This reference to Bernard Barton reminds me of a portrait he has left in one of his pleasant letters of a Suffolk yeoman, a class of whose virtues I can testify from personal experience. ‘He was a hearty old yeoman of eighty-six, and had occupied the farm in which he lived and died about fifty-five years. Social, hospitable, friendly, a liberal master to his labourers, a kind neighbour, and a right merry companion within the limits of becoming mirth. In politics a stanch Whig, in his theological creed as sturdy a Dissenter; yet with no more party spirit in him than a child. He and I belonged to the same book-club for about forty years. . . . Not that he greatly cared about books or was deeply read in them, but he loved to meet his neighbours and get them round him on any occasion or no occasion at all. As a fine specimen of the true English yeoman, I have met with few to equal, if any to surpass him, and he looked the character as well as he acted it, till within a few years, when the strong man was bowed by bodily infirmity. About twenty-six years ago, in his dress costume of a blue coat and yellow buckskins, a finer sample of John Bullism you would rarely see. It was the whole study of his long life to make the few who revolved round him in his little orbit as happy as he seemed to be himself. Yet I was gravely queried when I happened to say that his children had asked me to write a few lines to his memory, whether I could do this in keeping with the general tone of my poetry—the speaker doubted if he was a decidedly pious character! He had at times in his altitude been known to vociferate a song, of which the chorus was certainly not teetotalism: ‘“Sing old Rose, and burn the bellows, Drink and drive dull care away.”’