Hail Gluttony! O let me eat
Immensely at thy awful board,
On which to serve the stomach meet,
What art and nature can afford.
I'll furious cram, devoid of fear,
Let but the roast and boil'd appear;
Let me but see a smoking dish,
I care not whether fowl or fish;
Then rush ye floods of ale adown my throat,
And in my belly make the victuals float!

II.

And yet why trust a greasy cook?
Or give to meat the time of play?
While ev'ry trout gulps down a hook,
And poor dumb beasts harsh butchers slay?
Why seek the dull, sauce-smelling gloom,
Of the beef-haunted dining room;
Where D——r gives to every guest
With lib'ral hand whate'er is best;
While you in vain th' insurance must invoke
To give security you shall not choke?

LETTER IX.

New-Tarbat, Dec. 3, 1761.

Dear Boswell,

Ev'n now intent upon thy Ode,
I plunge my knife into the beef,
Which, when a cow—as is the mode—
Was lifted by a Highland thief.
Ah! spare him, spare him, circuit Lords!
Ah hang him not in hempen cords;
Ah save him in his morn of youth
From the damp-breathing, dark[23] tolbooth,
Lest when condemn'd and hung in clanking chains,
His body moulder down white-bleached with winter rains!

But let not me intermeddle with your province; to parody the ode to midnight, could only be thought of and executed by the mirth-moving, humour-hunting, raillery-raising James Boswell. You must send me the rest of your Gluttony by the return of the post, even though it should prove the night of the Beard-soaping Club. Did you ever suspect me of believing your marriage? No, I always said from the beginning, there was nothing in it; I can bring twenty witnesses to prove it, who shall be nameless; indeed if you had been married, I don't know but the same gentlemen might have been prevailed upon to vouch for me that I frequently declared my firm persuasion of it; these kind of witnesses have multiplied greatly of late years, to the eternal credit of many a person's surprising sagacity; but if you want to see this subject pursued and treated with accuracy, peruse Doctor Woodward's Treatise of Fossils, particularly his remarks upon the touchstone.

I am glad to hear you are returned to town, and once more near that seat of learning and genius Mr. Alexander Donaldson's shop. You tell me you are promoted to be his corrector of the press; I wish you also had the office of correcting his children, which they very much want; the eldest son, when I was there, never failed to play at taw all the time, and my queue used frequently to be pulled about; you know, upon account of its length it is very liable to these sort of attacks; I am thinking to cut it off, for I never yet met with a child that could keep his hands from it: and here I can't forbear telling you, that if ever you marry and have children, our acquaintance ceases from that moment, unless you breed them up after the manner of the great Scriblerus, and unless they be suckled with soft verse, and weaned with criticism.