at no one at times said better things, and to
happy examples formerly given I will add one or two of a kind he more
rarely indulged. "He is below par on the Exchange," a friend remarked of
a notorious puffing actor; "he doesn't stand well at Lloyds." "Yet no
one stands so well with the under-writers," said Dickens; a pun that
Swift would have envied. "I call him an Incubus!" said a non-literary
friend, at a loss to express the boredom inflicted on him by a popular
author. "Pen-and-ink-ubus, you mean," interposed Dickens. So, when
Stanfield said of his mid-shipman son, then absent on his first cruise,
"the boy has got his sea-legs on by this time!" "I don't know," remarked
Dickens, "about his getting his sea-legs on; but if I may judge from his
writing, he certainly has not got his A B C legs on."

Other agreeable pleasantries might be largely cited from his letters.
"An old priest" (he wrote from France in 1862), "the express image of
Frederic Lemaitre got up for the part, and very cross with the
toothache, told me in a railway carriage the other day, that we had no
antiquities in heretical England. 'None at all?' I said. 'You have some
ships however.' 'Yes; a few.' 'Are they strong?' 'Well,' said I, 'your
trade is spiritual, my father: ask the ghost of Nelson.' A French
captain who was in the carriage, was immensely delighted with this small
joke. I met him at Calais yesterday going somewhere with a detachment;
and he said--Pardon! But he had been so limited as to suppose an
Englishman incapable of that bonhommie!" In humouring a joke he was
excellent, both in letters and talk; and for this kind of enjoyment his
least important little notes are often worth preserving. Take one small
instance. So freely had he admired a tale told by his friend and
solicitor Mr. Frederic Ouvry, that he had to reply to a humorous
proposal for publication of it, in his own manner, in his own
periodical. "Your modesty is equal to your merit. . . . I think your way of
describing that rustic courtship in middle life, quite matchless. . . . A
cheque for L1000 is lying with the publisher. We would willingly make it
more, but that we find our law charges so exceedingly heavy." His
letters have also examples now and then of what he called his
conversational triumphs. "I have distinguished myself" (28th of April
1861) "in two respects lately. I took a young lady, unknown, down to
dinner, and, talking to her about the Bishop of Durham's nepotism in