If we have travelled
in France this autumn we may have met the ingenious gentleman who
perpetrated this daring and successful coup. We may have found him a
well-informed and agreeable man. I have been acquainted with two or
three gentlemen who have been discovered after--after the performance
of illegal actions. What? That agreeable rattling fellow we met was
the celebrated Mr. John Sheppard? Was that amiable quiet gentleman in
spectacles the well-known Mr. Fauntleroy? In Hazlitt's admirable paper,
"Going to a Fight," he describes a dashing sporting fellow who was in
the coach, and who was no less a man than the eminent destroyer of Mr.
William Weare. Don't tell me that you would not like to have met (out of
business) Captain Sheppard, the Reverend Doctor Dodd, or others rendered
famous by their actions and misfortunes, by their lives and their
deaths. They are the subjects of ballads, the heroes of romance. A
friend of mine had the house in May Fair, out of which poor Doctor Dodd
was taken handcuffed. There was the paved hall over which he stepped.
That little room at the side was, no doubt, the study where he composed
his elegant sermons. Two years since I had the good fortune to partake
of some admirable dinners in Tyburnia--magnificent dinners indeed;
but rendered doubly interesting from the fact that the house was that
occupied by the late Mr.
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