Most of us have been checked in such silly efforts to do good through forgetfulness of the fact that usually the poorest are the proudest.  Even the luxurious debris of London Club kitchens must be flung into swill-barrels for pigs, because starving men and women will not demean themselves to ask for it at the buttery-hatch.  Moreover, that such are often extravagant too, everybody has found out—­here’s an instance:  In my legal days, I now and then of course relieved poor folk, and sometimes passed through Seven Dials:  casually, I looked in upon an old couple to whom I had occasionally given a trifle, believing them to be near starvation; and I found them roasting a brace of partridges—­or was it quails? for they were waistcoated with bacon,—­and I had the charity to hope they had not stolen them!  Anyhow, I never called there again.  And, while I am in Seven Dials, let me record another useful small experience.  There was a lapidary handy, who had at times cut my beach-found choanites for me.  One day I found him making scarabaei out of bits of agate and lapis lazuli.  “Who gave you an order for these,” said I.  “Well, sir, I don’t rightly know his name; but he was a furriner.”  “Was the name Signor——?” “That’s it, sir.”  Then I set off straight to Sotheby’s where I knew the Signor’s Egyptian antiquities were soon to be sold, and duly forewarned the auctioneer of these forgeries.  I need not detail how at the sale he put buyers on their guard, exposing the fraud, and condemning the peccant scarabaei to extinction.  I wonder how many Grecian bronzes and copper Buddhas have been cast in Birmingham!

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Yet another old friend for many years, so far literary in that he was a sculptor, is to be recorded in Joseph Durham:  it was he who, more than thirty years ago, modelled in life and made in marble after death my beautiful three-year old daughter, little Alice, epitaphed in my poems.  Of Durham’s nobleness of character I can here give a charming trait.  I used to go about once a week—­sometimes less often—­to Alfred Place to see how Durham was getting on with the statue (a sleeping infant), and one day, to my astonishment, I perceived that instead of any progress having been made in the work, it had, miraculously to me, retrograded; not half so near completion as it was last week.  As I was wondering and perhaps not well pleased, Durham said, “I had hoped you would not call, till I had made it look as it did last week,—­and then you needn’t have known it.”  “Known what, friend?” “Well, only this; I came to a stain in the marble, and as I resolved you should have everything of the best,—­I took another block, and have worked at it night and day, in hopes you wouldn’t find me out.  There’s the other figure, under that cloth.”  Now, considering that the new block involved a cost of some twenty pounds,—­and that the old one might have been artificially doctored, and that anyhow the