rity will not be slow to cancel. But what shall we say to those pestilential sufferers, who unite all sorts of contrarieties and extremes, in an assemblage the most offensive and unnatural; who believe whatever you tell them, not according to the weight of evidence, but according to the complexion of the fact; wildly credulous of impossible mischief; curious in their distrust of authenticated good; anticipating, fabricating, circulating, distorting, confounding, suppressing events, and arguments, and wonders, without the shadow of reference to reason or to truth-to any principle, but that which is the reverse of honesty; to any sentiment but one, whose existence the patriot revolts from believing? If with all this you mingle a boisterous uproar for the word called Freedom, and a concurrent esteem and admiration of the Despot, who, in every other country of the universe, has murdered her essence, detruncating her images, scattering her emblems, blotting out her name from the books of language, and eradicating almost her first seeds and conceptions from the very nature and the soul of man: add this to the other characters of that disease which I have laboured to unfold to you, and no longer will you doubt that they present a combination, not to be analyzed by the ordinary rules of science, nor to be classed, by affinities as yet discovered, near any determinate tribe-monsters of the political and moral world, of whom we understand no more, than that we need not fear them!"

On discussing this matter further with my friend, he was of opinion that the last class of unfortunates owed their aliment" to certain impurities of the blood, originally generated by a French diet, and inflamed by the use of pernicious, but home-made liquors.' I hinted at the substitution of English for a foreign regimen

"Ah, my worthy neighbour," he replied, "their

stomachs

TRICKS OF NEWSMEN.

21

stomachs are too habitually depraved to be now reconciled to simple English aliment. Something, indeed, may still be done, by laying aside those mischievous liquors in which they have so long indulged. Porter, you and I know very well, used to be neat and drink to three-fourths of the people. But this once salutary beverage has quite degenerated, being either absolutely vapid, or so impregnated with poisonous drugs, as to be utterly destructive of the constitution. Good mild Ale is the substitute I would recommend; for almost every family might brew for themselves, and thus we should save vast sums of money, which certain great porter-brewers are glad enough to empty into their own wide pockets. But I would have nothing whatever to do with that dangerous drench called Perry; it is sure to get into the head, and invariably sours on the stomach. Genuine wine from Portugal is no comparison better."

As I had often seen the village apothecary make pills of paper and similar articles, I asked the ingenious Dr. Solid, whether a Gazette containing some satisfactory news might not be torn up, rolled into pills, and offered now and then to these poor devils, when their disease appeared most obstinate?—“Ay,” said he," and with decisive effect, if you could only prevail on them to get it down-but that will never do;-no, my dear Harry, your good-natured experiment would never answer; why, a Gazetto-phobia is part of the distemper-an attempt to swallow it might bring on convulsions; if indeed the pills were gilt- added the Physician, smiling sarcastically; "but that, at the present price of bullion, would cost more than the value of a hundred such patients." I wish, Mr. Editor, the Doctor had stayed a minute. longer to explain what he meant by "gilding the pill ;" for I am sure, by his smile, he had something comical in view-but he was that moment called away to an

old bed-ridden Parson close by, who is greatly plagued, as it would seem, by a Constitution, at which he diverts his spleen with perpetually railing, because he has grown too feeble to take any further liberties with it.

On Dr. Solid's departure, I sat down to give you the substance of what he said, before it should slip my memory. By the by, on reading the letter in The Morning Chronicle" about chess-playing," he appeared half inclined to make some observations on that game, which perhaps he may favour me with on a future occasion.

I am, Sir, your humble servant, and (except when this cursed Newsman plays me a trick) your constant reader,

W-bledon, Aug. 13, 1810.

HENRY HOPEFUL.

AN ARGUMENT FOR THE MODERN UNDRESS.

[From the Morning Herald, Aug. 18.]

UR Mother Eve, while free from vice,

OUR

Was free from dress, and knew no harm in't;

But when she sinn'd in Paradise,

"T was then she first put on a garment.

That vice and dress each maid abhors,
No man of sense can think so odd is,
Since sinning plainly was the cause

Of wearing clothes upon their bodies.

Now Ladies argue to the letter,

And thus excuse their want of dress;
They prove unblemish'd virtue better,

Who show uncover'd nakedness!

E. P.

THE

THE TEARS OF MARGATE; OR, DECORUM IN THE SUDS.

[From the same.]

BELLA, horrida bella!-The spirit of revolution and usurpation is at work at Margate; and King Le Bas, like the Grand Turk, is now tottering on his throne ! But hear the dreadful tidings, O reader!

One account says, that on the last Assembly night, when the widow Slyboots, from Crooked Lane, was calling to the band to play "The Devil among the Tailors," the monarch of the dance waved his necromantic wand of office, and the band ceased as suddenly as if Death had given the word of command. The waiter was ordered to put out the lights, as the prescribed hour of separation had arrived; when some officers (mirabile dictu!) broke the long extinguisher in two, and threw it into Cecil Square!

"There was a situation!"

"Why do you open that window?" questioned the M. C. strutting up to the offender like the King of Bantam To throw out a dirty stocking," rejoined the insurgents and the principal was in the act of seizing the little arbiter of elegance, when Terpsichore interfered, in the shape of the Spirit of Loyalty, and, by placing a slice of lemon under the lett foot of the aggressor, he, luckily, stumbled, which gave the alarmed Monarch a happy opportunity to escape, which he incontinently did (a la sourdine) by strides, which his abridged anatomy was heretofore deemed unequal to. Thus the innovators remained masters of the field, while that demon Democracy hovered round the roof in ecstacy, flapping her sooty wings at this signal overthrow of royalty and right!

The M. C. was fortunately discovered the ensuing morning by one of the waiters, who "nosed him

"

going to the lobby." He had dexterously taken refuge in the china-closet, and was found squatting, à la Turque, at the bottom of a punch-bowl, but without his regalia, and shorn of his beams-ah! how unlike his great self!

ANOTHER ACCOUNT.

Miss Debby Waddle, of Leather Lane, declared at the hoy fair, that the Sieur Le Bas remonstrated with a field-officer for dancing with spurs, contrary to his mandates, when the indignant son of Mars, taking his fair partner with one hand, and seizing the M. C. by the waistband of his inexpressibles with the other, rammed him into his coat-pocket, and actually finished the dance with this king of forms, thus incarcerated, who peeped and disappeared alternately, like the jacks of a harpsichord, when Dussek is running the allegro divisions of a sonata; calling lustily, but in vain, upon his merry subscribers for mercy, and a habeas corpus!

ANOTHER ACCOUNT.

Some say, that when he was dragged from the abyss of the punch-bowl, exhausted with lachrymal floods, and the pangs of a diseased soul, he was fanned into returning energy by Mr. Kidman's cook: when he first looked round him in wild dismay, like Ajax minor when he awoke in Tartarus, he ejaculated one emphatic exclamation, and no more, viz.

"All hell shall stir for this."

Three several committees of fashion have sate, successively, in Divan, upon this lamented event, in order to adjust the differences between the aggrieving and the aggrieved; but, ere they could come to a conclusion, the iron toe of pecuniary necessity hath kicked a majority on board of some friendly Hoy, whose sails were unbending for the classical and renowned port of Billingsgate. Thus the affair stands at present, for rest it cannot.

We