"Kirkpatrick's brother Roger was the Mercutio to his Shallow. Roger was a rare fellow, 'of the driest humour and the nicest tact, of infinite sleights and evasions, of a picked phraseology, and the very soul of mimicry.' He had the mind of a harlequin; his wit was acrobatic, and threw somersaults. He took in a character at a glance, and threw a pun at you as dexterously as a fly-fisher casts his fly over a trout's nose. 'How finely,' says Hazlitt, in his best and heartiest mood; 'how finely, how truly, how gaily he took off the company at the "Southampton!" Poor and faint are my sketches compared to his! It was like looking into a camera-obscura--you saw faces shining and speaking. The smoke curled, the lights dazzled, the oak wainscoting took a higher polish. There was old S., tall and gaunt, with his couplet from Pope and case at Nisi Prius; Mudford, eyeing the ventilator and lying perdu for a moral; and H. and A. taking another friendly finishing glass. These and many more windfalls of character he gave us in thought, word, and action. I remember his once describing three different persons together to myself and Martin Burney [a bibulous nephew of Madame d'Arblay's and a great friend of Charles Lamb's], namely, the manager of a country theatre, a tragic and a comic performer, till we were ready to tumble on the floor with laughing at the oddity of their humours, and at Roger's extraordinary powers of ventriloquism, bodily and mental; and Burney said (such was the vividness of the scene) that when he awoke the next morning he wondered what three amusing characters he had been in company with the evening before.' He was fond also of imitating old Mudford, of the _Courier_, a fat, pert, dull man, who had left the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1814, just as Hazlitt joined it, and was renowned for having written a reply to 'Coelebs.' He would enter a room, fold up his great-coat, take out a little pocket volume, lay it down to think, rubbing all the time the fleshy calf of his leg with dull gravity and intense and stolid self-complacency, and start out of his reveries when addressed with the same inimitable vapid exclamation of 'Eh!' Dr. Whittle, a large, plain-faced Moravian preacher, who had turned physician, was another of his chosen impersonations. Roger represented the honest, vain, empty man purchasing an ounce of tea by stratagem to astonish a favoured guest; he portrayed him on the summit of a narrow, winding, and very steep staircase, contemplating in airy security the imaginary approach of duns. This worthy doctor on one occasion, when watching Sarratt, the great chess-player, turned suddenly to Hazlitt, and said, 'I think I could dance. I'm sure I could; aye, I could dance like Vestris.' Such were the odd people Roger caricatured on the memorable night he pulled off his coat to eat beefsteaks on equal terms with Martin Burney.