ere the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his
hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion,
interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence,
and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence contrasted with
the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners in
society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the
last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An original he was,
undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed full information
concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should probably find
that what we call his singularities of manner were, for the most part,
failings which he had in common with the class to which he belonged. He
ate at Streatham Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at
St. John's Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. He ate
as it was natural that a man should eat who, during a great part of his
life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for
the afternoon. The habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear
privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. He
could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a
famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead and the
perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine; but,
when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These
were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged
with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The
roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be expected
from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been long tried by
the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes,
by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the
derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which
is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most
toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick.
Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had
struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in
the exercise of his power, he should be _eo immitior, quia toleraverat_;
that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his
demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress
he had sympa