Here performers, who move like blind asses in the manager's mill, usually raise the right arm, as though partisan meant the instrument in their grasp. O lame and impotent! As if a little bit of a truncheon could bruise a ghost! What says Ossian, speaking of a ghost? "The dim stars twinkled through his form." A plain proof of his want of substance. So of Pope's sylph:
Fate urg'd the shears and cut the sylph in twain;
But airy substance soon unites again.
Some fanciful persons will have it that partisan signifies companion, as though Marcellus should say, "shall I strike at it with the assistance of Bernardo?" Listen to the real original meaning:
Mar. Shall I strike at it with my parmesan?
In plain English, "shall I throw a cheese at its head?" This agrees with what was before advanced relative to beef, and shows that the sentinels of those days antedating the couplet in the Bath Guide,
He that would fortify the mind,
The belly first must fill,—
never mounted guard without a havresack well stuffed with eatables.
Coffee and Chocolate.
Coffee is the seed of a tree or shrub of the jessamine species, originally a native of Arabia, but now thriving in the West Indies, where it is become an important article of English commerce.