He gives us to understand that he had an ardent temperament, held in check by an introspective turn of thought, by natural bashfulness, and by habits of consideration for others. The portrait is drawn from a letter in the _Miscellanies_, of “a mind and person generally dressed in black,” and might have come bodily, and with charming grace, from _The Spectator_. “I have very little estate but what lies under the circumference of my hat . . . and should I by misfortune come to lose my head, I should not be worth a groat.” “I am seldom troubled by what the world calls airs and caprices, and I think it an idiot’s excuse for a foolish action to say: ‘’Twas my humor.’” “I cannot cheerfully fix to any study which bears not a pleasure in the application.” “Long expectation makes the blessing always less to me; I lose the great transport of surprise.” “I am a very great epicure; for which reason I hate all pleasure that’s purchased by excess of pain. I can’t relish the jest that vexes another. In short, if ever I do a wilful injury, it must be a very great one.” “I have many acquaintances, very few intimates, but no friend; I mean, in the old romantic way.” “I have no secret so weighty but that I can bear it in my own breast.” “I would have my passion, if not led, at least waited on by my reason.” This last text, repeated elsewhere by Farquhar, which is the counterpart of one in Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_, has interest from the lips of a child of the “dancing, drinking, and unthinking time.” Farquhar’s face, in the old prints, is wonderfully of a piece with these amiable reports: a handsome, humane, careworn, melancholy young face, the negation of the contemporary idea of the man about town. His constitution, at its best, was but frail. “You are as dear to me,” he says, pathetically, to his Penelope, “as my hopes of waking in health to-morrow morning.” A tradition has been received without question by his many critics and biographers, that his chief characters, all cast in the same animated mould, are but incognitos of himself. Highly-colored projections of himself, with latent traits exaggerated, and formed mental restraints removed, they may indeed be. The public, which loves identifications, insisted on finding him revealed in his Archers and Sir Harrys. Whether or not the dramatists of the day had universally the Rembrandtesque whim of painting themselves into their own foregrounds, they were obstinately supposed to do so, with Etherege in Young Bellair, with Otway in Jaffier. But the real Farquhar —“courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride,”