Denn. S' Death, Sir, a Distemper! It is no Distemper, but a Noble Art. I have sat fourteen Hours a Day at it; and are you a Doctor, and don't know there's a Communication between the Legs and the Brain?
Doct. What made you sit so many Hours, Sir?
Denn. Cato, Sir.
Doct. Sir, I speak of your Distemper, what gave you this Tumour?
Denn. Cato, Cato, Cato.
[Page 204,] line 2. Envious Junos. Lucina, at Juno's bidding, sat cross-legged before Alcmena to prolong her travail. Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Enquiry into Vulgar Errors, Book V., speaks of the posture as "veneficious," and cites Juno's case.
[Page 204,] at the end. Well known that this last-named vegetable. This is the old joke about tailors "cabbaging," that is to say, stealing cloth. The term is thus explained in Phillips' History of Cultivated Vegetables:—
The word cabbage ... means the firm head or ball that is formed by the leaves turning close over each other.... From thence arose the cant word applied to tailors, who formerly worked at the private houses of their customers, where they were often accused of cabbaging: which means the rolling up of pieces of cloth instead of the list and shreds, which they claim as their due.
Lamb returned to this jest against tailors in his verses "Satan in Search of a Wife," in 1831.