'I have known Suspirius, the screech-owl, fifty-eight years and four months, and have never passed an hour with him in which he has not made some attack upon my quiet. When we were first acquainted, his great topic was the misery of youth without riches; and whenever we walked out together, he solaced me with a long enumeration of pleasures, which, as they were beyond the reach of my fortune, were without the verge of my desires, and which I should never have considered as the objects of a wish, had not his unreasonable representations placed them in my sight.
'Suspirius has, in his time, intercepted fifteen authors on their way to the stage; persuaded nine-and-thirty merchants to retire from a prosperous trade for fear of bankruptcy; broke off a hundred and thirty matches by prognostications of unhappiness; and enabled the small-pox to kill nineteen ladies by perpetual alarms of the loss of beauty.
'Whenever my evil star brings us together he never fails to represent to me the folly of my pursuits, and informs me we are much older than when we began our acquaintance; that the infirmities of decrepitude are coming fast upon me; that whatever I now get I shall enjoy but a little time; that fame is to a man tottering on the edge of the grave of very little importance; and that the time is at hand when I ought to look for no other pleasures than a good dinner and an easy chair.'
The 'Rambler.'—Vol. I. No. 61.
Falsus honor juvat, et mendax infamia terret,
Quem, nisi mendosum et mendacem?—Hor.
False praise can charm, unreal shame control
Whom but a vicious or a sickly soul?—Francis.
Ruricola, who dwells in the country, is writing upon the airs which those, whose pursuits take them to London, assume on their return to their more homely associates; and he relates in particular the pretensions of one Frolic, who has endowed himself with importance upon the mysterious and self-conferred reputation of knowing town.
