furiously for his fee with a lamp-post, and exclaiming, as he struck it with his stick, “You want to rob me of it, you scoundrel, do you? But come on, we’ll see!” He was a relation of the celebrated Dr. Kidd, who wrote one of the Bridgewater treatises, and who lately died at Oxford full of years and honours. Another well-known clergyman in those days was the Rev. Mr. Moss, who was afterwards vicar of Walton for so many years. His share of “the drum ecclesiastic” was decidedly the drum stick. But, although a very moderate performer in the pulpit, he had a very good standing in society, and was very much liked in his own “set.” Not over witty himself, never was man the cause of so much wit in others, and often at his own expense. He was known in his own circle as “Old England,” because “he expected every man to do his duty;” that is, he never met a brother clergyman by any chance without seizing upon him, and asking him if he could do his duty on the next Sunday. In allusion to his convivial qualities and bad preaching, somebody once said of him that “he was better in the bottle than in the wood.” This gave him such dreadful offence that he positively consulted his lawyer on the subject of prosecuting the impious blasphemer for a libel. The answer to his enquiry was a hearty laugh on the part of the solicitor himself, with an intimation that he would be laughed out of court also, amidst a shower of jokes about the poet’s description of the Oxonians of that day, “Steeped in old prejudice and older port,” and be poked with all sorts of fun about _canting_, _recanting_, and _decanting_. The decanter triumphed, although it was a strong allusion to the original offending joke, and the idea of a prosecution was abandoned. Mr. Moss had an intense horror of all sorts of innovations, and, in the case of the first railway, that between Manchester and Liverpool, this feeling was greatly increased by the fact of his being a large shareholder in a certain canal which might be affected by its success. He was in a fever of excitement and almost raved whenever the subject was mentioned in company. He long clung to the notion that the accomplishment of the line was impossible and fabulous. He magnified every difficulty, dwelt upon every obstacle, and concluded every harangue on the question with the triumphant exclamation, “But, never mind, they cannot do it; Chat Moss will stop it; Chat Moss will stop it.” This was said in allusion to that great boggy waste, so called, which for so long a time did really battle with and baffle the skill and efforts of the engineers. On one occasion, when our friend had been holding forth in his usual strain, and finished with a look of defiance at all around him, “_Chat Moss will stop it_,” Mr. Thomas Crowther, who was one of the party, quietly answered, “Depend upon it, your _chat_, _Moss_, will not stop it.” This to us is the purest essence of wit, the very _ne plus ultra_ism of it.