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If you meet with a pleasant fellow in a stage-coach, dine and get drunk with him, and, still holding him to be a pleasant fellow, hear from his own lips at parting that he is a Whig—do not change your opinion of the man. Depend on it, he is quizzing you.
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The safety of women consists in one circumstance—men do not possess at the same time the knowledge of thirty-five and the blood of seventeen.
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If prudes were as pure as they would have us believe, they would not rail so bitterly as they do. We do not thoroughly hate that which we do not thoroughly understand.
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Few idiots are entitled to claver on the same form with the bibliomaniacs; but, indeed, to be a collector of anything, and to be an ass, are pretty nearly equivalent phrases in the language of all rational men. No one collects anything of which he really makes use. Who ever suspected Lord Spencer, or his factotum, little Dibdin, of reading? The old Quaker at York, who has a museum of the ropes at which eminent criminals have dangled, has no intention to make an airy and tassel-like termination of his own terrestrial career—for that would be quite out of character with a man of his brims. In like manner, it is now well known that the three thousand three hundred and thirty-three young ladies who figure on the books of the Seraglio have a very idle life of it, and that, in point of fact, the Grand Seignior is a highly respectable man. The people that collect pictures, also, are, generally speaking, such folk as Sir John Leicester, the late Angerstein, and the like of that. The only two things that I have any pleasure in collecting are bottles of excellent wine and boxes of excellent cigars—articles, of the first of which I flatter myself I know rather more than Lord Eldon does of pictures; and of the latter whereof I make rather more use than old Mustapha can be supposed to do of his 3333 knick-knacks in petticoats—or rather, I beg their ladyships’ pardon, in trousers.
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As to the beautiful material adaptation of cold rum and cold water, that is beyond all praise, and indeed forms a theme of never-ceasing admiration, being one of Nature’s most exquisite achievements. Sturm has omitted it, but I intend to make a supplement to his Reflections when I get a little leisure.