Besides serving Mr. H—— in the character of clerk or amanuensis, he used to dangle at his elbow on all occasions, swear religiously to all his charges, and show the way in laughing at all his jokes. He was so clever in the use of his pen in transcription, that his hand could travel over a sheet at the rate of eleven knots an hour, and this whether drunk or sober, asleep or awake. Death itself could scarcely have chilled his energies, and it was one of his favourite jokes, in vaunting of the latter miraculous faculty, to declare that he intended to delay writing his will till after his decease, when he would guide himself in the disposal of his legacies by the behaviour of his relations. We do not question his abilities for such a task; but one might have had a pretty good guess, from Nimmo’s appearance, that he would scarcely ever find occasion, either before or after death, to exercise them. These sketches, from the quaint flippancy of their style, may be suspected of fancifulness and exaggeration; yet certain it is, that out of the ten thousand persons said to be employed in this legal metropolis in the solicitation, distribution, and execution of justice, many individuals may even yet be found, in whom it would be possible to trace the lineaments we have described. Such persons as H—— and Nimmo dangle at the elbows of The Law, and can no more be said to belong to its proper body than so many rats in a castle appertain to the garrison. H—— continued in the course of life which we have attempted to describe till the year 1808, when his constitution became so shattered, that he was in a great measure unfitted for business or for intercourse with society. Towards the end of his life, his habits had become still more irregular than before, and he seemed to hasten faster and faster as he went on to destruction, like the meteor, whose motion across the sky seems to increase in rapidity the moment before extinction. After the incontestable character of the greatest wit and the utmost cleverness had been awarded to him,—after he had spent so much money and constitution in endeavouring to render his companions happy, that some of them, more grateful or more drunken than the rest, actually confessed him to be “a devilish good-natured foolish sort of fellow,”—after he had, like certain Scottish poets, almost drunk himself into the character of a genius,—it came to pass that—he died. A mere pot-house reveller like him is no more missed in the world of life than a sparrow or a bishop. There was no one to sorrow for his loss—no one to regret his absence—save those whose friendship is worse than indifference. It never was very distinctly known how or where he died. It was alone recorded of him, as of the antediluvian patriarchs, that _he died_. As his life had become of no importance, so his death produced little remark and less sorrow. On the announcement of the event to a party of his old drinking friends, who, of course,