Gillies, the historian of Greece, and Porson used now and then to meet. The consequence was certain to be a literary contest. Porson was much the deeper scholar of the two. Gillies was one day speaking to him of the Greek tragedies, and of Pindar's odes. "_We know nothing_," said Gillies, emphatically, "of the Greek metres." Porson answered, "If, Doctor, you will put your observation in the _singular_ number, I believe it will be very accurate." Porson being once at a dinner-party where the conversation turned upon Captain Cook, and his celebrated voyages round the world, an ignorant person, in order to contribute his mite towards the social intercourse, asked him, "Pray, was Cook killed on his first voyage?" "I believe he was," answered Porson, "though he did not mind it much, but immediately entered on a second." Porson said of a prospect shown to him, that it put him in mind of a fellowship--a long, dreary walk, with a church at the end of it. He used to say of Wakefield and Hermann, two critics, who had attacked him, but whose scholarship he held in great contempt, that "whatever he wrote in future should be written in such a manner that they should not reach it with their paws, though they stood on their hind-legs to get at it." It has been well said that all opportunities of earning honourably pudding and praise availed Porson nothing. "Two Mordecais sat at his gate--thirst and procrastination." Irony was Porson's chief weapon, though he could be sarcastic enough when he chose; as when he said of Tomline, Bishop of Lincoln, to whom a rich man, who had only seen him once, had left a large legacy, "If he had seen him twice he would have got nothing." Nor was he more eulogistic of Bishop Porteus, whom he used to call Bishop _Proteus_, from his having changed his opinions from liberal to illiberal. Porson made several visits to the British Museum to read and consider the Rosetta stone, whence he got from the officials the _sobriquet_ of Judge Blackstone. It is sufficiently notorious that Porson was not remarkably attentive to the decoration of his person: indeed, he was at times disagreeably negligent. On one occasion he went to visit a learned friend, afterwards a judge, where a gentleman who did not know Porson, was waiting in anxious and impatient expectation of the barber. On Porson's entering the library, where the gentleman was sitting, he started up and hastily said to him, "Are you the barber?" "No, sir," replied Porson; "but I am a cunning shaver, much at your service."