"The Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale, tall, strong man, and full of stories, gesticulations, and buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who, while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter; and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. The Hanoverian (another of the party) was a pale, bloated, young man, whose father had made a large fortune in London as an army contractor. He seemed to emulate the manners of young Englishmen of fortune. He was a good-natured fellow, not without information or literature, but a most egregious coxcomb. He had been in the habit of attending the House of Commons; and had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating society. For this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable industry; for he was perfect in Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary, and with an accent that forcibly reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderick Random, who professed to teach the English pronunciation; he was constantly _deferring_ to my superior judgment, whether or no I had pronounced this or that word with propriety or 'the true delicacy.' When he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always rose; for which I could detect no other motive, than his partiality to that elegant phrase, so liberally introduced in the orations of our British legislators, 'While I am on my legs.'" Coleridge continues his description of the party, and relates a quarrel that ensued between a little German tailor and his wife, by which he was the gainer of a bed, it being too cold to continue much longer on deck: "In the evening the sea rolling higher, the Dane became worse, and in consequence increased his remedy, viz. brandy, sugar, and nutmeg, in proportion to the room left in his stomach. The conversation or oration 'rather than dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever heard.' After giving an account of his fortune acquired in the island of Santa Cruz, 'he expatiated on the style in which he intended to live in Denmark, and the great undertakings he proposed to himself to commence, till the brandy aiding his vanity, and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a madman.