[26] William Roscoe (1753-1831), author of _Life of Lorenzo de' Medici_, _Life and Pontificate of Leo X_, and other works, was a native of Liverpool, and spent the main part of his life as a banker in that town.--M. It was a striking illustration of the impotence of mere literature against natural power and mother wit that the only man who was considered indispensable in these parties, for giving life and impulse to their vivacity, was a tailor; and not, I was often assured, a person deriving a designation from the craft of those whose labours he supported as a capitalist, but one who drew his own honest daily bread from his own honest needle, except when he laid it aside for the benefit of drooping literati, who needed to be watered with his wit. Wit, perhaps, in a proper sense, he had not--it was rather drollery, and sometimes even buffoonery. These, in the lamentable absence of the tailor, could be furnished of an inferior quality by Mr. Shepherd,[27] who (as may be imagined from this fact) had but little dignity in private life. I know not how far he might alter in these respects; but certainly, at the time (1801-2), he was decidedly, or could be, a buffoon, and seemed even ambitious of the title, by courting notice for his grotesque manner and coarse stories, more than was altogether compatible with the pretensions of a scholar and a clergyman. I must have leave to think that such a man could not have emerged from any great University, or from any but a sectarian training. Indeed, about Poggio himself there were circumstances which would have indisposed any regular clergyman of the Church of England, or of the Scottish Kirk, to usher him into the literature of his country. With what coarseness and low buffoonery have I heard this Mr. Shepherd in those days run down the bishops then upon the bench, but especially those of any public pretensions or reputation, as Horsley and Porteus, and, in connexion with them, the pious Mrs. Hannah More! Her he could not endure. [27] The Rev. William Shepherd, author of a _Life of Poggio Bracciolini_ (Liverpool, 1802) and _Paris in 1802 and 1814_ (London, 1814), and joint author of a work in two volumes called _Systematic Education, or Elementary Instruction in the various Departments of Literature and Science_ (London, 1815).--M.