It was just after this event that Uncle Jack, sanguine and light-hearted
as ever, suddenly recollected his sister, Mrs. Caxton, and not knowing
where else to dine, thought he would repose his limbs under my father's
trabes citrea, which the ingenious W. S. Landor opines should be
translated "mahogany." You never saw a more charming man than Uncle
Jack.

All plump people are more popular than thin people. There is something
jovial and pleasant in the sight of a round face! What conspiracy could
succeed when its head was a lean and hungry-looking fellow, like
Cassius? If the Roman patriots had had Uncle Jack amongst them, perhaps
they would never have furnished a tragedy to Shakspeare. Uncle Jack was
as plump as a partridge,--not unwieldy, not corpulent, not obese, not
vastus, which Cicero objects to in an orator, but every crevice
comfortably filled up. Like the ocean, "time wrote no wrinkles on his
glassy [or brassy] brow." His natural lines were all upward curves, his
smile most ingratiating, his eye so frank, even his trick of rubbing his
clean, well-feel, English-looking hands, had something about it coaxing
and debonnaire, something that actually decoyed you into trusting your
money into hands so prepossessing. Indeed, to him might be fully
applied the expression--Sedem animce in extremis digitis habet,--"He had
his soul's seat in his finger-ends." The critics observe that few men
have ever united in equal perfection the imaginative with the scientific
faculties. "Happy he," exclaims Schiller, "who combines the
enthusiast's warmth with the worldly man's light:" light and warmth,
Uncle Jack had them both. He was a perfect symphony of bewitching
enthusiasm and convincing calculation. Dicaeopolis in the
"Aeharnenses," in presenting a gentleman called Nicharchus to the
audience, observes: "He is small, I confess, but, there is nothing lost