consistent with gentility, yet a star among the minor gentry,
receiving the bows of the tradespeople and courtesies of the alms-women
daily. Children venerate him not less for his external show of gentry
than they wonder at him for a gentle rising endorsation of the person,
not amounting to a hump, or if a hump, innocuous as the hump of the
buffalo, and coronative of as mild qualities. 'T is a throne on which
patience seems to sit,--the proud perch of a self-respecting humility,
stooping with condescension. Thereupon the cares of life have sat, and
rid him easily. For he has thrid the _angustiae domus_ with dexterity.
Life opened upon him with comparative brilliancy. He set out as a rider
or traveller for a wholesale house, in which capacity he tells of many
hair-breadth escapes that befell him,--one especially, how he rode a mad
horse into the town of Devizes; how horse and rider arrived in a foam,
to the utter consternation of the expostulating hostlers, inn-keepers,
etc. It seems it was sultry weather, piping-hot; the steed tormented
into frenzy with gad-flies, long past being roadworthy: but safety and
the interest of the house he rode for were incompatible things; a fall
in serge cloth was expected; and a mad entrance they made of it. Whether
the exploit was purely voluntary, or partially; or whether a certain
personal defiguration in the man part of this extraordinary centaur
(non-assistive to partition of natures) might not enforce the
conjunction, I stand not to inquire. I look not with 'skew eyes into the
deeds of heroes. The hosier that was burned with his shop in Field Lane,
on Tuesday night, shall have passed to heaven for me like a Marian
Martyr, provided always that he consecrated the fortuitous incremation
with a short ejaculation in the exit, as much as if he had taken his
state degrees of martyrdom _in forma_ in the market vicinage. There is
adoptive as well as acquisitive sacrifice. Be the animus what it might,
the fact is indisputable, that this composition was seen flying all
abroad, and mine host of Daintry may yet remember its passing through
his town, if his scores are not more faithful than his memory.

* * * * *

To come from his heroic character, all the amiable qualities of domestic
life concentre in this tamed Bellerophon. He is excellent over a glass
of grog; just as pleasant without it; laughs when he hears a joke, and
when (which is much oftener) he hears it