Caledonians. With the exception of L, they all jump ed wonderfully; and J was quite miraculous, considering his brevity of stride. But the greatest wonder of the whole was Mr. P. He also is a short man, and he cannot be less than seventy, yet he took his stand with the assurance of an athletic, and positively beat every one of usthe very best of us, at least half a heel's breadth. I was quite thunderstruck, never having heard the least hint of his being so great a geometrician-in this sense of the word. I was, however, I must own, agreeably surprised by such a specimen of buoyant spirit and muscular strength in so venerable an old gentleman, and could not forbear from complimenting him on his revival of the ancient peripatetic ideas, about the necessity of cultivating the external as well as the internal energies, and of mixing the activity of the practical with that of the contemplative life. He took what I said with great suavity; and, indeed, I have never seen a better specimen of that easy hilarity and good humour, which sits with so much gracefulness on an honoured old age. I wish I could give you a notion of his face. It is not marked by any very striking features; but the unison of mildness of disposition, and strength of intellect in the expression, is too remarkable to be unnoticed even by a casual observer. His habits of profound thought have drawn some deep lines about his mouth, and given him a custom of holding his lips very closely shut, otherwise I suspect the whole countenance would have been nothing more than an amiable one; although the light eyes have certainly at times something very piercing in their glance, even through his spectacles. The forehead is very finely developed-singularly broad across the temples, as, according to Spurzheim, all mathematical foreheads must be; but the beauty in that quarter is rather of an ad clerum character, or as Pindar hath it, - προς 7ο παν Ερμηνεων χαλίζει. I, however, who really, in good earnest, begin to believe a little of the system, could not help remarking this circumstance; and more particularly so, because I found Mr. L's skull to possess many of the same features-above all, that of the breadth between the temples. This other great mathematician is a much younger man than P ; but his hair is already beginning to be grey. He is a very fat heavy figure of a man, without much more appearance of strength than of activity; and yet, although a bad leaper, by no means a slothful looking person neither. He has very large eyes, in shape not unlike Coleridge's, but without the least of the same mysterious depth of expression. Altogether, his face is one which, at first sight, you would pronounce to be merely a coarse one; but in which, once informed to whom it belongs, you are at no loss to discover a thousand marks of vigorous intellect and fancy too. Of this last quality, indeed, his eyes are at all times full to overflowing. In the midst of the sombre gravity of his usual look, there are always little flashes of enthusiasm breaking through the cloud, and, I think, adorning it; and, in this respect, he forms a striking contrast to the calm, tranquil uniformity of Mr. P's physiognomy and deportment. In thinking of this afterwards, I could not help recollecting a great many passages of richly-coloured writing in his scientific Essays in the Edinburgh Review, which, I remember, struck me at the time I first read them, as being rather misplaced. But this, perhaps, may be merely the effect of the sterile way of writing employed by almost all the philosophers of these late times, to which we have now become so much accustomed, that we with difficulty approve of any thing in a warmer taste, introduced into such kinds of disquisition. They managed these things better in Greece. By and bye, we were summoned to the drawing-room, where we found several ladies with Mrs. J. She, you know, is an American, and J— went across the Atlantic for her a few years ago, while we were at war with her country. She is a very pleasing person; and they have one extremely interesting little girl. J-made no alteration in his dress, but joined the ladies exactly in his morning costume, the little green jacket aforesaid, grey worsted pantaloons, and Hessian boots, and a black silk handkerchief. How had Grub-street stared to see the prince of reviewers in such a garb! The dinner was excellent-a glorious turbot and oyster sauce for one thing; and (sitesco referens) there was no want of champaigne the very wine, by the way, which I should have guessed to be Jeffrey's favourite. It is impossible to conceive of him as being a lover of the genuine old black-strap, or even of the quiet balminess of Burgundy. The true reviewing diet is certainly champaigne, and devilled biscuit. Had there been any blue-stocking lady present, she would have been sadly shocked with the material cast of the conversation during dinner-not a single word about "The sweet new poem!" Most of the company, though all men of literary habits, seemed to be as alive to the delights of the table, as if they had been "let in" (to use Dandie's phrase) by Monsieur Viard,— knowing in sauces, and delightfully reviewing every glass before they would suffer it to go down. It put me in mind of some lines of my friend W. 'Tis a bookseller that speaks "The days of Tonson, Lintot, Curll, are over, The time's gone by when we our coaches kept, And authors were contented with umbrellas- Too glad if cantos two could fill two bellies- Unless the quire was covered-Happy fellows! The introduction of the claret and desert made, for a long * Modern Dunciad, Canto II. time, very little alteration in the subject matter of discourse; but by degrees the natural feelings and interests of the company did begin to shine through the cloud of babillage, and various matters, in which I was much better pleased to hear their opinions, were successively tabled-none of them, however, with the least appearance of what the Scotch very expressively call fore-thought. Every thing went on with the utmost possible facility, and, in general, with a very graceful kind of lightness. The whole tone of Mr. J's own conversation, indeed, was so pitched, that a proser, or a person at all ambitious, in the green-room phrase, to make an effect, would undoubtedly have found himself most grievously out of place. Amidst all this absence of "preparation," however, (for it is impossible to talk of conversation without using French words,)—I have never, I believe, heard so many ideas thrown out by any man in so short a space of time, and apparently with such entire negation of exertion. His conversation acted upon me like the first delightful hour after taking opium. The thoughts he scattered so readily about him (his words, rapid, and wonderfully rapid as they are, appearing to be continually panting after his conceptions)—his thoughts, I say, were at once so striking, and so just, that they took in succession entire possession of my imagination, and yet with so felicitous a tact did he forbear from expressing any one of these too fully, that the reason was always kept in a pleasing kind of excitement, by the endeavour more thoroughly to examine their bearings. It is quite impossible to listen to him for a moment, without recalling all the best qualities of his composition--and yet I suspect his conversation is calculated to leave one with even a higher idea of his mind, at least of its fertility, than the best of his writings. I have heard some men display more profoundness of reflection, and others a much greater command of the conversational picturesque-but I never before witnessed any thing to be compared with the blending together of apparently little consistent powers in the whole strain of his discourse. Such a power, in the first place, of throwing away at once every useless part of the idea to be discussed, and then such a happy redundancy of imagination to present the essential and reserved part in its every possible relation, and point of view-and all this connected with so much of the plain sçavoir faire of actual existence, and such a thorough scorn of mystification, it is really a very wonderful intellectual coalition. The largeness of the views suggested by his speculative understanding, and the shrewdness with which his sound and close judgment seems to scrutinize them after they are suggested-these alone would be sufficient to make his conversation one of the most remarkable things in the world. But then he invests all this ground-work with such a play of fancy, wit, sarcasm, persiflage, every thing in that way except humour-which again, were they united in any person entirely devoid either of the depth or the justness of J's intellect, would unquestionably render that person one of the most fascinating of all possible companions. The Stagyrite, who places his summum bonum in having one's faculties kept at work, would certainly have thought himself in Elysium, had he been so fortunate as to discuss a flask of Chian in company with Mr. J———. The mere animal spirits of the man are absolutely miraculous. When one considers what a life of exertion he has led for these last twenty years; how his powers have been kept on the rack such a length of time with writing, and concocting, and editing reviews on the one hand, and briefs, and speeches, and journeys, and trials, and cross-questionings, and the whole labyrinth of barristership on the other-one cannot help being quite thunderstruck on finding that he has still reserved such a large fund of energy which he can afford and delight to lavish, when even the comparative repose of his mind would be more than enough to please and satisfy every one. His vigour seems to be a perfect widow's cruise, bubbling for ever upwards, and refusing to be exhausted-swelling and spreading till all the vessels of the neighbourhood are saturated, and more than saturated, with the endless unwearied irrigation of its superfluous richness. Mr. P was the only other person whose conversation |