's School for Scandal," and Otway's "Venice Preserved," or Rowe's
"Fair Penitent," are what he best likes in his heart. John Kemble is his
favourite actor--Kean he thinks somewhat vulgar. In prose he thinks Dr.
Johnson the greatest man that ever existed, and next to him he places
Addison and Burke. His historian is Hume; and for morals and metaphysics
he goes to Paley and Dr. Reid, or Dugald Stewart, and is well content. For
the satires of Swift he has no relish. They discompose his ideas; and he
of all things detests to have his head set a spinning like a tetotum,
either by a book or by anything else. Bishop Berkeley once did this for
him to such a tune, that he showed a visible uneasiness at the mention of
the book ever after. In Tristram Shandy, however, he has a sort of
suppressed delight, which he hardly likes to acknowledge, the magnet of
attraction being, though he knows it not, in the characters of Uncle Toby,
Corporal Trim, and the Widow Wadman. His religious reading is confined to
"Blair's Sermons," and the "Whole Duty of Man," in which he always keeps a
little slip of double gilt-edged paper as a marker, without reflecting
that it is a sort of proof that he has never got through either. His
Pocket Bible always lies upon his toilet table. He knows a little of
Mathematics in general, a little of Algebra, and a little of Fluxions,
which is principally to be discovered from his having Emmerson, Simpson,
and Bonnycastle's works in his library. In classical learning he confesses
to having "forgotten" a good deal of Greek; but sports a Latin phrase upon
occasion, and is something of a critic in languages. He prefers Virgil to
Homer, and Horace to Pindar, and can, upon occasion, enter into a
dissertation on the precise meaning of a "Simplex munditiis." He also
delights in a pun, and most especially in a Latin one; and when applied to
for payment of _paving-rate_, never fails to reply "_Paveant_ illi, non
_paveam_ ego!" which, though peradventure repeated for the twentieth time,
still serves to sweeten the adieu between his purse and its contents. He
is also an amateur in etymologies and derivatives, and is sorry that the
learned Selden's solution of the origin of the term "gentleman" seems to
include in it something not altogether complimentary to religion. This is
his only objection to it. He speaks French; and his accent is, he flatters
himself, an approximation to the veritable Parisian. Modern novels he does
not rea