Another celebrated character, who frequented Brookes's in the days of Selwyn, was Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton; and many keen encounters passed between them. Dunning was a short, thick man, with a turn-up nose, a constant shake of the head, and latterly a distressing hectic cough--but a wit of the first water. Though he died at the comparatively early age of fifty-two, he amassed a fortune of £150,000 during twenty-five years' practice at the bar; and lived notwithstanding, so liberally, that his mother, an attorney's widow, some of the wags at Brookes's wickedly recorded, left him in dudgeon on the score of his extravagance, as humorously sketched at a dinner at the lawyer's country-house near Fulham, when the following _conversation_ was represented to have occurred:-- "John," said the old lady to her son, after dinner, during which she had been astounded by the profusion of the plate and viands,--"John, I shall not stop another day to witness such shameful extravagance." "But, my dear mother," interrupted Dunning, "you ought to consider that I can afford it: my income, you know--" "No income," said the old lady impatiently, "can stand such shameful prodigality. The sum which your cook told me that very _turbot_ cost, ought to have supported any reasonable family for a week." "Pooh, pooh! my dear mother," replied the dutiful son, "you would not have me appear shabby. Besides, what is a turbot?" "Pooh, pooh! what is a turbot?" echoed the irritated dame: "don't _pooh_ me, John: I tell you such goings-on can come to no good, and you'll see the end of it before long. However, it sha'n't be said your mother encouraged such sinful waste, for I'll set off in the coach to Devonshire to-morrow morning." "And notwithstanding," said Sheridan, "all John's rhetorical efforts to detain her, the old lady kept her word."