Finally, one touching trait in the character of Gifford was his exceeding love for children. Looking back at his own desolate, loveless childhood, full of hardship, his heart expanded towards all little ones, and he delighted in attending juvenile parties, and rejoiced at seeing the children frisking about in the happiness of youth. His domestic favourites were his dog and his cat, both of which he dearly loved. He was also most kind and considerate to his domestic servants; and all who knew him well knew that his bark was worse than his bite; he made no answer, did not retaliate when attacked vindictively, insultingly by Hazlitt, and when William Cobbett called him “the dottrel-headed old shuffle-breeches of the _Quarterly Review_” he cast back no vituperative term in reply. Gifford was a staunch friend. He left his house in James Street, Buckingham Gate, to the widow of his old friend Hoppner, the portrait painter. Sir Walter Scott wrote on 17 January, 1827: “I observe in the papers my old friend Gifford’s death. He was a man of rare attainments and many excellent qualities. His _Juvenal_ is one of the best versions ever made of a classic author, and his satire of the _Baviad_ and _Mæviad_ squabashed at one blow a set of coxcombs who might have humbugged the world long enough. As a commentator he was capital, could he but have suppressed his rancours against those who had preceded him in the task; but a misconstruction or misinterpretation, nay, the misplacing of a comma, was in Gifford’s eyes a crime worthy of the most severe animadversion. The same fault of extreme severity went through his critical labours, and in general he flagellated with so little pity, that people lost their sense of the criminal’s guilt, in dislike of the savage pleasure which the executioner seemed to take in inflicting the punishment. This lack of temper probably arose from indifferent health, for he was very valetudinary, and realized two verses, wherein he says Fortune assigned him:-- One eye not over good, Two sides that to their cost have stood A ten years’ hectic cough, Aches, stitches, all the various ills That swell the devilish doctor’s bills, And sweep poor mortals off. But he might also justly claim as his gift the moral qualities expressed in the next fine stanza:-- A soul That spurns the crowd’s malign control, A firm contempt of wrong; Spirits above affliction’s power, And skill to soothe the lingering hour With no inglorious song. “He was a little man, dumped up together, and so ill made as to seem almost deformed, but with a singular expression of talent in his countenance.” Gifford was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his schoolfellow and lifelong friend, Dean Ireland, was afterwards buried in the same grave.