on his knee, and his fingers pressed on his cheek.  His face was shaded by his hand; yet it was a face that might once have been well accounted handsome; its features were manly and striking, a dignity resided on his eyebrows, which were the largest I remember to have seen.  His person was tall and well-made; but the indolence of his nature had now inclined it to corpulency.

His remarks were few, and made only to his familiar friends; but they were such as the world might have heard with veneration:  and his heart, uncorrupted by its ways, was ever warm in the cause of virtue and his friends.

He is now forgotten and gone!  The last time I was at Silton Hall, I saw his chair stand in its corner by the fire-side; there was an additional cushion on it, and it was occupied by my young lady’s favourite lap dog.  I drew near unperceived, and pinched its ears in the bitterness of my soul; the creature howled, and ran to its mistress.  She did not suspect the author of its misfortune, but she bewailed it in the most pathetic terms; and kissing its lips, laid it gently on her lap, and covered it with a cambric handkerchief.  I sat in my old friend’s seat; I heard the roar of mirth and gaiety around me:  poor Ben Silton!  I gave thee a tear then:  accept of one cordial drop that falls to thy memory now.

“They should wear it off by travel.”—­Why, it is true, said I, that will go far; but then it will often happen, that in the velocity of a modern tour, and amidst the materials through which it is commonly made, the friction is so violent, that not only the rust, but the metal too, is lost in the progress.

“Give me leave to correct the expression of your metaphor,” said Mr. Silton:  “that is not always rust which is acquired by the inactivity of the body on which it preys; such, perhaps, is the case with me, though indeed I was never cleared from my youth; but (taking it in its first stage) it is rather an encrustation, which nature has given for purposes of the greatest wisdom.”

“You are right,” I returned; “and sometimes, like certain precious fossils, there may be hid under it gems of the purest brilliancy.”

“Nay, farther,” continued Mr. Silton, “there are two distinct sorts of what we call bashfulness; this, the awkwardness of a booby, which a few steps into the world will convert into the pertness of a coxcomb; that, a consciousness, which the most delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove.”

From the incidents I have already related, I imagine it will be concluded that Harley was of the latter species of bashful animals; at least, if Mr. Silton’s principle is just, it may be argued on this side; for the gradation of the first mentioned sort, it is certain, he never attained.  Some part of his external appearance was modelled from the company of those gentlemen, whom the antiquity of a family,