“His chambers were on the first floor of No. 1 Inner Temple Lane.... He received me very courteously; but it must be confessed that his apartment and furniture and morning dress was sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt neck and knees of his breeches were loose, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up, and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly peculiarities were forgotten the moment he began to talk.”--1763. [Sidenote: Croker’s _Johnsoniana_.] “The day after I wrote my last letter to you I was introduced to Mr. Johnson by a friend. We passed through three very dirty rooms to a little one that looked like an old counting-house, where this great man was sat at breakfast.... I was very much struck with Mr. Johnson’s appearance, and could hardly help thinking him a madman for some time, as he sat waving over his breakfast like a lunatic. He is a very large man, and was dressed in a dirty brown coat and waistcoat, with breeches that were brown also (although they had been crimson), and an old black wig; his shirt collar and sleeves were unbuttoned; his stockings were down about his feet, which had on them, by way of slippers, an old pair of shoes.... We had been with him some time before he began to talk, but at length he began, and, faith, to some purpose; everything he says is as _correct_ as a _second edition_; ’tis almost impossible to argue with him, he is so sententious and so knowing.”--1764. BEN JONSON 1574-1637 [Sidenote: Aubrey’s _Lives of Eminent Persons_. *] “He was (or rather had been) of a clear and faire skin, his habit was very plaine. I have heard Mr. Lacy, the player, say that he was wont to weare a coate like a coach-man’s coate with slitts under the arme-pitts. He would many times exceed in drinke. Canarie was his beloved liquer.... Ben Jonson had one eie lower than t’other and bigger, like Clun, the player.” [Sidenote: Anderson’s _Poets of Great Britain_. *] “The character of Jonson, like that of most celebrated wits, has been drawn with great diversity of lights and shades, according as affection or envy guided the pencil. His person, as he has himself told us, was corpulent and large. His disposition seems to have been reserved and saturnine, and sometimes not a little oppressed with the gloom of a splenetic imagination.... Stern and rigid as his virtue was, he was easy and social in the convivial meetings of his friends; and the laws of his _Symposia_, inscribed over the chimney of the Apollo, a room in the Devil Tavern, near Temple Bar, where he kept his club, show that he was neither averse to the pleasures of conversation, nor ignorant of what would render it agreeable and improving.” [Sidenote: Lafond, _Notice sur Ben Jonson_. *]