sary to fix their stories on paper and transmit them to future inquirers! New stories and new relators drive their predecessors from recollection. The tale of to-day is forgotten to-morrow. Yet how much wit and wisdom, facts and opinions, incidents that illustrate life, manners and letters, are thus consigned to oblivion almost from the moment of birth! At a London dinner-table are heard things which may not transpire elsewhere. Men and women who form a puzzle to contemporaries as well as to posterity, commonly find some one there to explain what is curious, obscure or anomalous, and thus throw a ray of truth over what was previously error or conjecture. We view them and their associates face to face, not through the haze of rumour or antiquity, their persons—not an unimportant part of the portrait—as well as characters.
I may illustrate this by a celebrated public man of the last century. Lord Chesterfield is familiar to every one. We know his wit, pleasantry, gallantry, letters, intrigues, and libertinisms; and from these if unexpectedly questioned might suppose he was a man of personable or winning exterior. What is the fact as described by his contemporary, Lord Hervey?
“With a person as disagreeable as it was possible for a human figure to be without being deformed, he affected following women of the first beauty, and the most in fashion; and if you would have taken his word for it, not without success . . . . He was very short, disproportioned, thick, and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a Polyphe-
