He was a pimpled, ill-shaven, smart-speaking, clever-looking fellow, usually dressed in grey under-garments, an old hat nearly brushed to death, and a black coat, of a fashion at least in the seventh year of its age, scrupulously buttoned up to his chin. It was in his latter and more unfortunate years that he had become thus slovenly. A legal gentleman, who gives us information concerning him, recollects when he was nearly the greatest fop in Edinburgh—being powdered in the highest style of fashion, wearing two gold watches, and having the collar of his coat adorned with a beautiful loop of the same metal. After losing the protection of Mr. Crosbie, he had fallen out of all regular means of livelihood; and unfortunately acquiring an uncontrollable propensity for social enjoyments, like the ill-fated Robert Fergusson, with whom he had been intimately acquainted, he became quite unsettled—sometimes did not change his apparel for weeks—sat night and day in particular taverns—and, in short, realized what Pleydell asserted of Driver, that “sheer ale supported him under everything; was meat, drink, and cloth—bed, board, and washing.” In his earlier years he had been very regular in his irregularities, and was a “complete fixture” at John Baxter’s tavern, in Craig’s Close, High Street, where he was the _Falstaff_ of a convivial society, termed the “_Eastcheap Club_.” But his dignity of conduct becoming gradually dissipated and relaxed, and there being also, perhaps, many a landlady who might have said with Dame Quickly, “I warrant you he’s an infinite thing upon my score,” he had become unfortunately migrative and unsteady in his taproom affections. One night he would get drunk at the sign of the _Sautwife_, in the Abbeyhill, and next morning be found tipping off a corrective dram at a porter-house in Rose Street. Sometimes, after having made a midnight tumble into “the Finish” in the Covenant Close, he would, by next afternoon, have found his way (the Lord and the policeman only knew how) to a pie-office in the Castlehill. It was absolutely true that he could write his papers as well drunk as sober, asleep as awake; and the anecdote which the facetious Pleydell narrated to Colonel Mannering, in confirmation of this miraculous faculty, is also, we are able to inform the reader, strictly consistent in truth with an incident of real occurrence.