“Another acquaintance was Mr. York. He had his soft minutes as well as other men; and when he unbent his bow, (for he was very industrious,) he treated the fair sex with so much courtship and address, as if loving had been all his trade.
“I pass to my good friend Dr. Bullivant—both a gentleman and a physician. As a gentleman, he came of noble family, but his good qualities exceed his birth. He never practises new experiments on his patients, except in dangerous cases, where death must be expelled by death. This is also praiseworthy in him, that to the poor he always prescribes cheap medicines; not curing them of a consumption in their bodies and sending it into their purses, nor yet directing them to the East Indies for drugs, when they may have better out of their own gardens.
“I proceed in the next place to Mr. Gouge, a linen-draper from London. He is owner of a deal of wit; his brain is a quiver of smart jests. He pretends to live a bachelor, but is no enemy to a pretty woman.”
Dunton winds up his list with an apostrophe to Mrs. Comfort, the married daughter of his landlady. “You may well take it amiss,” he says, “if I should forget your favours to me in your father’s house, your pleasant company to Ipswich, your assistance when I was ill, and the noble looking-glass you sent my dear, and all with a world of innocence.”
“Kind Boston, adieu! part we must, though ’tis pity,
But I’m made for mankind: the world is my city.
Look how on the shore they whoop and they holloa,
Not for joy I am gone, but for grief they can’t follow.”
