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THE MARCH OF MIND.
Mr. Job Spimkins, grocer and vestryman of Crutched-Friars, was a stout, easy, good-natured, middle-aged gentleman, who—to adopt a mercantile phrase—was “well to do in the world,” and had long borne an exemplary character throughout his ward for sobriety, punctuality, civility, and all those homely but well-wearing qualities which we are apt to associate with trade. Punctuality, however, was the one leading feature of his mind, which he carried to so extravagant a height, that having formed a scale of moral duties, he had placed it in the very front rank, side by side with honesty—or the art of driving a good bargain—and just two above temperance, soberness and chastity. Even in his social hours, this peculiar trait of character decided his predilections; for, notwithstanding he was much given to keeping up feasts and holidays, and had a high respect for Michaelmas-Day, Christmas-Day, Twelfth-Day, New-Year’s-Day, &c., yet he always expressed an indifferent opinion of Easter, because, like an Irishman’s pay-day, it was seldom or never punctual. Next to this engrossing hobby was our citizen’s abhorrence of poetry, an abhorrence which he extended with considerate impartiality to every branch of literature.
But Dr. Franklin’s works formed an exception. He pronounced his commercial maxims to be the chefs-d’oeuvre of genius, and used to set them as large text-copies for his son, when he and the school-bill came home together for the holidays from Dr. Thickskull’s academy at Camberwell. But poetry—our prosaic citizen could not for the life of him abide it. The only good thing, he used to say, he ever, yet saw in verse, was the Rule of Three; and the only rhymes that had the slightest reason to recommend them, were “Thirty days hath September.”
To these opinions Mrs. Spimkins, like a dutiful wife, never failed to respond, “Amen.” In person, this good lady was short and stoutly timbered, with a face on which lay the full sunshine of prosperity, in one broad, unvaried grin. Three children were her’s: three “dear, delightful children,” as their grandmother by the father’s side never failed to declare, when punctually, every New-Year’s-Day, she presented them each with a five-shilling-piece, wrapt up in gilt-edged note-paper. Thomas, the eldest, was a slim, sickly youth; easy, conceited, and eighteen: Martha, the second, was a maiden of more sensibility than beauty: while Sophy, the youngest and sprightliest, to a considerable portion of the maternal simper and the paternal circumference, added a fine expanse of foot, which spreading out semi-circularly, like a lady’s fan, at the toes, gave a peculiar weight and safety to her tread.