The lustre of his bright eye was gone--his eloquent face was passive and looked thrown out of work--and his frame was bowed down by no feigned decrepitude. His melancholy errand to me related to a Farewell Address, which at the invitation of his staunch friend Miss Kelly--for it did not require a request--I had undertaken to indite. He pleaded earnestly that it might be brief, being, he said, “a bad study,” as well as distrustful of his bodily strength. Of his sufferings he spoke with a sad but resigned tone, expressed deep regret at quitting a profession he delighted in, and partly attributed the sudden breaking down of his health to the superior size of one particular stage, which required of him a jump extra in getting off. That additional bound, like the bittock at the end of a Scotch mile, had, he thought, overtasked his strength. His whole deportment and conversation impressed me with the opinion that he was a simple, sensible, warm-hearted being, such indeed as he appears in his Memoirs--a Joseph after Parson Adams’s own heart. We shook hands heartily, parted, and I never saw him again. He was a rare practical humorist, and I never look into Rabelais, with its huge-mouthed Gargantua and his enormous appetite for “plenty of links, chitterlings, and puddings,” in their season, without thinking that in Grimaldi and _his_ pantomime I have lost my best set of illustrations of that literary extravaganza. EPICUREAN REMINISCENCES OF A SENTIMENTALIST. “My _Tables_! _Meat_ it is, _I set it_ down!”--HAMLET I think it was Spring but--not certain I am-- When my passion began first to work; But I know we were certainly looking for lamb, And the season was over for pork. ’Twas at Christmas, I think, when I met with Miss Chase, Yes,--for Morris had asked me to dine,-- And I thought I had never beheld such a face, Or so noble a turkey and chine. Placed close by her side, it made others quite wild, With sheer envy to witness my luck; How she blushed as I gave her some turtle, and smiled As I afterwards offered some duck. I looked and I languished, alas, to my cost, Through three courses of dishes and meats; Getting deeper in love--but my heart was quite lost, When it came to the trifle and sweets! With a rent-roll that told of my houses and land, To her parents I told my designs-- And then to herself I presented my hand, With a very fine pottle of pines! I asked her to have me for weal or for woe, And she did not object in the least;-- I can’t tell the date--but we married, I know, Just in time to have game at the feast. We went to ----, it certainly was the sea-side; For the next, the most blessed of morns, I remember how fondly I gazed at my bride, Sitting down to a plateful of prawns.