Colonel said, turning away from his son to us: “excuse me, is that—that paper really a proof-sheet?” We handed over to him that curiosity, smiling at the enthusiasm of the honest gentleman who could admire what to us was as unpalatable as a tart to a pastrycook. Being with men of letters, he thought proper to make his conversation entirely literary; and in the course of my subsequent more intimate acquaintance with him, though I knew he had distinguished himself in twenty actions, he never could be brought to talk of his military feats or experience, but passed them by, as if they were subjects utterly unworthy of notice. I found he believed Dr. Johnson to be the greatest of men: the Doctor’s words were constantly in his mouth; and he never travelled without Boswell’s Life. Besides these, he read Cæsar and Tacitus, “with translations, sir, with translations—I’m thankful that I kept some of my Latin from Grey Friars;” and he quoted sentences from the Latin Grammar, _à propos_ of a hundred events of common life, and with perfect simplicity and satisfaction to himself. Besides the above-named books, the Spectator, Don Quixote, and Sir Charles Grandison formed a part of his travelling library. “I read these, sir,” he used to say, “because I like to be in the company of gentlemen; and Sir Roger de Coverley, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Don Quixote are the finest gentlemen in the world.” And when we asked him his opinion of Fielding,— “Tom Jones, sir; Joseph Andrews, sir!” he cried, twirling his mustachios. “I read them when I was a boy, when I kept other bad company, and did other low and disgraceful things, of which I’m ashamed now. Sir, in my father’s library I happened to fall in with those books; and I read them in secret, just as I used to go in private and drink beer, and fight cocks, and smoke pipes with Jack and Tom, the grooms in the stables. Mrs. Newcome found me, I recollect, with one of those books; and thinking it might be by Mrs. Hannah More, or some of that sort, for it was a grave-looking volume: and though I wouldn’t lie about that or anything else—never did, sir; never, before heaven, have I told more than three lies in my life—I kept my own counsel; I say, she took it herself to read one evening; and read on gravely—for she had no more idea of a joke than I have of Hebrew—until she came to the part about Lady B—— and Joseph Andrews; and then she shut the book, sir; and you should have seen the look she gave me! I own I burst out a-laughing, for I was a wild young rebel, sir. But she was in the right, sir, and I was in the wrong. A book, sir, that tells the story of a parcel of servants, of a pack of footmen and ladies’-maids fuddling in alehouses! Do you suppose I want to know what my kitmutgars and cousomahs are doing? I am as little proud as any man in the world: but there must be distinction, sir; and as it is my lot and Clive’s lot to be a gentleman, I won’t sit in the kitchen and boose in the servants’-hall.