three hundred and fifty pounds (twenty-five
stones), thereby beating Mrs. Harris by several
chalks. Five ordinary men could be buttoned
at one time within his waistcoat. He came to
London to see the famous Daniel Lambert.
The two men looked at each other.
Lambert was vastly the superior of Palmer in bulk;
but the latter puffed so much through his
fatness that Lambert pitied him, as a man to
whom life must have been a burden. Palmer
went home much mortified; his claim to
notoriety was suddenly eclipsed by a rival, and
his vexation hastened his death. A part of
his inn, the Golden Lion, had to be taken down
to allow room for his coffin to be removed;
and as there was no hearse large enough or
strong enough to carry it, the coffin was
conveyed to the grave in a timber-waggon.
Ryland, the engraver, who ended his days in
a shameful way towards the close of the last
century, had an apprentice named John Love.
Love left London after his master's death, and
settled at his native place in Dorsetshire. He
was so exceedingly thin and meagre that a
physician advised him to eat liberally. The
advice was so well taken, that Love became a
gormandiser; the food turned to fat instead of
to muscle and sinew; and his fatness killed him
at the age of forty, when he weighed three
hundred and sixty-four pounds (about twenty-six
stones). Growing bulkier and bulkier in our
examples, the next on our brief list is Mrs.
Dorothy Collier, who died about a century ago,
and who was (as the local prints assert)
"supposed to be the largest woman in the north of
England." It is to be hoped so, seeing that Mrs.
Collier weighed four hundred and twenty pounds
(thirty stones, or seven stones heavier than Mrs.
Harris). Her coffin was forty inches wide, and
thirty deep. This worthy lady was, however,
beaten by Frederica Ahrens, a young German
woman, who was living at Paris in 1819. She
weighed thirteen pounds when born, forty-two at
six months old, a hundred and fifty at four years,
and by the age of twenty had attained a weight of
four hundred and fifty pounds (thirty-two stones).
She measured sixty-five inches round the body,
and eighteen inches round the arm. Altogether,
Frederica must have been a formidable young
person to deal with, for she could lift two
hundred and fifty pounds weight with each
hand. Mr. Benjamin Bower, a native of Holt,
in Dorsetshire, attained a weight of four
hundred and seventy pounds (nearly thirty-four
stones) at the time of his death, in 1763. He
was active enough to travel from Holt to
London by stage-coach a few days before he
died. As in the cases of Mr. Baker and Mr.
Palmer, a part of the house had to be removed
to afford egress for the coffin containing the
massive remains of Mr. Bower. Günz, the
German writer, mentions the case of a young
woman who weighed four hundred and ninety-
two pounds (thirty-five stones); but of this
prodigy of womanhood we have no further
information. In 1774, there died at Cowthorpe,
in Lincolnshire, one Mr. Pell, who weighed five
hundred and sixty pounds (about forty stones).
Whether he had expressed any wish to have his
mightiness particularly taken care of does not
appear; but he was enclosed in three coffins, the
united weight of which, with himself, exceeded
three thousand pounds (nearly a ton and a
half). Mr. Bright, of Essex, was a person of great
notoriety in the early days of the reign of George
the Third. He was a grocer at Maldon, and
belonged to a family noted for their personal
bulkiness. He was a jolly fellow, who did not
allow either fatness or anything else to
interfere with his good humour; and his
biographer gives him the character of being "a
cheerful companion, a kind husband, a tender
father, a good master, a friendly neighbour,
and an honest man:" insomuch that fat people
would be glad to accept him as their
representative man. Nevertheless, he had a
sensible and reasonable foreboding that the later
years of a man of his enormous bulk, if his life
were prolonged, would bring more pain than
pleasure with them; and a few days before his
death at the early age of thirty, he expressed
a willingness to die. His weight was six
hundred and sixteen pounds (forty-four stones).
Seven men were, on one particular occasion,
buttoned up within his waistcoat. When his
career was ended, and his body was encased
in its monster coffin, not only walls, but
staircases, had to be cut through before it could
be got out; twelve men drew the low
carriage on which the coffin was placed; and "an
engine was fixed up on the church," as the
local chroniclers narrate, to lower the coffin
into the grave. There was an Irishman, Roger
Byrne, who died in 1804, whose bulk was so
great that his admirers claimed for him the
merit of being "several stones heavier than the
celebrated Mr. Bright of Essex." It required
thirty men to carry to the grave the bier on
which his body was laid. Mr. Spooner, a
Tamworth man, who was living in 1775, attained a
weight of nearly forty-nine stones (six hundred
and eighty pounds). He had long been too
heavy to walk, his legs being unable to bear
him. He measured four feet three inches across
the shoulders. It is recorded of him that "his
fatness once saved his life; for, being at
Atherstone market, and some difference arising
between him and a Jew, the Jew stabbed him in
the belly with a penknife; but the blade, being
short, did not pierce his bowels, or even pass
through the fat which defended them."

Walk up, Daniel Lambert, king of fat men!
In 1803, Lambert was keeper of the old county
bridewell at Leicester. He had, at that time,
an invincible repugnance to have his weight
ascertained, being annoyed at the comments
made upon him as a mountain of adipose
substance; but some of his acquaintances,
determined to settle the matter, contrived one day to
have a vehicle in which he was riding drawn
over a road weighing-machine. We have no
record at hand of his weight at that time; but
changes having been made in the prison arrangements
at Leicester, Lambert consented to come