made of some delicate vegetable stuff, and ornamented with
feathers. Next, he brought out a green silk waistcoat of very antique
fashion, trimmed about the edges and pocket-holes with a rich and delicate
embroidery of gold and silver. This (as the possessor of the treasure
proved, by tracing its pedigree till it came into his hands) was once the
vestment of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Burleigh: but that great statesman must
have been a person of very moderate girth in the chest and waist; for the
garment was hardly more than a comfortable fit for a boy of eleven, the
smallest American of our party, who tried on the gorgeous waistcoat. Then,
Mr. Porter produced some curiously engraved drinking-glasses, with a view
of Saint Botolph's steeple on one of them, and other Boston edifices,
public or domestic, on the remaining two, very admirably done. These
crystal goblets had been a present, long ago, to an old master of the Free
School from his pupils; and it is very rarely, I imagine, that a retired
schoolmaster can exhibit such trophies of gratitude and affection, won
from the victims of his birch rod.

Our kind friend kept bringing out one unexpected and wholly unexpectable
thing after another, as if he were a magician, and had only to fling a
private signal into the air, and some attendant imp would hand forth any
strange relic we might choose to ask for. He was especially rich in
drawings by the Old Masters, producing two or three, of exquisite
delicacy, by Raphael, one by Salvator, a head by Rembrandt, and others, in
chalk or pen-and-ink, by Giordano, Benvenuto Cellini, and hands almost as
famous; and besides what were shown us, there seemed to be an endless
supply of these art-treasures in reserve. On the wall hung a
crayon-portrait of Sterne, never engraved, representing him as a rather
young man, blooming, and not uncomely: it was the worldly face of a man
fond of pleasure, but without that ugly, keen, sarcastic, odd expression
that we see in his only engraved portrait. The picture is an original, and
must needs be very valuable; and we wish it might be prefixed to some new
and worthier biography of a writer whose character the world has always
treated with singular harshness, considering how much it owes him. There
was likewise a crayon-portrait of Sterne's wife, looking so haughty and
unamiable, that the wonder is, how he ever contrived to live a week with
such an awful woman.

After looking at these, and a great many m