them up for the entertainment of his friends, and improvement of the wit of the family. Whatsoever he is else, he is sure to be a squire, and bears arms the first day he bears office; and has a more indubitate and apparent title to worship, than any other person. If he be of the long robe, he is more busy and pragmatical on the bench than a secular justice; and, at the sessions, by his prerogative, gives the charge, which puts him to the expense of three Latin sentences, and as many texts of Scripture; the rest is all of course. He sells good behaviour; and makes those that never had any buy it of him at so much a dose, which they are bound to take off in six months, or longer, as their occasions require. He is apt to mistake the sense of the law, as when he sent a zealous botcher to prison for sewing sedition, and committed a mountebank for raising the market, because he set up his bank in it. BUTLER'S CHARACTER OF AN ALDERMAN. never meets about matters of importance, but the cramming his inside is the most weighty part of th work of the day. He despatches no public affai until he has thoroughly dined upon it, and is fully satisfied with quince-pye and custard: for men ar wiser, the Italians say, after their bellies are full than when they are fasting; and be is very cautious to omit no occasion of improving his parts tha way. He is so careful of the interest of his belly and manages it so industriously, that in a little spac it grows great, and takes place of all the rest o his members, and becomes so powerful, that the will never be in a condition to rebel against it an more. He is cloathed in scarlet, the livery of hi sins, like the rich glutton, to put him in mind of wha means he came to his wealth and preferment by. H makes a trade of his eating; and, like a cock, scrape when he feeds; for the public pays for all, and more which he and his brethren share among themselves An alderman has taken his degree in cheating, and the comes to be lord-mayor, he does not keep a grea for they never make a dry reckoning. When h highest of his faculty; or paid for refusing his man-house, but a very great house-warming for a whol damus. He is a peer of the city, and a member of year; for though he invites all the companies in th their upper house; who, as soon as he arrives at so city, he does not treat them, but they club to enter many thousand pounds, is bound by the charter to tain him, and pay the reckoning beforehand. Hi serve the public with so much understanding, what fur-gown makes him look a great deal bigger than h shift soever he make to raise it, and wear a chain is, like the feathers of an owl; and when he pulls i about his neck like a rein-deer, or in default to com-off, he looks as if he were fallen away, or like i mute, and make satisfaction in ready-money, the best rabbit, had his skin pulled off. reason of the place; for which he has the name only, like a titular prince, and is an Alderman-extraordinary. But if his wife can prevail with him to stand, he becomes one of the city supporters; and like the unicorn in the king's arms, wears a chain about his neck very right-worshipfully. He wears scarlet, as the whore of Babylon does; not for her honesty, but the rank and quality she is of among the wicked. When he sits as a judge in his court, he is absolute, and uses arbitrary power; for he is not bound to understand what he does, nor render an account why he gives judgment on one side rather than another; but his will is sufficient to stand for his reason, to all intents and purposes. He does no public business without eating and drinking; and BUTLER'S CHARACTER OF A CHURCH WARDEN. A church-warden is a public officer intrusted to rob the church by virtue of his place, as long as he is in it He has a great care to eat and drink well upon all public occasions that concern the parish: for a good conscience being a perpetual feast, he believes, the better he feeds, the more conscience he uses in the discharge of his trust; and as long as there is no dry-money-cheat used, all others are allowed according to the tradition and practice of the church in the purest times. When he lays a tax upon the parish, he commonly raises it a fourth part above the accompt, to supply the default of houses that may be burnt, or stand empty; or men that may break and run away and if none of these happen, his fortune is the greater, and his hazard never the less; and therefore he divides the overplus between himself and his colleagues, who were engaged to pay the whole, if all the parish had run away, or hanged themselves. He over-reckons the parish in his accompts, as the taverns do him, and keeps the odd money himself, instead of giving it to the drawers. He eats up the bell-ropes like the ass in the emblem, and converts the broken glass windows into whole beer-glasses of sack; and before his year is out, if be be but as good a fellow as the drinking bishop was, pledges a whole pulpit-full. If the church happens to fall to decay in his time, it proves a deodand to him; for he is lord of the manor, and does not only make what he pleases of it, but has his Bare recorded on the walls among texts of Scripture and leathern buckets, with the year of his office, that the memory of the unjust, as well as the just, may last as long as so transitory a thing may. He interprets his oath, as Catholics do the Scripture, not according to the sense and meaning of the words, but the tradition and practice of his predecessors; who have always been observed to swear what others please, and do what they please themselves. BUTLER'S CHARACTER OF A HERALD. A herald calls himself a king because he has authority to hang, draw, and quarter arms; for assuming a jurisdiction over the distributive justice of titles of honour, as far as words extend, he gives himself as great a latitude that way, as other magistrates used to do, where they have authority, and would enlarge it as far as they can. It is true, he can make no lords nor knights of himself, but as many squires and gentlemen as he pleases, and adopt them into what family they have a mind. His dominions abound with all sorts of cattle, fish, and fowl, and all manner of manufactures, besides whole fields of gold and silver, which he magnificently bestows upon his followers or sells as cheap as lands in Jamaica. The language they use is barbarous, as being but a dialect of pedlar's French, or the Egyptian, though of a loftier sound, and in the propriety affecting brevity, as the other does verbosity. His business is like that of all the schools, to make plain things hard with perplexed methods and insignificant terms, and ther appear learned in making them plain again. He professes arms, not for use, but ornament only; and yet makes the basest things in the world weapons of worshipful bearings. He is wiser than the fellow that sold his ass, but kept the shadow for his own use; for he sells only the shadow, (that is the picture) and keeps the ass himself. He makes pedigrees as apothecaries do medicines, when they put in one ingredient for another that they have not by them: by this means he often makes incestuous matches, and causes the son to marry the mother. His chief province is at funerals, where he commands in chief, marshals the tristitiæ irritamenta; and like a gentleman-sewer to the worms, serves up the feast with all punctual formality. He is a kind of a necromancer; and can raise the dead out of their graves, to make them marry and beget those they never heard of in their life-time. His coat is like the king of Spain's dominions, all skirts, and hangs as loose about him; and his neck is the waist, like the picture of Nobody with his breeches fastened to his collar. He will sell the head or the single joint of a beast or fowl as dear as the whole body, like a pig's head in BartholomewFair, and after put off the rest to his customers at the same rate. His arms being utterly out of use in war, since guns came up, have been translated to dishes and cups, as the ancients used their precious stones, according to the poet-Gemmas ad pocula transfert a gladiis, &c.—and since are like to decay every day more and more; for since he gave citizens coats of arms, gentlemen have made bold to take their letters of mark by way of reprisal. The hangman has a receipt to mar all his work in a moment; for by nailing the wrong end of a scutcheon upwards upon a gibbet, all the honour and gentility extinguishes of itself, like a candle that is held with the Other arms are made for the flame downwards. spilling of blood; but h's only purify and cleanse it, like scurvy-grass; for a small dose taken by his prescription will refine that which is as base and gross as bull's blood, (which the Athenians used to poison withal) to any degree of purity. BUTLER'S CHARACTER OF A PHILOSOPHER. muse is short-winded, and quickly out of breath. She A philosopher seats himself as spectator and critic on flies like a goose, that is no sooner upon the wing the theatre of the world, and gives sentence on the but down again. He was originally one of those plots, language, and action of whatsoever he sees re-authors that used to write upon white walls, from whence his works being collected and put together, presented, according to his own fancy. He will pretend to know what is done behind the scene; but so pass in the world, like single money among those who seldom is in the right, that he discovers nothing more that is nothing while it is in, and nothing again as deal in small matters. His wit is like fire in a flint, than his own mistakes. When his profession was in credit in the world, and money was to be gotten by it, soon as it is out. it divided itself into multitudes of sects, that main He is a kind of vagabond writer, that is never out tained themselves and their opinions by fierce and of his way, for nothing is beside the purpose with hot contests with one another; but since the trade him, that proposes none at all. His works are like a decayed and would not turn to account, they all fell running banquet, that have much variety but little of themselves; and now the world is so unconcerned of a sort; for he deals in nothing but scraps and in their controversies, that three reformado sects parcels, like a tailor's broker. joined in one, like Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, BUTLER'S CHARACTER OF A JEALOUS MAN. will not serve to maintain one pedant. He makes his A jealous man is unsettled in his mind, and full of hypotheses himself, as a taylor does a doublet, withdoubts, whether he should take his wife for better, or out measure; no matter whether they fit nature, he for worse. He knows not what to make of himself, but can make nature fit them, and, whether they are too fears his wife does, and that she made him and his strait or wide, pinch or stuff out the body accordingly. heir at a heat: his horns grow inward, and are very He judges of the works of nature just as the rabble do of state-affairs: they see things done, and every in watching opportunities to catch himself cuckold in uneasy and painful to his brain. He breaks his sleep man according to his capacity guesses at the reasons the manner. He fancies himself regenerate in the of them, but knowing nothing of the arcana or secret body of his wife, and desires nothing more than, with movements of either, they seldom or never are in the Cardan and Gusman, to know all the particulars and right; however they please themselves, and some circumstances of his own begetting. He beats his others, with their fancies, and the farther they are off truth, the more confident they are they are near it; as those that are out of their way believe, the further they have gone, they are the nearer their journey's end when they are furthest of all from it. Heretofore his beard was the badge of his profession, and the length of that in all his polemics was ever accounted the length of his weapon; but when trade fell, that fell too. In Lucius's time they were commonly called beard-wearers; for all the strength of their wits lay in their beards, as Sampson's did in his locks: but since the world began to see the vanity of that hairbrained cheat, they left it off, to save their credit. brains perpetually to try the hardness of his head, and find out how the callus improves from time to time. He breeds horns as children do teeth, with much pain and unquietness; and (as some husbands are his wife breeds. Her pleasures become his pains, said to be) is sick at the stomach and pukes when and, by an odd kind of sympathy, break out on his forehead, like a tobacco-pipe, that being knocked at one end breaks at the other. WHOLESALE PRACTICE. A physician to a metropolitan hospital, a few years ago, being in haste to leave his public for his private duties, was asked by the house-surgeon, what he should do with the right and left wards-"O," exAn epigrammatist is a poet of small wares, whose claimed the other, "what did you do with them yester BUTLER'S CHARACTER OF AN EPIGRAMMATIST. "I day?""By your directions," said the surgeon, LACONICS. We have just enough religion to make us hate, but How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as take warning? I forget whether advice be among the last things which Ariosto says are to be found in the moon; that ad time ought to have been there. What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly-that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage. When a man observes the choice of ladies now-adays in the dispensing of their favours, can he forbear paying some veneration to the memory of those mares mentioned by Xenophon; who, while their manes were on, (that is, while they were in their beauty,) would never admit the embraces of an ass. It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of a spider. The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes. Physicians ought not to give their judgment of reReligion seems to have grown an infant with age, ligion, for the same reason that butchers are not adand requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its in-mitted to be jurors upon life and death. Ali fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of The next year's revenue. One argument to prove that the common relations #ghosts and spectres are generally false, may be drawn from the opinion held, that spirits are never seen by more than one person at a time; that is to ay, it seldom happens to above one person in a company to be possessed with any high degree of spleen melancholy. The reason why so few marriages are happy, is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages. If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches. Ill company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best. Satire is reckoned the easiest of all wit; but I take it to be otherwise in very bad times for it is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to I am apt to think, that in the day of judgment praise well a man of distinguished virtues. It is easy there will be small allowance given to the wise for enough to do either to people of moderate characters. heir want of morals, and to the ignorant for their When the world has once begun to use us ill, it want of faith, because both are without excuse. This afterwards continues the same treatment with less Tenders the advantages equal of ignorance and know-scruple or ceremony, as men do to a woman of pleasure. lege. But some scruples in the wise, and some vetes in the ignorant, will perhaps be forgiven upon the strength of temptation to each. It is pleasant to observe how free the present age 3 in laying taxes on the next: "Future ages shall talk of this; this shall be famous to all posterity:" shereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now. Herodotus tells us, that in cold countries beasts very seldom have horns, but in hot they have very large ones. This might bear a pleasant application. Anthony Henly's farmer, dying of an asthma, said, "Well, if I can get this breath once out, I will take care it shall never get in again." Complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives, and the sincerest part of our devotion. The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter, and a scarcity of words; for whoever is a master of language, and has a mind full of ideas, will be apt in speaking to hesitate upon the choice of both; whereas common speakers have only one set of ideas, and one PREDILECTIONS IN DRINKING. set of words to clothe them in; and these are always ready at the mouth; as people come faster out of a church when it is almost empty, than when a crowd is at the door. If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time. Kings are commonly said to have long hands; I wish they had as long ears. Princes, in their infancy, childhood, and youth, are said to discover prodigious parts and wit, to speak things that surprise and astonish; strange, so many hopeful princes, so many shameful kings! If they happen to die young, they would have been prodigies of wisdom and virtue; if they live, they are often prodigies, indeed, but of another sort. Silenus, the foster-father of Bacchus, is always carried by an ass, and has horns on his head. The moral is, that drunkards are led by fools, and have a great chance to be cuckolds. Those who are against religion, must needs be fools; and therefore we read that, of all animals, God refused the first-born of an ass. A very little wit is valued in a woman, as we are pleased with a few words spoken plain by a parrct. A nice man is a man of nasty ideas. Apollo was held the god of physic, and sender of diseases. Both were originally the same trade, and still continue. Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason; their long beards, and pretences to foretell events. Let musty old anchorites banish good wines, When he toasts the bright glance of his mistress's eyes, And his sorrows drown deep in Champagne. But variety even in drinking we court, And mankind still to differ consent; Here's Spruce for the dandies, those fanciful elves, Here's Madeira for each pretty lass! The player will Punch for his favourite greet Then let each fill his glass, till exhausted 's our store, SPECIAL JURIES. A gentleman of Islington was for the first time summoned, a few years ago, on a special jury in the Exchequer. He arrived too late, and found the jury A person was asked at court, what he thought of impanneled. Alarmed at his delinquency, and expect an ambassador and his train, who were all em-ing to be heavily fined, he took advice, and was rebroidery and lace, full of bows, cringes, and gestures; he said, it was Solomon's importation, gold and ferred to the solicitor of the Excise, who, happening to be much engaged, told him in a sharp way to come again to-morrow. On the morrow he went again and began his humble suit.-"So then you were not on the jury?"-"No," replied the trembling juro, expecting his sentence to follow the confession. "Well" said the other, "do betier another time, but take it," and he threw him a guinea. The juror stared, and was beginning some observations,when the solicitor |