either of those worthies, not merely as holding "fate and physic" in his
hand, but as the general, and as it were official, associate, adviser,
comforter, and friend, of all ranks and all ages, of high and low, rich
and poor, sick and well. I am no despiser of dignities; but twenty
emperors shall be less intensely missed in their wide dominions, than
such a man as my friend John Hallett in his own small sphere.

The spot which was favoured with the residence of this excellent person
was the small town of Hazelby, in Dorsetshire; a pretty little place,
where every thing seems at a stand-still. It was originally built in
the shape of the letter T; a long broad market-place (still so called,
although the market be gone) serving for the perpendicular stem, traversed
by a straight, narrow, horizontal street, to answer for the top line.
Not one addition has occurred to interrupt this architectural regularity,
since, fifty years ago, a rich London tradesman built, at the west end
of the horizontal street, a wide-fronted single house, with two low
wings, iron palisades before, and a fish-pond opposite, which still
goes by the name of New Place, and is balanced, at the east end of
the street, by an erection of nearly the same date, a large square
dingy mansion enclosed within high walls, inhabited by three maiden
sisters, and called, probably by way of nickname, the Nunnery. New Place
being on the left of the road, and the Nunnery on the right, the T has
now something of the air of the italic capital T, turned up at one end
and down at the other. The latest improvements are the bow-window in the
market-place, commanding the pavement both ways, which the late brewer,
Andrews, threw out in his snug parlour some twenty years back, and where
he used to sit smoking, with the sash up, in summer afternoons, enjoying
himself, good man; and the great room, at the Swan, originally built by
the speculative publican, Joseph Allwright, for an assembly-room. That
speculation did not answer. The assembly, in spite of canvassing and