He was not a man to be valuable at a dinner-table as a good talker.

It was when there were but two or three together that he was happy himself and made others happy; and then it would rather be from some special piece of drollery that the joy of the moment would come, than from the discussion of ordinary topics.

After so many years his old friends remember the fag-ends of the doggerel lines which used to drop from him without any effort on all occasions of jollity.

And though he could be very sad,--laden with melancholy, as I think must have been the case with him always,--the feeling of fun would quickly come to him, and the queer rhymes would be poured out as plentifully as the sketches were made.

Here is a contribution which I find hanging in the memory of an old friend, the serious nature of whose literary labours would certainly have driven such lines from his mind, had they not at the time caught fast hold of him: In the romantic little town of Highbury My father kept a circulatin' library; He followed in his youth that man immortal, who Conquered the Frenchmen on the plains of Waterloo.
Mamma was an inhabitant of Drogheda, Very good she was to darn and to embroider.
In the famous island of Jamaica, For thirty years I've been a sugar-baker; And here I sit, the Muses' 'appy vot'ry, A cultivatin' every kind of po'try, There may, perhaps, have been a mistake in a line, but the poem has been handed down with fair correctness over a period of forty years.