By cheating all, both rich and poor,
Dared cry aloud “the land must sink
For all its fraud,” and whom d’ye think
The sermonizing rascal chid?
——A GLOVER, THAT SOLD LAMB FOR KID.”
MANDEVILLE.
Among the high privileges, which we digressive writers enjoy, may be reckoned that which Don Quixote gave his horse, to choose a path and pursue it at pleasure. In another point there is an affinity between us and that errant steed, so renowned in the volumes of Cervantic chivalry. When we begin an excursion, the Lord only knows how it will be prosecuted, or where it will end. Whim and caprice being commonly our guides, and those personages never keeping in their almanack a list of stages, we are sometimes most sadly benighted. As this is my day for similitudes, I stop not here; having so modestly compared myself and other ramblers to a quadruped, I will descend still lower into “the valley of humiliation,” and liken them to an insect, which is a spider. Though their stock is confessedly small, they have the art of drawing out a most lengthy texture. Thus an essayist, conscious of the scantiness of his stores, handles a topic as a farmer’s wife manages her annual pound of bohea, in such a manner as to make it last.
When I began my second speculation with some general remarks on the utility of an alliance between application and genius, I little thought that I should quit my sober task, and commence character painter. When Fancy handed me a pencil, and bade me sketch the likeness of Meander, I had no design to ransack his room, or transcribe his diary; and lastly, when the journal was published, I tremblingly thought I had said too much, and dreaded lest my readers should complain that they were surfeited by the Farrago. But they who are even tinged with the metaphysical doctrine of ideas flowing in a train, will not be confounded, though they see another speculation rising from the last, when I narrate the following incident. A friend who had attentively gazed at the portrait of Meander, saw me the day after its exhibition. So, Mr. Delineator, cries he, must you become a dauber in caricature? One so fond of the zigzag walk in life as you, is hardly entitled to ridicule deviation in another. I blushed; and the suffusion, like Corporal Trim’s bow, spoke as plainly as a blush could speak, “my man of remark, you are perfectly sage in your opinion.” This trivial circumstance led me to reflect, first on my own inconsistency, and next on that of others. By exposing the rambles of genius I virtually made proclamation for dissipation to depart, but she taxed me with issuing contradictory orders, and pertinently asked how she could go into exile, when I insisted on her keeping me company? I then looked on my neighbours. Their characters were similar to mine, and they wore not the uniform of regularity more than myself. Celia, who murders reputations, as “butcher felleth ox” pronounced, t’other day at a tea-table, a most bitter invective against scandal, though five minutes before she had invented a tale of calumny against her friend. Vafer censorially cautions a young gallant to beware an indulgence of the licentious passion, but forgets, while reading his lecture, that he once was amorous, that he solicited the virgin and the wife, and that, unsatisfied with the ordinary mysteries of intrigue, he elaborately refined on the system of seduction. Vinoso, whose face is as red-lettered as the court calendar, and who makes his Virginia fence at nine in the morning, applauds a very heavy excise on distilled spirits, and zealously damns every drunkard in the nation. Bobbin the haberdasher, who in vending a row of pins, defrauds the heedless customer of four, and who, when furnishing the village lass, with a set of apron-strings, pilfers from her a portion of the tape, exclaims against a vinter for adulterating his liquors, and wittily wonders, that he can adopt the Christian scheme so far, as to baptize even his wine. Messalina, whole chastity is valiant as a holiday Captain because no enemy is at hand, and who produced a lovely pair of twins six months before marriage, frowns at the forwardness of young flirts; and a decayed maiden, “far gone in her wane, Sir,” who has been but twenty these ten years, and who has more wrinkles in her forehead, than dimples on her chin, even she scoffs the vestal sisterhood, and turns up her note at the staleness of antiquated virginity.
In literature, as well as in life, we may recongnize this propensity. Authors are noted for inconsistence. Instances might be selected from almost every writer in our language. Pope, in conjunction with Arbuthnot and Swift, composed a satirical treatise, the design of which was, to lash his poetical brethren for attempting to soar, when their wings only served them to sink. Yet Pope, after some fine panegyrical verses upon Lord Mansfield, fell from a noble height of poetry to the very bottom of the bathos, by concluding his eulogy with the following feeble lines,
Graced as thou art with all the power of words,