Sir Thomas Baker was also the possessor of three numbers of another early Manchester paper. Whitworth’s “Manchester Magazine, with the History of the Holy Bible.” Tuesday, January 16th, 1738-9. No. 107 is a small, dingy folio of four pages. Its opening paragraphs are devoted to Muley Abdalah, who, in his abdicating the throne of Morocco, expressed “a great regret that he had cut off but 2,000 heads at most.” We have then a dreadful thunderstorm at Bristol, and a quantity of Court and personal gossip. From “Hawick, in Northumberland, December 14th. This day, died here (aged 105), Mr. William Baxter. He taught school in his youth, afterwards followed malting very closely for above sixty years, and though he lived very freely all that while he was never known to have any disorder but one only, occasioned by a over-discharge of bad liquor, which was carried off by a vomit.” The old gentleman was hearty to the last, and knocked under to “a common fever, which as an Argument of his great vigour terminated in a Phrenzy, and in a week’s Time despatch’d him.” We hear of a wolf breaking loose, which was kept by a gentleman who lives near the vineyard in St. James’s Park, and of the mischief it wrought upon—two milk pails; of an attempted escape from Newgate; and of sundry highway robberies. We have then
“A New Receipt.
Take Homer’s Invention, with Pinder’s high strain,
Theocritus’ pure Nature, Anacreon’s soft vein;
To Virgil’s sound judgment join Ovid’s free air,
And Juvenal’s keen Satyr to Horace’s sneer;
To Spencer’s Description add Milton’s Locution,
And Dryden’s close sentence to Boileau’s conclusion;
Of Antients and Monderns [Moderns] take the Flower I hope,
All these put together make our English Pope.”