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 at the comparative insignificance of
the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the
shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was
in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed
him. What was it then? Was he rich? Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very
poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear