Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted him,--he
hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His ample coat, too,
I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous cuffs, and
beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat, arching in
front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence,
involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned buttons, and the
strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns of support to the
massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over it. I can hear
him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and a gap is widened
to make room for his portly figure. "A fine day," says Sir Joshua.
"Sir," he answers, "it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and
the skies are nebulous," at which the great painter smiles, shifts his
trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.

Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the
eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club,
between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and
dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the
snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the
shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper in the
Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what
I shall find when it is opened.

Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear
old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next
Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,--I seem to find
myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.

Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me has
been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old dwelling-house,