; 'how finely,
how truly, how gaily he took off the company at the "Southampton!" Poor
and faint are my sketches compared to his! It was like looking into a
camera-obscura--you saw faces shining and speaking. The smoke curled,
the lights dazzled, the oak wainscoting took a higher polish. There was
old S., tall and gaunt, with his couplet from Pope and case at Nisi
Prius; Mudford, eyeing the ventilator and lying perdu for a moral; and
H. and A. taking another friendly finishing glass. These and many more
windfalls of character he gave us in thought, word, and action. I
remember his once describing three different persons together to myself
and Martin Burney [a bibulous nephew of Madame d'Arblay's and a great
friend of Charles Lamb's], namely, the manager of a country theatre, a
tragic and a comic performer, till we were ready to tumble on the floor
with laughing at the oddity of their humours, and at Roger's
extraordinary powers of ventriloquism, bodily and mental; and Burney
said (such was the vividness of the scene) that when he awoke the next
morning he wondered what three amusing characters he had been in company
with the evening before.' He was fond also of imitating old Mudford, of
the _Courier_, a fat, pert, dull man, who had left the _Morning
Chronicle_ in 1814, just as Hazlitt joined it, and was renowned for
having written a reply to 'Coelebs.' He would enter a room, fold up his
great-coat, take out a little pocket volume, lay it down to think,
rubbing all the time the fleshy calf of his leg with dull gravity and
intense and stolid self-complacency, and start out of his reveries when
addressed with the same inimitable vapid exclamation of 'Eh!' Dr.
Whittle, a large, plain-faced Moravian preacher, who had turned
physician, was another of his chosen impersonations. Roger represented
the honest, vain, empty man purchasing an ounce of tea by stratagem to
astonish a favoured guest; he portrayed him on the summit of a narrow,
winding, and very steep staircase, contemplating in airy security the
imaginary approach of duns. This worthy doctor on one occasion, when
watching Sarratt, the great chess-player, turned suddenly to Hazlitt,
and said, 'I think I could dance. I'm sure I could; aye, I could dance
like Vestris.' Such were the odd people Roger caricatured on the
memorable night he pulled off his coat to eat beefsteaks on equal terms
with Martin Burney.

"Then there was C., who, from his slender neck, shrillness of v