"How do you stand this flabby weather? I tremble to hear, but want to hear of all things. If you have done with my stupid West India Ly., pray send 'em, for they go to-morrow or next day at latest. 'Tis hardly worth while to trouble Ld L with so much chaff and so little wheat--then why you! "Very true. 'Tis a sad thing to have to do with a fool, who can't keep his nonsense to himself. You know I am a rose, but I have terrible prickles. Dear madam, adieu. Pray God I may hear you are well, or that He will enable me to make you so, for you must not be sick or die. I'll find fools and rogues enough to be that for you, that are good for nothing else, and hardly, very hardly, good enough for that. Adieu, Adieu! I say Adieu, Adieu. "M. M." Truly did Dr. Messenger Monsey understand the art of writing a long letter about nothing. CHAPTER XVIII. AKENSIDE. There were two Akensides--Akenside the poet, and Akenside the man; and of the _man_ Akenside there were numerous subdivisions. Remarkable as a poet, he was even yet more noteworthy a private individual in his extreme inconsistency. No character is more commonplace than the one to which is ordinarily applied the word contradictory; but Akenside was a curiosity from the extravagance in which this form of "the commonplace" exhibited itself in his disposition and manners. By turns he was placid, irritable, simple, affected, gracious, haughty, magnanimous, mean, benevolent, harsh, and sometimes even brutal. At times he was marked by a childlike docility, and at other times his vanity and arrogance displayed him almost as a madman. Of plebeian extraction, he was ashamed of his origin, and yet was throughout life the champion of popular interests. Of his real humanity there can be no doubt, and yet in his demeanour to the unfortunate creatures whom, in his capacity of a hospital-physician, he had to attend, he was always supercilious, and often cruel. Like Byron, he was lame, one of his legs being shorter than the other; and of this personal disfigurement he was even more sensitive than was the author of "Childe Harold" of his deformity. When his eye fell on it he would blush, for it reminded him of the ignoble condition in which he was born. His father was a butcher at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and one of his cleavers, falling from the shop-block, had irremediably injured the poet's foot, when he was still a little child.