I find recorded the following words of this once notorious character. A friend requested him to sit to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and have his portrait placed in Guildhall, as he was then so popular in London that the Court of Aldermen would willingly have paid the expense. "No," said he, "no; they shall never have a delineation of my face that will carry to posterity so damning a proof of what it was. Who knows but a time may come when some future Horace Walpole will treat the world with another quarto volume of historic doubts, in which he may prove that the numerous squinting portraits on tobacco-papers and halfpenny ballads, inscribed with the name of John Wilkes, are a weak invention of the enemy;' for that I was not only unlike them, but, if any inference can be drawn from the partiality of the fair sex, the handsomest man of the age I lived in."

SIR PHILIP FRANCIS (JUNIUS).

B. 1740. D. 1818.

"WITHOUT intending an indecent comparison," said Junius, "I may express my opinion that the Bible and Junius will be read when the commentaries of the Jesuits are forgotten."

In the dedication of his celebrated "Letters to the English Nation," a similar idea is more elaborately repeated, as follows:

"When kings and ministers are forgotten, when force and direction of personal satire is no longer

understood, and when measures are only felt in their remotest consequences, this book will, I believe, be found to contain principles worthy to be transmitted to posterity. . . . This is not the language of vanity. If I am a vain man, my gratification lies within a narrow circle. I am the sole depositary of my own secret, and it shall perish with me."

But the secret has not perished. The world has long conceded the authorship to Sir Philip Francis, and there is less dispute about it now, notwithstanding former controversies, than about the authorship of Homer or of Shakspeare.

B. 1750.

THOMAS ERSKINE.

D. 1823.

DR. PARR and Erskine were equally vain and conceited, — though the merits of the first as a writer, the last as a speaker, cannot be denied,—and when they met they paid each other most extravagant compliments. On one of these occasions Dr. Parr promised that he would write Erskine's epitaph; to which Erskine replied, that such an intention on the Doctor's part was almost a temptation to commit suicide.

As the youngest son of the Earl of Buchan, Erskine started in life with very limited means, and used to say he lived on "cow-heel beef and tripe." He was even grateful for occasional free admissions to Covent Garden. To his friends he would boastingly exclaim,

“Thank fortune, out of my own family I don't know a lord!"

From his first appearance in court, however, he never lacked retainers. Riding on the Home Circuit with his friend William Adam, he exclaimed after a long silence," Willie, the time will come when I shall be invested with the robes of Lord Chancellor, and the Star of the Thistle shall blaze on my bosom."

Erskine was a man of undoubted genius, and yet was a great spendthrift of the personal pronoun, so much so that Cobbett, who was printing one of his speeches, stopped in the middle, stating that the remainder would be published when they got a new font with sufficient I's, and that it was proposed Erskine should take the title of Baron Ego of Eye, in the county of Suffolk."

His elder and penurious brother, the Earl of Buchan, showed his relationship, if not in brotherly assistance, at least in the family inheritance of personal vanity. The Earl often used to observe, " According to Bacon, 'great men have no continuance,' and in the present generation there are three examples of it,- Frederick of Prussia, George Washington, and myself." To an English nobleman who visited him, he said, "My brothers Harry and Tom are certainly extraordinary men; but they owe everything to me." This occasioning some surprise, he continued: "Yes, it is true; they owe everything to me. On my father's death they pressed me for a small annual allowance. I knew that this would have been their ruin, by relaxing

their industry. So, making a sacrifice of my inclination to gratify them, I refused to give them a farthing; and they have both thriven ever since,-owing everything to me."

Canning, in one of his witty publications, gave a caricature of a peroration by Mr. Erskine at a reported meeting of the Friends of Freedom, which at the time was greatly relished; and as it illustrates the egotism generally attributed to a really very able man, the extract which follows may be acceptable:

"He had been a soldier and a sailor, and had a son at Winchester School; he had been called by special retainers during the summer into many different and distant parts of the country, travelling chiefly in post-chaises; he felt himself called upon to declare that his poor faculties were at the service of his country, — of the free and enlightened part of it, at least. He stood here as a man; he stood in the eye, indeed in the hand of God, -to whom (in the presence of the company and waiters) he solemnly appealed; he was of noble, perhaps royal blood; he had a house at Hampstead; was convinced of the necessity of a thorough and radical reform; he loved the Constitution, to which he would cling and grapple."

B.1751. RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN. D. 1816.

It must be borne in mind that profanity one hundred years ago was far from being held at its true value, or, as it is now held, not only the wickedest, but the most vulgar and indecent kind of slang; and when Sheridan failed in his first speech, he exclaimed, "I have it in me, and, by God! it shall come out."

B. 1752.

THOMAS CHATTERTON..

D. 1770.

THE boy-poet, Chatterton, for whose untimely fate the world still grieves, begged of a painter to paint him "an angel with wings and a trumpet, to trumpet his name over the world."

It is almost certain that he committed suicide rather than to beg. He had seasons of gayety, and, when he wrote to his mother or sister, strove to impress them with his growing importance. On the 20th of July, 1770, he wrote: "Almost all the next Town and County Magazine is mine. I have universal acquaintance; my company is courted everywhere, and, could I humble myself into a comptor, I could have had twenty places before now: but I must be among the great; State matters suit me better than commercial. The ladies are not out of my acquaintance."