He is an old story, he says, and hates to show on these occasions.

But they tease him, and coax him, and can't do without him, and feel all over his poor weak head until they get their fingers on the fontanelle, (the Professor will tell you what this means,--he says the one at the top of the head always remains open in poets,) until, by gentle pressure on that soft pulsating spot, they stupefy him to the point of acquiescence.
There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one's garden and clutch up a handful of what grows there,--weeds and violets together,--not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them.

That's his idea of a post-prandial performance.

Look here, now.

These verses I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots just in that way, the other day .-- Beautiful entertainment,--names there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as familiarly as AND or THE; entertainers known wherever good poetry and fair title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted, modest, genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts of his countrymen, the British people, the songs of good cheer which the better days to come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will turn into the prose of common life.