fretted that his profession made him a vagabond by act of Parliament,
or that his adoption of it in place of the law had prevented his
becoming, by virtue of the same formal and supreme stamp, the equal
of the Sampson Brasses plentiful in his day as in ours among their
betters of that honorable vocation. His self-respect was of tougher if
not sounder grain. "Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow,"
was the motto supplied him by his friend and neighbor, Pope, but
obeyed long before he saw it in the poetic form.

[Illustration: GARRICK'S VILLA.]

Garrick's house is separated from its bit of "grounds," which run down
to the water's edge, by the highway. It communicates with them by a
tunnel, suggested by Johnson. It was not a very novel suggestion,
but the excavation deserves notice as probably the one engineering
achievement of old Ursus major. We may fancy the Titan of the pen and
the tea-table, in his snuffy habit as he lived and as photographed
by Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Fanny Burney, and their epitomizer Macaulay,
diving under the turnpike and emerging among the osiers and water-rats
to offer his orisons at the shrine of Shakespeare. For, in the fashion
of the day, Garrick erected a little brick "temple," and placed
therein a statue of the man it was the study of his life to interpret.
The temple is there yet. The statue, a fine one by Roubillac, now
adorns the hall of the British Museum, a much better place for it.
Garrick, and not Shakespeare, is the _genius loci_.

[Illustration: RIVER SCENE, THAMES DITTON.]

This is but one, if the most striking, of a long row of villas that
overlook the river, each with its comfortable-looking and rotund trees