and glee abound,

You'll soon grow bright

With borrow'd light,
And shine as he goes round."

He was also a bit of a dabbler at Poetry, a writer of Songs, Epigrams,
Epitaphs, &c.; and having been a long resident in the East, was thought
to be a very useful guide on such an excursion, and proved himself a
very ~259~~ pleasant sort of companion: he had a dawning pleasantry
in his countenance, eradiated by an eye of vivacity, which seemed to
indicate there was nothing which gave him so much gratification as a
mirth-moving jest.

"What spirits were his, what wit and what whim, Now cracking a joke, and
now breaking a limb."

Give him but food for laughter, and he would almost consider himself
furnished with food and raiment. There was however a pedantic manner
with him at times; an affectation of the clerical in his dress, which,
upon the whole, did not appear to be of the newest fashion, or improved
by wearing; yet he would not barter one wakeful jest for a hundred
sleepy sermons, or one laugh for a thousand sighs. If he ever sigh'd at
all, it was because he had been serious where he might have laugh'd;
if he had ever wept, it was because mankind had not laugh'd more and
mourn'd less. He appeared almost to be made up of contrarieties, turning
at times the most serious subjects into ridicule, and moralizing upon
the most ludicrous occurrences of life, never failing to conclude his
observations with some quaint or witty sentiment to excite risibility;
seeming at the same time to say,

"How I love to laugh;
Never was a weeper;
Care's a silly calf,
Joy's my casket keeper."

During dinner time he kept the table in a roar of laughter, by declaring
it was his opinion there was a kind of puppyism in pigs that they
should wear tails--calling a great coat, a spencer folio edition with
tail-pieces--Hercules, a man-midwife in a small way of business, because
he had but twelve labours--assured them he had seen a woman that morning
who had swallowed an almanac, which he explained by adding, that her
features were so carbuncled, that the red lettered days were visible on
her face--that Horace ran away from the battle of Philippi, merely to
prove that he was no lame poet--he described Critics as the door-porters
to the Temple of Fame, whose business was to see that no persons slipped
in with holes in their stockings, or paste buckles for diamond ones, but
was