Indeed, something or the embarrassment of a fresh introduction might naturally be felt by an individual, thus beginning again, as the lawyers say, _de novo_, and renewing ties he had virtually cast off. The guilty hand was as dubiously extended to me as if it had been a dyer’s,--its fellow meanwhile performing sundry involuntary motions and manipulations about his cravat, as if nervously mistrusting the correctness of the ties or the stability of a buckle. As for his face, there was a foolish, deprecatory smile upon it that would have puzzled the pencil of Wilkie; and even Liston himself could scarcely have parodied the indescribable croak with which, conscious of an unlucky notoriety, he inquired “if I had heard”--here, a short husky cough--“of anything particular?” “Not a word,” was the answer. “Then you don’t know”(--more fidgeting about the neck, the smile rather sillier, the voice more guttural, and the cough worse than ever)--“then you don’t know”--but, like Macbeth’s amen, the confession literally stuck in the culprit’s throat; and I was left to learn, an hour afterwards, and from another source, that “Jemmy G*** had _fought a duel with himself_, and cut his own weazand, about a lady.” For my own part, with the above figure, and all its foolish features vividly imprinted on my memory, I do not think that I could ever seriously attempt “what Cato did, and Addison approved,” in my own person. On the contrary, it seems to me that the English moralist gave but an Irish illustration of “a brave man struggling with the storms of fate,” by representing him as wilfully scuttling his own hold, and going at once to the bottom. As for the Censor, he plainly laid himself open to censure, when he used a naked sword as a stomachic--a very sorry way, by the way, when weary of conjectures, of enjoying the benefit of the doubt, and for which, were I tasked to select an inscription for his cenotaph, it should be the exclamation of Thisby, in the Midsummer Night’s Dream-- “This is old Ninny’s tomb.”