It was just after this event that Uncle Jack, sanguine and light-hearted as ever, suddenly recollected his sister, Mrs Caxton; and not knowing where else to dine, thought he would repose his limbs under my father's _trabes citrea_, which the ingenious W. S. Landor opines should be translated "mahogany." You never saw a more charming man than Uncle Jack. All plump people are more popular than thin people. There is something jovial and pleasant in the sight of a round face! What conspiracy could succeed when its head was a lean and hungry-looking fellow, like Cassius? If the Roman patriots had had Uncle Jack amongst them, perhaps they would never have furnished a tragedy to Shakspeare. Uncle Jack was as plump as a partridge--not unwieldy, not corpulent, not obese, not "_vastus_," which Cicero objects to in an orator--but every crevice comfortably filled up. Like the ocean, "time wrote no wrinkles on his glassy (or brassy) brow." His natural lines were all upward curves, his smile most ingratiating, his eye so frank, even his trick of rubbing his clean well-fed English-looking hands, had something, about it coaxing and _debonnair_, something that actually decoyed you into trusting your money into hands so prepossessing. Indeed, to him might be fully applied the expression--"Sedem animæ in extremis digitis habet;" "He had his soul's seat in his finger ends." The critics observe that few men have ever united in equal perfection the imaginative with the scientific or musing faculties. "Happy he," exclaims Schiller, "who combines the enthusiast's warmth with the worldly man's light"--light and warmth, Uncle Jack had them both. He was a perfect symphony of bewitching enthusiasm and convincing calculation. Dicæopolis in the _Acharnenses_, in presenting a gentleman called Nicharchus to the audience, observes--"He is small, I confess, but there is nothing lost in him: all is knave, that is not fool." Parodying the equivocal compliment, I may say, that though Uncle Jack was no giant, there was nothing lost in him. Whatever was not philanthropy was arithmetic, and whatever was not arithmetic was philanthropy. He would have been equally dear to Howard and to Cocker. Uncle Jack was comely, too--clear-skinned and florid, had a little mouth, with good teeth, wore no whiskers, shaved his beard as close as if it were one of his grand national companies; his hair, once somewhat sandy, was now rather grayish, which increased the respectability of his appearance, and he wore it flat at the sides and raised in a peak at the top; his organs of constructiveness and ideality were pronounced by Mr Squills to be prodigious, and those freely developed bumps gave great breadth to his forehead. Well-shaped, too, was Uncle Jack, about five feet eight, the proper height for an active man of business. He wore a black coat; but to make the nap look the fresher, he had given it the relief of gilt buttons, on which were wrought a small crown and