son to us: "excuse me, is that--that paper really a proof-sheet?" We
handed over to him that curiosity, smiling at the enthusiasm of the
honest gentleman who could admire what to us was as unpalatable as a tart
to a pastrycook.

Being with men of letters, he thought proper to make his conversation
entirely literary; and in the course of my subsequent more intimate
acquaintance with him, though I knew he had distinguished himself in
twenty actions, he never could be brought to talk of his military feats
or experience, but passed them by, as if they were subjects utterly
unworthy of notice.

I found he believed Dr. Johnson to be the greatest of men: the Doctor's
words were constantly in his mouth; and he never travelled without
Boswell's Life. Besides these, he read Caesar and Tacitus, "with
translations, sir, with translations--I'm thankful that I kept some of my
Latin from Grey Friars;" and he quoted sentences from the Latin Grammar,
apropos of a hundred events of common life, and with perfect simplicity
and satisfaction to himself. Besides the above-named books, the
Spectator, Don Quixote, and Sir Charles Grandison formed a part of his
travelling library. "I read these, sir," he used to say, "because I like
to be in the company of gentlemen; and Sir Roger de Coverley, and Sir
Charles Grandison, and Don Quixote are the finest gentlemen in the
world." And when we asked him his opinion of Fielding,--

"Tom Jones, sir; Joseph Andrews, sir!" he cried, twirling his mustachios.
"I read them when I was a boy, when I kept other bad company, and did
other low and disgraceful things, of which I'm ashamed now. Sir, in my
father's library I happened to fall in with those books; and I read them
in secret, just as I used to go in private and drink beer, and fight