Garth has, apart from his literary productions, one great claim on posterity. To him Dryden owed honourable interment. When the great poet died, Garth caused his body to be conveyed to the College of Physicians, and started a public subscription to defray the expenses of the funeral. He pronounced an oration over the deceased at the College in Warwick Lane, and then accompanied it to Westminster Abbey. Of the stories preserved of Garth's social humour some are exquisitely droll. Writing a letter at a coffee-house, he found himself overlooked by a curious Irishman, who was impudently reading every word of the epistle. Garth took no notice of the impertinence, until he had finished and signed the body of the letter, when he added a postscript, of unquestionable legibility: "I would write you more by this post, but there's a d---- tall impudent Irishman looking over my shoulder all the time." "What do you mean, sir?" roared the Irishman in a fury. "Do you think I looked over your letter?" "Sir," replied the physician, "I never once opened my lips to you." "Ay, but you have put it down, for all that." "'Tis impossible, sir, that you should know that, for you have never once looked over my letter." Stumbling into a Presbyterian church one Sunday, for pastime, he found a pathetic preacher shedding tears over the iniquity of the earth. "What makes the man greet?" asked Garth of a bystander. "By my faith," was the answer, "and you too would greet if you were in his place and had as little to say." "Come along, my dear fellow," responded Garth to his new acquaintance, "and dine with me. You are too good a fellow to be here." At the Kit-Kat he once stayed to drink long after he had said that he must be off to see his patients. Sir Richard, more humane than the physician, or possibly, like the rest of the world, not disinclined to be virtuous at another's expense, observed, "Really, Garth, you ought to have no more wine, but be off to see those poor devils." "It's no great matter," Garth replied, "whether I see them to-night or not, for nine of them have such bad constitutions, that all the physicians in the world can't save them; and the other six have such good constitutions, that all the physicians in the world can't kill them."