ering, did not seize
with avidity on any opportunity which was afforded him, of performing to
his heart's content on the first violin.

MR. ROBERT BOLTON: THE 'GENTLEMAN CONNECTED WITH THE PRESS'

In the parlour of the Green Dragon, a public-house in the immediate
neighbourhood of Westminster Bridge, everybody talks politics, every
evening, the great political authority being Mr. Robert Bolton, an
individual who defines himself as 'a gentleman connected with the press,'
which is a definition of peculiar indefiniteness. Mr. Robert Bolton's
regular circle of admirers and listeners are an undertaker, a
greengrocer, a hairdresser, a baker, a large stomach surmounted by a
man's head, and placed on the top of two particularly short legs, and a
thin man in black, name, profession, and pursuit unknown, who always sits
in the same position, always displays the same long, vacant face, and
never opens his lips, surrounded as he is by most enthusiastic
conversation, except to puff forth a volume of tobacco smoke, or give
vent to a very snappy, loud, and shrill _hem_! The conversation
sometimes turns upon literature, Mr. Bolton being a literary character,
and always upon such news of the day as is exclusively possessed by that
talented individual. I found myself (of course, accidentally) in the
Green Dragon the other evening, and, being somewhat amused by the
following conversation, preserved it.

'Can you lend me a ten-pound note till Christmas?' inquired the
hairdresser of the stomach.

'Where's your security, Mr. Clip?'

'My stock in trade,--there's enough of it, I'm thinking, Mr. Thicknesse.
Some fifty wigs, two poles, half-a-dozen head blocks, and a dead Bruin.'

'No, I won't, then,' growled out Thicknesse. 'I lends nothing on the
security of the whigs or the Poles either. As for whigs, they're cheats;
as for the Poles, they've got no cash. I never have nothing to do with
blockheads, unless I can't awoid it (ironically), and a dead bear's about
as much use to me as I could be to a dead bear.'

'Well, then,' urged the other, 'there's a book as belonged to Pope,
Byron's Poems, valued at forty pounds, because it's got Pope's identical
scratch on the back; what do you think of that for security?'

'Well, to be sure!' cried the baker. 'But how d'ye mean, Mr. Clip?'

'Mean! why, that it's got the _hottergruff_ of Pope.

"Steal not this book, for fear of hangman's rope;
For it belongs to Alexander Pope.