JOHN THE FOOTMAN.
“I declare I never knew a flatter companion than yourself,” said Tom of Finsbury, the other evening, to the lion of Lambeth. “Thank you, Tom,” replied the latter; “but all the world knows that you’re a flatter-er.” Tom, in nautical phrase, swore, if he ever came athwart his Hawes, that he would return the compliment with interest.
MY FRIEND TOM.
—“Here, methinks,
Truth wants no ornament.”—ROGERS.
We have the happiness to know a gentleman of the name of Tom, who officiates in the capacity of ostler. We have enjoyed a long acquaintance with him—we mean an acquaintance a long way off—i.e. from the window of our dormitory, which overlooks A—s—n’s stables. We believe we are the first of our family, for some years, who has not kept a horse; and we derive a melancholy gratification in gazing for hours, from our lonely height, at the zoological possessions of more favoured mortals.
“The horse is a noble animal,” as a gentleman once wittily observed, when he found himself, for the first time in his life, in a position to make love; and we beg leave to repeat the remark—“the horse is a noble animal,” whether we consider him in his usefulness or in his beauty; whether caparisoned in the chamfrein and demi-peake of the chivalry of olden times, or scarcely fettered and surmounted by the snaffle and hog-skin of the present; whether he excites our envy when bounding over the sandy deserts of Arabia, or awakens our sympathies when drawing sand from Hampstead and the parts adjacent; whether we see him as romance pictures him, foaming in the lists, or bearing, “through flood and field,” the brave, the beautiful, and the benighted; or, as we know him in reality, the companion of our pleasures, the slave of our necessities, the dislocator of our necks, or one of the performers at our funeral; whether—but we are not drawing a “bill in Chancery.”