were applications made under every kind of pretext, letters being sent to him from all sorts of professors and tradesmen about town. One man offered him snuff for himself and friends for ever, if he would only mention the name and shop of the manufacturer. Another promised him a perpetual polish for his boots upon the same terms. He was solicited to mention every sort of exhibition, and to puff all the new quack medicines. The wines sent to him to taste, though alleged to be of the finest quality, nevertheless required “a bush,” which was to be hung out nightly at his “house of entertainment.” Patent filters, wigs and waistcoats, boots and boothooks, “ventilating hats” and “bosom friends,” all gifts, used to stock Mathews’s lumber-room. An advertising dentist one day presented himself, offering to find Mathews’s whole family in new teeth, and draw all the old, if the comedian would only in return draw the new patent mineral masticators into notice. In fact, Mathews was so inundated with presents, that his cottage sometimes looked like a bazaar, and his wife had frequently occasion to exercise her ingenuity in contriving how to dispose of the generally useless articles forced upon their acceptance.
Though this was a great