The humour of Professor Porson lay in parodies, imitations, and hoaxes, ready wit and repartee; in his oddities of dress and demeanour; and his disregard for certain decencies of society is very deplorable, though at the same time mirthful in its very extravagances. Porson left Cambridge to become the scholar about town; to quench his thirst for Florentine MSS. in the tankards of the "Cider Cellar;" and to exchange the respectability and stateliness of the Trinity common room for the savage liberty of Temple chambers. He had for some time become notorious at Cambridge. His passion for smoking, which was then going out among the younger generation, his large and indiscriminate potations, and his occasional use of the poker with a very refractory controversialist, had caused his company to be shunned by all except the few to whom his wit and scholarship were irresistible. When the evening began to grow late, the Fellows of Trinity used to walk out of the common room, and leave Porson to himself, who was sometimes found smoking by the servants next morning, without having apparently moved from the spot where he had been left over-night. Porson's imitations of Horace, which appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_, have really no merit at all, nor have any of the hundred and one epigrams which he is said to have written in one night upon the drunkenness of Mr. Pitt. But two other papers, one called _The Swinish Multitude_, and the other _The Saltbox_, display certainly both wit and humour. One is a satire upon the famous expression of Burke, in his _Letters on a Regicide Peace_; the other, a parody of the Oxford style of examination in Logic and Metaphysics. Of the hundred and one epigrams, the story goes--that when Pitt and Dundas appeared before the House, Pitt tried to speak, but showing himself unable, was kindly pulled down into his seat by those about him; Dundas who was equally unfitted for eloquence, had sense enough to sit silent. Perry, of the _Morning Chronicle_, witnessed the scene, and on his return from the House, gave a description of it to Porson, who, being vastly amused, called for pen and ink, and musing over his pipe and tankard, produced the one hundred and one pieces of verse before the day dawned. The point of most of them lies in puns. The first epigram is: "That _Ça Ira_ in England will prevail, All sober men deny with heart and hand; To talk of _going_ sure's a pretty tale, When e'en our rulers can't as much as stand." The following are better:-- "Your gentle brains with full libations drench, You've then Pitt's title to the Treasury Bench. Your foe in war to overrate A maxim is of ancient date; Then sure 'twas right, in time of trouble, That our good rulers should see double. The mob are beasts! exclaims the King of Daggers; What creature's he that's troubled with the staggers?"