The statement of Malone about the elder Richardson sounds the keynote to the present argument. It became part of Richardson’s business to collect gossip about his contemporaries and others--in other words, he procured the outlines, and filled in the background and colour, if they were wanting, so far as he judged them requisite for the immediate purpose. He was one of many. Aubrey, Chetwood, Oldys, Walpole, and Malone himself, did much the same. Chetwood is wholly untrustworthy. Aubrey is to be accepted with many grains of allowance. But Oldys, Walpole and Malone were unusually accurate and scrupulous, and took pains to ascertain the truth, or not to set down, at any rate, what they knew to be the reverse. Valuable as the information and traits preserved by Walpole and Malone must always remain, neither looked much below the surface, or took the trouble to scrutinise very closely the stories which reached their ears,--although we have seen, just above, that the latter, at all events, took true measurement of Richardson. In the use of made-up tales or gossip, it was doubtless considered that the original outlines were of insufficient interest and dramatic completeness; and we are presented accordingly with a finished scene or conversation built out of a mere meagre skeleton. Like the first sketch of a picture which the artist makes in the fields or on the water, the professional adept in another way obtains his rough material at the club or the dinner-table, and takes it home with him to finish _pro bono publico_. A curious glimpse of what may be described as preliminary rumination and subsequent cookery is afforded by Malone in what he says about the celebrated Lord Chesterfield:-- “The late Lord Chesterfield’s _bons-mots_ were all studied. Dr. Warren, who attended him for some months before his death, told me that he had always one ready for him each visit, but never gave him a second on the same day.” Chesterfield’s utterances, in other words, were second-hand impromptus--clever things which occur to one after the event, to be brought adroitly in next time. They resemble the speech which the man makes to himself on his way home, but which he should have delivered at the meeting or the banquet. There are producible specimens, not only of the _radix_, which an artificer elaborates to suit his purposes, but of the converse--where the length of the original saying has been regarded as prolix, and has been shorn of its ample proportions, till it becomes a _mot_ or an epigram. Every one has heard, for instance, of the capital observation of Horne Tooke, in reply to somebody who had stated in his hearing that the law was open to all men: “And so is the London Tavern!” But the more correct version of this matter appears to be one which is given in _Joe Miller_, 1832, No. 947:--