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due encouragement. To duelists and such as venture their necks in battle, they will be an effectual armour as far as they go-not to mention the terror they may happen to strike into an enemy unaccustomed to these phænomena. As fools are had in great honour in certain countries, and as, in the country of Monstrous Craws, idiotism for the most part goes together with this attribute, our young English travellers may profit mightily by this fashion in their progress over the Continent, provided they do nothing more to forfeit this idiotic pre-eminence than they have hitherto done in their customary tours."

It is impossible I should comment upon half the absurdities which have either scandalised or diverted me during my stay in the metropolis. I have made minutes, however, of every thing that has attracted my observation, to furnish out the matter of a future paper. What has given me as much trouble as any thing, has been the multitude of little improvements in the most diminutive articles of ordinary use, with which life of late is become ponderous. A pair of snuffers is as complicated as a cotton mill; and a man must have a knowledge of mechanics to put on his buckles. Among them all, I cannot find one that, as Pythagoras said of Euclid's 47 th proposition, deserves a hecatomb. For my own part, I would willingly consign to oblivion the greatest part of these holiday, inventions, to recover some of those useful discoveries which have been swallowed up by the avidity of time; and would willingly see exchanged Mr. Merlin's chairs for Archimedes's machines; and our newlyinvented liquid shining blacking for shoes, for the Egyptian secret of staining marble. Every thing you touch now-a-days, is endued with a kind of mechanical life; and if I venture to handle a piece of

NÓ 54. furniture at a friend's house, 'tis ten to one but that, in a moment or two, there flies out a spring, by which I receive a violent rap on the forehead-and this passes for a great convenience. It is in vain that I endeavour to reinstate the thing in the posture in which I found it; it mocks all my ingenuity, and I am forced to call in the master of the house to my assistance. The other day, in visiting an acquaintance, I was obliged to ring the bell to inquire how to knock at his door; and after my admittance, the whole evening was passed in a succession of trick and surprise, insomuch that I could not have been in greater alarm if I had been trespassing among steel traps and spring guns. The chairs and tables, the knives and forks, the skreens and the fire things, seemed all bewitched, and I scarcely touched an article without sincere repentance.

The diversions were of the same cast: curious packs of cards, puzzling fans, and magic lanterns, made out the whole amusement of the evening; and I found my old friends converted into conjurors, much against the design of nature. I reckon it indeed a peculiar piece of good fortune, that I have been able to find a simple unsophisticated shagreen spectaclecase for my mother, who might puzzle herself for an hour to find a use for those conveniences which I have generally found annexed to it. There was a time when our contrivances used to be made for our wants; but now we begin at the other end, and must make wants for our contrivances.

Thursday night, 10 o'clock. The following proclamation has just this moment been brought to me by express from my mother's synod.

"Whereas it has been made known to our high

court of females, in council assembled, that the rage of public amusements is grown to such a height among our loving subjects, that the London ladies run away to them before they are entirely dressed; we do hereby order, that such females be subjected to the penalties of the vagrant act. As it is the nature of fashion to familiarise us gradually to the most frightful innovations, and to carry us step by step into the most indecorous habitudes, we shall shortly publish, with the stamp and seal of our authority, a scale of dress, adjusted to the thermometer, from the freezing point up to blood heat. We shall hereby provide, that in the sultriest weather the British ladies never uncover below a certain point, or let the Zephyr on any account imprint a kiss upon their bosoms; for we judge it not only perilous to our own sex, but unjust towards the other, to overheat the gentlemen in cooling ourselves. We have, moreover, taken into our most serious consideration the disorder and disorganization that has taken place in the different parts of our dress, which has of late years occasioned strange deficiencies and redundancies, in contradiction to, or in exaggeration of, nature's benign institutions. To restore the necessary equilibrium, we we shall take very summary measures to call up all the constituent parts of dress into their proper places, so that every lady may appear with the form that Nature has bestowed upon her, and not outrage her work by coarse attempts to correct it. We cannot but consider the sex, at present, to be in the condition of other bodies, whose equilibrium of electrical fire being destroyed, are ready for explosion as soon as they come into contact with a proper conductor. Thus their bosoms are charged with negative, and their waists with positive electricity-- a state as dangerous as can well be imagined to the tranquillity of

their minds and safety of their persons. We do therefore enact, by virtue of our sovereign authority, that all females in England, in our dominion of Wales, and town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, do implicitly and reverently comport themselves in strict observance of this our scale of dress, after the 6th day of May next. Given at our Court, the 21st day of April, 1793."

I cannot help thinking that my mother's apprehensions on my account, now that I am exposed to these surrounding temptations, have accelerated the publication of this wise proclamation.

No 55. SATURDAY, JUNE 1.

Τα ἡγεμονικα αυτων διαβλέπε, και τες φρόνιμες, δια μεν φεύγεσιν, δια δε διωκεσιν.

ANTONIN. PIUS.

Examine the constitution of their minds, and the nature of their pursuits, the grounds and objects of their disgusts and affections.

every

I HAVE been now three days in the capital; and hour's experience confirms me in the conviction, that I was not born to make any considerable figure within the bills of mortality. It is not that my coat is so out of the fashion, though I confess that even there I am not in all the severity of the mode; but there is a certain incorrigible indocility in the turn of my mind, which

makes it slow in adopting what has nothing to recommend it but change, and dull in comprehending the value of inconvenience, and the wisdom of incumbrance. I carry about with me a formal cast of thinking, which fastens upon a set of principles, that refuse to be disciplined by the world, or modified by its customs. My pleasures too are still of a more unaccommodating nature, and will not be tutored into that line of enjoyment which fashion has prescribed to its votaries. Being thus, in a manner, abandoned to my own counsels, I am determined upon making the best of my bargain; and as I observe that it is among the secret maxims of every man's bosom, when he finds himself in an error, to invent a system to countenance and support it, rather than confess his fallibility; and that, when a philosopher is wrong, his way is not to seek to correct himself, but to prove himself right: so it shall be my business to fortify myself in my singularities of opinion, by building up a system around them.

Preparatory to a business of such magnitude, it will be necessary to remove all interruptions and impediments that may rise in my way from former systems, and to make, as other great philosophers do, a general clearance, to all of whom the old proverb may be very properly applied, "That new brooms sweep clean." I give notice, therefore, that I have it in contemplation to astonish the world with a new list of vulgar errors, or pseudodoxia epidemica; a short specimen of which 1 shall here subjoin:

A fine coat makes, proves, or discovers the gentleman; A red coat, the soldier;

A tight pair of breeches,
A snuff-box,

An eye-glass,

a fellow of ease;

a connoisseur;

a short-sighted man;

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