More successful than Sir Francis was rollicking Tom Porter, or Major Porter, according to his military rank. Both were luckless gentlemen; but Tom wrote one play, the "Villain," which put the town in a flame, and raised Sandford's fame, as an actor, to its very highest. Tom was also the author of a rattling comedy, called the "Carnival," but rioting, and bad company and hot temper marred him. He and Sir Henry Bellasys, dining at Sir Robert Carr's, fell into fierce dispute, out of mutual error; fierce words, then a thoughtless blow from Sir Henry, then swords crossing, and tipsy people parting the combatants. They were really warm friends; but Tom had been struck, and honour forbade that he should be reconciled till blood had flown. So Dryden's boy was employed to track Bellasys, and the Major came upon him in Covent Garden, where they fought, surrounded by a crowd of admirers. Tom's honour was satisfied by passing his sword through the body of his dearest friend. The knight felt the wound was mortal, but he beckoned the less grievously wounded major to him, kissed him, and remained standing, that Tom might not be obstructed in his flight. The friend and poet safe, the knight fell back, and soon after died. There was really noble stuff in some of these dissolute fine gentlemen! But there are no two of them who have so faithfully illustrated themselves, and the times in which they lived, as Sir George Etherege and Sir Charles Sedley; the former, a knight by purchase, in order to please a silly woman, who vowed she would many none but a man of title; the latter, a baronet by inheritance. Sir George, born in 1636, was the descendant of a good--Sir Charles, born three years later, a member of a better--family, reckoning among its sons scholars and patrons of scholars. Sir George left Cambridge undistinguished, but took his degree in foreign travel, came home to find the study of the law too base a drudgery for so free a spirit, and so took to living like a "gentleman," and to illustrating the devilishness of that career by reproducing it in dramas on the stage. Sedley left Oxford as Etherege left Cambridge, ingloriously, bearing no honours with him. Unlike Sir George, however, he was a home-keeping youth, whereby his wit seems not to have suffered. He nursed the latter in the groves, or at the paternal hearth at Aylesford, in Kent, till the sun of the restored monarchy enticed him to London. There his wit recommended him to the King, won for him the hatred of small minds, and elicited the praise of noble spirits, who were witty themselves, and loved the manifestation of wit in others. "I have heard," says honest, brilliant, and much-abused Shadwell, "I have heard Sedley speak more wit at a supper than all my adversaries, putting their heads together, could _write_ in a year." This testimony was rendered by a man whose own reputation as a wit has the stamp and the warrant of Rochester.