This peculiarity has been attributed, but we speak merely from common report, to a disgust which he contracted for that species of spurious wit, during his frequent intercourse with the Johnians, a race of students who have, from time immemorial, been identified with the most profligate class of punsters; be this, however, as it may, we are inclined to believe that a person who resides much amongst those who are addicted to this _vice_, unless he quickly takes the infection, acquires a sort of constitutional insusceptibility, like nurses, who pass their lives in infected apartments with perfect safety and impunity. His favourite, and we might add his only pursuit, beyond the circle of his profession, was the study of antiquities; he was, as we have already stated, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; had collected a very tolerable series of ancient coins, and possessed sufficient critical acumen to distinguish between Attic _ærugo_, and the spurious _verdure_ of the modern counterfeit. Often had he undertaken an expedition of a hundred miles to inspect the interior of an ancient barrow, or to examine the mouldering fragments of some newly-discovered monument; indeed, like the connoisseur in cheese, blue-mould and decay were the favourite objects of his taste, and the sure passports to his favour; for he despised all _living_ testimony, but that of worms and maggots. A coin with the head of a _living_ sovereign passed through his hands with as little resistance as water through a sieve, but he grasped the head of an Antonine or Otho with insatiable and relentless avarice. Mr. Twaddleton’s figure exceeded the middle stature, and was so extremely slender as to give him the air and appearance of a tall man. He was usually dressed in an old-fashioned suit of black cloth, consisting of a single-breasted coat, with a standing collar, and deep comprehensive cuffs, and a flapped waistcoat; but so awkwardly did these vestments conform with the contour of his person, that we might have supposed them the production of those Laputan tailors who wrought by mathematical principles, and held in sovereign contempt the illiterate fashioners who deemed it necessary to measure the forms of their customers; although it was whispered by certain censorious spinsters in the village that the aforesaid mathematical artists were better acquainted with the _angles_ of the Seven Dials, than with the _squares_ of the west end. They farther surmised that the vicar’s annual journey to London, which in truth was undertaken with no other objects than those of attending the anniversary of the Society of Antiquaries, on Saint George’s day, and of inspecting the cabinets of his old crony, the celebrated medallist of Tavistock-street, was for the laudable purpose of recruiting his wardrobe. If the aforesaid coat, with its straggling and disproportioned suburbs, possessed an amplitude of dimensions which ill accorded with the slender wants of his person,