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.--

A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, was fine
rattling, rattleheaded Plumer. He was descended,--not in a right line,
reader, (for his lineal pretensions, like his personal, favoured a
little of the sinister bend) from the Plumers of Hertfordshire. So