excellent, his style is easier than in his prose.  There is deception in this:  it is not easier, but better suited to the dignity of verse; as one may dance with grace, whose motions, in ordinary walking, in the common step, are awkward.  He had a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking:  yet, though grave and awful in his deportment, when he thought it necessary or proper, he frequently indulged himself in pleasantry and sportive sallies.  He was prone to superstition, but not to credulity.  Though his imagination might incline him to a belief of the marvellous and the mysterious, his vigorous reason examined the evidence with jealousy.  He had a loud voice, and a slow deliberate utterance, which no doubt gave some additional weight to the sterling metal of his conversation[26].  His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantick, and grown unwieldy from corpulency.  His countenance was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured by the scars of that evil, which, it was formerly imagined, the royal touch[27] could cure.  He was now in his sixty-fourth year, and was become a little dull of hearing.  His sight had always been somewhat weak; yet, so much does mind govern, and even supply the deficiency of organs, that his perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate[28].  His head, and sometimes also his body shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy:  he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions[29], of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus’s dance.  He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair-buttons[30] of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles.  Upon this tour, when journeying, he wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth great coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio Dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick.  Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars.  Every thing relative to so great a man is worth observing.  I remember Dr. Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow[31], told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles.  When I mention the oak stick, it is but letting Hercules have his club; and, by-and-by, my readers will find this stick will bud, and produce a good joke[32].

This imperfect sketch of ‘the COMBINATION and the form[33]’ of that Wonderful Man, whom I venerated and loved while in this world, and after whom I gaze with humble hope, now that it has pleased ALMIGHTY GOD to call him to a better world, will serve to introduce to the fancy of my readers the capital object of the following journal, in the course of which I trust they will attain to a considerable degree of acquaintance with him.