N.B. An approved Method is adopted for keeping them clean without discommoding by Dust.
In some future day, when personal comfort again becomes one of the fine arts, one of the chief tests for a wranglership may be the making of mathematical breeches. If the age is very material, perhaps the approved method of cleaning them may stand in stead of classics, which are already going much out of fashion. Our next specimen comes from the Emerald Isle, and though short is well marked with both of the most prominent characteristics of the natives. It was given away and posted up in various parts of Dublin at the end of July 1781:—
This is to certify that I, Daniel O’Flannaghan, am not the Person that was tarred and feathered by the Liberty Mob, on Tuesday last; and I am ready to give 20 Guineas to any one that will lay me 50, that I am the other Man who goes by my Name.
Witness my Hand, this 30th July. Daniel O’Flannaghan.
A man who can afford to lay seventy guineas to thirty that he is himself, and nobody else, deserves credit for his boldness, if not for his ingenuity. Another bill from Ireland, of a few years later on, next claims our attention. It refers to a house to let in Coleraine, and is a specimen of quite another kind of Hibernian humour:—
To be Let
To an Oppidan, a Ruricolist, or a Cosmopolitan, and may be entered upon immediately.
The House in Stone Row, lately possessed by Capt. Siree. To avoid verbosity the proprietor with compendiosity will give a perfunctory description of the premises, in the compagination of which he has sedulously studied the convenience of the occupant—it is free from opacity, tenebrosity, fumidity, and injucundity, and no building can have greater pellucidity or translucency—in short, its diaphaneity even in the crepuscule makes it like a pharos, and without laud, for its agglutimation and amenity, it is a most delectable commorance; and whoever lives in it will find that the neighbours have none of the truculence, the immanity, the torvity, the spinosity, the putidness, the pugnacity, nor the fugacity observable in other parts of the town; their propinquity and consanguinity occasions jucundity and pudicity—from which, and the redolence of the place (even in the dog days) they are remarkable for longevity. For terms and particulars apply to James Hutchison, opposite the Market House.
Coleraine, 30th September, 1790.
We commend this to that rather numerous class of people who like words with plenty of sound, and regard sense as quite a secondary consideration. Dogberry would have been delighted with it, and the writer could have commanded his own price as a contributor to certain newspapers, or as a sporting tipster. We have already given our readers an advertising tombstone, which was a swindle, inasmuch as it was placed up to the memory of a person who never existed. We now give another, which is really what it pretends to be—an improvement of the opportunity to combine business, not with pleasure, but with mourning. It stood, we are told, in a burial-ground belonging to one of our old ivy-clad churches in the North, and was an elegantly-carved memorial stone, the inscription being:—
Sacred to the Memory
of
JOHN ROBERTS,
Stonemason and Tombcutter,
Who died on Saturday, October the 8th, 1800.
N.B.—The business carried on by the Widow at No. 1, Freshfield place.