personage he is represented in some engravings of him (which makes his heartrending romance appear unaccountable and cruel), has a face as uneasy as can well be conceived--flushed and shattered with emotion. We recognise the sensitive, enduring man, such as he really was--a heap of bad nerves. It is worth anybody's while to go to Stationers' Hall, on purpose to see these portraits. They are not of the first order as portraits, but evident likenesses. Hoadley looks at once jovial and decided, like a good-natured controversialist. Prior is not so pleasant as in his prints; his nose is a little aquiline, instead of turned up; and his features, though delicate, not so liberal. But if he has not the best look of his poetry, he has the worst. He seems as if he had been sitting up all night; his eyelids droop: and his whole face is used with rakery. It is impossible to see Prior and Steele together, without regretting that they quarrelled: but as they did quarrel, it was fit that Prior should be in the wrong. From a Whig he had become a Tory, and showed that his change was not quite what it ought to have been, by avoiding the men with whom he had associated, and writing contemptuously of his fellow wits. All the men of letters, whose portraits are in this hall, were, doubtless, intimate with the premises, and partakers of Stationers' dinners. Richardson was Master of the Company. Morphew, a bookseller in the neighbourhood, was one of the publishers of the _Tatler_; and concerts as well as festive dinners used to take place in the great room, of both of which entertainments Steele was fond. It was here, if we mistake not, that one of the inferior officers of the Company, a humourist on sufferance, came in, one day, on his knees, at an anniversary dinner when Bishop Hoadley was present, in order to drink to the "Glorious Memory."[54] The company, Steele included, were pretty far gone; Hoadley had remained as long as he well could; and the genuflector was drunk. Steele, seeing the Bishop a little disconcerted, whispered him, "Do laugh, my lord; pray laugh:--'tis _humanity_ to laugh." The good-natured prelate acquiesced. Next day, Steele sent him a penitential letter, with the following couplet:-- Virtue with so much ease on Bangor sits, All faults he pardons, though he none commits.