Page:Everybody's Book of English wit and humour (1880).djvu/52

 Those eyes that dart destructive rays, E'en let them sparkle to His praise; Thy breast, the seat of love and snow. Teach it His praise to pant and glow! Then heaven inspire thy yielding voice To one that's better worth thy choice. And if the rest my suit disdain, The thought shall never give me pain; But, that I tempt no greater curse, Heaven I'll adore I'm made no worse. Tom Sheridan was his father's own son. While at Cambridge,he was pronounced to be the cleverest fellow in the place—as in point of wit and fun he very probably was. His father once said to him, "Tom, you have genius enough to get a dinner every day in the week at the first tables in London—and that's something; but that's all, you can go no further."

They thoroughly understood each other. The son was equally complimentary to the father, as many oft-repeated anecdotes can testify. On one occasion Tom complained over the bottle to him that his pockets were empty.

"Try the highway!" was the father's answer.

"I have," said Tom, "but I made a bad hit; I stopped a caravan full of passengers, who assured me they had not a farthing, for they belonged to Drury-lane Theatre, and could not get a penny of their salary."

[Tom's father was lessee of the theatre at the time.]

Dr Parr and Lord Erskine are said to have been the vainest men of their times. At a dinner on one occasion, Dr Parr, in ecstasies with the conversational powers of Lord Erskine, called out to him, though his junior, "My lord, I mean to write your epitaph!"

"Dr Parr," replied the noble lawyer, "your promise is a temptation to commit suicide!"

In the later days of his life the Rev. Rowland Hill used to come to his chapel in a carriage. He got an anonymous letter rebuking him for this, because it was not the way his Heavenly Master