One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other; the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited.

We may anticipate and insert an anecdote of one of her boys at the age of eleven.

This anecdote is doubtless apocryphal, although the oak table upon which the joint was supposed to have received its knighthood, might have been seen by any one who visited Friday-Hill House, a few years ago.

I had this anecdote from one of the sons of Mr. Reynolds, and have no doubt of its authenticity.

The Anecdote Gallery VOLTAIRE.

* THE ANECDOTE GALLERY.

He was about to leave, was, in fact, concluding his choicest anecdote of "Big Joe" Kestrilfor

" It was a favorite anecdote of the minister's, but I had never known him before to tell it to a lady on the occasion of his first call.

[550] On the subject of Lady Margaret Macdonald, it is impossible to omit an anecdote which does much honour to Frederick, Prince of Wales.

I may add in support of this explanation the following anecdote, related to me by one of the ablest commentators on Shakspeare, who knew much of Dr. Johnson: 'Now I have quitted the theatre, cries Garrick, I will sit down and read Shakspeare.'

In justice to him I would not omit an anecdote, which, though in some degree to my own disadvantage, exhibits in so strong a light the indulgence and good humour with which he could treat those excesses in his friends, of which he highly disapproved.

See Mrs. Piozzi's Synonymy, i. 323, for an anecdote of this walk.

And it is probably of her, too, that another anecdote is told:'We had been visiting at a lady's house, whom, as we returned, some of the company ridiculed for her ignorance:"She is not ignorant," said he, "I believe, of any thing she has been taught, or of any thing she is desirous to know; and I suppose if one wanted a little run tea, she might be a proper person enough to apply to.'"

123, for an anecdote of Lord Westcote.

" The doctor made no comment on the anecdote.

The following anecdote may serve in part to illustrate my meaning.

An interesting anecdote from Dr. Dewees.

I have been much amused, and not a little instructed, by the following anecdote on this point, from Dr. Dewees: We were speaking with a lady who had lost three or four children with "croup," who informed us she was convinced, from absolute experiment, that there was nothing like exposure to all kinds of weather to protect and harden the system.

Anecdote of Benjamin West.

Anecdote of a poor mother.

The young Duke of Chartres, the son of Égalité Orleans, and the future Louis Philippe, has related in his journal an anecdote which illustrates that subtle poison of distrust which undermines all legal authority, the moment that suspicion of political partiality in the judiciary enters the popular mind.

" Danton explained in the Convention that it was because of the deep distrust of the judiciary in the public mind, which this anecdote shows, that the September massacres occurred, and it was because all republicans knew that the state and the army were full of traitors like Dumouriez, whom the ordinary courts would not punish, that Danton brought forward his bill to organize a true political tribunal to deal with them summarily.

This singular transaction has appeared in all the public papers, but having had an opportunity of collecting the particulars through a channel of undoubted authority, I consider it an anecdote of too interesting a nature, as connected with the subject before me, not to insert it here.

Indeed, we question whether such a biography would be of any use whatever to the world; for the man who cannot, by studying his dramas in some tolerably accurate chronological order, and using as a running accompaniment and closet commentary those awe- inspiring sonnets of his, attain to some clear notion of what sort of life William Shakespeare must have led, would not see him much the clearer for many folios of anecdote.

In these poems and letters of Burns, we apprehend, is to be found a truer history than any anecdote can supply, of the things which happened to himself, and moreover of the most notable things which went on in Scotland between 1759 and 1796.