nd conversation of Sir Walter Scott, highly
creditable to that celebrated person, and calculated to add regard to
admiration. His commonest imitations were not superficial. Something of
the mind and character of the individual was always insinuated, often
with a dramatic dressing, and plenty of sauce piquante. At Sydenham he
used to give us a dialogue among the actors, each of whom found fault
with another for some defect or excess of his own. Kemble objecting to
stiffness, Munden to grimace, and so on. His representation of Incledon
was extraordinary: his nose seemed actually to become aquiline. It is a
pity I can not put upon paper, as represented by Mr. Mathews, the
singular gabblings of that actor, the lax and sailor-like twist of mind,
with which every thing hung upon him; and his profane pieties in quoting
the Bible; for which, and swearing, he seemed to have an equal
reverence.

One morning, after stopping all night at this pleasant house, I was
getting up to breakfast, when I heard the noise of a little boy having
his face washed. Our host was a merry bachelor, and to the rosiness of a
priest might, for aught I knew, have added the paternity; but I had
never heard of it, and still less expected to find a child in his house.
More obvious and obstreperous proofs, however, of the existence of a boy
with a dirty face, could not have been met with. You heard the child
crying and objecting; then the woman remonstrating; then the cries of
the child snubbed and swallowed up in the hard towel; and at intervals
out came his voice bubbling and deploring, and was again swallowed up.
At breakfast, the child being pitied, I ventured to speak about it, and
was laughing and sympathizing in perfect good faith, when Mathews came
in, and I found that the little urchin was he.

Of James Smith, a fair, stout, fresh-colored man, with round features, I
recollect little, except that he used to read to us trim verses, with
rhymes as pat as butter. The best of his verses are in the _Rejected
Addresses_; and they are excellent. Isaac Hawkins Browne with his _Pipe
of Tobacco_, and all the rhyming _jeux-d'esprit_ in all the Tracts, are
extinguished in the comparison; not excepting the _Probationary Odes_.
Mr. Fitzgerald found himself bankrupt in _non sequiturs_; Crabbe could
hardly have known which was which, himself or his parodist; and Lord
Byron confessed to me, that the summing up of his philosophy, to wit,
that

"Naught is every