could command an order for the then Drury-lane theatre at pleasure—­and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, in Brinsley’s easy autograph, I have heard him say was the sole remuneration which he had received for many years’ nightly illumination of the orchestra and various avenues of that theatre—­and he was content it should be so.  The honour of Sheridan’s familiarity—­or supposed familiarity—­was better to my godfather than money.

F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen; grandiloquent, yet courteous.  His delivery of the commonest matters of fact was Ciceronian.  He had two Latin words almost constantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oilman’s lips!), which my better knowledge since has enabled me to correct.  In strict pronunciation they should have been sounded vice versa—­but in those young years they impressed me with more awe than they would now do, read aright from Seneca or Varro—­in his own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, or Anglicized, into something like verse verse.  By an imposing manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the highest parochial honours which St. Andrew’s has to bestow.

He is dead—­and thus much I thought due to his memory, both for my first orders (little wondrous talismans!—­slight keys, and insignificant to outward sight, but opening to me more than Arabian paradises!) and moreover, that by his testamentary beneficence I came into possession of the only landed property which I could ever call my own—­situate near the road-way village of pleasant Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire.  When I journeyed down to take possession, and planted foot on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor descended upon me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity?) with larger paces over my allotment of three quarters of an acre, with its commodious mansion in the midst, with the feeling of an English freeholder that all betwixt sky and centre was my own.  The estate has passed into more prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian can restore it.

In those days were pit orders.  Beshrew the uncomfortable manager who abolished them!—­with one of these we went.  I remember the waiting at the door—­not that which is left—­but between that and an inner door in shelter—­O when shall I be such an expectant again!—­with the cry of nonpareils, an indispensable play-house accompaniment in those days.  As near as I can recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of the theatrical fruiteresses then was, “Chase some oranges, chase some numparels, chase a bill of the play;”—­chase pro chuse.  But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed—­the breathless anticipations I endured!  I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Rowe’s Shakspeare—­the tent scene with Diomede—­and a sight of that plate can