The ’Squire has got spunk in him.
Second FELLOW.
I loves to hear him sing, bekeays he never gives us nothing that’s low . . .
Fourth FELLOW.
The genteel thing is the genteel thing at any time. If so be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.
Third FELLOW.
I like the maxum of it, Master Muggins. What, tho’ I am obligated to dance a bear, a man may be a gentleman for all that. May this be my poison if my bear ever dances but to the very genteelest of tunes. Water Parted,* or the minuet in Ariadne.’
* i.e. Arne’s Water Parted from the Sea,—the song of Arbaces in the opera of Artaxerxes 1762. The minuet in Ariadne was by Handel. It came at the end of the overture, and is said to have been the best thing in the opera.
[When Methodist preachers, etc.] Tony Lumpkin’s utterance accurately represents the view of this sect taken by some of his contemporaries. While moderate and just spectators of the Johnson type could recognize the sincerity of men, who, like Wesley, travelled ‘nine hundred miles in a month, and preached twelve times a week’ for no ostensibly adequate reward, there were others who saw in Methodism, and especially in the extravagancies of its camp followers, nothing but cant and duplicity. It was this which prompted on the stage Foote’s Minor (1760) and Bickerstaffe’s Hypocrite (1768); in art the Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism of Hogarth (1762); and in literature the New Bath Guide of Anstey (1766), the Spiritual Quixote of Graves, 1772, and the sarcasms of Sterne, Smollett and Walpole.
It is notable that the most generous contemporary portrait of these much satirised sectaries came from one of the originals of the Retaliation gallery. Scott highly praises the character of Ezekiel Daw in Cumberland’s Henry, 1795, adding, in his large impartial fashion, with reference to the general practice of representing Methodists either as idiots or hypocrites, ‘A very different feeling is due to many, perhaps to most, of this enthusiastic sect; nor is it rashly to be inferred, that he who makes religion the general object of his life, is for that sole reason to be held either a fool or an impostor.’ (Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Works, 1834, iii. 222.)