Not unfrequently he had to appear before the Bench for being drunk and incapable, and though he was sometimes mulcted in a fine, as often as not some smart sally of wit won the admiration and sympathy of the "Great Unpaid," who let him down as softly as their sense of duty would permit. Dick, on those occasions, would declare that it was his legs only, and not his head, that was drunk. He would assert that, like a barrel, he was easily upset when only partially filled; but, when full to the bung and end up, he was steady as a rock. At one time in his career Dick kept a beer-house, the sign over the door being a representation of the Globe, with the head and shoulders of a man projecting through it, and underneath it the legend: "Help me through this World!" By way of counteracting any bad moral effects that arose from his vending of beer on week-days, he taught a Bible-class in a room over the beer-shop on Sundays. He christened one of his sons "Gentleman," Gentleman Taylor, being determined, as he said, to have one gentleman in the family, whatever else. Poor Dick Taylor! I always felt grateful to his personality and to the humour which girt him round. He was a link that bound us to the past; a kind of embodied poetical idea in keeping with the ancient Forest and its traditions. I have more than half a suspicion that he must have been lying dormant for centuries in the muniment-room of Clitheroe Castle, and, like Rip Van Winkle, awoke at length to resume his interrupted duties. I never conversed with him without being carried in imagination back to bygone times, and on such occasions it was with a half-resentful feeling of annoyance that the proximity of a later--should we be justified in saying, a higher?--civilization, in the guise of a smoky factory chimney, dispelled the illusion. The post of ale-taster, though still nominally maintained, is in reality obsolete, and could not be revived, even in out-of-the-way places, without committing an anachronism. Even in Dick Taylor's day the office was looked upon as belonging to the past--a relic of a bygone age, in which a social system, different from the present, prevailed. It belonged to the days of stocks and pillories, of ducking and cucking stools and scolds' bridles; of sluggard wakeners and dog whippers. _Tempora mutantur._ It needed a genial humorist to assume the duties of the office in this latter half of the nineteenth century, and a vulgar imitator would find no favour.